What Are We Owed? Land As Our History and Future
Black Yard Farm Collective was never simply about producing food. The farm is an opportunity to build community, housing, education, and, most importantly, connect people to land.
Voices from the Land is a collaborative op-ed and video series between Farm School NYC (FSNYC) and the New Harvest Project (TNH) that highlights urban and rural farmers, policy that impacts their work, and what we can do to uplift legislation reflective of their needs to direct future policy decisions. This project is funded by the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation (RAF) through the Rural Advancement Foundation International - USA (RAFI).
Photo Courtesy of Ashanti Williams, Founder of Black Yard Farm
Black Yard Farm sits on 89 acres in Washington County, New York. Many lives live here. There are chickens—48 at the moment, with hundreds more raised throughout the year—along with a pig named Pedro, 11 cats, a turkey, and plans for sheep and goats. I grow 43 varieties of vegetables each year.
I always knew that building Black Yard Farm was never simply about producing food.
I grew up in The Bronx, where my introduction to farming began with my grandfather, Abu Talib, who, along with a few other community members, established Taqwa Community Farm on a vacant city-owned lot in the early 1990s to address food insecurity in the neighborhood. The community farm still stands today, providing fresh food in a neighborhood with limited access to grocery stores, while also giving young people like me a place to learn this work. By the time I was 11, I was helping my family start a youth-run farmers market. That early experience continues to shape the possibility of what the full robustness of Black Yard Farm could look like. To me, I see the farm as an opportunity to build community, housing, education, and, most importantly, connect people to land.
The Beginnings of Black Yard Farm
Black Yard Farm began in 2020 as a collaborative project involving six people. After difficulties with the original property and its lease, and team dynamics, the farm project relocated to its current home in Washington County.
I was fortunate to find landowners who were excited about returning what had become just a residential property back to active farmland and were even more excited about Black Yard Farm's mission to do so collectively. I envision this farm to be a producer cooperative where various agricultural and farm-adjacent businesses will operate on the same land, caring for it collectively while creating their own products and livelihoods and market these goods under the same umbrella.
This could look like maple production, honey bees and mushroom cultivation, educational programs, visiting chefs using food grown on the property, and eventually housing for people participating in the cooperative. Black Yard Farm will stand as an ecosystem, just how nature does. At one point, my understanding of what a cooperative and farming ecosystem was completely different. I used to think that meant everyone working on the same piece of property, doing the same things together all the time. But I now know that co-existence and cooperative living can look how you want it to.
For small farmers and Black farmers, who have historically been barred from accessing significant amounts of capital, collaboration can expand opportunity without requiring each individual to bear the full cost of land, infrastructure, and equipment alone.
While some recent federal programs designed to reach historically underserved farmers offer meaningful opportunities, the application process can still be difficult. It can be burdensome to understand the language of these programs and applications and to figure out how best to present an entity like Black Yard Farm in the current political climate.
There is so much uncertainty since the turn of the Administration. Thankfully, I have a favorable lease for Black Yard, which leaves me with the first option to purchase the land next spring. However, I will likely have to rely on federal funding.
In the current moment, I worry about the discomfort of identifying as a Black-led and centered business, particularly when it comes to applying for federal funding since diversity, equity, and inclusion are being actively targeted.
What Are We Owed?
As stated in The Color of Money: Black Banks and The Racial Wealth Gap, by Mehrsa Baradaran, the wealth of the United States was built on the labor of Black people in agriculture, specifically through cotton production, and we seem to be forgetting that. I will always bring up reparations.
Not only were enslaved Black folks exploited for their labor during slavery, but they were traded and sold as commerce—liquid assets, if you will. Black folks were prevented from participating in receiving profit or any benefits from the institution of slavery and the production of cotton, the very system that led America to economic dominance worldwide. Federal laws were put in place to uphold slavery and the notion of Black folks being inferior to whites, being considered ⅗ of a man, and that it was God's will for slavery to exist were spread far and wide. When slavery ended, white farm owners were compensated for their “loss of capital”, after no longer being allowed to exploit black folks for profit. After slavery was abolished, the era of Jim Crow was ushered in, and laws were put in place to continue restricting access to resources and funding to Black folks. This perpetuates today in the current wealth and land ownership gaps amongst black and white folks.
Black Yard Farm is an opportunity to hold space for this knowledge and build new restorative systems that value all beings present, working the land and beyond. We are owed the same opportunities to build sustainable, profitable businesses that nourish our lives and communities.
That is a radical idea in a capitalist society, and we must hold on to it.
New York has the Infrastructure to Keep Food Affordable and Local. It just needs Investment.
