As Communications Coordinator for the Farmers of Color Network at RAFI, I spend a lot of time uplifting the voices, labor, and brilliance of Black, Indigenous, and people of color who farm against all odds. This past week, I stepped away from my desk and into the soil. I joined 21 other aspiring and emerging land stewards for Soul Fire Farm’s immersive, week-long BIPOC farmer training in Grafton, NY. What I experienced was much more than training; it served a return.
Soul Fire Farm, located on Mohican territory, is a national beacon for food sovereignty. It’s not just a place where people grow food. It’s a place where people grow free.
A Living Model of Sovereignty and Repair
The Soul Fire Immersion is an intensive training program for new and aspiring BIPOC farmers rooted in Afro-Indigenous land stewardship. It is a cohort of soil dreamers, food justice warriors, and spiritual kin bonded in a transformative experience. The program integrates hands-on farm work, workshops, cultural rituals, and community building to support participants as they reconnect to land in ways that invoke therapeutic liberation.
Each day begins with intention setting and community care, followed by hours of “hands on the land,” weeding, harvesting, composting, planting, and preparing the food that nourishes both the cohort and Soul Fire’s free CSA, which prioritizes those most impacted by food apartheid. The labor was light in comparison to the full weight of Soul Fire Farm’s work, but our presence on the land, our hands in the soil, was anything but symbolic. It felt like legacy-building work.
What truly sets this immersion apart is its intrinsic harmony. The farm’s internal systems are a model of skill and alliance. From chore rotations to workshop transitions, which can range from kitchen prep to compost management, every part of the farm moved with precision and intention. Schedules were transparent, and teams worked together seamlessly. Their recordkeeping practices provide compelling evidence of their adherence to regenerative farming principles. The entire program delivered comprehensive farm education.
These experiences are held by a powerful team of facilitators and farm educators who center consent, safety, and sacredness in all activities. Workshops like Agroforestry & Plant Medicine with Leah Penniman and Jaz Bias, Soil Love with Leah Penniman and Neshima Vitale-Penniman, and a Food Sovereignty Timeline with Naima and Neshima reminded us that this work is both ancient and urgent. We are not just growing food, we are reclaiming history.
Reparations in Action
Soul Fire Farm doesn’t just talk about reparations, it practices them. The farm pays a voluntary land tax and holds a cultural easement with the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans, the original stewards of the land it occupies. Their CSA shares are offered at no cost to those most harmed by systemic injustice, including undocumented families, low-income elders, and others navigating food apartheid.
This model challenges the nonprofit-industrial complex and reimagines what a truly just food system can look like, one rooted in direct action, community voice, and ancestral wisdom.
A Homecoming for the Disconnected
Some of the participants had never farmed before but felt a spiritual pull toward growing food. Others came from families that had once farmed in the South but stopped after being pushed off the land through violence or dispossession. Many identify as queer, trans, and gender-expansive, holding complex and painful histories of exclusion from traditional farming spaces.
At Soul Fire Farm, these identities are not just welcomed — they are held and celebrated.
This is a place where people sing in the fields, dance at the compost pile, build altars for their ancestors, and laugh over chopping vegetables in the communal kitchen. It is a place where rest is sacred, grief is honored, and earth work becomes soul work.
Carrying the Torch Forward
The impact of the immersion extends far beyond the boundaries of the farm. Participants leave with the tools to start gardens, healing clinics, land collectives, seed libraries, and farm businesses rooted in justice. They leave with a new understanding of land as not just property, but as relative, teacher, and liberator.
For those whose lineages were shaped by the Great Migration, or by the disconnection that comes with urbanization and survival, this return to land is not just a career choice; it is an act of reclamation.
Reflections for the Food Justice Movement
As climate change, economic inequality, and corporate consolidation threaten the viability of small farms, it is urgent to invest in BIPOC and queer land stewards who are building regenerative, community-rooted models of agriculture.
Programs like the Soul Fire Immersion don’t just train farmers; they also restore relationships. They reconnect descendants of displaced people with the soil, the stories, and the systems that were interrupted, but not broken.