“A friend of mine wants to know how things are with our nation’s Black farmers?”
Tory, who’s asked me, grew up on a Colorado potato farm and ranch. Last month, I used remodeling an old house with my daughter as a theme for meeting local leaders who shape critical parts of our national life, which also needs some remodeling. That house project connected me with Faatma Oné, whose work helped to answer my friend Tory’s question.
Faatma is a noted urban gardener in Denver. She’s a friend and mentor to my daughter, who taught dance to Faatma’s daughter. After checking out our house remodel’s bare backyard for a potential garden, Faatma observed, “There are lots of happy weeds, so the soil has good potential. There’s a lot of shady space and a big area with good sun. Her best approach will be to put in a cover crop for one season. Then she’ll do fine, planting it.”
Faatma, a delightful Renaissance-type woman, is one of several urban BIPOC* farmers who may become potential partners, working with agricultural “remodelers” in farm country. Her expansive life vision brims rim-to-rim from her agrarian experiences. They shape the wide range of her artistic, cultural, and political wisdom. Food centers this wisdom on one helpful fact:
“Everyone has to eat!“
Faatma grew up in my neighborhood’s center of Denver’s Capitol Hill. Her gregarious waitress mother was the heart of a big community of local Greek restaurant customers, but her family had no farming experience. As a single mother, Faatma worked for social justice non-profits while earning her fine arts degree in ceramics at Metro State University. Then her entrepreneurial instincts kicked in; she started as co-owner and simultaneously learned to open and manage Karma Café at the edge of downtown Denver for two years. Curious about nutritional values, she became intrigued with how the food she served her customers was grown.
She challenged herself to learn—fast: She evaluated soils and tested different kinds of quality vegetables and fruits. She interned for a year at a five-acre urban fruit and vegetable farm. She proved good at it…so good she was hired to manage the Farm! Delaney’s Farm is historically preserved and coordinates with Denver Urban Gardens and the Farm’s host city, Aurora, at the east edge of Denver’s most prominent suburb.
Faatma’s achievements include building and managing a successful 140-member Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) network, with personalized individual boxes of produce from her Farm and from
other farmers provided to nearby city-dwellers, paying CSA members—all while donating food to two
non-profits that serve families caught in food insecurity. She sums up her first nine-year experience
as a grower very simply:
“That was the best!“
It was a beginning. She moved on … for two years, she managed the Moondog Farm, which served Denver’s legendary countercultural Mercury Café, planning and custom-growing the Farm’s fresh vegetables and fruits according to the restaurant’s order list. Next, she built a one-acre urban farm from scratch for Dahlia Community Farms in inner city northeast Denver. She worked with urban farming pioneer Beverly Grant for two years at her Seeds of Power Unity Farm, two miles north of my home.
When I talked with her and other farmers, both urban and rural, one word stood out again and again:
“community”. Faatma sees fresh, affordable local fruits and vegetables as a way to put growers and dozens of families together into new health-giving communities amid tens of thousands of
Denver families that largely lack access.
“Community farming needs the farmer who works the earth and the person who cultivates community; these are not usually the same person,” she says. “The first is more introverted and soil-and-plant connected.“
To unite the community that benefits from and supports the work of growers, a more outgoing type is needed—an organizer who learns to be a local food system “remodeler.”
Remembering Tory’s question — how are Black Farmers doing? An additional answer lies in the pricing dilemmas our two million U. S. farms confront, i.e., their near-complete lack of bargaining power with the costs of farm inputs and the prices they earn for their grains, vegetables, and meat animals.
As a result, more than one million farms operate in the red yearly. Though most farms, 1.8 million, are still small family farms, forty-two percent of those operate in the red. Those operating in the black have less than a ten-percent income margin. They live with high financial risk from farm markets, weather, and financing conditions. Families keep their land by earning off-farm income.
Understanding what that means for urban farmers became clear to Faatma through an hourly income exercise she did for a Colorado State University Extension workshop. Amid the cost-price squeeze at Delaney’s Farm, she determined that, without her subsidized salary, if she operated at market prices, she would have earned a net income of $4.36 an hour growing all that fresh local food.
Along with other local farmers like her, Faatma admires the work of James Grevious. With his Rebels in the Garden projects in center-city Aurora, James fills both sides of her recommended success equation. He’s a soil, seed, and plant-engaged grower who inspires inner-city youth to reorganize local food-growing and its community marketing. You’ll enjoy meeting him—next time!
*Black, Indigenous, and People Of Color
Editor’s Note: Black farmers have considerable challenges staying in business since private financial services, and USDA refused access to loans and farm programs for decades. Still recovering from the discrimination, creative solutions have become increasingly necessary to stay in business. Dave Engelken’s continuing story offers creative solutions to help some farmers stay in business. More solutions are required, including fair and competitive markets, tightening antitrust laws, and recognizing past damage inflicted because of the many refusals that stopped Black Farmers from applying. We applaud the many approaches, including lawsuits, to rectify financial damage.