Ed. note: This excerpt is taken from Chapter 2, Momentum: Carrie Martin and Erin Martin, Footprints in the Garden, of the book From the Ground Up, written by Stephanie Anderson and is published by The New Press in November 2024.
Momentum: the traveling pattern exhibited by a wave, combining both oscillatory motion and forward motion.
That unforgettable line from the song “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” blasts from a nearby speaker as I park my car in front of a vegetable-filled high tunnel and step outside. I’ve just arrived at Footprints in the Garden, a fifty-acre diversified vegetable and fruit farm co-operated by mother-daughter duo Carrie Martin and Erin Martin, located about an hour’s drive southeast of Raleigh near Mount Olive, North Carolina. The overcast, blustery morning weather contrasts with the song’s iconic dance beat, but that’s the point. Carrie and Erin have fun farming on this land, and they want others to catch the spirit, too. Carrie, fifty-seven, walks over from a field that currently contains kohlrabi, celery, Brussels sprouts, and broccoli. She wears a wide-brimmed black hat and brown leather work boots with black rubber soles. She greets me with a hug and what I quickly learn is her characteristic smile and optimism. “We try to keep things upbeat,” she says over the music. “We like to have a good time around here.” Carrie’s positive outlook is one reason I am at her farm, and a big reason she is here. Despite countless challenges and a career path that at times felt uncertain, her determination to stay optimistic and find solutions ultimately led her to this land.
Carrie comes from a long line of Black farmers. But in the 1970s her parents moved into town to pursue better-paying jobs in health care and industrial engineering. Still, the family maintained a connection to the land. “Every year we had a garden,” Carrie says. “We killed chickens. During family events, we barbecued hogs, had pig pickin’s, all those good things.” In high school Carrie met her future husband, Tim Martin, and the two attended college, she at Shaw University and he at Chowan University. Carrie worked in hotel management, then banking, and then pursued a master’s degree in business from North Carolina State University. She and Tim bought a home in Raleigh and had their two children, Wesley and Erin. Motherhood was especially challenging when Tim, who served in the U.S. Army, was called overseas for long periods, like during Desert Storm. “It was hard because it was like being a single mom,” she recalls. “He of course was doing what he had to do because it was during conflict. A lot of times it wasn’t peaceful, campaigns where they were.”
Carrie’s professional life took more turns as her children grew up. She served as a social worker, then worked for ten years in the communications department in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at NC State, where she often supported the Cooperative Extension Service and became familiar with state and federal agriculture programs. She worked in the foster care system and in employment services and tended to her parents until they passed away. “I’m very proud of those things,” Carrie says. “Just being able to be a community-supportive person throughout most of my careers, trying to help people advance and get educated, whether it’s finance or being able to maintain your life.” Then Carrie lost the job in employment services. So she did what she had counseled other jobseekers to do, which is to conduct a life assessment of the skills, assets, and interests she might harness to make a career change. One family asset stood out: the farmland in Mount Olive that she and Tim had inherited from his parents.
Carrie realized she was uniquely positioned to utilize that land for agriculture—a revelation enabled by her positive thinking. She came from generations of farmers. She understood how to access government agriculture programs and traverse the legalities of landownership. She could commute from Raleigh to Mount Olive because her children were older. She was passionate about health and community service. And she had a diverse professional and educational background that would lend itself to innovative farming and business ownership. “It led me right back here because of the finance, and the banking, and the hospitality, and working with employment, being able to put out job announcements and things like that. We do all of those things right here on the farm,” Carrie says. She and Tim launched Footprints in the Garden in 2012, with Carrie as the primary farmer.
Carrie transitioned out of the USDA’s beginning producer category (for people farming ten years or less) a year before I spoke with her in 2023. Though not technically a new farmer anymore, she’s still part of the wave of women moving into agriculture over the last few decades, some traversing unlikely paths to get there.
And like so many others in the movement, Carrie brings an ethic of environmental and social care to her work. She chose the name Footprints in the Garden as a nod to the marks we all leave on the Earth, and how connecting with the land in deep, authentic ways helps a person leave a positive footprint. “Farming is always associated with a lot of work, and it is. But it’s also a place of tranquility and peace,” she says. Erin shares her mother’s vision of the farm as a site of healing. “I want it to be a place where people feel safe, people feel it’s therapeutic. When things are going on, they can come to our land and decompress, whether it’s from abuse, or PTSD from the army, or postpartum depression,” Erin says. “I want our land to come to a person’s mind when they’re going through something.” Regenerative agriculture is one way to leave that positive footprint.
And to Carrie and Erin, the idea of positive footprints is nothing novel; it is a continuation of agricultural philosophies passed down in their family that prioritize ecological reciprocity, responsible land management, and human health. “I’m doing what my forefathers and foremothers did. We come up every year with fancy words like regenerative, and organic, and all of those things. We’re doing what our grandparents and great-grandparents taught us to do. And that’s just to care for the land, to make sure you protect your family by not using the heavy pesticides, the heavy fertilizers,” Carrie says.
