Leah Penniman

Cultural

Leah Penniman was born in Boston to a Haitian-American mother and a white New England father; raised in rural [[barre-ma|Massachusetts]]; trained at Clark University (BA Environmental Science) and the University of [[barre-ma|Massachusetts]] Amherst (MAT Education). She has farmed since the late 1990s, including at the Many Hands Organic Farm and at the Food Project’s Lincoln, MA training farm. In 2010, with her partner Jonah Vitale-Wolff and their family, she co-founded Soul Fire Farm in Petersburg, NY — an 80-acre Afro-Indigenous-centered farm that would become the most-recognized institutional center of contemporary U.S. Black food-justice work.

[[soul-fire-farm|Soul Fire Farm]]‘s programs:

• Black-Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) — a multi-day intensive training program teaching Afro-Indigenous farming techniques, business planning, and racial-trauma-informed agricultural education to Black and Latinx people entering or expanding farm work
• Skywoman Farm Day / Youth programs — youth education centering on land-relationship and ancestral foodways
• Liberation on Land / Reparations Map — direct-action work facilitating reparations-based land transfers from white landowners to Black, Indigenous, and Latinx farmers
• Policy advocacy — Soul Fire is a foundational organizational voice in the U.S. food-justice and food-sovereignty policy conversation

[[farming-while-black|Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land]] (Chelsea Green, 2018) is Penniman’s central public work. The book is simultaneously a practical farming manual (soil management, crop selection, farm business basics, equipment, livestock), a history of African-Diaspora and Indigenous American agricultural traditions, and a framework for racial-justice work within agriculture. It is the first comprehensive practical handbook for Black agrarian work in the United States in over a century — direct lineage to the Tuskegee-tradition manuals of Carver and Whatley.

Penniman’s work has substantially shaped the contemporary U.S. food-justice movement: the framework of reparations within agriculture, the training pipeline for Black and Latinx farmers, the institutional infrastructure (Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, the Black Farmer Fund, [[black-church|the Black Church]] Food Security Network) that has emerged in the past decade.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Shares approach with: [[george-washington-carver]] · [[booker-t-whatley]] · [[vandana-shiva]] · [[food-sovereignty]]
• Member of: [[person]]