Authors:
Alsie Parks and Whitney Jaye, SAAFON’s Co-Executive Directors
As you may have noticed, our website and our newsletter have a new look! Rooted in the wisdom, stories, experiences and visions of our founders, and Black farmers across the U.S. South and Caribbean, these refreshed elements tell the story of our history and future. We hope that you will enjoy them, as we look forward to providing more robust storytelling about our work and network.
The buzz of the summer season has still not winded down, even as we swiftly approach the autumnal equinox. In this spirit, much like nature, Summer for SAAFON has been a time of activation, moving and shaking, being in the “field.” We get busy when our farmers get busy, and the months leading up to Fall are spent on farms, in the landscape, and continuing our institutional development work to be in solidarity and service.
Although we hold our roles and responsibilities as institutional stewards, we will always be field organizers. Time in the field, with our farmers and our organizing kin, enriches the quality of our touches and feeds the organization’s vision and mission. Some recent personal highlights:
- Cooking and preparing meals for our farmers at the Weaving Wisdoms gathering, one of the largest in-person gathering of our members coming together across geographies to date;
- Linking up with Braiding Seeds fellows on the land as they gathered in Georgia, helping our farmers hold space for radical hospitality and sharing our kinship and analysis;
- Weaving cultural connections through storytelling and sipping homemade sapodilla wine while hosting a mixer for the community we are becoming a part of on St. Croix.
Our consistent desire to be with our folks and be of service to farmers is one of the many rewards that comes with the hard work of relationship and institution building.
While SAAFON has diligently worked to serve our members, we do nothing without being in relationship. We understand the value of an ecosystem of care – the web of support necessary to increase the viability of farms – and are a part of the support system, alongside organizers and institutions in our region. Building within our landscape is a part of our organizing strategy, and we prioritize lifting the vast work happening in our collective movement.
This season, we celebrated our collaboration and co-stewardship of the Southern Black Farmer Community Led Fund, a space where we invest in the Southern region, which has entrusted SAAFON to cultivate our Southern Agrarian Youth Network (SAYN). It is exciting that we can prioritize intergenerational exchange, and nurturing and connecting young farmers and land stewards in the South. This past weekend, we realized months of planning for the 2nd Annual SAYN Gathering at Foxfire Ranch in Waterford, Mississippi. With an intersection with blues artists, camping out underneath the stars, and eating Big Mama Annie’s food, this gathering fed and nourished the legacy extension and continual renewal of Black agrarianism by next the generation farmers and youth.
Amid our ongoing building of relationships, institution, and landscape, we recognize the nexus of the historical and current conditions that shape our material and climate reality. During our time in St. Croix in July, we heard from farmers about their visions, needs, and the continued advocacy it has required for them to provide the vital role they play in the island food system. This summer, as Ernesto transitioned from a tropical storm to a hurricane on route to the U.S. Virgin Islands, farmers collectively organized themselves, rebuilding, and remaining steadfast in their call to feed their people and communities, now and in the future. This persistence of farmers is the foundation of our system – their commitment calls for movements that prioritize food security, sovereignty, and justice to continue to invest in the farm infrastructure and farmer organizing that it takes to sustain us all. And it is with that imperative that we at SAAFON continue to serve, and be in service to, expand, laugh, craft kinship, build, work alongside each other, and dig in.