As seen in Chapter 1, modern iterations of regenerative agriculture often draw from time-tested BIPOC wisdom. But regenerative agriculture’s Afro-American origins are even less acknowledged than its Indigenous, Latin, and Asian roots. This denial is part of white America’s long history (and continued habit in many circles) of erasing Black contributions to everything from music and cuisine to science and politics, erasures fueled by notions of white supremacy stretching back to the colonial era. In truth, Africans developed regenerative forms of agriculture and land management well before white invaders arrived.
“African Indigenous agriculture was as diverse as the continent itself,” writes Liz Carlisle in Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming. African farmers managed incredibly diverse and productive savanna farms and practiced layered agroforestry in the tropics to create food forests. When colonizers trafficked them across the Atlantic, Africans carried with them their agricultural knowledge—and seeds for popular foods of today like black-eyed peas, okra, watermelons, and sweet potatoes—and deployed their seeds and skills in dooryard gardens while enslaved.
White slave owners often took notice of and exploited enslaved people’s agricultural talents privately, while publicly dismissing them as ignorant. For instance, West Africans introduced rice, a crop cultivated primarily by women, using what we today call regenerative methods, such as rotating rice production with livestock grazing. Knowing West African women were highly skilled rice growers, white plantation owners in coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida routinely paid more for those women and converted their expertise and labor into profit.
More often, though, white farmers practiced extractive agriculture and forced enslaved people to participate. As a result of their destructive methods, white farmers were already abandoning spent fields in favor of fresh holdings to the west by the early to mid-1600s.
Three main factors contributed to their disregard for the land. First, most European immigrants simply were not good stewards. European farmland had been degraded by continuous cropping and tillage well before American colonization; in fact, soil exhaustion helped motivate European colonialism in general. Second, seemingly limitless virgin land to the west discouraged farmers from conserving soil already under cultivation in the East and South. George Washington wrote extensively about the “unproductive” and “ruinous” agriculture going on in early America, as did Thomas Jefferson.
Third, the chattel slavery system tied plantations to single-crop, extractive farming that necessitated more and more land. From the 1700s until the Civil War, Southern plantation owners used slave labor to grow monoculture tobacco, cotton, and other cash crops without crop rotation, cover crops, or livestock integration, which quickly exhausted the soil. Plantation owners did not want slaves, whom they saw as interchangeable cogs in the agricultural machine, to “waste” time by sustainably tending diverse forms of crops and livestock. To slaveholders, the repeated and psychologically simple (though physically brutal) tasks of monoculture cropping better suited slave labor. When the land became too unproductive, slave owners cleared new fields or sold their plantations and moved west or deeper south.
Slave owners eventually ran out of arable acres as more farmland fell under ownership and more states banned slavery. That is why slaveholders fought so fervently to establish slavery in new U.S. states and hoped to colonize the Caribbean and Central and South America—they were running out of land. When neither effort worked, slaveholders revolted against the United States government to protect their own interests. Soil depletion driven by the South’s extractive, slave-based agricultural system was a major cause of the Civil War.
Human and soil exploitation continued after the war, despite early efforts to prevent that outcome. Black leaders understood the economic and social power of landownership, and they told Abraham Lincoln’s generals that their people wanted tillable farmland to make their own living, separate from white Southerners, who they feared would harbor hate well into the future. On January 16, 1865, the Lincoln administration’s General William T. Sherman ordered the distribution of four hundred thousand acres of former Confederate land along the southeastern coastline to newly freed Blacks. Each family would receive roughly forty acres; Sherman later granted the army permission to lend mules to the families as well. By June, about forty thousand freed Blacks were settled on their land in self-governing communities. But meanwhile, the unthinkable happened: Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865. His successor, Southern sympathizer Andrew Johnson, annulled the land grant order in the fall and gave the land back “to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America,” as historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it.
Atoning completely for the unforgivable sin of slavery is impossible, but America at least had a chance to give a mostly agricultural population of about 3.9 million people, people kept uneducated and financially under-resourced by law, people whose enslavement the nation had institutionalized, a fighting chance to thrive. Instead, the nation pretended it owed former slaves nothing. “Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth,” Gates writes. “After all, one of the principal promises of America was the possibility of average people being able to own land, and all that such ownership entailed. As we know all too well, this promise was not to be realized for the overwhelming majority of the nation’s former slaves.”
Without access to land, and in the face of overwhelming white animosity in the Jim Crow era that followed, many Black people intent on farming took the only opportunity on the table: sharecropping.
Of the formerly enslaved, the majority had labored in agriculture; farming was what they knew, and a profession open to them when most others were closed. In this system, sharecroppers “rented” land to grow crops, and they gave the landlord, typically a white landowner, a portion of their harvest or proceeds as payment. The bigger the crop, the bigger the profit for both, or so the thinking went. But only cash crops like cotton, tobacco, and rice made sense in a skewed sharecropping system that demanded constant production to achieve even meager economic survival.
