Today, June 19, is the holiday known as Juneteenth, which commemorates the day in 1865 when word reached the enslaved people of Galveston, Texas that they had been freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years earlier. Black communities across the county have celebrated Juneteeth ever since, making it the oldest annual celebration of the end of slavery and the fight for freedom. Festivities traditionally involve barbecue and a feast of foods specially prepared for the occasion, participants dressing in their finest clothes, prayer, speeches, and games. Understanding history in order to make progress as individuals and as a society has always been a primary focus of Juneteeth ceremonies.

In light of this focus, I’d like to share what I’m learning about the work of Fannie Lou Hamer and her Freedom Farm Cooperative, which exemplified a movement using farming as a vehicle for empowerment, self-determination, and resistance against oppression that stretches through history to the present.

Fannie Lou Hamer is best known for her voting rights work, her activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and her cofounding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. But, born in 1917 into a Mississippi sharecropping family, she knew firsthand the way that the mainstream agricultural system oppressed People of Color, keeping them enslaved in all but name. Not only did the sharecropping system keep Hamer and others like her in constant poverty, hunger, and debt, but also deprived them of control over their own lives. When Hamer overcame the many barriers in place to disenfranchise Black citizens and successfully registered to vote, the owner of the plantation where she worked ordered her to rescind her voter registration. Hamer’s reply: “I didn’t go down there to register for you. I went down to register for myself.” He promptly fired her and evicted her from the property. This was a common experience among other Black folks fighting for the right to vote.

In 1969, Fannie Lou Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) as an alternative farming model to that which forced Black Mississippians to labor either as sharecroppers or to struggle with poverty on their own small farms. “The time has come now when we are going to have to get what we need ourselves. We may get a little help, here and there, but in the main we’re going to have to do it ourselves,” Hamer stated. With financial backing from from a Wisconsin-based non-profit, Hamer bought 40 acres of farmland to grow vegetables to feed member families and cash crops to support the co-op’s operational expenses. In addition to vegetables, the farm also fed its members through a “pig bank” that raised and distributed thousands of pigs to participating families. Poverty was the only qualification for joining the co-op, Hamer explained. “This is the first kind of program that has ever been sponsored in the country in letting local people do their thing themselves.”

Under Hamer’s tireless leadership, the FFC grew exponentially over the next few years. By the early 1970s, the farm comprised nearly 700 acres, and the co-op expanded to a comprehensive system of community and individual empowerment. Its programs included child education, affordable housing, job training, and health care. It housed a sewing cooperative, a tool library, a commercial kitchen, and community gardens. The Freedom Farm Cooperative strived to address each of the various ways the community had been oppressed and deprived of opportunity, and to provide the tools and the space for members to reclaim their agency and liberate themselves. It envisioned a system that lifted people up rather than crushing them and grinding them down.

The Freedom Farm Collective received little institutional support and dissolved by the mid-1970s. However, other farmers have continued its work and legacy in various ways. Today, farms from Soul Fire Farm in New York’s Hudson Valley to Oakland, California-based Black Earth Farms work to end food apartheid and center People of Color in all they do. Soul Fire Farm offers a multitude of workshops and immersion programs for Farmers of Color, operates a sliding-scale CSA to fight food insecurity, and provides an interactive Reparations Map on its website that connects potential donors with Black and Indigenous-led farming projects seeking resources. Black Earth Farms is a collective of Black and Indigenous Farmers that works to decolonize the food system and provide fresh produce to the unhoused and others in need, including people protesting for racial justice in recent weeks. Other farms in this movement of farming as activism include:

• Soil Generation, Philadelphia, PA
• The Black Oaks Center for Sustainable Living, Chicago, IL
• Cooperation Jackson, Jackson, MS
• Rise and Root Farm, Chester, NY
• Backyard Gardeners Network, New Orleans, LA
• Hilltop Urban Gardens, Tacoma, WA
• The Fannie Lou Hamer-Sundiata Acoli Farm at the Harriet Tubman House, Baltimore, MD
• And many more around the country.

 
I am only scratching the surface of this movement, and am excited to start Monica M. White’s book Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement to learn more about Fannie Lou Hamer and others in the tradition of agriculture as a source of resistance and self-reliance.
 
