Regenerative agriculture is sometimes branded as a new idea. But the tradition of maintaining soil carbon and honoring the earth, of leaving the land better than we found it, has been part of indigenous traditions for thousands of years. So, what can we do to re-center the stories of Black and Native American growers and give credit where credit is due?
Leah Penniman is the Co-Director and Farm Manager at Soul Fire Farm, an Afro-Indigenous-centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system. Leah has 20-plus years of experience as a soil steward and food sovereignty activist, and she is the author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation of the Land. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Leah joins Ross and cohost Rebekah Carlson to explain George Washington Carver’s work pioneered modern regenerative agriculture—two decades prior to J.I. Rodale.
Leah describes the work she has done to reclaim a connection with the land (beyond the oppression of slavery and sharecropping) and offers advice on reconnecting with your own indigenous roots. Listen in for Leah’s insight on the shift among Black Americans from rural to urban farming and learn how you can support Soul Fire Farm’s work to promote social and environmental justice.
Connect with Ross & Rebekah
Write to me through Substack @ rosskenyon.com.
Listen to our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom
Resources
Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation of the Land by Leah Penniman
‘Why Farming Is an Act of Defiance for People of Color’ in Healthyish
Owen Taylor on The Table Underground Podcast EP030
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty
The land-healing work of George Washington Carver at Grist
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
The Justice for Black Farmers Act
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am the creative editor at NORI’s Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today, we have with us Leah Penniman, farmer, educator, food sovereignty activist, and author of Farming While Black, Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. Hey, Leah.
Leah Penniman: Hey, thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: My pleasure. I’m so happy to have you. We did a book club on your book, Farming While Black, last year for our Patreon group. Rebekah, who’s hosting it here with me, Rebekah Carlson. Thank you, Rebekah, for picking this up and then saying like, we really got to do this show. Like we weren’t able to do it last year. Let’s see if we can make it happen. So it seems like you really dug this book too, Rebekah.
Rebekah Carlson: Oh yeah, totally dug it completely. And happy to be here and just like honored to be in the conversation with you, Leah. So thanks for joining. I just want to first off start by saying thank you again for writing this book, Leah. It is such an incredible resource for anybody who is interested in farming from like the logistics of how to like bioremediate your soil to like recipes to grow from what you put on your land. So I just am thankful for the generous resource for it and Really recommend it to all listeners.
But I just want to start out by saying, like, why did you choose to write this book? Because it is quite the undertaking and so thoughtful. So what was the purpose behind it in your mind?
Leah Penniman: Why write Farming While Black? Well, the real reason is, as beloved author Toni Morrison said, you know, if there is a book that you need to read that hasn’t been written, go and write it. And I’ve been farming now since 96. And I needed a book like this when I was a teenager getting into the field and so passionate about organic and regenerative ag, so passionate about feeding the community while taking care of the planet. I needed to know that I wasn’t an interloper in someone else’s history. You know, I needed to know that the history of my people intersected with the land outside of just the oppression that took place on the land.
And so the stories that are in that book around the raised beds of the Obambo people and the OG composting of Cleopatra and the Honestly, invention of organic by Dr. George Washington Carver. Those were stories that I needed to fortify me to know that as a black person, I was on the right path in reclaiming connection to the land. And most of what was available at the time were requiems for the black farmer or, you know, laments, righteous laments, but still laments about the hardship that took place on the land.
That was the heart reason. And then the practical reason, of course, is that Soul Fire Farm had been doing many years of on-farm trainings, that center that needs a black and brown growers. And the impetus was to take all of our little scraps of curriculum and put them in one place to make our trainings go more smoothly and to make sure that we weren’t gatekeeping the knowledge for folks who weren’t able to travel out to the farm. Amazing.
Rebekah Carlson: OG composting from Cleopatra. Heard it here first, I guess. That is like another, like, as you touched upon, like that thread of bringing the new narrative back to farming and regenerative farming. And my role at Nori is like really focused on regenerative farming. And I think it’s so important to highlight things that we aren’t highlighting now. And I found a portion, actually, one of your articles in Healthy-ish. Do you mind if I read it back to you just as like a... Go ahead.
