Food has an odd way of being connected to everything. When you’re strolling down the vegetable aisle at HEB, you can’t help but wonder about pesticides, and about whether the farming practices are sustainable. You wonder where your produce might have come from, but do you ever think about where the land came from? How did the company that grew your zucchini acquire the farmland to do so?
For generations, land has been ripped from underneath the feet of Black Southern farmers. Black farmland ownership in the U.S. peaked around 1920, right around the time when the reactionary force of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist hate groups attempted–often successfully so–to scare Black farmers and their families away from the land they bled and wept for. And then there’s our beloved federal government, whose policy agenda has forced money out of the hands of Black farmers.
In rural Louisville, Mississippi, criminal justice reform advocates Teresa Ervin-Springs and her husband Kevin Springs are leading the charge for Black land ownership, after inheriting a plot of land and uprooting their lives in South Florida to start TKO Farming. They’re now hoping to acquire an additional 20-acre plot for a community land trust in order to found the Southern Agrarian Training Center, which would teach agricultural skills to Black youth on Black-owned land.
They’re currently less than $12,000 away from their $125,000 goal.
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 XP: What are your long term goals once you acquire the 20 acres? Any aspirations?
TE: Our first priority is securing Black land. That's because we're not making any more land. The preservation of Black-owned land [is important]. Let me give you the backstory on why we are trying to move forward with an agrarian training center. [When] we got this land–once Kevin's mother turned the land over to him–we lived in South Florida. We both owned nonprofits assisting individuals affected by the criminal justice system. There's a long backstory, but we decided to honor our parents by not selling the land. We didn't know how to farm. We couldn’t dot an I or cross a T. We didn't know anything. But the only thing we could do is make a solemn promise–Kevin did–that he would not sell the land. But then we came up and we made a track through the forest.
KS: We just went in the woods, and coming out on the other side of the woods was somehow transformative. It was at that time that I decided, kind of threw it out there into the ancestral realm, that whatever happened, we wouldn't sell the place. That I wouldn't sell the place.
We didn't know what we were doing. I mean, we were both city dwellers, for lack of a better term [LAUGHS]. We had no idea what we're going to do with the land, and I think I was embodied with my stepdad's spirit, because I came in and put on his hat, put on one of his jackets, and Teresa was like, ‘Oh my God. Oh, take that off. You look just like your stepdad. You’ve got none of his DNA but something happened. Take that stuff off because you’re scaring me.’
From that point, I started working. I mean, there was some things that happened. We got involved with a couple of agencies–the [National Resources Conservation Service], the [Farming Service Agency]. But there was no result from the NRCS. There was no results from the FSA. The [local] co-op helped us to a large extent to get started. But all those federal agencies didn't do jack. We didn't get any assistance from any of them. In fact, we just got roadblock after roadblock.
TE: [LAUGHS] Every night he would read [up on agriculture], I would read, we would tell each other, we would go out the next day and implement whatever.
KS: Sometimes we’d come back and say, ‘Well, that didn’t work!’
TE: With all the experience we've had here, all the mishaps, missteps, mistakes, if you take all the awful things–I called them learning curves–that we've had here, I believe that we can help so many people get in front of that, or not make the same mistakes that we did, especially when it comes to the systems that are in place to hinder Black people. They're supposed to be in place to help, but there is no oversight. So, people in offices, whether it's the NRCS, FSA, the USDA, all these nonprofits, they're supposed to be in place to help Black farmers, the minority, historically underserved. If it wasn't for our ability to say, okay, that didn't work, let's move on, it would have devastated us and we would have stopped in our tracks.
So even before the pandemic, there were thousands of people saying that they want to get back to farming, but now it's just off the roof with people understanding the importance of land, the importance of growing your own food, because we see all these systems failing. We understood that this system that has been created would eventually fail us. In all our dealings here with people, through conferences, through reading, we just understood that the system would fail. So we've been trying to build a system outside of the current system. We try to create a culture–a setup here–that we, whoever is here, can be protected, could have nutritionally dense food. We have a well, we have vegetables, we have cattle, we have goats. We can really contain a community. That's what we've been trying to do for the last couple of years.
Now, when [the 20 acres’ previous owner] Pastor Head passed away, we saw a perfect opportunity, because we were thinking of doing some sort of training here on our property, but since [the Head family’s land is] only two and a half miles away, we saw the perfect opportunity to create the same thing that we've created here, but we would transfer it there. It would be dedicated just to training Black people and helping them navigate all those traps of farming.
KS: Or completely divest.
TE: Yes. That's Kevin's favorite thing–to divest from what, Kevin, the current system? [LAUGHS]
KS: [LAUGHS] Yeah. That’s just folly on my part.
TE: That’s the thing. Even before the pandemic, we had this on our mind. But since the pandemic, there's been so many people reaching out and understanding that, okay, this is what we need to do, but we need a farming immersion. They need the elders. We partner with a lot of the elderly farmers because they have so much knowledge. Most of the farmers here are 70 or older, so if they pass away, the knowledge passes away too. We have a youth and young adults educational exchange. We have a youth mentorship program. We have farm immersions. We also have spring outbreaks. So all these components of TKO and what we've learned, and especially as far as the elder farmers and the young farmers who come here, or aspiring farmers who come here, we want to make that intergenerational connection. We think this is a perfect opportunity to take not only what we've learned, but the information that our elders in the community have learned and their knowledge, and make that connection, and just give all we can to this agrarian training center, and just move forward in whatever the future is gonna look like.
XP: What would you say y’all have learned about yourselves, about your heritage?
TE: Long story short, we began to understand the food apartheid in our country. We understood that there needed to be a local food system in our community, because there was a lot of high blood pressure [and] diabetes directly related to people not being able to get to nutritionally dense food. We kind of started to pair criminal justice with food justice.
