Dandelion Ridge Farm
  • Home
  • About
  • Offerings
  • Recipes
  • Blog
  • Shop
  • Home
  • About
  • Offerings
  • Recipes
  • Blog
  • Shop
Search

By deepening our connection to the food system, we  can further connect with each other and the world around us.

Supporting Food Security in Central KY

11/16/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
 We are fortunate to serve as community partners with The Learning Center (TLC), an alternative high school in Lexington, where we recently got to listen to student presentations (via Zoom) proposing solutions to food insecurity in Lexington. It’s wonderful to see the school tackle such an important issue across disciplines, and to hear the students’ creative solutions, ranging from rooftop gardens to food education classes. We look forward to seeing the students’ good work benefit the community as their projects unfold.

Speaking of food insecurity, did you know that 14.9% of all Kentuckians lack consistent access to enough “nutritionally adequate” food? Feeding America has a fascinating interactive map where you can explore food access statistics by county, and some of the numbers are pretty shocking. Especially as we all give thanks for what we have, I encourage you to support local organizations working to end hunger if you can.

At Dandelion Ridge Farm, we work closely with Glean Kentucky, a Lexington based non-profit that fosters a powerful network to tackle both hunger and food waste in the state. They glean excess fruits and vegetables from farms, grocery stores, and farmers’ markets and redistribute this produce to more than 100 local feeding programs. The Access Men’s Shelter and Soup Kitchen in Frankfort works hard to keep many people well fed, especially during the pandemic. They just suffered the traumatic loss of their incredible kitchen manager, and I’m sure could use any love sent their way. The Frankfort Emergency Food Pantry is another excellent organization feeding those in need in our community. They have a virtual food drive underway right now, if you want to pitch in!
Picture
Picture
0 Comments

Gratitude for the Most Essential Workers

9/7/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Photo courtesy of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers https://ciw-online.org/campaign-for-fair-food/
This Labor Day, we want to hold up all of the frontline workers who put themselves at risk to keep things running and take care of our communities, not only during this pandemic, but all the time. Industrial farmworkers and food processors are some of the most essential workers, keeping the nation fed. Yet many of them face exploitation and health hazards, and are especially at risk of COVID-19.

Farmworkers have been organizing for many years to fight for their rights, dignity, and health, whether through strikes or community organizing.  The organizing of workers in Florida’s tomato fields led to the formation of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in 1993. The CIW has been recognized internationally for its achievements in fighting human trafficking and gender-based violence at work, as well as its groundbreaking Fair Food Program, which monitors participating farms for socially responsible practices and partners with national buyers to pay workers more for their work. Other organizations working to lift up farmworkers include Farmworker Justice, Feeding the Frontline, the Food Chain Workers Alliance, and the National Center for Farmworker Health, and I encourage you to support their important work.

If you want to learn more about farmworker issues, these books are also excellent places to dive in:
  • Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, by Barry Estabrook, Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2011
  • Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, by John Bowe, Random House, 2007
0 Comments

The Earth Knows My Name

7/23/2020

0 Comments

 
If you’re looking for a good book to read on days when it’s too hot to be out in the garden, might I recommend Patricia Klindienst’s The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans? I just finished this engaging, but gentle, almost meditative book.  The author visits farmers and gardeners all over the United States whose gardens both feed their bodies and nourish their cultural connections, whether their homeland is Cambodia, Italy, or India, or their ancestors have farmed the same land since long before European settlement. Klindienst provides space for the farmers to speak for themselves, revealing the stories of their gardens as ways of telling their personal and cultural histories.

I was struck by the diversity of experience within growing food, which is done all over the world, in very different situations and environments, growing very different crops. Yet there is a deep commonality to this practice: an intense connection to the place, the land, and the particulars of climate and ecosystem, as well as the attention paid, care given, skills perfected, and community built. For the people in the book who had left their homeland to forge a new life in the United States, their gardens—their traditional practices and techniques, as well as the crops they grow—serve as a way to ground them in their new homes and tangibly connect them back to the places and people they had left behind. For people such as the Gullah farmers of South Carolina and the Native American farmers of New Mexico, growing food is an embodiment of their heritage, a continuous line from the past through the present to the future.
For all of the growers in the book, their gardens are deeply healing places, and their relationships with their gardens seem akin to familial bonds, or even extensions of themselves. “The earth is the actual ground of our lives—we grow out of the soil too. If it dies, we die. If it lives, we eat and live. You know this when you grow your own food,” Klindienst reminds us.