Landlords could dictate what crops tenants grew and how, and remove tenants who disobeyed, all of which prevented sharecroppers from prioritizing sustainability. “When tenants didn’t control their land and could be evicted at any time—or kicked off their land on trumped-up charges—they had little incentive to improve the soil,” a Smithsonian Magazine writer explains. Sharecroppers often had little choice but to continue extractive plantation-style agriculture.
On top of this, many landlords sold or rented farm necessities from on-farm stores at exorbitant prices, sometimes even mandating that tenants purchase from them on credit at high interest rates. This created a cycle of perpetual debt, and laws in some jurisdictions forbade indebted sharecroppers from leaving the land. To make matters worse, Southern soils were exhausted from decades of plantation-style cropping, which depressed yields and profits.
The sharecropper system exploited white and Black farmers alike and has been called wage slavery and slavery by another name. Keep in mind, though, that Black farmers were denied institutional credit and aid programs available to white sharecroppers, and they came to sharecropping with virtually no cash or assets.
Black thought leaders spearheaded efforts to correct American agriculture—and once again, the white agricultural world mostly ignored them. The brilliance of George Washington Carver’s work at Tuskegee University’s agricultural school in the early 1900s cannot be overstated. He showed farmers how to incorporate nitrogen-and food-producing crops like peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes into cash crop rotations, which increased both soil fertility and food security. He famously developed hundreds of ways to market surplus peanuts as an added revenue stream. Carver extolled farmers to forgo store-bought fertilizer and chemical pesticides in favor of compost, animal manure, and natural pest control for environmental and financial reasons. He encouraged them to grow their own vegetables, practice agroforestry, and employ permaculture—true sustainability.
Carver’s goals were twofold: liberate farmers from the yoke of industrial agriculture so they could achieve food and economic sovereignty, and make farming a holistic, environmentally sustainable act that works in tandem with nature. During his life Carver did receive recognition for his ecological approach to farming, but today credit for inventing regenerative agriculture largely goes to white people, like J. I. Rodale, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry. Same for Booker T. Whatley, another Black regenerative agriculture advocate from Carver’s era who often goes uncredited. Whatley also invented the CSA model of direct marketing to advance social and economic justice for small-scale Black farmers, a model now used by farmers around the world.
Even lately, praise for regenerative agriculture innovation tends to go to white farmers, scientists, and activists, like Allan Savory, David Montgomery, Gabe Brown, Nicole Masters, and Robert Rodale. The 2020 film Kiss the Ground is an especially obvious example of how the movement prioritizes white voices. But countless BIPOC-led organizations and farms are pushing regenerative agriculture forward in groundbreaking ways, with women at the forefront. For instance, Angela Dawson founded 40 Acre Cooperative in Minnesota to empower Black farmers and ranchers with mentorship, training, access to markets, and financial assistance through the co-op’s collective buying power for items like seeds and farm equipment. Dr. Cindy Ayers Elliot left Wall Street to start a regenerative diversified produce and livestock farm, with the goal of combating Mississippi’s high obesity and diabetes rates by channeling fresh, healthy food into the Jackson community. She also trains new farmers, especially young people of color. Clarenda “Cee” Stanley operates Green Heffa Farms, a North Carolina organic regenerative hemp farm that works to expand access to agriculture to underserved and under-represented farmers. Green Heffa Farms is also a certified B Corporation, the first farm with a Black female CEO to earn that status. A few more of the many, many other notable BIWOC leaders include A-dae Romero-Briones, Winona LaDuke, Karen Washington, Oliva Watkins, Leah Penniman, Mai Nguyen, Lyla June Johnston, and Aidee Guzman.
Situated in this long tradition of Black regenerative agriculture are Carrie and Erin. Their farm reflects Carver’s vision of sustainability, employs Whatley’s CSA model, and incorporates the diversity and sustainability of past and present Black agriculture. In addition to eliminating or minimizing sprays, they rely on a number of other regenerative practices and tools, such as no and low tillage, companion planting, polyculture cropping, and natural, organic sprays for pests or plant diseases they can’t otherwise manage. They enrich soil with farm-produced compost, potash (a naturally occurring, non–fossil fuel–derived fertilizer), and fish meal. They install portable drip tape each season to deliver liquid compost tea and water (though the land rarely needs irrigation thanks to good soil health). That drip tape allows targeted fertilizer and water applications, which reduces runoff and overapplication. Carrie and Erin control weeds by hand, through intercropping, and by covering raised beds with limited plastic that also conserves water. They grow all manner of vegetables— leafy greens, root vegetables, asparagus, tomatoes, legumes, celery, herbs, way more plants than I can list here—as well as fruits like watermelons, blueberries, raspberries, elderberries, and grapes.
