The Legacy of Seeds:
An Interview with Leah Penniman

It’s our duty to pick up the seeds and carry them forward and name these points along the way in Black history that are part of that legacy.
 

Introduction

Penniman’s first book, Farming While Black (Chelsea Green, 2018), is a how-to for Black and brown farmers, chockfull of inspiration, practical information, historical context, and uplifting stories. It is, in a word, fertile. While its focus is on supporting Black and brown farmers, people of all races should dive in to learn the rich history and contemporary successes and struggles of farmers of color. Black Earth Wisdom (Amistad Press, 2023), her second book, is a collection of conversations with Black environmentalists that can be read cover to cover or flipped open to any page to listen in on what Earth’s defenders have to say. Even her books are spaces for connection, offering readers and contributors alike an opportunity to benefit from multiple points of view.

I live in Penniman’s corner of the world in rocky upstate New York, where it meets Massachusetts and Vermont. I’ve been to a couple of Soul Fire Farm’s SOULstice celebrations of the sun’s highest point in the sky. The farm is a work of art: 80 acres of integrated crops, livestock that forage among trees, and buildings made from natural and locally sourced materials. When I drive past their road sign and think about what is growing back on their acreage—both on the land and with the people—I am buoyed. Simply put, the planet is better with Penniman in it.

We spoke on Earth Day, which Penniman mentioned was her favorite holiday as a kid. I asked her to tell me more about that, and much more.

Earth has this endless capacity to compost trauma and give us back ourselves, give us back our whole hearts and our whole beings.

Interview

Leah Penniman: My dear sibling Naima and I were total Earth devotees from a very young age. Among our projects was the junior ecologist kids club, which usually had two members—the two of us—but sometimes a neighbor would join. We would go on pollution patrols, picking up trash, and we would write letters and postcards to people in the phone book encouraging them to take shorter showers and conserve energy. We guerrilla-planted the median and tried to stop the loggers with the levels of sophistication that you’d expect of six- and seven-year-olds, but we were out there really doing our best.

So Earth Day was the galvanizing holiday for people like us who saw nature as teacher, nature as sacred being. We had anthems and songs we sang that we had written.

Cara Benson: How was that received by your local community?

Leah Penniman: My family wasn’t socially accepted in our small town. We grew up in a nearly all-white, conservative working class town in central Massachusetts. Our family, for most of our growing up, was one of the few non-white families in the town, sometimes the only one. Between our racial differences, our poverty, and our dedication to healing and repairing the world, social bullying was predominant in our childhood. There was a lot of violence directed at the three of us children and at our family throughout our school years.

Cara Benson: You write about that isolation and the racism you experienced growing up and how the woods were a solace for you and your siblings. I’m really struck by how your life now seems so community-based. It’s even true in your books! They’re all about conversation and pulling in so many voices. Then there’s the communal project that Soul Fire Farm is. I’m wondering if you think that this is in some way a response to the isolation of your childhood.

Leah Penniman: That’s such an insightful and thoughtful question. I’m not sure. I think the communal leaning developed initially more as a political abstraction. I had an understanding that the individualistic, capitalist, greedy mindset of Western civilization was going to get us into bigger and bigger trouble over time and that the way forward was focusing on interdependence and community orientation and service. So it was an ethic. My nature is a bit more introverted and solitary actually, so I was always bumping against that even as I was living in intentional community. My entire adulthood I have been in one form or another living and working communally.

I don’t know if I have a psychoanalysis of it in terms of isolation. It has been a political choice to create these autonomous pods, so to speak. In our space and certainly with Soul Fire, we are similarly in a rural white conservative small town. To have a group of Black and brown folks who are justice-minded living in close proximity is practical, but it’s also a safety consideration to make sure that we have each other’s backs in that context.

Cara Benson: Has anything changed in the community that you’ve experienced since moving in? What are the challenges still?

Leah Penniman: We have care and respect for our neighbors across political and racial differences, so we found that by and large, one-on-one and on a relational level we can find common ground with folks. One of them would hunt on our lands and give us venison, and we would give him chicken that we raised. So we’ve tried to engage with respect and compassion with our neighbors and to build relationships.

Cara Benson: I want to talk about the conversation you had in Black Earth Wisdom with Lauret Savoy, Rue Map, and Audrey Peterman about land conservation. You were talking about the National Park Service and that land conservation has a racist history of removing Indigenous people to make room for whites to recreate. Now land trusts can have a different problematic bent in what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the “velvet rope” type of conservation, where the approach is to keep all people out because the land needs to heal without us. This sets up a nature-human divide that is really destructive, right? What are your experiences with land trusts? And what is your vision for conservation?