Leah Penniman: I’m curious what I wrote. Okay.
Rebekah Carlson: All right. So... As we’re talking about wonderful history in regenerative ag from the Black agrarian community, you wrote, okay, learning this, 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 corrosion and brutality and misery and sorrow. Yet here was an entire history, blooming into our present, in which Black people’s expertise and love of the land and one another was evident.
When we as Black people are bombarded with messages that are our only place of belonging on the land as slaves, performing dangerous and back-breaking menial labor, to turn that our true and noble history as farmers and ecological stewards is deeply healing. Fortified by a more accurate picture of my people’s belonging in the land, I knew I was ready to create a mission-driven farm centering on the needs of the Black community. With that, like that just like it’s such a beautiful and proactive and like bold movement into farming. And thank you for that.
So could you just talk a little bit more into like the detail of what that theme, how it drives you in conversations and in what you do?
Leah Penniman: Hmm. How it drives me. I mean, it’s the air I breathe, right? So I’ll tell you a little juxtaposition of an example of how that knowing drives me. So when I was researching for the book, one of the sort of jaw-dropping bits of history that I encountered was the fact that European colonizers within just a single generation of farming the Great Plains had driven 50% of the soil organic matter up into the atmosphere as gaseous carbon. In just a generation and with a corresponding decrease in fertility and nutrient holding and water holding and all that we know.
And you at Nori obviously know really well because you’re very focused on soil carbon capture. And yet indigenous peoples across the world have like We’ve been knowing how to maintain soil carbon and get ourselves fed at the same time. Going to West Africa, where my maternal ancestors are from, one of the really poignant sort of counter examples to this is what the women of Ghana and Liberia do, which is create something called African Dark Earth, which is this super rich pyrogenic black compost that combines bone char, ash from the cooking fires, scraps from the kitchen, scraps from the field, combined just so.
And it’s a very high carbon retentive super compost. Now it’d be enough if they just made this compost because that’s super dope, but there’s actually a moral obligation in the community that everybody will add to it so much so that you can determine the age of the community by the depth of the compost, like the opposite soil ethic, right? I mean, I feel like the story speaks for itself. You can pull a lot of themes out of it. But the idea that in our traditions, there is a way of honoring...
The obligation to our descendants and honoring the obligation to our human and non-human siblings through the way that we interact with the environment is really powerful. And that informs what we do on the farm and just how we try to move through the world.
Ross Kenyon: In your opinion, do you see a lot of this in older European traditions? Was there a period where there was a dominant paradigm within the European or Euro-American ways of being that prioritize this regenerative mindset? Did we lose it at some point? Was it ever there? When did white people go from being indigenous and lose that? Or does that even make sense as a question?
Leah Penniman: Oh, it absolutely makes sense. And I am no historian of that, so I won’t pretend to know. But I can say with certainty that all of us have indigenous roots. All of us once belonged to place and all of us once had cycles of sustainability in place. You know, some scholars talk about that being pre-medieval. Some scholars go back even before that. But I think in some ways, white folks, including my white family members and ancestors, have a greater challenge in front of them because the generations that Separating us from indigeneity are more.
And so that repair, that reaching is more that needs to happen.
Ross Kenyon: You feature this so prominently in your writing of connecting with so many different layers of heritage is one way of perhaps framing it that you have access to that are trying to integrate into a coherent self insofar as such a thing as possible. I feel sort of deracinated as a term that people I don’t feel like I have like a strong set of ancestors behind me. I don’t feel the weight of my ancestors like maybe you do. You’ve done a lot of research. I feel very disconnected from that. I want to reclaim some of that indigeneity, but I also don’t want to do it in a way where if you saw me at something, you’d be like, you’re trying too hard.
You’ve made a wrong turn somewhere. I think we all know who we’re talking about. Is there some way I can start or how should I start thinking about this?
