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Before COVID-19, most people weren’t waking up with a burning desire to become farmers. Many of us that were able to work from home likely began fantasizing about life in the countryside and spending more time in nature. As a collective, we consciously shifted back to the basics, but it was bigger than minimizing our wardrobes — it’s been a full-on reconsideration of what is essential for our quality of life. For many BIPOC, the return to nature has served as a spiritual awakening that’s less about escapism and more about reconnecting with our deepest roots in order to rebuild a better future.
When flocks of New York City residents fled to suburbs across the country at the apex of COVID-19, many of those who stayed behind made a deeper commitment to keeping their communities intact. Following the peak of panic shopping at supermarkets, local community fridges started popping up in major cities to counter food scarcity as inventories were replenished. Deemed essential workers, for farmers all over the world, there was never a break from this global health crisis. Few tasks are as important as feeding the nation, especially in marginalized communities that are deprived of the basic necessities due to structural racism in the food system. Based on the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) annual Economic Research Service report, food insecurity affects one in 10 households in New York. The non-profit organization Robin Hood estimates that 40% of the New York population experiences food hardship.
While there’s work to be done in every borough, urban farming has paved a new avenue where controlling the means of production through community gardens is feasible when BIPOC youth respond to the call.
Vianca Lugo, 27, decided to become an urban farmer after dropping out of film school and living on Indigenous land in Northern California for six months. Even though they worked in the fields alongside other people of color, the land was owned by white men. As a queer Puerto Rican, it was important for Lugo to find a way to do land work and grow food for their own community. After returning to New York in 2017, they came across Farm School NYC (FSNYC), one of the few certificate programs that “centers marginalized voices.” “It’s always been BIPOC at the forefront of food sovereignty work, and it’s no coincidence that the network that exists here in NYC today reflects that,” they say.
This year marks Lugo’s first full season working on a farm and seeing a seed “from start to harvest.” (Before the pandemic, they managed an events space full-time.) Right now, Lugo is focused on boosting community engagement while also working with the grassroots organization New York Boricua Resistance, but the long-term goal is to invest in an aquaponics farm in Puerto Rico. “For me, this land work has been so healing and I definitely want other people to have that experience in their own community,” Lugo says. “This land belongs to the folks who take care of it.”
The urban agriculture landscape dates back to 3500 BCE, when the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations were said to have integrated gardens and irrigation systems into their structures. Throughout the 1900s, war or victory gardens were commonly used as a tool to combat environmental injustice, economic recession, and urban decline while also sustaining the public food supply during World War I and World War II. According to Farming While Black, community land trusts in the U.S. were established by Black farmers in 1969. Following a nationwide financial crisis, the USDA introduced the Urban Gardening Program in 1977 in an effort to help low-income residents grow their own food. (Even though it was successful, the program was shuttered in 1994. Since then, the USDA has established the Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production Competitive Grants Program.) From there, urban farming initiatives expanded with various non-profit projects like former NBA player Will Allen’s Growing Power that eradicated the urban-rural divide.
Bronx native Sunny Vazquez started working with land about three years ago while recovering from an injury that left her unable to walk. All that time she had to sit with herself allowed Vazquez to redirect her energy, which divinely led her upstate to Soul Fire Farm. The visit completely altered her perception of what it means to have a relationship to the land and how farming could be a revolutionary act.
“Food is our birthright and it has become so politicized that the very act of growing food for free for the community is justice in itself, and making people more aware of these systems that are in place in order to keep us away from this knowledge,” she tells Teen Vogue. “Being in those spaces and growing food and knowing that the seed I'm planting is going to feed someone later on is so powerful for me.”
After bearing witness to the power of local green spaces, Vazquez applied for the urban agriculture training program at FSNYC. Last year, the 29-year-old completed her certification with an apprenticeship at Kelly Street Garden where she is now a garden assistant. Someday, Vazquez hopes to return to Puerto Rico where her great-great-grandmother was once a slave and work on different farms with the elders. For now, she’s tending to the land in a way that feels like a reclamation.
“I'm really grateful to have answered the call to start farming because I feel like growing up in the city, you're so detached from the food system. It's so important, especially right now, to take that power back and really integrate yourself with the land,” Vazquez says.
Feeding America reports that food insecurity has affected more than 35 million people. The USDA estimates that 23 million Americans live in food deserts, areas where access to affordable and nutritious food is limited or nonexistent. The ever-present issue of food apartheid in the U.S. disproportionately impacts low-income communities and people of color — parts of New York City, Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Memphis are amongst the highest ranking in this category. Based on a survey from 2018, community gardens in New York are now one of the primary sources of produce for the food-insecure.
Ariella Riapos grew up in a Slovakian and Honduran household in Jersey City with both sides of their family coming from rural backgrounds associated with farming. Some of the 24-year-old’s earliest memories come from being outside in the garden with their grandmother, playing with plants in the dirt. They add, “I feel like that's the way that my ancestors speak to me.” To them and many other BIPOC, farming is a sacred practice in the process of decolonization.
“[Farming] is reclaiming all of the ancestral traditions that I lost,” Riapos explains. “It makes me sad thinking about the way that commercial agriculture is because for me farming is one of the most deeply spiritual things that I've ever done in my life. When I'm out in the garden and I’m with the plants and watching them grow, I can't really even necessarily put into words how incredible it feels. How you can move these seeds in your head, put them in the ground, watch them grow, and then get food.”
