We currently have multiple farming projects underway in cities throughout the Mid-Atlantic (Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia). We intentionally focus on growing Afro-Diasporic crops as culturally significant foods which remain in high demand by our community. Okra, watermelon, sorghum, black-eyed peas are all nutrient-dense foods we grow to feed the soil and feed our people. We use bio-fertilizers, crop rotations, intercropping and integrated pest management (IPM) to grow food in communion with the Earth. Through the simple processes of (re)building topsoil, stewarding Afro-Diasporic seeds and capturing carbon from the air and returning it to the soil, we address intersecting problems of food insecurity, climate change and cultural theft.
Our training methodology is grounded in the intersections of political/cultural formation, agroecological formation and self-development. The political/cultural formation starts with the studying of African Diasporic spiritualities and nature, Black agrarian history and various political ideologies which inform how we reframe the narrative around land and agriculture within Black experiences. The agroecological formation emphasizes the technical knowledge of land stewardship such as how to develop and use bio-fertilizers appropriately, how to save seeds and the stories that come with them, how to do crop rotation and inter-cropping based on soil type and other important factors, how to align the crop cycle with the moon cycle and more. The self-development formation centers the intentional work of growing closer to our humanity by building relationships, engaging in dialogue with each other, and emancipating our artistic expressions. West African drumming and dancing, forest walks and meditation and culinary explorations all illuminate the importance of intuitive knowing and survival skills.
The Afroecology Encounters and Brigades are sites of political pedagogical activations and sacred places for human-to-human and earth-human connections. These spaces honorably draw from the traditional campesino-a-campesino methodology that started in Central America in the mid-1970s in the aftermath of the collapse of the Green Revolution. Farmers teach and learn with other farmers on their own terms, using their own frames of reference, tools and experiences. Under this framework, these horizontal knowledge exchanges serve as trainings to revalorize communal and collective forms of knowledge and engage in meaningful work with the land and each other. The head, heart and hands are collaboratively activated with the understanding that social transformation is an interlocking process that addresses the intellectual, emotional and physical of our being.
