The Black Agrarian legacy is planted in the fertile grounds of time and aligned with nature itself. Organic is her tending. Bold are her features. And understood are her rhymes, for she harmonizes with the tones of mineralized living things. Among that tribal symphony lies the voice of SAAFON. Shaped by the SAAFON farmer, this language of the land mimics the forebears who walked this ground before us.
In this connection, the SAAFON voice contends with the word organic, not as a lifestyle that simply exists in the hands and blood of Black Agrarians across the South and throughout rural communities around the globe, but as a certification branched from the gnarly tree of capitalism.
In 2025, SAAFON conducted a survey seeking to grasp a contemporary understanding of the word organic throughout the network—after all, the word is in our name. The findings were clear and profound: SAAFON farmers do not use organic practices because of certification. They use them because it is the only way they believe food should be grown. Organic is a practice and an identity, not a paperwork process.
What emerged from this survey was a shared inner voice—a cultural, agrarian consciousness shaped by history, care, survival, and visions for the future. A consciousness rooted in a world where knowledge is communal, not proprietary.
This reality that organic is a lifestyle cultivated over generations of land stewardship repeats itself throughout the survey. Whether in the words of Mama Sandra Simone from the rolling hills of Alpine, Alabama, confessing, “I was always organic… it matched the way I was thinking. My impact wasn’t measured by markets, it was measured by principle,” or in the voice of Tahz Walker from the montmorillonite clay of Durham County, North Carolina: “That’s how I learned. I don’t know any other way.”
Jean Young, a SAAFON farmer out of Athens, Georgia, states plainly: “We were doing organic before the word existed… it’s about growing the way we’ve always grown.”
And this beat continues with expressions like: “It’s in my blood.” and “It’s our traditional way.”
The survey goes on to reveal deeper patterns of thought—a collective Black Agrarian Cosmology that holds our truth as something that precedes paperwork. Farmers across the network described a worldview that does not separate environmental care from bodily care because they know that healthy soil equals healthy plants equals healthy food equals healthy communities. Within this cosmology, our own body, our family, our soil, and our community are understood as one system.
Again and again, farmers equated organic with health, safety, integrity, community care, and healing not a market category. To the SAAFON farmer, organic is a way of showing love through a covenant between farmer and community. And this covenant is far more sacred than any certification.
The survey also revealed a quiet resistance—a revolution seeking sovereignty over validation. Mama Beverly Collins-Hall of Robeson County, NC, an original SAAFON member and director of American Indian Mothers, rejected the idea that certification systems validate our wisdom when she said, “We were paying others for our knowledge.”
Mama Beverly stands within SAAFON’s origin story. She, along with American Indian Mothers, walked alongside our founding mother, Mama Cynthia Hayes, during the early 2000s as she organized Black and Indigenous farmers toward USDA organic certification. Beverly explained that the nearest organic auditor was in South Carolina, and their farm was forced to pay over $1,100 a year just to maintain the organic stamp—and even then, the market opportunities did not align with the annual cost. She was not alone. Almost every farmer who once held the organic stamp, but no longer does, voiced the same sentiment.
Survey respondents continued to highlight the challenges of certification, especially the sheer load of paperwork. The Addersons of Keysville, Georgia, leaders in their farming community, held organic certification in the early 2000s, yet eventually opted out. Mama Loretta Adderson explained: “I stayed up until three in the morning doing paperwork and still didn’t finish.”
The burden pushed them toward other marketing strategies, yet their cultural organic practices remain intact.
Garry Ogden of Devereux, Georgia, shared his struggles simply to schedule an auditor: “We began the USDA process, but they couldn’t even schedule the visit before harvest.”
And then there is Mississippi—“Mississippi goddamn,” as Nina Simone wrote. While Georgia and the Carolinas face a shortage of organic auditors (and even more of a shortage of auditors of color), Mississippi has none. Auditors are paid by the mile and the minute. An already expensive process becomes even more costly.
So the question becomes: Where are the resources for farmers seeking certification—and who absorbs the added expenses?
The fact is that there are limited.
Ozell White, a Mississippi farmer, expressed that the process “has been an uphill journey…” with no relief in sight. He went on to detail the difficulty of affording OMRI-certified inputs—another layer of expense embedded in certified organic systems.
James Burch of Lexington, Mississippi, stated: “The cost of growing organic (especially in the state of Mississippi) is not a cost I will pass on to my community.”
The words of our network are intentional—rooted in principle, not profit.
The waking voice of SAAFON farmers tells stories of market challenges, and throughout their responses lingers a gleaming mistrust—hovering like fog at dawn before a day of unwanted duty. Farmers spoke of this mistrust as though it were warranted—and such mistrust is warranted. Black farmer distrust is rooted in generations of mishandling, targeted discrimination, and structural violence.
Trevor Warner, a U.S. Virgin Islands farmer, expressed plainly: “The majority of us do not trust the system of certification.”
Georgia farmer Roxanne Masters echoed the sentiment with visceral clarity: “Certification feels like a ploy to me.”
Yet through all of this, one truth remained constant: the SAAFON farmer is clear on their stance. Ten toes down. To them, the word organic is not a label linked to higher price points and administrative burdens. It is an ancestral return.
Organic is SAAFON’s origin story, written across thousands of acres and decades of memory. Farming is not a career; it is a calling and a continuation. When farmers say things like “It’s in my blood,” or when Ajoa Yemaya declares, “Organic is land reclamation and community healing… organic is connected to how we restore ourselves,” we are reminded that the work of our hands and the stewardship of the land is not merely practice. It is spiritual. Not a spiritual abstraction, but a spiritual reality grounded in land, hands, and lived experience.
Twenty years ago, founding Mother Cynthia Hayes understood that the Black farmer was again being left out, perhaps even left behind, in a market shaped by the very practices their ancestors helped create. With a steadfast heart and a steady hand, she ushered in the first wave of certified organic Black farmers. Yet even then, we understood that organic is how our people lived and stewarded land long before industrialized seed, synthetic inputs, or certification programs. It is not new. It is what we always did—because it is who we have always been.
This survey simply highlights the growth of the movement and the language that will shape our future. The SAAFON farmer has declared that organic is healing work—not technical work—and that community trust is soil-deep. Trust is the currency of our agrarian world.
This is not the language of a job. This is the language of vocation, perhaps even ordination.
Organic farming is how we continue the work of our ancestors, protect our descendants, and contribute to creation in sacred ways that are deeply Southern, profoundly Black, and wholly agrarian.
