Black food sovereignty, from Freedom Farm to Vancouver Island

Forty acres in the Delta

In 1969 Fannie Lou Hamer bought 40 acres of land in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Hamer had been evicted from the plantation where she worked as a sharecropper after she tried to register to vote, and in 1963 she had been beaten in a jail in Winona. She knew what it meant to depend on a landowner for food, work and housing. The cooperative she founded on that land, the Freedom Farm Cooperative, was meant to end the dependence.

The farm grew to several hundred acres. Cotton and soybeans brought in cash, while collard greens, okra and sweet potatoes fed member families. Its best-known idea was the pig bank. With money from the National Council of Negro Women, then led by Dorothy Height, the cooperative bought a starting herd: 35 female pigs and five males, by one well-documented account. Families borrowed pigs and raised the litters, so the herd kept multiplying and spreading, and within about three years it had produced thousands of animals.

Floods, drought and tornadoes in 1972 and 1973 hit the cash crops, funders pulled back and Hamer's health failed. The cooperative closed in 1976. Its logic outlived it: when you cannot buy your way out of hunger, build a system in which wealth reproduces itself among neighbours.

Breakfast before school in West Oakland

The same year, on the other side of the United States, the Black Panther Party began serving breakfast. The first Free Breakfast for Children program opened in January 1969 at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in West Oakland, where Father Earl Neil worked with the Party and parishioners to run it. Eleven children ate on the first day. By the end of that week the count had reached 135, and by the end of the year chapters in many other cities were running their own breakfasts.

Parishioner Ruth Beckford-Smith coordinated the Oakland program and recruited neighbourhood mothers to cook and serve. The work ran on volunteers and a church kitchen, and it put the Party in daily contact with families who might never have attended a rally.

Feeding people was the program, and organizing them was the point.

Soul Fire Farm and farming while Black

Half a century later, Black food sovereignty took the shape of a farm school. Soul Fire Farm, in Rensselaer County in upstate New York, was co-founded by farmer and educator Leah Penniman in the early 2010s. It describes itself as an Afro-Indigenous centred community farm and training centre, and its work combines training a new generation of Black, Indigenous and other farmers of colour with raising and distributing food.

Penniman's 2018 book, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, published by Chelsea Green, has become a standard text. It mixes soil science and crop planning with history, and Penniman often returns to one image: African ancestors who braided seeds into their hair before they were forced onto slave ships. In 2019 Penniman received the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award.

What Soul Fire adds to the older models is training. A cooperative needs members who know how to farm, and many Black families were pushed off the land generations ago. Teaching is how the knowledge comes back.

Toronto: Black Creek Community Farm and the Afri-Can FoodBasket

Canada has its own lineage. The Afri-Can FoodBasket has worked in Toronto since 1995. It was started by Anan Lololi and Anyika Tafari as a culturally sensitive food bank, a place where African, Caribbean and Black families could find the foods they actually cooked. Over the years it moved from distribution toward growing: church gardens, backyard gardens, youth programs and urban farms.

One of those farms is Black Creek Community Farm, an eight-acre property at Jane Street and Steeles Avenue in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood of North York. When the farm launched in 2013, the Afri-Can FoodBasket was among the partner organizations behind it, alongside Everdale, FoodShare and Fresh City Farms.

The Toronto groups then did something the earlier models had not: they took Black food sovereignty into city policy. On 1 October 2021 Toronto City Council unanimously adopted the Toronto Black Food Sovereignty Plan, developed with the city's Confronting Anti-Black Racism Unit and the Afri-Can FoodBasket. Its aims include growing space for Black communities, Black-led food hubs and culturally rooted nutrition programs.

What these models offer growers on Vancouver Island

Vancouver Island is not the Mississippi Delta, and Victoria is not Toronto. The Black community around Victoria is small and spread out. Farmland is expensive, and the growing season is long but cool, with dry summers that favour some African and Caribbean crops and frustrate others.

Even so, several pieces carry over:

• Cooperative ownership. Freedom Farm showed that land held in common can survive what no single family could afford. A small land cooperative or a long shared lease can open the door for growers who would never qualify for a mortgage on farmland.
• Pass-it-on stock. The pig bank translates naturally into a seed bank. Seeds of callaloo, jute mallow or garden egg adapted to island conditions can be lent out and returned with the harvest, building a local supply year by year. Which plants are worth trying is covered in the guide to culturally relevant crops on Vancouver Island. For leaves alone, start with the piece on African and Caribbean greens for island gardens.
• Food plus teaching. The breakfast program and Soul Fire both paired food with learning. A cooking session built around a crop, or a workshop on the history of black-eyed peas, creates the demand that keeps growers in business.
• Policy. Toronto's plan shows that municipal governments can commit land, water and money when communities arrive with a plan. The Capital Regional District already has a regional food and agriculture strategy, Setting Our Table, published in 2016, and plans like it are revised over time.

Each model also carries a warning. Freedom Farm closed once bad seasons hit the cash crops and outside funding dried up. A project that depends on one grant or one charismatic founder is fragile, however strong its idea.

For an island grower, the practical starting point is whichever of these could begin this spring, on a quarter acre, with the people already involved.