“We try to do niche market kind of things, like we don’t just grow a regular beet. It’ll be something like an orange beet, or it’ll be the kohlrabi, which is purple or white, or three or four kinds of radishes, which will be like an Easter egg radish or black radish or a watermelon radish,” Carrie says. “We’re just trying to do nontraditional-type things to get folks interested in and learning about different vegetables that are available for their health, and to experiment and see if they really like it. We really believe that food is the key to good health.” To diversify even further and attract pollinators, Carrie and Erin recently put in an orchard of around seventy-five peach, pear, fig, persimmon, papaw, and plum trees. They plant crops within the orchard, a practice called agroforestry, to build soil health, control weeds, and boost biodiversity. A forest stands on the farm’s far end, which provides wildlife habitat, cools the air in summer, protects crops from wind damage, and will serve as an income stream when the forest matures enough to practice sustainable logging.
Carrie and Erin rotate where they plant annual crops each year, with the remaining fields devoted to cover crops like the buckwheat I see nearby. Cover crops, which are crops planted before, with, or after cash crops, are an essential regenerative practice. For example, row crop farmers can plant a rye / vetch mix after a corn crop. Or they might interseed corn with sweet clover, buckwheat, or cowpeas so everything grows together. Cover crops keep a living root in the soil year-round, which sustains soil biology. They provide diversity for the above- and belowground ecosystems. They also keep soil covered to control weeds, stop erosion, and prevent moisture loss, a critical benefit in a warming world.
“Soils hit 100 degrees, and everything in there dies. And if it’s wet, it’s going to be worse because the water inside it is going to boil,” explains Dr. Jill Clapperton, principal scientist and CEO of Rhizoterra Inc. and the founder of the online Global Food & Farm Community. “This is why we need insulation on the ground. This is why we’re doing what we’re doing with regenerative and trying to keep mulches on the ground, trying to keep plants growing all the time. When it’s 115 outside, if you have plants growing, it can be 80 degrees under the canopy. As long as it’s 80 degrees under the canopy, that plant will keep sweating, keep transpiring, which means it will keep pumping up nutrients, and it will keep growing and it will survive the heat stress. It will retain its biological components and maintain the infrastructure that’s belowground.”
Cover crops help soil stay alive through the winter as well. “You don’t have to just have bare ground in the winter,” Clapperton continues. “Under a good snow cover, as long as the soil isn’t frozen, the microbiology is working. Microarthropods are working; they’re all working.” Again, because of climate change, a cover crop’s winter benefits become amplified. Winter moisture manifests more often than it once did as rain, which runs off of bare soil. Snow that does materialize is increasingly likely to fall in extreme bursts, and bare soil can’t hold that either. Warmer winters also expose bare soil to higher temperatures over longer durations, further reducing biological life.
Erin is still on her way from Raleigh, so Carrie leads me on a walking tour of the farm. The first stop is a brick farmhouse just off the paved road, the house Carrie’s in-laws built and where Tim grew up. Carrie shuts off the speaker on the front step so we can hear each other better. The house functions as storage for produce and farm tools and as a staging area for packing CSA boxes. That’s soon to change, though, because in the coming months Carrie and Erin are converting an adjacent building into a cold storage area with a CoolBot walk-in cooler. Erin won grants from Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA and the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund for the remodel. Majestic pecan trees, planted by Tim’s parents, stand watch at the house’s front and rear.
These trees provide another revenue stream through the sale of pecans and pecan-based products. Carrie points out one of two Martin family cemeteries about a hundred yards away. Living relatives are nearby, too. Three other Martin families farm the surrounding land, which has passed from generation to generation. “I’m so thankful for Tim’s ancestors, because they had a vision of what they wanted. And it was for us to stay together and work together,” Carrie says.
The farm is currently in transition as winter and early spring crops wind down and late spring and summer crops replace them.
Determining when to plant is trickier than it used to be as climate change ushers in more frequent extreme weather events, like unseasonal temperature swings. “North Carolina weather, because of the climate changing, we just don’t really know [when the last frost will be] . But we’re going to try to plant somewhere the first week of May to put more of our spring and summer crops in,” Carrie tells me as she points out where asparagus beds are established and where the watermelons and sunflowers will go. The sunflowers are a new addition, part of Erin’s larger effort to scale up agrotourism. “She’s also a photographer, so her vision is to have a sunflower field so that she can use her photography skills and invite other photographers and families out to take pictures,” Carrie explains.
Carrie shows me two more agrotourism elements, the farm’s meditation garden and the spot where she and Erin hope to construct a building for hosting community events. The building would also replace the old farmhouse as an aggregation center, which would give them space to bring in even more produce and value-added items from other farmers for their CSA boxes.