Leah Penniman: I think you bring that up so beautifully in terms of the kind of fortress conservation ethos versus the sense of interdependent kinship where we are looking at how we conserve land alongside and with Indigenous people, with local people. I really love Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work in terms of the studies that she shares of sweetgrass and other species that only survive with harvesting and with coexistence with humans. Part of how we have tried to embody that is we’re one of the founding farms for the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, which combines the conservation land trust and the community land trust model to envision Indigenous-led, multiuse spaces that have housing and agricultural land, as well as land for wildlife and beauty and conservation and all of that. Those uses can be compatible with thoughtful land management strategy that leans on Indigenous wisdom.

The Kingston Land Trust is also doing great work with the Land in Black Hands Initiative. They’ve historically been more conservation-focused but are starting to integrate cultural use. They just purchased a property in Kingston which has a certain amount of land set aside for housing and Black agriculture and then additional land that I think the Open Space Institute conserved that has hiking trails and a wildlife preserve all on one property. The mixed-use model is what we have to be considering more. Not the people-get-out and the animals-are-somewhere-else models, or creating playgrounds for the white wealthy to enjoy their adventures. That’s not the way forward.

Cara Benson: Mentioning the Open Space Institute makes me think of the work that they just did in deeding Papscanee Island back to the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians. And didn’t Soul Fire Farm just give 250 acres back to the Mohicans?

Leah Penniman: Our friendship with the Mohican Nation is almost as old as Soul Fire. We first got to know Bonnie Hartley, the tribal historic preservation manager. She joined our CSA in the early years. Through that we got to know other members of the Stockbridge Munsee Mohican community and figure out how we could be in friendship and solidarity with them.

That looks like fighting to save Papscanee Island, doing petitions and fundraisers. We have a sister seed-saving program with them where we raise Lenape black bean and Mohican blue corn to keep that genetic material alive and those cultural stories alive. This was really important this past year because they had a crop failure of their maize. We were able to send them their seed and be a backup seed bank for them.

Then, of course, the land work. The first land project we did with Mohican Nation was to establish a cultural respect easement about five years ago, so they have deeded rights to the Soul Fire property in a shared sovereignty arrangement. This is the first of its kind in New York. Additionally, there were 250 acres that have sacred relevance and we coordinated a fundraising project to purchase that so that it could be returned to the Nation. We’re still in paperwork around the actual deed transfer, but the hard part is done.

Cara Benson: The idea of healing on the land is clearly such a huge part of the mission of Soul Fire Farm. Not only healing the land itself, but healing for African American people in particular. I’m thinking of the conversation in Black Earth Wisdom where you write, “We have confused the subjugation our ancestors experienced on land with the land herself, naming her the oppressor and running toward paved streets without looking back. We do not stoop, sweat, harvest, or even get dirty because we imagine that would revert us to bondage…. Part of the work of healing our relationship with soil is unearthing and relearning the lessons of land reverence and agrarian innovation from the past.”

What have you experienced as you bring people to the farm? Have you witnessed any of that healing that reconnecting with the land can bring?

Leah Penniman: I think that’s been one of the biggest surprises of choosing this path. I got into farming not necessarily to heal from racial trauma. I suppose that was in there somewhere, but I wanted to serve the Earth. I wanted to serve community. I found it undeniably good in this way that was clarifying and grounding.

When we started doing programming on Soul Fire back in the early years, it was and still continues to be primarily focused on hard skills. How do you do a soil test and interpret it, and what will a business plan look like, and safe harvest handling, and so on. So it was as much a surprise to me as anyone when the feedback came after these programs—responses like, “I put my feet on the ground and I felt my Grandmother’s spirit speaking to me about coming over to the land.” Or, “I have been able to kick these substance addictions or move away from violent circumstances in a relationship or life because of this contact with land.”

Over time we’ve made that more explicit, but we almost don’t have to. Earth has this endless capacity to compost trauma and give us back ourselves, give us back our whole hearts and our whole beings. Seeing it thousands of times just makes it undeniable.

Cara Benson: It’s like the way people think about art. You don’t need to necessarily preference the therapy part, although there is a specific practice of art therapy, but that making art and creative expression have this potential for healing without even calling it as such. That leads me to another conversation in Black Earth Wisdom about the African American eco-literary tradition and the role writing and art can play in developing a relationship with the nonhuman world. You wrote about Ross Gay being on the farm and reading the poem about the orchard and how even though you had all been working in the orchard all morning, hearing that poem opened you up to the land in a way that hadn’t come from the physical experience alone.

Story is a key part of how we understand who we are as people, where we’ve been, and where we’re headed.

I’m wondering about not only reading, but writing. Did the act of writing Farming While Black influence your relationship to place? Has the writing changed you?