More about the Freedom Farm Cooperative:

• https://indianapublicmedia.org/eartheats/fannie-lou-hamers-freedom-farm-cooperative.php
• https://lifeandthyme.com/commentary/fannie-lou-hamer-and-farming-as-activism/
• https://foodheroespodcast.com/2018/07/03/fannie-lou-hamers-freedom-farm-cooperative-an-early-example-of-food-and-democracy-through-local-food-activism/
• https://snccdigital.org/events/fannie-lou-hamer-founds-freedom-farm-cooperative/
• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07409710.2017.1270647?journalCode=gfof20
• https://popularresistance.org/black-co-ops-were-a-method-of-economic-survival/
• https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mvmt/6508mvmt.pdf

Okay, not literally. But you know I can’t resist a story about seeds and seed sovereignty! So I was thrilled to come across this episode of the Wisconsin Public Radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge all about the topic. Listen for 4 stories exploring the question “Who owns seeds?”

The show’s description reads “It's easy to take seeds for granted, to assume that there will always be more corn or wheat or rice to plant. But as monocropping and agribusiness continue to dominate modern farming, are we losing genetic diversity, cultural history, and the nutritional value of our food? We speak to farmers, botanists and indigenous people about how they are reclaiming our seeds.”

In the midst of the current crisis, lots of folks are starting their own vegetable gardens for the first time or digging into existing gardens with a greater sense of purpose. There can never be too many vegetable gardens, as far as we’re concerned, and growing some of what you eat, even if it’s just a few herbs or a potted tomato plant on your deck, is such an empowering way of connecting with your food. I will never forget the thrill of growing our first garden eight years ago--the magic of sprouting seeds and the intense satisfaction of eating our first harvest.

It’s inspiring to see so many of our neighbors and friends turning over ground to start their own coronavirus victory gardens for food security and for the joy of watching plants thrive under loving care. In a time with so much unknown, when many are feeling disconnected from the world we’re used to, it can be profoundly grounding and empowering to put your hands in the dirt and to know in the deepest way where our nourishment comes from.

Growing food is a continual learning experience (part of what keeps it interesting!), but here are a few online resources we have found really useful in our ongoing garden education:

• Southern Exposure Seed Exchange’s Growing Guides are a great place to start. They are very thorough, covering everything from seed starting and growing for biodiversity to crop-specific guides for just about any vegetable you’d want to grow.
• Seed Saver’s Exchange also has a very good library of articles on all aspects of the vegetable garden, including site planning, crop-specific growing guides, and seed saving information.
• Your county extension office is an incredible resource (shout out to our amazing horticulture agent, Faye Kuosman!). They can help you with soil testing (a key step to garden success!), troubleshooting, and connecting you with all the resources you need. The UK Extension Office’s guide to Home Vegetable Gardening in Kentucky is a useful reference, as well.
• Johnny’s Selected Seeds’ Growing Center has excellent charts, calculators, and other planning guides, as well as an “Ask a Grower” feature.
• The Organic Grower’s School has a wealth of resources for home gardeners, farmers, and consumers on their website, including some specific to growing during the COVID-19 pandemic, an excellent Gardener’s Library, and materials from their annual conferences.
• We haven’t used Territorial Seed’s Garden Planner App yet, but it looks like a user-friendly way to keep track of all of your garden planning information in one place (rather than our approach of massive spreadsheets!). I want to give it a try in the future.
• The Bionutrient Food Association has a vast library of documents, videos, and book recommendations available online. They tend to be more advanced, for experienced growers wanting to increase nutrient content in their crops by creating a super healthy soil food web.
• The University of Kentucky’s Center for Crop Diversification is geared toward professional growers growing on a large scale, but its crop profiles and maps contain a lot of good information.
• I really enjoy listening to the Farmer to Farmer Podcast, in which host and experienced organic farmer Chris Blanchard has down to earth conversations with other farmers about their operations and experiences. Unfortunately, Chris Blanchard passed away in 2018, but there is a hefty archive of past episodes to listen to while you work.