Then we enter the pièce de résistance: the high tunnel, which allows Carrie and Erin to extend the growing season. The sugar snap peas, leeks, celery, Swiss chard, carrots, tomatoes, herbs, and beets growing now represent the last of the spring harvest. Soon the tunnel will be brimming with summer crops. Our final stop is the greenhouse, where Carrie and Erin start seedlings. They buy additional seedlings from a local nursery, yet another way small farms like Footprints in the Garden support rural economies. Looking around, I see Carrie’s vision for a positive footprint taking many forms: helping the area’s farms and food businesses market products, stewarding the land, minimizing carbon emissions, welcoming others to the farm, and providing fresh, nutritious food.
As the regenerative agriculture movement grows, I can also envision a future where more farms like Footprints in the Garden help regenerate rural communities across the nation—in other words, a future more aligned with Carrie’s optimistic outlook. “We’ve maintained and survived, and we try to keep it as lively and as positive as we can,” she says. “Our place is open. We want everyone to be valued, whatever their beliefs are, their cultures are, whatever their sexual orientation is. That’s up to them. We’re wide open here.”
Erin arrives with her daughter, Elana, a sweet-natured fifteen month-old in a purple hoodie with curly hair and a charming smile. Erin often brings Elana to the farm, as her brother Wesley does with his children, Julian and Jett. Elana is curious about everything; she especially likes patting dirt into seed trays, Carrie told me earlier. She and Erin joke that Elana is the “farm manager” since her moods can dictate how the day goes. Erin plans to teach Elana the ins and outs of growing food, an empowering and necessary skill. “There’s a lot of people that don’t know how to grow their own food,” Erin says. “There’s a lot of people that don’t even know how to put the seed into the ground, and you have to keep watering it, and have the right temperature, and know what season to grow in. It’s important for our children to know that.”
The knowledge gap is not always a function of people not caring, Erin points out. Often they lack exposure to agriculture and nutrition information, or require more resources, time, and connections to pursue those interests. But Erin sees a shift in her generation toward a greater interest in food, health, and the environment, a shift driven by multiple factors. “I think a lot of people are interested [in farming], definitely interested in their health, and I think 2020 gave us that scare that we needed to bring us back to the land. I think it’s definitely something that people think about,” she says. “As I get older, my group is having children, so that’s a realization check for them as well, too, to be able to put fresh, affordable food in front of their children.”
Erin admits that as a child she did not always appreciate the farm or why knowing how to grow food is important. She credits Carrie with cultivating curiosity and modeling how to keep learning. “I have to give her props on that because she keeps us up to date on those different things. We were going to workshops when I was younger to learn about these different things, but I wasn’t paying attention because I’m ten, twelve years old, just like, ‘When are we going home?’ I wasn’t paying attention to that,” Erin recalls. “But now I am taking notes, I’m making sure that I know exactly how to do these things or how to install and repair the drip tape, and I’m able to pass those down to my daughter.” Today Carrie and Erin attend educational events together. They also lead them. When they install the CoolBot next month, for instance, they will turn the day into a workshop so other farmers can see the process.
One reason for Footprints in the Garden’s success is this combination of Carrie’s experience and Erin’s Gen Z perspective. Like many of today’s young and beginning farmers, Erin leverages social media to market products and promote agrotourism enterprises. She creates content that keeps customers engaged and, ideally, eager to buy more. In addition to CSA boxes, Carrie and Erin market through North Carolina food hubs in Wilmington and Durham. They also sell at the Black Farmers’ Market that alternates between Raleigh and Durham.
Communication is vital for marketing, Erin explains. At the markets especially, she says, it’s about “just talking to people, not being scared to talk to people about what you do, how you want to display things. You can’t be scared to talk to people about what you want to do, what you believe in, because how are they going to know if you don’t talk about it? It’s getting out here and meeting new people.” Social media and one-on-one conversations also lower the veil on agricultural life, allowing the public to see what farming and ranching look like—that farmers are not uneducated country hicks who look like they work in the fields all day. They have pride in their work and how they look. And when producers use regenerative practices, there is nothing to hide.
Social media is only the beginning. Erin ignited the farm’s push into agrotourism, like hosting farm-to-table dinners—a vision she had even before joining the farm. “That’s something I really saw a long time ago because I’ve always liked cooking. I’ve always been the cook of our family, whether it was cooking something untraditional or traditional and trying to put a spin on it,” she says. “Seeing a vegetable go from seed to full flourishing and then turning it into a meal that feeds your family and friends is something that I always prefer doing.” This season she has plans for a kids’ sunflower maze and a big Juneteenth celebration. Such onsite business is easier now that, thanks to Erin, the farm accepts credit and debit card payments. In addition to agrotourism, Erin introduced farm-derived value-added products, like her elderberry syrup and pepper jelly, to diversify the farm’s revenue even more.