Leah Penniman: That’s great. I love the trying to hurt. Yeah, definitely don’t appropriate anyone else’s indigeneity. That would be the trying to hurt. But I would say the person who speaks really eloquently on this that I recently listened to was Owen Taylor of True Love Seeds, who is a Italian American, you know, white bodied person who was on a podcast with my dear friend Tegan Engel of the Table Underground and talking about the cost of whiteness and the history of Immigration to the United States and how in exchange for the badge and benefits of white supremacy, immigrant communities, including Italians, Jewish people and others had to trade in exactly what you’re talking about, you know, language, culture, cuisine, belonging, religion, in many cases, just ties to ancestry that would otherwise fortify them and in exchange got power and privilege.
And what does it mean to actually relinquish And he doesn’t outline, you know, a whole roadmap for that. But I think it’s a really important framing. And for him, one of the things that he started with was to... Get to know his grandparents more deeply, get to know and plant the seeds of his people and get to know what that bean, how that bean tastes distinctive from other beans and what happens when you cook with it. And so it’s been a slow process of reclaiming intimacy with heritage. That’s helped my friend Owen in his journey around his ancestry as a white person.
So I would check out that episode if you haven’t heard it.
Ross Kenyon: No, I absolutely will. One of the last books I read about this was, did you read Michael W. Twitty’s The Cooking Gene?
Leah Penniman: I love it. So our family is black and Jewish. And so, of course, we’re and Michael Twitty is also a friend. So I love that he talks about the bumping of pestles and grinding of mortar stones at the night and the night is this call to ourselves. I mean, just a brilliant, brilliant author, historian.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, maybe it’s my own laziness I’m pointing towards then because he spent so much time and his ancestry is surely much more difficult by orders of magnitude than my own. So it should be easier to engage with some of that. And since he’s been so successful at it, what’s my excuse? Do I have one? It does take some effort.
Leah Penniman: I should say that. So I have white ancestors on my dad’s side and it’s So powerfully well documented that it’s like there’s no thrill, you know, I mean, there’s books and there’s stuff in museums and, you know, to uncover the black and indigenous lineages, it has involved traveling to the Smithsonian sitting down with Researchers whose specific job it is to trace through ship records and property records. I traveled to the continent of West Africa and spent time in Ghana interviewing people. It took a lot of effort to uncover these stories.
Rebekah Carlson: Sounds like fun effort, though. I don’t know.
Leah Penniman: And it’s been a lifetime. It’s work that I started when I was 18 and done bit by bit. You know, literally finding out where a great, great grandparent was buried and sort of triangulating the stone, which was, you know, my family could only afford like an inset stone. It wasn’t a headstone. And then digging in that place to uncover the name. I mean, there’s been so many beautiful moments of, yeah, I guess just adding bricks to that arch of meaning.
Rebekah Carlson: I have like a thousand things to say about like identity through culture and history and How we can get so bland over time, what we traded for that. However, that could be a whole other episode of like, come on back, Leah. So hard pivoting, I guess, away from the ancestry, but actually kind of threaded throughout is like regenerative agriculture and the history that we have there. And we’re at an interesting spot where regenerative agriculture seems so cool. People are talking about it. It’s marketable, but really it’s not And so when we’re thinking about the typical story about regenerative ag, when there are a lot of stories about there, what would you say it is right now?
And what do you think it’s actually missing as we’re thinking back to how really our ancestors did farm the land and till or not till the land?
Leah Penniman: Well, I’m not sure I know the full breadth of the mythology at present, but I will say that regenerative ag, at least in its modern form, originated out of Tuskegee University in Alabama, which is a black agricultural institution that was literally built brick by brick by its former students, and specifically Dr. George Washington Carver, who is well known for his work with the peanut and the sweet potato and the thousands of inventions that he made with peanuts in particular. What is lesser known about Dr. Carver is the reason he was so obsessed with peanuts is that they are legumes.