You don't have to look hard to find worker-owned cooperatives, community food hubs, local distributors, and independent growers that have built the infrastructure needed to move fresh food from farms throughout the Hudson Valley, the Catskills, western New York, New York City, and beyond. That's exactly what Brooklyn Supported Agriculture does.
Voices from the Land is a collaborative op-ed and video series between Farm School NYC (FSNYC) and the New Harvest Project (TNH) that highlights urban and rural farmers, policy that impacts their work, and what we can do to uplift legislation reflective of their needs to direct future policy decisions. This project is funded by the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation (RAF) through the Rural Advancement Foundation International - USA (RAFI).
Photo Courtesy of Brooklyn Supported Agriculture
New York has an opportunity to rethink what affordability and local food actually mean.
You don't have to look hard to find worker-owned cooperatives, community food hubs, local distributors, and independent growers that have built the infrastructure needed to move fresh food from farms throughout the Hudson Valley, the Catskills, western New York, New York City, and beyond. That's exactly what Brooklyn Supported Agriculture (BSA), the organization I co-founded with Shawn Santana in 2016, does as a worker-owned cooperative focused on changing the food system. However, one key hindrance to our local ecosystem is institutional food procurement—a process that allows institutions such as universities and hospitals to source food and other services from the lowest bidder.
We have built a food system that treats food like any other commodity. Consumers expect the lowest price. Contracts are awarded to entities—in this case, farm and food aggregators—that can supply food and services at the lowest cost. This means that large corporations, institutions, and agencies can maximize their bottom lines. But the farmers and farmworkers growing our food and the small businesses trying to make fair prices work for everyone get squeezed.
For me, this is where the tension lives.
While the cheapest offer wins, food quality and fair wages are often disregarded, failing to reflect the true cost of growing food. The result is a system where schools, hospitals, and senior centers receive inexpensive food that is likely not the most nutritious. This begs the question of why we aren't prioritizing the health of our elders and youth. At BSA, we are always doing a delicate dance to get our farmers the highest price we can for the labor and care they put into growing our food, while making sure we offer prices our customers can afford.
It has been encouraging to see legislation such as the Good Food NY Bill that pushes municipalities to “consider other factors when determining best value,” rather than just the lowest cost. The bill, inspired by The Good Food Purchasing Program, supports institutions in shifting toward a values-based procurement model that prioritizes five key aspects: local economies, animal welfare, environmental sustainability, nutrition, and a valued workforce, to hold institutions more accountable in their practices and procurement decisions. Focused on supporting small and historically marginalized farmers and food vendors, this is a step in the right direction toward creating an equitable, local food system while helping organizations like BSA secure larger contracts.
Can City-Owned Groceries and Small Farm and Food Businesses Work Together?
Rather than building entirely new food systems, New York should strengthen its existing networks. The forthcoming city-owned grocery stores proposed by Mayor Mamdani’s Administration offer an opportunity to do so. For BSA and for where we stand as activists and business owners, the critical question is whether these new grocery stores will strengthen the existing ecosystem or simply recreate the same supply chains under a different name. Other questions we have are:
Will local farmers have a seat at the table?
Will worker-owned cooperatives and the existing local food ecosystem be part of the initiative?
How might local farmers and this Mayor’s office work together to strengthen food access?
While the five proposed grocery stores will not transform New York City's food system overnight and will face logistical challenges, we must acknowledge how incredible this bold idea is. This is the kind of experimentation that helps public systems improve. At the same time, community food enterprises, like BSA, Corbin Hill Food Project, Connected Chef and many other community food hubs, and regional logistics organizations have spent years solving problems that the government now hopes to address.
We have relationships with farms. We know how to aggregate produce, manage refrigerated transportation, and deliver fresh food into neighborhoods that have historically lacked access. I see these city-owned groceries as an opportunity to work together. We have shared our concerns and guidance in a white paper in collaboration with Equity Advocates, Catskills Agrarian Alliance, New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, and other partners. Prioritizing Affordable, Quality, Neighborhood-Based Supermarket Access as a Public Good: Focus on City-Owned Supermarkets and Complementary Cooperative Ownership Models makes recommendations for how NYC’s city-owned grocery stores can succeed while grounding what a solidarity economy could look like for our food system.
While much of our food is now through apps and fast-delivery platforms, one focus of BSA is to bring back face-to-face relationship-building. Over the past few months, we’ve been doing more pop-ups and community-focused events such as our recurring pop-up at BEM Books & More, Brooklyn Children’s Food Festival and Black VegFest, alongside our new updated storefront in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. We are seeing that people want more opportunities to interact with us and each other, and this is how we can continue to build community.
If we truly want a resilient local food system, we don't need to invent one from scratch. We need the political will and opportunities to support the one that's already growing around us.