"She's so young, but so brave, proud, devoted. Her heart overflows with love. When you're with her, it feels like travelling back in time, all the way to meeting your ancestors. You understand that she has a mission, a mission assigned to her by our ancestors."

So says Karen Washington, 67, describing her 41-year-old friend Leah Penniman. The two women met at one of the many gatherings organised at Soul Fire Farm. Located in the Taconic Mountains, part of the more famous Appalachian chain on the eastern coast of the United States, it is the farm that Penniman and her husband Jonah Vitale-Wolff opened in 2010, once they had finished preparing the land they bought in 2006. The decision came from the shortage of fresh, wholesome food in the city where they lived, Albany (capital of New York State), and from the violence that was bloodying its streets: the couple's younger children narrowly survived a shooting.

The story of Leah Penniman

At first, it wasn't easy. "When we arrived, it was snowing. So hard we got stuck. It was 26 December, just after Christmas. I remember I cried," Penniman tells the Washington Post. She was full of doubts: "Did I make a wise decision?" she wondered. "Will I lose my friends?" With the passing of years, the choice proved to be the right one.

When the flowers began to bloom at Soul Fire Farm, the same happened to Leah Penniman.

Darryl Fears, journalist at the Washington Post

With a Haitian mother and an American father, Leah Penniman is leading a small but mighty revolution. At her farm, which covers around 30 hectares, cultivation follows exclusively the principles of regenerative agriculture, which allow the land's properties to be drawn upon without exploiting or depleting it. The Soul Fire staff grow some 100 quintals of vegetables, fruit and medicinal plants, which they deliver, along with fresh eggs, throughout the area — even to Penniman's former neighbours in Albany.

The goals of Soul Fire Farm

While conventional agriculture in 2019 generated 10 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States — not counting those caused by land conversion — a 1 per cent increase in organic matter in just half a hectare of soil sequesters around 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

That is this courageous woman's purpose, but it is not her only one: she is trying to share her knowledge with African Americans and Native people who want to enter the world of farming, so as to make them part of the change. She wants to debunk the myth of "Black people not wanting to work the land." As she explains in her book Farming while black, that is certainly not the reason why Black farmers have gone from making up 14 per cent of the total in 1910 to 2 per cent today, while Latino Americans account for just over 3 per cent and Asian Americans and indigenous people around 2 per cent.

The real reason is what she calls "food apartheid": decisions made by white people in government, by white people who populate rural states, and by white people in banks who can grant loans or not. According to spokespeople for African American agricultural entrepreneurs, the latter have been "marginalised and systematically discriminated against" for years by the Department of Agriculture, both through legislation and through perverse market logics that have made it harder for them to access financing and government programmes — so much so that over the past century the land they own has decreased by 85 per cent. Not to mention that minorities are also the primary victims of climate change: not only are the areas where they live often the hardest hit by extreme weather events, but "it is also more likely that these will leave them homeless," Penniman explains.

There's a wind of change in the air

The courses offered by the woman, who has studied and travelled to acquire the necessary skills, have been an extraordinary success. In 2019, Soul Fire Farm educated 120 people of colour, along with more than 900 activists. 675 young people took part in gatherings on cultivation techniques and food justice. Also thanks to these projects, four new farms have been established.

What excites me more than anything else is the capacity of Afro-indigenous regenerative agriculture to reduce CO2 levels. We are demonstrating how it is possible to sequester carbon in the soil by using our ancestral methods such as composting and sod seeding — that is, not tilling the land dedicated to herbaceous crops.

Leah Penniman

Penniman also offers classes in carpentry, beekeeping, and lessons on fungi and soil health. "She is teaching and demonstrating that you don't need to exploit nature and people to feed communities with abundant, nutritious food," says Ricardo Salvador of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Soul Fire Farm is among the members of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, which brings together farmers and activists who share the same goals and are pursuing them with passion.

This farm is an example of how, often, healing the planet simply requires healing human beings, and vice versa. It is yet another demonstration of how closely the health of the Earth and that of its inhabitants are connected. A just society is a stronger society in the face of the climate crisis. One must be willing to make sacrifices — the story of this couple we have told you does not hide that — but it simultaneously reveals just how positive the results can be. And it is towards the light that we must look.