And legumes are the BFFs of rhizobial bacteria and are able to make a collaboration with them to pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere and put it into the soil, which is why there’s nitrogen in the soil in the first place. Amazing, amazing collaboration. And he was noticing that the monocropping of the southern soils with cotton or tobacco was depleting them. And we were just a few years away from complete decimation of the southern economy. And got people to start rotating crops, got them to start doing polycultures and cover cropping, leaving fallow, pulling in muck from the wetlands to make mulches and compost, you know, silver pasturing animals between the oak forest.
I mean, just all these practices that we talk about today. And this was the late 1800s, two whole decades before Rodale, who is sometimes credited as the founder of organic. And something even lesser known about Dr. Carver that I’m just starting to uncover myself is that he saw this regenerative ag work as a spiritual practice and believed wholeheartedly that God spoke to him through organic. Soil critters, through flowers, through trees, and would go out very, very early in the morning to nature to hear what God’s message was. And these farming practices and his inventions with the peanut, he said, were direct messages from the divine through nature that he heeded.
So pretty, pretty powerful.
Ross Kenyon: You see Rodale getting a lot of attention or you see Rudolf Steiner and the biodynamic farming getting a lot of attention. And you’re like, where’s George Washington Carver? That’s the centerpiece for you. He’s missing something like that.
Leah Penniman: Yeah. I mean, I guess what is maybe missing is sometimes I see regenerative ag branded as some new idea. And similar to permaculture, it’s an amalgamation of indigenous ideas that are rebranded, repackaged and sold, you know, and yeah. That’s a tragedy, not just in terms of narrative and credit, but also it perpetuates the legacy of theft upon which this nation is founded. You know, the theft was originally and continues to be land and bodies. And additionally, now there’s We’re better than that, I hope. Perhaps so.
Ross Kenyon: If I’m understanding your perspective here, it’s that when we think of regenerative farming, we’ve located within a space of whiteness, primarily, and you’re trying to de-center that whiteness and sort of re-center people of color inside of this tradition, which is a I’ll link to a question I’ve had for a long time. I’ve been dying to ask you, actually, if you could shed some light on this history. When I think of enslaved persons in the United States, and even before the United States, actually, I think of it primarily about rural, agrarian economies, cash crops, that sort of like extractive mining of the soil.
Nowadays, one of the more euphemistic terms for people of color, African Americans is urban. So how did it go from being a people that I associate primarily with rural labor to being urban? When and how did that switch?
Leah Penniman: Yeah, so that demographic switch was mostly early to mid 1900s with a demographic trend called the Great Migration when 6 million black people moved from south to north. And if you learned about it at all in school, it was the largest internal migration in this country’s I mean, six million is a lot of people to get up and move. It’s taught sometimes as a search for opportunities in the factories of the urban north. You know, World War I, World War II needed people to build machines and so on and so forth.
The sort of deeper truth of that’s not often told is that it was a refugee crisis. And I’ll explain why. So at the end of the Civil War, 1865, the South was in a freakout. Like, That was running on free labor. Now the labor is freed. What are they going to do? And so they tried a lot of tricky tactics to keep people in forms of neo-bondage. Sharecropping is one well-known. Another lesser known is convict leasing, which is the habit of making These kind of ridiculous rules, like no loitering, which means no standing around or no vagrancy, which means not having no, no being unemployed, and locking black people up for that and then renting them back to the plantation as convicts.
Ross Kenyon: Slavery by Another Name is that? Talk about that. Okay, that didn’t mean to interrupt. But if you haven’t read that book, it’s troubling, to say the least.
Leah Penniman: Yeah. So, you know, it went on, you know, the guest worker programs are arguably an extension. All that to say, even despite these efforts, you know, black folks kept trying to get land. I mean, 40 acres and a mule was a promise, but it was not fulfilled. In fact, reparations was given to the quote slave owners for losing their quote property. But black people did manage to purchase 16 million acres of land by 1910, which was astounding. It was 14% of the nation’s farms. These were mostly small marginal land holdings, but it still was their own land.