Leah Penniman: The short answer is yes, the writing absolutely changes me. I think the moment when I noticed the way that writing changes me was when I was on assignment for Yes magazine. It was a run-of-the-mill article about USDA funding for urban agriculture, and they wanted me to see if it was effective. I interviewed maybe eight or ten folks who had applied for the program or gotten the program to get a sense of it.

I remember having this aha moment where I was like, oh, as a writer I get to see the landscape in a way that I don’t as a practitioner. It’s such a gift. I was the first person who’d asked these questions about this new program. Then my duty was to write a story that weaves these narratives together and defines the language that we’ll be using to understand this particular moment in time around this USDA program.

Both books were similar in how I went about them. When I decided to write Farming While Black, I reached out to a bunch of leaders in the Black farming movement, like Dara Cooper and Malik Yakini and Karen Washington. I said I know it’s bold to write a book called Farming While Black. I want to make sure I have your blessing, and also I want to know what’s important. I began the process of pulling together not only Soul Fire’s curriculum, but anecdotes and quotes from other farms and part of the history of Black agrarianism. The story that emerged about who we are was greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly with Black Earth Wisdom I was interviewing people along these themes.

Story is a key part of how we understand who we are as people, where we’ve been, and where we’re headed. The narrative leadership component of what we do at Soul Fire might end up being the most enduring part of our work. I hypothesize that folks might say years from now that we helped people to know the legacy of seeds braided in our ancestors’ hair before they were forced into the bowels of slave ships. It’s our duty to pick up those seeds and carry them forward and name these points along the way in Black history that are part of that legacy. That might be what the imprint that is left in the geological record will be.

Cara Benson: You’re gonna have to etch it into stone somewhere.

Leah Penniman: Tiffany LaShae, who’s a Black soil scientist, farmer, and guest facilitator for our immersion program, did some soil core studies on the farm a couple years ago. She could read the history of the land through the soil. She was able to read in it the burning of the forest 1,000 years ago to clear for deer, for example, and multiple other historical layers. And she said, “This layer on top of this black rich soil, that’s yours. Someone will be able to read that layer thousands of years from now and know that somebody did regenerative farming at this time period on this land.” That’s some Lauret Savoy geological timescale. That’s our etching in stone.

Cara Benson: In Black Earth Wisdom, Awo HalfKenny speaks about learning from the river, how it’s always moving and changing, and that from this we can see that freezing something in time isn’t the best way to understand it. What are some of the things that you learned specifically from the land at Soul Fire Farm, from the particular type of land that it is?

There’s a way that the Earth teaches attention, patience, and compassion. If you want to pull out joy and abundance from this land, you need to be intimate with her.

Leah Penniman: Oh my God, so much. We’re in these heavy clay, rocky soils that are poorly drained. The winter lingers and it’s tricky. It’s always popping in and out, blasting your blossoms. I think there’s a way that one could lament, if we only had millions of dollars we could be in the rich river bottom soils of the Hudson Valley. Instead here we are in the rugged mountains.

But there’s a way that the Earth teaches attention, patience, and compassion. If you want to pull out joy and abundance from this land, you need to be intimate with her. You need to know the soggy spot and the dry spot. You need to be able to read the weather. You need to tune in. And then she’ll rock with you, but she’s not an easy lover and she shouldn’t be. She’s like: you need to win me over.

Then in thinking about Earth as a teacher of compassion, I think of all the people in the world who are trying to farm on a steep hillside because of colonial displacement or trying to farm in lead soils because of the violence that’s been done to their urban communities, or Indigenous people who’ve been forced to an island in Panama off of the mainland and it’s salty, but they’re trying to make it work. So any time that there is a late frost or a crop failure, I remind myself, let me open my heart to all the beings who are also on marginal land and must feed their communities. Who must make a way out of no way. Must use the provision gardens on the back of a plantation because that’s all there is. And so those difficult clay soils, I have my moments, but I bow to them as teachers of that intimacy and attention and patience and compassion that is necessary in creating the world we want to create.

Cara Benson: One last question: What’s on the horizon for you?

Leah Penniman: Something that is really exciting at Soul Fire Farm is that we’re almost to the finish line with our multiyear campus build project. Our programs have been constrained based on the construction schedule. So I’m really excited for being at a space where we can cut the ribbon and open the new dining hall and classroom and lodging facilities and be able to have the level of bustle and sharing and programming that our community merits. I’m looking forward to that.

Learn more about Leah Penniman and Soul Fire Farm.

Cara Benson is a writer and writing mentor dedicated to the wellbeing of the planet. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, Orion, The Brooklyn Rail, and selected for Best American Poetry. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and wrote a series on walking in the woods during the pandemic for Best American Poetry website. Currently Cara is at work on a memoir about love, loss, and commitment in the climate crisis. She lives in a former church in the ancestral homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans.

Header photo of Soul Fire Farm by Capers Rumph.