Minkah Taharkah is an artist, poet, farmer, and organizer. While a student at UC Berkeley, she co-founded Black Earth Farms based on her desire to eat healthy and affordable food and to provide the local community with the same opportunity. Black Earth farms also provided a vehicle for BIPOC community members to get actively involved in the Food Justice Movement.
Growing up in Leimert Park, a vibrant Black neighborhood of Los Angeles, helped ignite both her artistic creativity and her passion for social justice, and Minkah now works for the California Farmer Justice Collaborative, supporting farmers and farmworkers who are challenging racism and structural discrimination in the food system. She also works with The Butterfly Movement, an organization/network that seeks to empower Black women and girls, foster their entrepreneurship, and advocate for social equity.
Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviewed Minkah at a recent Bioneers Conference. The photos, by Jan Mangan, are accompanied by Minkah’s personal reflections on fashion, dance and art.
ARTY MANGAN: You currently live in Fresno, the number one agricultural county in the country. Why did you choose to live there?
MINKAH TAHARKAH: I’m homesteading, which I have wanted to do for a while. I’ve been like a seed in the wind for a time. I lived in Yosemite for a while, and up in Tuolumne County. I lived in the Bay Area for about eight years. I lived in Ghana for a year. And then I came to Fresno because I farm and work with farmers.
Living in Fresno and seeing the connections between urban and rural regions and cultures has been really eye-opening. The Central Valley is such a hub of agriculture, not just in the state or the country, but in the world. Unfortunately, the people there face a lot of injustice and exploitation. I work with farmworkers who are experiencing what I call “nutricide”—their health is being depleted because they don’t have access to good nutrition; and that’s a bitter irony because those folks working in the fields are the ones harvesting healthy produce for other people. So, there is a lot of work to do, and part of the reason I’m there is to work with farmworkers and farmers, including Black, Latino and Hmong farmers.
ARTY: How did you, who grew up in an urban environment, get interested agriculture?
MINKAH: I co-founded Black Earth Farms with a few of my colleagues from UC Berkeley in 2019 after we did a bit of trekking through Cuba and Jamaica learning from different farmers about their different techniques and practices. One of those colleagues, Diego Jimenez, taught a permaculture class at Berkeley. While I was a student there, I studied environmental science through the “Society and Environment” track, but that didn’t necessarily bring me into direct connection with the land and farming.
And at the time, I had become interested in growing food because I was a student on a very limited budget spending a lot of money on rent, and I’m a vegan and wanted to eat well, but I could not afford Berkeley Bowl, so I knew I had to do something. So, we began growing food on campus. In 2019, Will Smith, Diego Jimenez, Jibril Kaiser and I worked together to co-found Black Earth Farms utilizing spaces on the Berkeley campus. There had been some similar projects initiated by students already, such as the Gill and Oxford tracts, where food was grown and sold at a sliding scale, prioritizing Black families across the East Bay. I transitioned from Black Earth Farms in 2022, and now I work with the California Farmer Justice Collaborative.
ARTY: Is Black Earth Farms still operating?
MINKAH: To my knowledge, Black Earth Farms is not operating anymore. We grew to about 12 people involved in supplying food to about 60 families. I really want to pay homage to everyone who was involved because we learned a lot about ourselves, about the nature of organizing, about supply and demand, and about organizational development.
ARTY: It sounds like a really worthy project for college students: working together with the shared goal of helping people in need.
MINKAH: Exactly. I really value and still hold true to a lot of the connections that I made there, and from that experience, I’m still involved in agriculture now.
ARTY: It’s interesting to see what forms our life’s path, how one thing leads to another.
MINKAH: The way things have gone I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The people I met along the path were so integral to helping me build the perspective and the resilience that permits me to now work with the California Farmer Justice Collaborative. I was the first staff person for the organization. CFJC is an amazing group of farmers, of people who decided that we need more equity for BIPOC small farmers and producers, land tenders and preservers, and bee keepers in California. They came together with that in mind to craft the Farm Equity Act, which passed in 2017. The Act explicitly names BIPOC folks—Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian folks—who have been historically marginalized to be prioritized and provides a definition for “socially disadvantaged farmer and rancher,” so that we don’t get lost in some of the jargon that often isolates us when it comes to policymaking.
I want to recognize the legacy of CFJC’s core group of folks who have done and do so much grassroots organizing and work to get accessible language on current policies that affect BIPOC producers so that there is a more digestible framework and farmers can mobilize when necessary. People involved with making policy often say: “We tried to talk to farmers but they’re just too busy.” My response to that is that if you’re not operating on the farmers’ time, how do you expect to support them? You’ve got to meet them where they’re at, so you’re not just doling out resources willy-nilly, but instead you’re finding out what people actually really need and figuring out how to connect them with those resources. That’s pretty much CFJC’s ethos.