And again, the South is freaking out because they see the writing on the wall. Okay, so if Black people own their own land and their own businesses, we’re not going to have the labor that we need and our social structure will be upended. This is white Southerners speaking. And so they started to burn down financially successful Black areas, Tulsa, Black Wall Street. They started to lynch and destroy lives and homes of land owning black farmers. There’s over 4000 documented cases of these murders, including, you know, David Walker and Hankman, Kentucky in 1908.
He and his wife and five kids were murdered. And the white neighbor took over the deed and still has it to this day, their descendants. So people got out of there. I mean, Wouldn’t you, right? People fled. So it was people fleeing from this terror campaign of the Klan, the Whitecaps, the White Citizens Council and other terrorist groups who were state supported and went to go north and west to urban areas. The Black population is now more urban than rural, but it doesn’t mean that Black farmers have disappeared from rural space or that rural sentiments have disappeared where people that can move in both spaces.
And there is, you know, what I think will become a demographic trend right now of returning to the South and returning to the land. So we’ll kind of see, we’ll see how that all plays out. But it’s fascinating, this back South movement that’s just starting to catch steam.
Ross Kenyon: In hindsight, 40 acres and a mule seems like such a bargain to avoid centuries of racial strife and having an underclass that is seemingly permanent. I feel like we would probably, everyone, with the exception of a few, we probably all would have been healthier, safer, happier, all good adjectives. We probably would have been all of those things now had we dealt with it. It just seems incredibly wasteful and sad.
Leah Penniman: I have a hard time understanding how Well, it’s because your logic assumes that black people are human beings and worthy of freedom, belonging, dignity, and life. And the assumption Sadly, at the time, predominantly, and still to this day, with approximately half of white Americans, is that Black people are actually less than human and need to be controlled and in roles of servitude. Otherwise, we’re too scary. So I agree with your heart. But the goal was not actually to have Black folks have economic freedom and independence. The goal was to try to continue to push Black people into roles of economic servitude, which was Largely successful by the former plantation owners of that time.
We got to really question the whole premise of the system. And, you know, it’s why the Movement for Black Lives used the hashtag Black Lives Matter, because it really is about how do we value life? Whose life do we value?
Rebekah Carlson: Reading your book, yes, practical, but also so convicting and hard to read, especially your chapter of the healing from trauma. And it’s like, can you imagine the trajectory had the 40 acres and the mule been fulfilled? If that promise had been fulfilled, like what would our landscape look like? What would these conversations be? It would just would be so foundationally different than what we’re at now.
Leah Penniman: Absolutely. And one exciting thing, I mean, I don’t know if you’ve all been following in the news, but the Justice for Black Farmers Act introduced by Senators Booker, Warren and Gillibrand attempts to correct that through a major land reform proposal that would actually give back the millions of acres of land through purchasing land off the market and making it available to trained farmers from the Black community. And I think their strategy is it probably won’t get passed as a complete piece of legislation, but they’re taking pieces of it and stuffing it into other bills.
So the debt relief portion actually just the debt relief for Black farmers who still have debt left over that wasn’t addressed during the major Pigford lawsuit was put into a COVID relief bill and actually passed. Astounding, you know, millions and millions of dollars of debt just being forgiven for these farmers who were oppressed by the USDA, U. S. Department of Agriculture. So I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to see land reform still. Yes. Amen to that.
Rebekah Carlson: Can I say that? I don’t know.
Leah Penniman: I do.
Rebekah Carlson: So in this like it’s hard to read and convicting portion of this, you have a portion that’s talking about as we’re looking at new like agricultural landscapes and this like idea of viewing egg is like the Wild West. And what that point of view of the Wild West is like, we settled it and like exploited things. And it was convicting because in Nori, we’re in the carbon marketplace. I’m always like, this is the Wild West. What’s there’s so much to figure out. There’s so much to think about. There are no rules.
And as we are entering into a potential new portion of farming, of carbon farming to help incentivize and restore regenerative agriculture, what are some things that you think we should keep in mind as we’re integrating ideas of those who’ve gone before us so we’re not redoing bad stories, replaying narratives if we’re going to be successful in this?