And some of our favorite gardening books include:

• John Jeavons’ books How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine and The Sustainable Vegetable Garden: A Backyard Guide to Healthy Soil and Higher Yields, which is essentially a condensed and very accessible version of How to Grow More Vegetable. Both books are helpful with creating a solid garden plan.
• Eliot Coleman’s The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener and Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long are bibles in the organic growing realm. Coleman grows year-round in Maine, so he has the art of the four-season harvest down!
• Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical Self-Reliant Gardening is another treasure. Bonsall, also a Maine farmer and homesteader, has a strong personality and sense of humor that come though his writing along with his passion and hard-earned knowledge.
• The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving, put out by Seed Savers Exchange and edited by by Lee Buttala and Shanyn Siegel and Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners by Suzanne Ashworth are excellent resources if you want to save your own seeds.
  

We learn so much every growing season, from publications, from other farmers, and from the garden itself. It is so exciting to see many others jumping enthusiastically into growing food. Please let us know if we can share our experiences to help you get started!

Many seed companies have been inundated with orders this spring and many are sold out or are suspending orders to catch up. We have some little plants ready to go into your garden, ranging from cilantro and basil to okra and peppers from our own saved seeds and heirloom tomatoes. We also have a set of edible flower plants to make your harvest as beautiful as it is delicious!

Happy Growing!

I’m feeling very thankful for the farmers’ markets right now, and appreciating how much they feed us, not just in fresh local food, but in connections as well. As people are wary of grocery stores and cooking more at home—and are longing for connection-- farmers’ markets are more important than ever right now. Unfortunately, we do need to make some adjustments to keep markets safe and healthy spaces.

The Franklin County Farmers’ Market just had its first weekly market of the season, run entirely through online preorders and delivery to customers’ cars (it will operate this way at least through May 9). It was surreal chatting with our fellow vendors behind masks, and we really missed the customer interaction that we look forward to every week, catching up with regulars and getting to know newcomers through shared excitement over fresh food. These distancing measures have brought out how important community is to the farmers’ market experience. While it feels like we’re missing that community right now, I think we just need to find creative ways to connect with each other. We miss seeing our regular customers smile when they see we’ve brought something new to market and hearing what they made with our produce last week, but I’m trying to remember that we are still interacting with each other when placing and receiving orders, lovingly harvesting and packing herbs and vegetables, and enthusiastically cooking with that produce. We’ll get through this chaotic and uncertain time, supporting each other the best we can, and we'll appreciate the smiles and conversations all the more on the other side!

We’re excited to be joining another community this week at the Chevy Chase Farmers' Market at the Apostles Anglican Church, 200 Colony Boulevard in Lexington! We were a one-time vendor last year, and it was a great little market! We’re looking forward to being there each Wednesday this season, starting April 22. The market runs from 8 to noon and will be a normally structured market with some common-sense safety precautions. Find more about how the market will run in this video. We’re eager to connect with you there!

Names: Bramble and Zelda

Titles: Benevolent Overlords, Official Greens and Herbs Taste Testers

Favorite Foods: cabbage, Brussels Sprouts, kale, collards, dandelion greens, mint, basil, parsley, lemon balm, celery...

Zelda and Bramble have shared our home since March 2016. They had been abandoned in a grocery store parking lot in Watkins Glen, NY, during a February rainstorm. Fortunately, a Good Samaritan brought the duo to Farm Sanctuary, where Abbie was a caregiver. Bramble’s and Zelda’s strong and distinct personalities, friendliness despite their rough history, and mutual devotion were clear, and we knew right away that they would be moving in with us! They have enriched our lives beyond description and we are so grateful for our wonderful little friends! It has been fun getting to know their individual quirks, their inquisitive and communicative nature, and the roles they fulfill in each others’ lives. When they take over the world, Zelda will be the mad scientist and safecracker, while Bramble will ask nicely, wiggle his luxurious cheeks, and get exactly what he wants!

Zelda and Bramble now live in their own room in our house, a palace that Kevin customized based on their interests, complete with a window perch/jungle gym, interactive peg board walls, and a private deck with a bunny door so they can come and go as they please. They love tearing in and out of their room, watching the sun rise and set from their deck, sitting in the window and overlooking their domain, and requesting dandelion offerings from passing subjects.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of seed saving and the work of seed banks such as the World Vegetable Center. I want to share a wonderful update from the world of seed saving that I read recently. According to this article in The Guardian, the Cherokee Nation is depositing seeds from nine of its most culturally important crops in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seed repository known as the “doomsday vault,” located deep in a Norwegian mountain above the Arctic Circle.

