Black women farmers tend the land, carry the future

De-centering European farming techniques, passing down a love of the land, Black farming is personal and political  

Once Rankin County farmer Gwen Cannon began growing her own food, she had a question.

It is perhaps with some side-eye that a Black food producer sees pop culture depict Black people as “city folk” who would starve to death in a garden — especially considering Black blood-deep ties to farming in America and the advantage they have over many white farmers.

Traditional European farming techniques gave way The Great Depression, yet it’s somehow still the standard

In fact, farmer-rancher Lauren McCalister says it was only traditional white farmer’s access to the latest in technology that gave them any advantage over Black growers, whose talents with the land stretches back not just hundreds of years, but thousands upon thousands of years. “Before Reconstruction we were stolen and brought here. … They brought these agricultural geniuses [from Africa] and said ‘grow in rows’. Can you believe that?” demanded McCalister.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia for white farming,” said McCalister. “For them to have caused the Great Depression and for us to have nostalgia about it is wild for me. They’re so screwed up they almost all died, and they’re like ‘we got to get back to that’ and I’m like ‘do we?’ Because last time we almost all died.” McCalister has little respect for the white farming style that ransacked the dirt and caused the Dust Bowl ecological and agricultural disaster in the 1930s.

It’s true that every field along the road these days has the same assembly line row-pattern . It’s conducive to machinery driving through it in a straight line, either to plow or harvest. But this wasn’t always the way to do it, said McCalister, who runs the 25-acre 3 Flock Farm in Ellettsville, Indiana with her partner Brett. Together they also run the People’s Cooperative Market for community-building and for market opportunities for other growers and food producers. 

Until perhaps the last few hundred years, people did not grow their food in straight lines. That is a straight-up European thing. But white people in American brought an exploitative row method from Europe, and it nearly ended with disaster.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia for white farming,” said McCalister. “For them to have caused the Great Depression and for us to have nostalgia about it is wild for me. They’re so screwed up they almost all died, and they’re like ‘we got to get back to that’ and I’m like ‘do we?’ Because last time we almost all died.”

McCalister has little respect for the white farming style that ransacked the dirt and caused the Dust Bowl ecological and agricultural disaster in the 1930s. It hit the heart of the nation’s breadbasket when severe soil mistreatment from European style farming locked fingers with a nagging drought and caused massive dust storms that devastated farming. Together it aggravated the economic ruin of the Great Depression. 

More effective farming techniques have been passed down from agricultural geniuses through Black families

There are better ways, and McCalister says many Black families already have the tools and know how to make it happen.    Beyond planting in assembly rows, there’s “mound planting,” “polyculture” and “no-till” soil management techniques, which have worked for untold thousands of years. And then there’s the forsaken miracle of the “Three Sisters” method of growing, which involves planting corn, beans, squash in tight groups to complement and nourish one another. Beans are nitrogen fixers, and they use little bulbous bacteria factories in their roots to dump nitrogen into the soil for sister plants. Corn provides a frame for bean vine growth while leafy squash deters pests and weeds and shades the ground.

For many, it’s in the blood. McCalister said her own entry into food production was deeply familial, beginning with her grandmother Dorothy Davis White, who singlehandedly “fed all seven cousins and all of the adults every day before school.” 

And we’re not talking about peanut butter sandwiches shoved into little baggies.

“The sheer volume of food she was gathering, cleaning up and preparing really taught me that this was never about individual servings. I never saw her cook a meal for herself. There was no time when that was possible. She had a garden.”

Similarly, her great-grandmother on the other side grew sweet potatoes and kale, which “covered” both the front and back yards of her home: “There was no separation for her,” said McCalister. “You walked outside her home and there was food growing. You walked into her back yard and there was food growing.”

For Rankin County farmer Gwen Cannon and her husband Harold Cannon, the ties to the land are even more close and visceral. 

“They taught me farming by way of my momma [Clotea Fisher]. I picked it up from [her],” said Cannon, who co-owns The Cannon Farm, LLC. in Rankin County, Mississippi. “… The greatest memory I have is we’d go and visit [grandparents Alice and George McGee] and when we needed to take baths, we’d have to get the mule and hitch it to a flat and we’d ride down to the pond and we’d fill containers with water and take it back to the house, and that was out bath water.”

Running water wasn’t a thing everywhere in rural Mississippi in those days, so the siblings and cousins would take baths in ten tubs — sometimes sharing the water. But then came the delightful days of picking peas and produce and taking them to market on Fridays.