As we chat, Elana scoops dirt from a bucket with a trowel. She laughs and gleefully shows us her dirt-covered hands. The soil she plays with is more than a life-giving resource—it represents a legacy first seeded by Erin’s great-great-grandfather, Harry. Harry and his siblings were born into slavery in Sampson County, North Carolina. In the 1860s, when Harry was sixteen, he came upon the slave master beating his sister. To save her, he struck the master in the head and ran for his life. The master pursued with dogs, but Harry’s sister hid him in the hollow of an oak tree. Traveling by night, Harry escaped to the neighboring county, Wayne County, and not long after joined the 135th United States Colored Troop infantry division.
When the Civil War ended, Harry returned to Wayne County and in 1883 purchased land for himself and his five children. The land passed from generation to generation for more than a century, with family members purchasing additional acreages through the years and keeping their family heritage alive in different ways. Erin respects Harry’s tenacity and generosity, which create positive ripple effects in her family’s lives to this day. “He had enough education and literacy to write a deed up and preserve it, and register the deed with Wayne County. We were able to obtain [Century Farm] status in 2022,” she says. “But that just is mind-boggling because a lot of slaves didn’t know how to read, they didn’t know how to write. The fact that he went on to be able to write a deed up so that we could obtain that status today is amazing.”
That the Martin family still owns their land is remarkable given the systematic assault on Black land rights over the past 150 years. Black Americans owned between 16 and 19 million acres of farmland in 1910, the peak of Black farmland ownership. Today, Black farmers own less than 3 million of the 4.7 million farmland acres they operate, according to FarmAid. The stark decrease is in large part the result of centuries of structural discrimination that separated Black Americans from their land. One example of such institutional racism is heirs’ property laws. If a landowner dies without a will stating who should inherit the land—referred to as “dying intestate”—then the land becomes heirs’ property, or property owned in common by family members.
One can imagine the legal nightmares of common ownership, especially in a big family. Because these heirs lack clear title to the property, they cannot use it as collateral for loans or collect various forms of federal and state assistance. They are jointly responsible for taxes and maintenance. Heirs may die without wills like their relatives did, further fragmenting ownership. Heirs may not live near or even know one another. As Thomas W. Mitchell, legal scholar and director of Boston College School of Law’s Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights, notes, “Because of these characteristics of heir property, economic development of a significant proportion of land owned by African Americans has been stifled. Owners have difficulty obtaining financing and coowners may not be able to agree on the most appropriate use of the land.” In short, heirs’ property cannot function as a wealth-building asset.
Studies reveal that at least half, likely more, of rural Black landowners in the South do not have wills. The result is that heirs’ property is prevalent in rural Black communities compared to white communities. Mitchell argues that the reasons behind the lack of wills are not well understood but seem to center on access. We know that the legal system and law as a profession were largely off-limits for Black people in the late 1800s and early 1900s, so many never gained titles for purchased or inherited tracts. Many could not seek wills either. Although legal access improved in the post–civil rights era, many rural Black families could not and still cannot afford legal services. Mitchell also points to studies showing that many rural Black landowners do not fully understand the heirs’ property laws, which further suggests a lack of access to legal professionals and the knowledge they provide.
The heirs’ property system seems designed to separate families from their land. In that system, white judges often decide the fate of Black-owned property—and that can lead to discrimination. For instance, when even one heir asks a court to dissolve the joint tenancy, judges can order partitions in kind that physically divide land among family members and grant individual titles. But courts typically order partition sales instead, which force the sale of all the land and divide the proceeds among the heirs. As one lawyer wrote, “Scholars attribute this preference [for partition sales] to a variety of motivations, ranging from implicit or explicit racial bias to the application of economic analyses to merely preferring the simplest alternative.” Whatever the motivation, the result is usually the same, and it is hard to imagine that judges don’t know it: Black families lose their land in the end. Heirs could buy the land back at auction, but white buyers with more cash and borrowing leverage typically outbid them and other would-be buyers of color. Heirs’ property laws still dispossess Black families of their land.
That is why Carrie serves as the director of agriculture and conservation at Black Family Land Trust, one of the nation’s only conservation land trusts dedicated to the preservation and protection of African American and other historically underserved landowner assets. People like Carrie and organizations like Black Family Land Trust are working to close the legal knowledge gap and motivate rural Black landowners to utilize the system to protect their land and legacy. “I learn from those farmers that I help, and I help them by bringing them more of the technical type of things, like the easements, helping them try to avoid heirs’ property, but be able to exist if they are in a current heirs’ property situation,” she explains. “To educate the youth about the power of being landowners.”
Heirs’ property laws are not the only form of structural discrimination. Black farmers often missed out on institutional agricultural assistance, which made keeping their farms harder than it otherwise might have been. White people controlled, and usually still do, the government agencies, land grant institutions, nonprofits, agribusinesses, and other farm-related entities that provide aid, support, education, and economic opportunities. That power fueled both deliberate and passive discrimination against Black farmers, as well as preferential treatment for white farmers. For instance, white administrators of New Deal agendas denied loans and sharecropping work to Black farmers. USDA bureaucrats tailored aid programs for large-scale commodity farms while bypassing smaller farms growing more labor-intensive, high-value crops like fruits and vegetables—the type of farms BIPOC and women operators tend to run.