ARTY: Important work. What does your daily routine look like?
MINKAH: I work on finding farmers, calling them, scheduling meetings to go visit them at their farm and showing up. We also have a small grant program called the Farmer Justice Micro-Grant, which is up to $10,000 of emergency and direct operating funds. There’s an important ethos in developing a framework of equity. When we focus on those that need the most support, everyone else will benefit, and if you take that same approach to our land, to our earth, and focus on the health of the soil, everything else begins to bloom.
When working for equity, it’s important to understand that for Black folks, many of our ancestors worked the land, but legacies of dispossession and colonization have taken most of us away from a connection to the land. How do we bring ourselves back to the land in a way that offers us the opportunity to heal? There are studies that show how touching soil can be very effective in reducing stress.
ARTY: Yes, that’s true, but at the same time the life of a farmworker can be grueling: long hours and low pay for very physically demanding work.
MINKAH: Most of us don’t have to go and work on a farm every day because farm worker folks are working the land for sometimes 13 hours, day-after-day-after day. I worked with a family last year who were going from farm-to-farm picking grapes, and then they’d come and weed on our land. It was my first time working with farmworkers. I don’t even like saying the phrase “farm workers” because they’re actually farmers, people who tend land, so I often use the term “land stewards.” Farming can be very violent. We have to talk about the relationship to violence when it comes to farming versus tending the land. When it comes to working with the land, people are being forced to rush and are not able to care of themselves or the land.
ARTY: The economic system doesn’t incentivize farmers to be land stewards. They are pressured to produce as much as possible without regard to the impact on the land or those who work the land. The system is exploitive, and farmers, land, workers, etc. are all in servitude to large scale agribusiness.
MINKAH: An additional inequity of the industrial food system is that it produces excess food and yet not everybody has access to food. However, I do strongly believe that people at the grassroots working together can alleviate some of those injustices. I work with amazing humans right now who allow me to get up every day and talk to them and strategize about tools we can use to ensure that our families and friends are nourished and cared for. And that ripples out to people that you have one or two degrees of separation from, and even to those you have multiple degrees of separation from.
ARTY: To expand the idea of food security to include the larger community, we can look to traditional cultures that shared the work of the harvest and the gains of the hunt not just with family but with other community members.
MINKAH: Absolutely. I also work with the Butterfly Movement co-founded by my mentor Brandi Mack, who is also part of the CFJC Governance Committee. Within the Butterfly Movement, we have a project called Sankofa Gardens that started as a mutual aid backyard garden program out of the pandemic. Folks were calling Brandi asking what to do since the grocery stores were empty. They were ready to try to grow food, so we built several gardens in East Oakland. The project is based at Castlemont High School at their beautiful 1-acre farm. The farm manager, Arthur McDade, is working diligently to ensure that students and community members have access to the food grown there. So, together we grow food at Castlemont and people also have their backyard gardens at home. We work together planting, weeding, and harvesting. One of the phrases that we often use is “many hands make for light work.” We have embodied that.
ARTY: What are some of the challenges you have encountered trying to get people to work together for a common goal?
MINKAH: Figuring out how to be together is one of the biggest things that I have learned so far in the many projects that I’ve worked with. I’ve been part of many cooperatives and intentional communities, and one of the biggest gaps is taking the time to be with each other and learning how to be with each other. It’s the art of relationship-building. It’s a skill, and it starts with being able to know yourself because if you don’t take the time to know yourself, how are you going to be able to accommodate and experience where others are coming from in a way that is anti-oppressive and non-violent? I love being in community because when I’m in my authentic community, they are able to hold me accountable and also reflect me back to myself in a way that helps illuminate parts of myself that I didn’t necessarily see or pay attention to.
ARTY: What have you learned about yourself?
MINKAH: I want to be on land, but what does it really mean to be on the land? My relationship to the land feels so very vulnerable and tender. I feel like it’s a place where I have to be stripped of all things. Pomp and circumstance don’t really exist there. It’s the one place that truly brings me to my knees, and I have to surrender. It’s such an important place to practice meditation and other mindfulness exercises to be connected to the soil and to the land—it is literally grounding, so my entire physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual wellbeing depends on my relationship to the land. I’m so thankful that I’m able to have that relationship, and I’m dedicated to sharing what I’ve learned with the next generations and to help create spaces and opportunities so they too can also know themselves through that relationship.
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