Since moving to Bushwick about five years ago, Riapos immersed themself in community organizing which led to teaming up with friends to turn an empty parking lot into a garden. They are mostly self-taught with the help of elders, but it’s been a very organic transition into what Riapos describes as “guerilla gardening.” Given that their full-time job is in work management, being in service to the community doesn’t feel like strenuous work because it’s a civic duty.
While there is beauty in returning to nature, we can’t romanticize labor on the land without addressing the generational trauma that is still present in the soil. Long before America was dispersed with grids of concrete jungles, this country was primarily covered in rural land that belonged to Indigenous people. As the story goes, white people stole this sacred ground from the Native tribes and then exploited enslaved Africans for labor on these newfound plantations for centuries. After the Civil War, freed slaves acquired 19 million acres of land, but it was seized through acts of manipulation like financial debt and domestic terror.
Of course, there’s also the history of discrimination against BIPOC farmers through oppressive legislation like the California Alien Land Law of 1913 which have made it more difficult for thos farmers to obtain ownership of agricultural land. Since then, the federal government has perpetuated this prejudice by excluding BIPOC farmers from New Deal policies that would provide relief, blocking their access to critical farm programs, and even ignoring their civil rights claims. Today, BIPOC comprise less than two percent of farm owner-operators in America.
Farming is no easy task, but working on the land can be fulfilling. Isa Jamira has been humbled every step of the way on this road to her career. “In reality, a farmer is not a 9 to 5 profession, it's very much around the clock all the time,” she says. For her, farming isn’t a hobby—it’s a lifestyle. Jamira adds, “It's health, it's exercise, it's my mood uplifter, it's the way that I can release and gain, it's a way to communicate… It's any and everything under the sun, it's the whole.”
For as long as she can remember, Jamira has been challenging the norms of America’s destructive capitalistic society straight from its epicenter. The 24-year-old majored in environmental studies at Bates College, but her life path wasn’t clear until she learned that “the way I take care of the planet is also the way I take care of myself.” Jamira’s passion for education around food justice deepened while working on Black-owned farms. Since interning at Oko Farms, she has become a seasonal farmer and educator and currently has a partnership in the works to create Oko Gardens University.
Farming and ranching are professions that makeup 1.3% of the U.S. labor force with more than 2 million farms currently in operation. Despite this, there’s still a certain image that comes to mind when most think about the classic farmer identity — we tend to envision a white man dressed in overalls, plaid, and a straw hat, sort of like Grant Wood’s 1930 painting American Gothic, which served as a satirical commentary on midwestern culture and celebration of rural American values. In the 2018 book Farming While Black, Leah Penniman writes “I realized that during all those years of seeing images of only white people as the stewards of the land, only white people as organic farmers, only white people in conversations about sustainability, the only consistent story I’d seen or been told about Black people and the land was about slavery and sharecropping, about coercion and brutality and misery and sorrow.”
This is something that Frances Pérez-Rodríguez is hyper aware of now that she’s deep in the thick of it. “When you look across the globe, it's Black and brown people who are growing our food,” she says. “Black and brown people are harvesting our food, distributing our food, packaging our food, selling our food, cooking our food.”
Another FSNYC graduate, Pérez-Rodríguez’s interest in farming was initially sparked by a curiosity in herbal medicine while studying journalism at Rutgers University. As a Black Puerto Rican from the South Bronx, she felt compelled to ”completely commit to reconnecting with the land.” She adds, “I grew up in a family of musicians and artists and teachers so to come from that and to now be able to see a life with farming affirms to me that it’s the most important thing that I’ve encountered.”
Pérez-Rodríguez is currently the farm manager of La Finca Del Sur in the South Bronx and Food & Land Education Coordinator for Woke Foods. Through urban farming, she has come into contact with many community organizers that are doing so much more than growing food. Pérez-Rodríguez is dedicated to the fight for abolition through a framework that combines social and food justice but is moving at her own pace in order to see it through.
“I think America is in crisis,” she explains. “Living in capitalism and white supremacy is a crisis, and it really is a marathon. I want to slow down and stay healthy so that I can continue doing the work… I try not to feel like it's the end of the world. I think the world has ended many times for many people. I try to stay grounded so that I can still be there to organize and to do the work that's needed.”
Sustainable agriculture isn’t a new concept that is breaking the “grass ceiling” so to speak. Organic farming actually comes from an indigenous African system that was resuscitated by the agricultural scientist and plant doctor George Washington Carver, who pushed southern farming methods toward diversified horticulture operations. BIPOC have been doing this labor without taking proper credit for centuries, but the co-operative farming movement will not carry on in silence. Riapos, Lugo, Pérez-Rodríguez, Jamira, and Vazquez recognize that this is their legacy as ecological citizens because industrialized food systems won’t save us or the planet.
The future of urban agriculture is diverse, intersectional, and powered by community. In healing the land, we heal ourselves too. As Pérez-Rodríguez says, “Sometimes people want to save the world and do something huge when really there is stuff to do right on our block.”
Here’s a list of local farms, non-profits, organizations, and mutual aids to support right now:
Oko Farms
Farm School NYC
Black Feminist Project
New York Boricua Resistance
La Finca Del Sur Community Farm
Comida Pal Pueblo
Bushwick Ayuda Mutua
Food Issues Group
Urbe Apie
In Our Hearts
The Friendly Fridge
Morning Glory Garden
CREDITS:
Photographer and Video: Mat + Kat
DP: Austin Kearns
Stylist: Michelle Li
Makeup Artist: Shaina Ehrlich
Production Assistant: Liz Coulbourn
Art Director: Emily Zirmis
Fashion Director: Tahirah Hairston
