From Stolen Land to Reclaimed Roots: Black Women Farmers Rise

Seeds carry memory. That’s the quiet truth threaded through centuries of Black women’s relationship with American soil—a relationship built on dispossession, survival, and now, deliberate reclamation.

At Soul Fire Farm in Rensselaer County in Upstate New York, participants gather not just to learn how to grow food, but to reconnect with ancestral knowledge that refuses to stay buried. Co-founder Leah Penniman, who uses all pronouns, frames this work simply but powerfully:“I believe in the healing power and potential of land connection for Black women.”It’s not sentimental. It’s resistance.

The numbers tell a brutal story. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, women produce half the world’s food—between 60 and 80 percent in developing countries. Yet Black women make up less than 1 percent of farmers in the United States. Since 1910, Black farmers have lost millions of acres. In North Carolina alone, 950,000 acres of farmland vanished between 2002 and 2022. A study found that forced land sales and discriminatory practices, including by the USDA, drained $326 billion in land value from Black farmers throughout the 20th century. This wasn’t accident. It was architecture.

The history runs deeper still. After slavery ended in 1865, formerly enslaved families were promised“40 acres and a mule”—a promise President Andrew Johnson eviscerated within months, returning roughly 400,000 acres to former enslavers. Black families became sharecroppers and tenant farmers under Jim Crow. Those who managed to acquire land faced legal manipulation and violence designed to pry it from their hands. Even when policy efforts attempted repair, sexism ensured Black women were left behind. As Savi Horne, executive director of the Land Loss Prevention Project, puts it: gender bias blocked access to resources and services even when the policies existed on paper.

Yet here’s what matters now: Black women are not waiting for permission to reclaim what was stolen. Urban agriculture specialist Nataka Crayton works through models like land trusts, which hold land collectively to protect it from seizure or loss. These structures reduce barriers by providing growing space, technical assistance, and small grants. Whether it’s a micro farm in Boston or herbal gardens at Paige Academy, a Black-owned elementary school, the work is happening at multiple scales—each rooted in the same principle: that Black women’s connection to the land never actually broke. It was interrupted, not severed.

The deeper reclamation is generational. The author of this story witnessed it firsthand after returning home to Boston from Soul Fire Farm: a neighbor girl, six or seven years old, pointing to mint regrowing in summer sun and declaring,“I know how to harvest.”That seed—both literal and metaphorical—is already growing. The stewards are rising.