Until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black farmers faced Jim Crow bureaucratic restrictions, bullying, physical violence, economic punishment, and other barriers in voting for representatives who would advance their interests. In addition, “Lynchings, police brutality, and other forms of intimidation were sometimes used to dispossess black farmers, and even when land wasn’t a motivation for such actions, much of the violence left land without an owner,” writes journalist Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic. Such harassment was particularly egregious in the South, where most Black farmers lived.
Even after the civil rights movement, the USDA continued to systematically discriminate against Black farmers, as evidenced in numerous assessments of its practices and by the successful discrimination lawsuit Black farmers settled in 2010. Indigenous, Hispanic, and female producers went on to file and win similar lawsuits. Given this history, it’s no wonder distrust lingers between BIPOC farmers and the federal government.
Carrie tells me about the skepticism she faced from a white Farm Service Agency (FSA) official when applying for COVID-19 farmer relief funds. The problem: the agent claimed that the word “producer” in the aid program’s guidelines applied to large-scale farmers only. She was essentially telling Carrie and Erin that they were not real farmers. “I had to bring them the statement that this is what the literature said, and that other counties are taking advantage of this and they’re not interpreting that word producer as a big-name producer,” Carrie says. “I was told, ‘Okay, yes, we’re going to put your paperwork through, but there’s a possibility that you may be audited.’ Needless to say, the next week or two later, I got a letter saying that I was being audited. So I had to gather all my paperwork, and luckily we do fairly well with our paperwork. I was able to send them the paperwork which they needed. I don’t think they looked at it. I think they just didn’t feel like I had the paperwork.”
Carrie and Erin are not the only farmers of color to encounter this kind of suspicion. In 2020, the USDA accepted just 37 percent of Black farmer applications for a program that helps pay for land, equipment, and repairs. Meanwhile, the agency accepted 71 percent of white farmer applications. For a separate COVID-19 relief program, less than 1 percent of funds went to BIPOC farmers, despite the fact that such farmers make up 5 percent of the total farming population. Among young farmers, Black and Indigenous producers are more likely than their white counterparts to report that local and state USDA officials ignore them or treat them in unwelcoming ways, and more likely to be denied federal assistance. “I think for me, and I think for a lot of farm families, we just want to have fair access to programs. A lot of folks are being denied program benefits that they pay for with their tax dollars,” Carrie says.
Unsurprisingly, the presence of Black farmers in the food system has declined because of mass dispossession and structural discrimination. In 1920, the percentage of Black farmers peaked at 14.2 percent of the farming population. Today, more than 95 percent of U.S. farmers are white, while 1.3 percent are Black. Researchers estimate that Black-owned farm loss was more than twice that of white-owned farm loss in the past half century. White control of farmland contributed to the erosion of Black food cultures and agricultural practices. It further spurred migration of Black people to cities, lowered diversity in rural communities, and severed career paths for Black children. Then there are the economic consequences: Black families lost billions in generational wealth due to land loss, the equivalent of $326 billion in today’s dollars to be exact. What’s more, under white farmers’ watch, agriculture became industrial, all about dominance of the land rather than harmony with it, a corporatized race for profits at any ecological cost. I am hesitant to delve too far into what-if scenarios, but I do believe that if BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and female farmers had been fairly represented in agriculture, then food and farming would look radically different—more environmentally sustainable, more equitable for all involved, more nutrition focused, and more climate-friendly.
Despite all the obstacles, the number of Black primary farm operators grew from 33,371 to 45,508 between the 2012 and 2017 Censuses of Agriculture. The number of Hispanic and Indigenous operators jumped by even larger margins. As with the latest data on female operators, some of the BIPOC producer increase is the result of a new census format that allows respondents to list more people involved with farm decisions. But also as with female producers, the modified format accounts for only some of the growth. The survey often fails to count the types of farms many BIPOC producers run. Compared to most conventional farms, these under-counted farms tend to be smaller; nontraditional in crop type, business model, and location; and more centered on sustainability. However, the USDA’s focus historically is large, industrial operations. “[The Censuses of Agriculture] tend to miss urban and they tend to miss small, [and] African American and Latinx farmers are going to be more in that space,” says Kathryn Brasier, professor of rural sociology at Pennsylvania State University.
The damaged relationship between farmers of color and the USDA is another reason the census likely does not reflect the total number of BIPOC farmers, because those producers may not respond to or even receive a census form. In addition, non-USDA research by academics and farm advocacy groups tends to reflect the white farmer experience, creating a knowledge gap about BIPOC farmers. Looking at research on female growers in particular, scholars note that “while the research on women in agriculture in the US is of fundamental importance, too often, this work tends to suffer from either an oversampling of white women, discussions of research participation that do not include the racial demographics of participants (or makes them a footnote), or discussions of research findings that ignore the centrality of race to theorizing and understanding the experience of women in agriculture.” Even if the data is incomplete, the fact remains that the number of BIPOC farmers is rising. Erin is one of those newcomers.
