Meet the Team Behind: Soul Fire Farm

Soul Fire Farm is cultivating food justice by training the next generation of Black and Brown farmers, advocating for equity in agriculture, and bringing fresh, healthy food to communities most impacted by food apartheid. Learn more here! 

Can you tell me about your mission? 

Soul Fire Farm is an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm and training center dedicated to uprooting racism and creating sovereignty in the food system. We practice regenerative agroecology, raise and distribute life-giving food, equip the rising generation of BIPOC farmers, and mobilize communities to work toward food and land conservation. We use silvopasture, wildcrafting, polyculture, and spiritual farming practices to regenerate mountainside land, producing fruits, plant medicine, pasture-raised livestock, honey, mushrooms, vegetables, and preserves for community provisioning. 

What does your farming practice look like? 

Rather than rototill the soil to add air and remove weeds, we use heavy mulches to smother the weeds and encourage the worms to do the aeration. We use cover crops like peas, oats, and buckwheat to protect the soil from erosion and add important nutrients, and compost manure from our livestock and crop residues. Rather than planting a whole field in just one crop, we integrate dozens of crops in each section, and all are grown in raised beds. We raise small ruminants, like sheep, which are experts at surviving on native grasses and forage with minimal purchased feed, and our structures are all handmade using locally sourced materials. 

What kind of programs do you offer? 

Our community farm days allow participants to learn about some of our farming practices while supporting our work and getting your hands on the land. Throughout the farming season, we invite our community to experience some of the plants, animals and humans that grow here. We also have hands-on workshops by and for BIPOC that dive deep into specialized topics in specific farming and land stewardship practices. Our Uprooting Racism training is a theory and action workshop for environmental and food justice leaders to develop tangible action plans to uproot systemic racism in food and land systems.

What are Solidarity Shares? 

Soul Fire Farm provides no cost doorstep delivery of vegetables, fruits, medicine, eggs, and valuable products to people living under food apartheid in the Albany-Troy, NY area, which we call Solidarity Shares. We accept donations of non-perishable, natural food items to include in Solidarity Shares, such as soup mixes, preserves, honey, sauces, salad dressing, grains, dry beans, teas, dried fruit, and herbal products. We also include products from our new line that emerged from our commitment to increasing climate-healing perennials on the land such as fruit trees, herbal medicines, and pasture.