Guess who was doing “organic-local-farm-to-table" before it was cool? Black farmers

  “We’d travel the road to Jackson, and we rode on the back of the truck.” ‘Watermelon man!’ we’d shout. ‘Peas! Corn!’ And the people knew what time we’d be coming and they would come running to the door and running out to get the fresh vegetables. No pesticides, no fertilizer. Just straight from the ground.”

The concept of ‘no pesticides’ is the presiding concept that stuck with Cannon over the decades. That’s why her farm has been supplying produce without it since 1972. 

“We realize that most of the food out of the grocery stores have pesticides and chemicals, and we don’t use pesticides and chemicals,” she said. “We need to eat straight from the ground.”

Her farm provides collard greens, mustard greens, and turnip greens, as well as butterbeans, peas and corn. There’s also muscadines, peaches, pears, figs, persimmons, and apples. If you have different tastes there’s cows, horses, donkey, chickens, ducks, geese, various eggs and rabbits. 

“You name it, we raise it,” she said.

Cannon Farm also preserves their own fruits and vegetables, which Cannon says is a lost art because of modern refrigeration.

But there are other talents being lost as well, and Cannon says it’s past time to bring them back.

“The land hasn’t changed, but people aren’t using what they got. Take this area,” she said, nodding to the land of her surrounding neighbors in the expansive exurb of Mississippi’s capitol city. “People out here have land, but they’re not using it. They’re not growing their own stuff. No gardens. They depend on the store. That house over there has maybe three acres of land up on this side but they’re not utilizing it.”

“People like microwave stuff,” chided Cannon. “That may be the reason why a lot of us have health issues now. When we were coming up there was no McDonalds or a Krystal you could run to for fast food. People want stuff right now. But if you have to work for it, it would also get you off the couch, get you off the computer, get you off the phone and using your body muscles.” 

For many Black women farmers growing is personal and also political

For Cannon, growing and tending the land is about survival because most of her family revenue comes directly from the earth. But McCalister said her growing is personal — but also deeply political.

“Once you start growing food for yourself you start wondering ‘why am I getting food from other people?’ And those questions really bothered me. Why was I not in control of what I was able to eat, and who decided that I needed only red tomatoes, or only green bell peppers,” McCalister said. “There was a political awakening in the fact that I was in a co-op space [with other growers], but I think there was also a spiritual waking from being part of a larger farming network.”

McCalister points out that it was farmers and growers who fueled the Civil Rights Movement by feeding protestors who were laid off for daring to speak their minds. They provided food, but also employment when white farmers fired their Black field workers for boldly trying to vote.

“When I woke up to that reality, I started seeing old memories coming back … from my great grandmother Annie May Green,” said McCalister. “She spoke to me about growing food for sustenance, not just to perform.” 

Will the next generation of Black farmers please stand up

McCalister says that her own 12-year-old son is knee-deep in the growing effort and will likely take that appreciation into his adult life — and hopefully share that appreciation with other Americans who desperately need to reconnect.

“Because Jasper has been growing up in a consciousness around food, even if he’s not a producer, he will be a part of this conversation,” said McCalister. “He already knows that regardless of what job he has he could also be growing food. He’s already asked me how long you need to go to school to be a chef.

“Is he like, ‘I want to buy 100 acres with my hippie friends and grow food’? I don’t know about that, but I do know there will probably be chickens wherever he lands. There will definitely be food growing [nearby] because of the orientation politically that he’s having at our farmer’s market. Him being in those political conversations about the power of food being used as a political weapon, food being used for self-determination — that’s what I mean by ‘orientation.’”

Cannon, meanwhile, says all of her children either work directly with the land or retain a deep appreciation for it.

“My children right now are using what they have,” said Cannon. “I have five kids. I have a son in Washington, DC. and even he takes his land and he’s raising vegetables and fruits and feeding his family. I have two daughters in Dallas and they’re doing the same thing. You should see their backyards. They’re raising healthy foods. My son, next door, he’s doing the same thing I am [farming].”

“All of my kids, the legacy is being passed onto them,” Cannon assured. “Even through when they were kids they didn’t want to do it. But when they left home, they realized the importance of it and came back to it. And it brings us closer together, like a glue.”

Connect with farms

Cannon Farms  601-519-6468   

Indian Springs Farmer Association  

601-310-5223   

SDS Farm  225-995-5550