She officially joined the farm in 2020 at age twenty-four, but she studied, worked, and advocated within the food system for years prior. In high school, for instance, she had to pick a career and research it as part of her senior high capstone project. Erin chose dietitian, a natural inclination given her love for cooking. Diving into the world of food and nutrition, she learned that southeast Raleigh, where her high school is located and not far from where the Martins live, is a food desert. The USDA defines food deserts as “regions of the country [that] often feature large proportions of households with low incomes, inadequate access to transportation, and a limited number of food retailers providing fresh produce and healthy groceries for affordable prices.” Urban and rural food deserts share some common demographic traits. Compared to other areas, they tend to have smaller overall populations but greater concentrations of minority groups. The USDA has four ways to measure food access, but the common understanding is that an urban community is a food desert if the nearest grocery store is more than a mile away for the majority of residents. For a rural community, the distance is more than twenty miles.
Erin realized that the produce her mom grew could feed underserved families in her hometown community. She and her mom could be “food desert fighters,” as she frequently puts it. “That’s what led us to Raleigh City Farm,” she explains, an organization she learned about through her capstone research. Raleigh City Farm is a nonprofit urban farm founded in 2011 on a formerly vacant one-acre lot in downtown Raleigh. Its mission is to reconnect city dwellers with healthy food production and nourish the diverse Raleigh community via a Pay-What-You-Can Farmstand and by donating about 50 percent of its produce to local nonprofits addressing food insecurity and access. At the time, the farm also ran a food hub that aggregated food from nearby small farms and sold it to local restaurants, hotels, and Raleigh residents.
Erin introduced Carrie to the farm’s leadership, and soon Footprints in the Garden was marketing product through Raleigh City Farm. The partnership facilitated connections with other farmers and leaders in the local food scene, which inspired Carrie and Erin to experiment with new farming techniques and crops. Over the years Footprints in the Garden elevated its presence in the community; Beyoncé and Jay-Z even dined at a restaurant that featured their vegetables.
Meanwhile, Erin attended Wake Technical Community College, taking general classes that would allow her to transfer to a four-year university to obtain a bachelor of science degree in agriculture. But like the plans of so many other Americans, Erin’s plans were derailed when COVID-19 hit in 2020 and she lost her job. She found herself asking a question similar to the one Carrie had faced about a decade prior: how to marry a diverse set of skills and work experience with a passion for social justice, especially in relation to food and health? The question took on greater urgency as food supplies tightened as a consequence of the pandemic; Erin’s community needed the produce Footprints in the Garden was growing. Plus, she had a newborn baby to care for. And so as it was for Carrie, Erin’s answer to the question of how to move forward was on the land.
Another way Erin’s life echoes Carrie’s is through service. While she plans to attend a local university in summer 2024, she also has her eye on becoming a registered forester to increase her knowledge of the land and provide services and information to landowners about forested land. The U.S. forestry sector desperately needs more people like Erin. There is a shortage of foresters generally, and less than 3 percent of foresters and conservation scientists are Black and even fewer are female. Erin’s commitment to sustainable forest management and regenerative agriculture even made her the winner of the inaugural Carolinas Leopold Conservation Award in 2023.
That’s not all when it comes to service. Since 2022, Erin has worked as community engagement coordinator for Fertile Ground, a Raleigh food cooperative working to increase access to healthy, affordable food. Her role is to keep members engaged and up to date about Fertile Ground’s efforts, a task informed by her farmwork. “I feel like that brought my whole world full circle. Because you have this community that you need to feed, you have this land, you need to start doing something with it, as well as feeding the community that you spent so much time in,” she says. “Our people need that food. Our children need that food.” The co-op plans to open a grocery store and community gathering space in southeast Raleigh in 2025; in fact, Erin participated in a site reveal event the day before my farm visit.
Erin’s work with Fertile Ground, and Carrie’s with Black Family Land Trust, are part of the multidimensional aspect of regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture renews both urban and rural communities, and it nourishes both human bodies and the planet. It reaches back into history, honoring its diverse ancestors while welcoming new recruits. It remedies social inequities and repairs broken relationships. Such agriculture also builds soil fertility, ecological resources, and revenue possibilities for future generations. Unlike industrial agriculture, which degrades soil and too often leaves the next generation in debt, regenerative operations are better positioned to leave a legacy. Erin thinks about all this more now that Elana is in her life. “I hope that I can create something easier for my children. There’s also aspects and parts of farming that have created a work ethic in me that I think is not in a lot of younger individuals. So maybe not too easy, but easier,” she says. “I hope I can create something that will put reassurance in their mind to want them to come back to the land.”