Referring to her garden, Italian-American Maska Pelligrini tells Klindienst, “It’s our life, you know.” Klindienst reflects that “Maska’s all-embracing phrase, ‘It’s our life,’ included the whole garden—soil, plants, worms, birds, insects, water, sun, wind, and her. In her marvelous, encompassing, humble phrase, ‘our life’ extended to include ‘their lives.’ Her garden was an interdependent community, a democracy.”[1]


[1] Klindienst, 241.
Picture
Picture
Prak Kom, Khmer Growers, Amherst, MA, from pklindienst.com
Picture
Ralph Middleton, St. Helena Island, SC. Photo courtesy of Stephen Morton, from pklindienst.com
0 Comments

Juneteenth and Farming as Activism

6/19/2020

0 Comments

 
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
“The people in the South are like seeds, each with the potential to grow and spread more seeds, for more growth: creating gardens and forests of themselves—lawns of living. They are planted in their lives.”
–"Fannie Lou Hamer, Crabgrass Politician,” in SNCC’s The Movement, August 1965. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mvmt/6508mvmt.pdf.

Picture
Fannie Lou Hamer. Photo from http://www.marcelinamartin.com/SouthernEthic/index22.html
Picture
Freedom Farm Cooperative. Photo from http://www.marcelinamartin.com/SouthernEthic/index22.html
Picture
Sunflower County, Mississippi Sewing Co-op. Photo from http://www.marcelinamartin.com/SouthernEthic/index22.html
0 Comments

Black Lives Matter. Black Farmers Matter.

6/6/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Photo from John Francis Ficara's photography book Black Farmers in America. Photos and a great article at https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5230129
We cannot be silent. The brutal murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other African Americans in the past weeks have brought this country’s ongoing legacy of systemic inequality and white supremacy to the fore. In the wake of these killings and amidst the outcry of grief and rage around the country (indeed, around the world), we are keenly aware of our immense white privilege and the ways we benefit from unequal systems.

Systemic racism has long infiltrated all aspects of society, beyond racial profiling, overpolicing and mass incarceration, unequal healthcare access, and housing discrimination all the way to land dispossession and fresh food inequality. Black farmers have faced debilitating discrimination from banks when applying for loans, from the USDA at all levels, and from corporate farms and white farming communities that have driven them from their lands. Heirs property laws have further tied the hands of those farmers who were able to hold on to their land. The very people who toiled the fields while enslaved, amassing wealth for their white masters, were robbed of the ability to grow nourishment for their families.

In fact, George Floyd’s family experienced this land theft first hand. One of his ancestors, Hillary Thomas Stewart, was born a slave, but once free, he managed to acquire 500 acres of farmland in North Carolina. His white neighbors took advantage of Stewart’s race and illiteracy and took over his land, leaving him powerless to defend his property. That was in the 1800s, and since then the Floyd family has been subject to unequal treatment in both rural and metropolitan settings alike. We have to wonder, when will they, and other Black American families, find a place to call home?

We know that we have an enormous amount to learn and to do to make our society one in which everyone has the opportunity to thrive and grow. We stand in solidarity with protesters and others doing the vital work of antiracism. In addition to supporting organizations fighting for justice and equality in all arenas, and giving your business to Black Farmers in your community, we encourage you to explore and support these organizations working on behalf of Farmers of Color and for food access and sovereignty in marginalized communities:
  • Soul Fire Farm is a Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-centered community farm near Albany, NY committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system. Its Founding Co-Director, Leah Penniman, recently published the book Farming While Black, which I am eager to read. Soul Fire Farm has numerous other publications and is an incredible source of inspiration and information.
  • Southeastern African American Farmers’ Organic Network (SAAFON) is a regional network for Black farmers committed to using ecologically sustainable practices to manage land, grow food, and raise livestock that are healthy for people and the planet.
  • Black Soil, based in Lexington, KY, organizes on-farm dining experiences that serve to reconnect black Kentuckians to their legacy and heritage in agriculture and to help foster a greater market share for black farmers and producers as they provide healthy food options to a larger consumer base.
  • National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA) is a coalition of Black-led organizations working towards cultivating and advancing Black leadership, building Black self-determination, Black institution building and organizing for food sovereignty, land and justice.  
  • The Land Loss Prevention Project works to curtail epidemic losses of Black owned land in North Carolina, the same state in which the Floyd family once farmed.
  • The National Black Farmers Association is a non-profit community organization that works to encourage the participation of small and disadvantaged farmers in gaining access to resources of state and federal programs administered by the USDA. Founder John Boyd Jr's story is indicative of common experiences of Black Farmers.
  • HEAL Food Alliance is a multi-sector, multi-racial coalition building collective power to transform our food and farm systems. Its member organizations include the Union of Concerned Scientists, Food Chain Workers Alliance, Real Food Challenge, and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance.
There are many more incredible organizations working for racial and food justice. Find more at the following links:
  • https://foodtank.com/news/2020/06/19-individuals-and-organizations-building-stronger-black-communities-and-food-systems/
  • https://civileats.com/2020/06/02/want-to-see-food-and-land-justice-for-black-americans-support-these-groups/

I’d like to end with a poem by Ross Gay that the Xerces Society shared. It was inspired by the 2014 police killing of Eric Garner, another Black American like George Floyd, whose dying words were “I can’t breathe.”