Leah Penniman: Oh, wow. Well, I did read your website, so I know what you do, but I’m not sure I know enough about your practices or carbon markets to give you any solvent advice. But yeah, I definitely empathize with wanting to interrogate the whole concept of the Wild West because, of course, the West was not wild. It was inhabited by... So I think it is important to interrogate even our metaphors for how do we talk about newness and how do we talk about spaces of creativity and possibility and openness outside of a colonizer framework, right?
Because it’s not something to be conquered. Yeah, I’m not aware of, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but I’m not aware of any indigenous examples of commodifying ecological services. And I get it. Why we want that. Because what you all are doing is you’re translating between capitalism and the earth, right? The needs of the earth. And I wish you well. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: There are versions of that too that I find equally, well, I don’t know if I equally, but I definitely find them icky when I see them. I’m like, you’re clearly viewing this instrumentally or in a way that I find inappropriate. And we read plenty of Robin Wall Kimmerer or Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver, anyone who encouraged you to stick your hand in the dirt and just sit with that. Whereas trying to translate that into a commodity market, like this is a category error.
Leah Penniman: It does not compute, right?
Ross Kenyon: But you also need some of that for scale. And we want to help agribusiness and farmers overall move that direction. So are those changes on the margin important? Or is it better to get people to do something more akin to what you’re doing of trying to get them reconnected in a place-based sensibility? Oh, I don’t think it’s either or at all.
Leah Penniman: I think both are really important. And so I’ll give you a little metaphor for that. So we often talk about social and environmental justice as being represented by a butterfly with four winglets. And we all know a butterfly will not fly with one, two or three. It needs all four. So on one of those wings. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. There’s reform, the third wing, which is a little bit your domain. It’s how do you work within the existing system to make incremental change. So that’s our radical school teachers, our elected officials, folks who get jobs in prosecutors’ offices and try to lighten sentences.
And then the fourth wing is the healers, the therapists, the artists, the visionaries, the singers, the people who help us be whole. We need all of that. And if for nothing else, you know, if you have the radical resistors over there in the streets, they scare the middle of the road people into signing up for a program like yours because that feels like less terrifying and more emotional. I feel like it all is going to point us in the right direction, but we have to recognize that the ultimate endgame, at least for me, is not to make a gentler capitalism.
It’s really to rethink our whole social and economic structure in a way that does adhere to the laws of the blessed earth.
Ross Kenyon: Are you satisfied with that, Rebekah? It’s a tall order. I know, yeah. It’s pretty sensible to me.
Rebekah Carlson: I mean, it’s absolutely such a beautiful metaphor for it. And it’s just so hard to balance it all. Trying to move things forward and talk to all people who are part of the conversation keeps me up at night. But I think the way you framed it and having each of those four wings as a part of how you move something forward is the only way to do it, I guess.
Ross Kenyon: Leah, I have a couple more questions that actually come from some of our listeners from our Patreon. Would you indulge them with some personalized responses here?
Leah Penniman: I will. I’ll give it a try.
Ross Kenyon: All right. Here’s this first one. It says, I wonder if the land itself is feeling a form of trauma these days from being so abused. I’m so concerned about the apparent soil degradation that I see everywhere. Leah talks about soil fertility. How can we help with that even in small spaces like our own yards?
Leah Penniman: Yeah, well, I do believe that the earth is not just an environment or a commodity or a bundle of natural resources, but is a sentient, conscious being, actually a deity, you know, and does feel the pain that we inflict and does mourn for the callousness of her children against her. So I’m with your listener on that. As far as how we can help with healing the soil in our own small yards, you know, I do write about in the book, Farming While Black, How there was lead in the soils in my small urban yard and community gardens at one point.
And we did the slow, painstaking work of remediating that lead using hyperaccumulating plants of scented geranium and sunflower and mustard. And so if there is damaged soil around you, however small, I think it’s worth giving it a try to clean it up. And in absence of that, because some of us really Don’t have access to soil. We can think about how our societal actions impact the soils that we do use because our footprint extends beyond the soils we touch. The food we eat, the type of transportation we use, how much energy we consume all impact soil.