Then it was just learning so much about how our ancestors were kept out of funding and lost their land and, well, ran away from their lives in the South. We began to understand the importance of the land under our feet. The land provided us everything. We came here with like $200. I mean not sold everything, but we left all that we knew to come here. By the time we paid off what we needed and rented a truck, by the time we got here, we had about $200. But the thing that we did have was the land under our feet and the home paid for. We had no debt.
KS: Black people are resilient, period. I don't know where all these false narratives come from. Well, yes, I do. But that's beside the point, right? My people are incredibly resilient.
TE: We come from traumatic backgrounds, like most or a lot of Black people, a lot of trauma in our lives. So, when we got here, the land, and I believe the ancestors, began to guide us into a different understanding. I know that the land began to heal us. I can't say I've totally healed, but in all of my trauma that I’ve experienced, beginning to put my hand in the soil… If something happened, I would go out and put my hands in the soil. By the end of the day, I'm at peace.
That is scientific. I speak of it as spiritual and healing.
KS: Like the microbes that are absorbed by the soil that make you feel better.
TE: Yes. We think of this land in our experience, to me, it's been guided. If you look at our history, our character, whatever we decide to indulge or our endeavors, we go 100–we just go hard.
KS: The resilience is really entwined, and the commitment. We made a commitment to this land, to protect it. Not that it needs us to protect it, but if you just leave the land and humans keep their hands off of it, it will fry anyway. But our commitment to not only not sell the land, but to work within the ecosystem, to work within the framework. Anyway, what I’ve learned is resilience, commitment, and love–all of these things will yield favorable or positive results.
For example, I built a four-foot fence [around the property] by myself, with the exception of a few hundred feet.
XP: That’s no easy task.
KS: It took me like six months–six months! Teresa thought, ‘This man is gonna kill himself.’
There were moments where I wouldn’t go out there and touch that fence for a couple of weeks, because I just couldn’t. I’d find other things to do that were far more easier, I guess you could say. But when I put that last wire up on that fence–
TE: You were about dead. He’d lost so much weight. [LAUGHS]
KS: I was just about on life support. [LAUGHS] When I looked at what I’d done, for somebody who had never built a fence, who had no idea how to do this… Fast forward a couple years, I'm having a conversation with someone about using a Bobcat, or a track hoe. I said, ‘Man, I don't know nothing about messing around with no bulldozer.’ He said, ‘From the way I see things, the way you learn, the biggest thing for you is going to be to learn how to start the darn thing.’
For some photos of these two at work, head on over to the Salt, Soil, & Supper instagram page.
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Southerly, Carly Berlin
“Communities with a pattern of police violence are often the same ones experiencing environmental racism.”
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate, Sara Sneath
“Louisiana shrimpers started heading out to sea Monday as the fall inshore shrimp season kicked off. But with restaurants closed due to coronavirus, opening day arrived at a time when fewer people are buying shrimp, and prices remain low.”
WUSF, Cathy Carter
“[Last] week a federal court ruled that offshore fisheries cannot be permitted in the Gulf of Mexico under existing policy. Opponents of a proposed fish farm off Sarasota's coast called the decision a victory, but the CEO of the company spearheading the local project says he's pushing ahead.”
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Texas Monthly, Morgan O'Hanlon
“According to Texas Department of Agriculture commissioner Sid Miller, five thousand acres of Texas soil were licensed for hemp this year. Many farmers are betting that CBD products will save Texas agriculture from the ruinous effects on commodity prices of the ongoing trade war with China. But experts say very few acres have yet yielded a profitable crop.”
The Counter, H. Claire Brown
"Farmers who apply to host guest workers through the H-2A program make all sorts of promises to them: They’re supposed to pay a certain wage (never below the federal minimum), guarantee work for a certain number of hours per week, provide housing and transportation to and from the worksite, and pay for transportation to and from the workers’ home country. In practice, though, those commitments aren’t honored …”
Mississippi Clarion Ledger, Alissa Zhu and Maria Clark
“Executives have gone unpunished for profiting from undocumented workers, who in turn face housing instability, deportation and family separation.”
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Poor man pork tacos
Funds have been tight in the Peters-Maldonado household lately. Luckily, the shabby meat market down the way from our house in New Orleans’ Upper Ninth Ward found a bunch of pork rib slabs that fell off the truck (I’m kidding… I think), so they had a good deal and we’ve been eating on those for the last week or two. Being as broke as we’ve been, we’ve gotten creative.
The Steps:
- Cut your raw slab of ribs into portions that’ll fit in a frying pan. Season generously on both sides with dried thyme, cayenne pepper, black pepper, red pepper, and salt.
- Put a fat of your choice in a frying pan–olive oil, bacon lard, butter, whatever–and turn the heat up till the oil or grease pops, then place your slabs of the ribs in the pan.
- Cook for an hour to an hour and a half, flipping the ribs at least twice. Then remove meat from the pan and shred it from the bones. Place your meat back into the frying pan and cook for another 10 minutes to get all grease and seasoning into the meat. Cut a lime and two avocados, and then squeeze the lime juice into the pan.
- Toast your corn tortillas over a hot stove burner, letting them get a little crunchy.
- Cut your cilantro and remaining lime, choose your salsa (we’ll get to that next week.)
- In two tortilla fashion, build your tacos with the ingredients above. Enjoy!
The Ingredients:
- Slab of pork ribs
- Dried thyme
- Cayenne pepper
- Black pepper
- Red pepper
- Salt
- Cooking fat of choice (olive oil, bacon lard, butter, etc.)
- Corn tortillas
- Cilantro
- Six limes
- Two avocados
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That's a wrap for this week, y'all.
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I hope you got enough to eat. There’ll be enough to go around next week and the week after.
—Xander
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