A Small Needful Fact
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

 [Copyright © 2015 by Ross Gay. Reprinted by the Xerces Society from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.]
Picture
0 Comments

Honoring Paul Robeson in the Tomato Garden

5/18/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Image from the BBC.
One of our favorite tomato varieties is the Paul Robeson. It is an exceptionally juicy beefsteak type variety with purple shoulders. I knew it was a Russian variety named after the African American actor, singer, and activist, but am embarrassed to say that I didn’t know much of anything about the man other than the fact that he had a delicious tomato named after him. We recently watched a PBS American Masters documentary about Robeson, and I am astounded that his name and life story aren’t better known.

Robeson was born in 1898. His father, a former slave, taught him early in life that he was just as capable and worthy as his white peers, and he took that message of equality to heart throughout his life. Robeson won a scholarship to Rutgers College, where he was the only black student. He gained a national reputation as a college football star and was valedictorian of his class. He graduated from Columbia Law School, but refused to accept a law career subject to racist barriers, and instead followed his passion for singing and acting.

Robeson’s incredible bass baritone voice is best known today from his performance of “Ol’ Man River” in the musical and film Show Boat, but his musical range was vast, crossing many styles and languages. Between concerts all over the world, Broadway performances, music recordings, and early films, Robeson became the most famous black man in the world. His performances of Othello in London and on Broadway were renowned (at this time, the role was typically played by a white actor in blackface) and he played to some of the first racially integrated audiences. While he struggled to land film roles that met his goal of uplifting the black experience, he continually used his platform to stand up for, and stand with, the downtrodden.

His activism ranged from black civil rights to anti-colonialism, labor rights to anti-fascism to the peace movement. He became enamored with the Soviet Union, where, when touring, he found himself treated as “a human being for the first time in my life,” he said. “I walk in full human dignity.”[1] His unbridled affection for the USSR got him in trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Intense anti-communist pressure from Senator McCarthy and others caused many civil rights leaders to denounce Robeson out of fear. Robeson stood firm on principle, refusing to play the game. During his testimony to the HUAC, Robeson was asked why he didn’t leave the US and move to Russia. His reply: “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”[2] His defiance did not help his case, and Robeson was entirely blacklisted in the US. His records and video footage were destroyed. His passport was even seized by the government so he could not tour abroad.

In 1958, a Supreme Court ruling restored Robeson’s passport and his career started a gradual recovery, but a mental and physical breakdown in 1961 forced him to retire from public life. He died in 1976 following a stroke.
Truly, Robeson had problematic blind spots when it came to his stalwart defense of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Yet his unflinching activism, dedication to his beliefs, brilliance, and sheer talent in arenas from music to sports to linguistics should make him an honored household name. With my new knowledge of Paul Robeson’s life and work, I now think of tending his legacy when tending his tomatoes.
 
Sources:
 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-paul-robeson-said-77742433/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUki-v-NvoE
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6440/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/paul-robeson-tomato

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-paul-robeson-said-77742433/
[2] http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6440/
Picture
Photo from Tomato Growers Supply Company
0 Comments

    Archives

    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019

    Categories

    All
    Books
    Cabbage
    Candy Roaster Squash
    Canned Goods
    Celery
    Chevy Chase Farmers' Market
    Community
    Conferences
    Cooperative
    Edible Flowers
    Education
    Fannie Lou Hamer
    Farmers' Market
    Farm To Frankfort Workplace Delivery Program
    Farm Updates
    Food Access
    Food Justice
    Franklin County Farmers' Market
    Freedom Farm Cooperative
    Garden
    Ginger
    Ginger Marmalade
    GleanKY
    Greenhouse
    Greens
    Herbs
    High Tunnel
    History
    Insects
    Jelly
    Lemon Balm
    Lemon Thyme
    Lizzie's Chow Chow
    Marjoram
    Meet The Crew
    Mint
    Miss Winnie's Mulled Butternut Pickles
    Multiculturalism
    Non Profits
    Non-profits
    Okra
    Organic Association Of KY
    Parsley
    Paul Robeson
    Plant Starts
    Pollinators
    Pomodoro Tomato Jelly
    Racial Justice
    Recipes
    Resources
    Roasted Tomatillo Salsa
    Roasted Tomato Coulis
    Roasted Tomato Juice
    Sage & Thyme Butternut Pickles
    Sampling
    Seeds
    Social Justice
    South Frankfort Food Share
    Sovereignty
    Sun-dried Tomatoes
    Sunny Zucchini Relish
    Sustainability
    Sweet Abundance Green Tomato Jelly
    Sweet Potatoes
    Tarragon
    Tomatillos
    Tomatoes
    Turmeric
    Value Added
    Value-added
    Winter Squash
    Xerces Society
    Zucchini

    RSS Feed

Picture

HOME

ABOUT

OFFERINGS

RECIPES

BLOG

Copyright © 2020
  • Home
  • About
  • Offerings
  • Recipes
  • Blog
  • Shop