And so making those ecological choices, advocating for policies that protect soil also, even though they’re a few steps removed, you know, help us do our part to protect the earth.
Ross Kenyon: It’s lovely. I’m sure they’ll be very happy with that response. We have one other from a farmer as well, actually. She wanted to connect with you on this level. She says, I particularly love harvesting potatoes, garlic, and eggplant. The first two, because it feels like Digging for gold every time. Their bounty is hidden in such a great surprise. An eggplant just because a big, beautiful eggplant seems so exotic and hard to grow here up in Atlantic Canada. So she’s wondering which crops bring you the most joy to grow.
Leah Penniman: Oh, I love those. So when your listener is talking about hidden treasure, my daughter, Nishima, who’s grown up on the farm, who’s now 18, Always would be like, Mom, tell me when it’s time to harvest the carrots or the beets or the turnips or whatever, because she wanted to be the one to pull that magic out of the earth. So yeah, but I will say the ones that bring me the most joy... Hands down, strawberries. So many things about strawberries. One, they come ripe in my birthday month, which is June.
Two, it’s the first crop I ever gardened starting at age five with my grandmother in her backyard outside of Boston. We made jam out of berries and apples. And three, just because it’s a freaking miracle. I mean, it’s this plant that just keeps regenerating itself, gives forth these luscious, like sweet, Delectable red fruits all over the ground, and they were just abundant and wonderful. So yeah, there’s nothing like strawberries.
Rebekah Carlson: Except for they take over things, that’s for sure, but keep them in line. Anytime I plant something and it germinates, if it’s a small thing in my garden, if it’s like a field that I was walking back in Nebraska, when plants emerge, it is the most beautiful thing. And it’s like always a miracle. Like how does that little thing- I doubt it every spring.
Leah Penniman: Like we just filled our greenhouse with the first, you know, last week was our first big planting for the spring. And I don’t believe it every year. I’m like, nothing’s going to grow. There’s no way. And then it does. It’s amazing. Yeah.
Rebekah Carlson: No way. It’s going to die. No. Oh my gosh, it’s coming out. And it becomes this huge plant that gives nourishment and provides service. It’s a new joy every spring or whenever planting emerges.
Ross Kenyon: I also, I forget to see the magic and I love being reminded of it. And that’s what those authors I mentioned earlier with Robin Wall Kimmerer and others. I’m just like, oh yes, the world is miraculous and I have forgotten how to see it. Thank you for reminding me. So thanks for the nudge. Well, Leah, we should take us out of here. Where should people learn more about your work? How can they get involved? Where might you steer them?
Leah Penniman: So we’d love to have folks get involved with Soul Fire Farm. You can find a lot of information on our website, www. soulfirefarm. org. And on all the socials, Soul Fire Farm, all one word, all lowercase. And we’ll see you hopefully at one of our events or advocating for more humane and sustainable policies. But we’re excited to collaborate with you.
Ross Kenyon: I heard that you’re working on a new book. Is that true?
Leah Penniman: It is true. So my next book is Black Earth Wisdom, published by HarperCollins, and it will bring together the voices of 30 respected Black environmentalists who are letting us know what the Earth is instructing us to do in these times.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. When might we expect that to be available?
Leah Penniman: Probably Earth Day 2022. That’s what we’re shooting for.
Ross Kenyon: Nice. Yeah, the lead on book times is always pretty far out. Yeah, it’s not written yet.
Leah Penniman: I’m doing interviews right now, so.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, thank you so much for being here. And thank you, Rebekah, too, for co-hosting.
Rebekah Carlson: Absolutely. Yes. Thanks, Leah, for the wonderful insights and the sharing of knowledge. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. Take care, you both.
Ross Kenyon: Take care, too. Bye for now. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at nori. com where there is a newsletter. That’s nori. com slash subscribe. There’s podcast. There’s a whole bunch else. Or you can send us an email at podcast at nori.
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