Various seed banks have been destroyed due to war, natural disasters, and the affects of climate change, losing precious crop seed forever. The carefully built Svalbard vault stores backup copies of acquisitions from seed banks all over the world with the intention of preserving crop diversity for thousands of years.
The Cherokee are depositing seeds from four types of corn, four types of beans, and candy roaster squash (a delicious variety that we grow at Dandelion Ridge Farm!). These crops have been integral to Cherokee culture for many generations.

Incredibly, the only other seeds from an indigenous community in the Svalbard Vault are potatoes from the Quechua people of the Andes. Indigenous peoples around the world domesticated most of the food plants we all know and enjoy, and many varieties that are vital to their diets and ways of life. Hopefully there will be many more of these seed deposits to come.

The Franklin County Farmers’ Market is putting on another Pop-Up Winter Market this Saturday, January 25, where we’ll be unveiling a couple of new products that we think will bring some sunshine to your winter: Roasted Tomato Juice and Pomodoro Tomato Jelly!

Over the summer, during peak tomato season, we slow-roasted our heirloom plum tomatoes to coax out as much flavor as possible, and canned the intense juice for a burst of tomato goodness any time of year. We think of the juice as a secret ingredient to add multi-layered tomato flavor—sweetness, tartness, and complexity—to all kinds of cooking. We use it like an intense stock: as the base of a soup, in a marinade, to cook grains, or to add an extra splash of flavor when roasting vegetables. Its high acid content makes it perfect for deglazing, as well. (Be aware that the acid in the tomato juice can affect the cooking of some beans and grains, so when in doubt, add the juice to already-cooked beans and grains). We like to experiment with the Roasted Tomato Juice and play in the kitchen and hope you do, too. Try it in this savory oatmeal recipe!

We also made some of the magical tomato juice into a really neat golden jelly that somehow has an almost honey-like or apple-like quality. It’s hard to describe the nuanced flavors that come through the Pomodoro Tomato Jelly—you’ll just have to try some!

You may have read about Dandelion Ridge Farm’s jar return program on the back of your canned good labels; for each jar returned to us, we will make a donation to a relevant cause. Roasted Tomato Juice jars prompt a donation to the Edible Schoolyard Program, which fosters a network of thousands of school gardens around the world, and creates edible education curricula. When you return a Pomodoro Jelly jar, we donate to the World Vegetable Center. This global non-profit develops nutrient-dense vegetable varieties and promotes efficient production methods to combat poverty and improve nutrition around the world. It also maintains an enormous bank of seeds and other plant genetic material, including about 12,000 specimens from indigenous vegetables around the world.

Seed saving, selecting, and sharing over the generations have developed an enormous diversity of vegetable varieties suited to the different situations, environments, needs, and priorities of the growers and their communities. Seed banks and libraries are invaluable repositories and caregivers of plant biodiversity that might otherwise be lost for reasons ranging from disuse and improper storage to natural disasters and climate change. This week, I learned about a beautiful art project celebrating and exploring the biodiversity within seed banks: Dornith Doherty’s Archiving Eden. Currently on display in Toronto, this interactive exhibition encourages visitors to exchange X-ray images of seeds with actual seeds of Canadian crops and wild plants. I was fascinated to learn of Doherty’s work here and hope you’ll find it inspiring, too!

Here at Dandelion Ridge Farm, we’re spending the winter doing all the work that there isn’t time for during the peak growing season. Kevin is wiring our greenhouse for electrical, so we can finally turn on the chandelier we have hanging in there (and run fans, heat mats, and the other practical pieces)! We’re planning for next season, learning from conferences like the Kentucky Fruit & Vegetable Growers Conference this past week, and doing lots of record-keeping and other office work—not the most glamorous and fun part of farming, but almost as vital as the planting, weeding, and harvesting! We’ve been working with the wonderful folks at Kentucky Center for Agriculture and Rural Development (KCARD) on business planning, and are also preparing all the records needed to apply for organic certification this spring.