Farming While Black

by Leah Penniman

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  The Oldest Tool in the World

  The digging stick originated in Africa in pre-agricultural times as a tool used by foragers to dig out wild tubers, and was later adapted for farming. It is a stick with a pointed end, used for making holes into which seeds can be dropped. Subsequently, farmers began adding iron tips to be able to work denser soils. Over time these iron ends became flatter and wider to resemble the first long-handled hoes. In the early 1900s farmers added perforated stone weights to the top of their digging sticks to increase the penetration of the pointed end. In Cameroon, Gabon, and Congo, farmers developed some of the first planting knives, called couteau de culture. They were leaf-shaped blades used for planting and the basis for the modern trowel.

  Transplant drench can be added to irrigation water to reduce transplant shock and support the transition from greenhouse to field. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.

  Irrigation

  Water is life. If we have the good fortune of a favorable climate, rainfall may provide enough moisture to enliven the soil biota, nourish the crops, and fill our drinking wells. In fact, most farmers in the world still rely on rainfall as their only source of agricultural water. In a rural community outside Odumase-Krobo, Ghana, where farmers depend on rainfall, the community chief keeps a record of the dates of the rains scratched into his doorpost. When I was living there in 2002, he showed me how climate chaos was making the rains come later each year and end sooner, with the consequence that not all of the crops could fully mature. Climate variability and climate change mandate that we think about supplementary water sources for our farms. Irrigation is a survival strategy.

  For the small-scale grower, it may be reasonable to simply hand-water the garden using a watering can or a hose with a spray nozzle. Once you scale up, however, the amount of time it takes to stand there holding the hose becomes untenable. For crops that are direct seeded, a sprinkler system works well. We pay homage to Black farmer Joseph Smith for his invention of the lawn sprinkler. We use mini sprinklers that feature adjustable distance and droplet size to nourish our direct-seeded crops that would have trouble germinating without an even penetration of water. The sprinklers sit on risers about a foot above the ground and can be adjusted to cover just one or two 100-foot (30 m) beds at a time. These mini sprinklers hook up to a garden hose and utilize its water pressure to operate. They have disadvantages in that they waste much of the water through evaporation and need to be continuously moved to new areas in order to cover the farm. Still, these low sprinklers do conserve more water than those with large arcs and high spray volumes.

  Our preferred irrigation method is a drip system, the most water-conservative and easiest to use of any we have tried. We use a Rain-Flo irrigation kit and have added components over time. A 1-inch (2.5 cm) lead pipe carries water from our well that goes through a screen filter to remove grit, then to a pressure reducer to lower the pressure to 12 PSI (83 kPa). After the pressure reducer, the water flows to a check valve where we can divert it to a fertigation line; there it can pick up a specific concentration of compost tea or other organic nutrients to be delivered to the plants along with the water. Next the water travels out to the crop area, where it flows into four arteries that correspond to the four main sections of our growing area. From there we attach two lines of drip tape per bed off the main header lines or arteries. The whole system mirrors the circulatory system in our bodies or the roots of a tree in its branching pattern. The drip tape is midweight and has a flow rate of 0.45 gallon (1.7 L) per minute per 100 feet (30 m). The drip tape attaches to the artery by a reverse-threaded valve. The far end of the tape is folded over and secured with an end sleeve. We also install irrigation staples at the ends and middle of the bed to prevent the drip line from blowing out of place. Should someone accidentally puncture the tape with overzealous use of a garden fork, it can easily be repaired with coupling hardware.

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  Irrigation Systems of Africa

  Ancient Egyptians developed the first irrigation systems in the world, over 5,000 years ago. Their water management technology, known as basin irrigation, involved the construction of a network of earthen banks near the Nile River that formed basins of diverse sizes. The farmers built sluices that directed floodwater into the basins, where it was allowed to percolate until the soil was saturated. Then the excess water would be drained to another basin or canal, allowing the farmers to plant their crops. In this manner Egyptian farmers cultivated nearly 2 million acres for millennia.4

  In arid areas devoid of floodwaters, African farmers developed climate-adapted irrigation technologies. In the Sahel desert of North Africa, farmers dug underground channels through bedrock to transport water from deep aquifers to the surface. The channels were 100 to 14,000 yards (90 to 12,800 m) in length with aeration wells 8 to 40 yards (7 to 36 m) deep at 10 to 500 points along the channel. These foggaras were built through collective labor and shared ownership. Each owner received a share of the water commensurate with their contribution to its development and maintenance. The foggara is the oldest irrigation technology still in use today, with channels in Algeria over 1,000 years old that continue to irrigate thousands of acres of date palms.5

  African farmers have long used bunding and canals to manage surface water. In dry areas, farmers build mounds of stone or soil (bunds) along the contours of the slope in order to slow the rare storm waters. The bunds have periodic outlets at half their height to release excess water; that water is further retained with mulch and shelterbelts. Bunds are essentially the opposite structure to canals, used by farmers in the Rio Nunez region of Guinea for managing waterlogged soils. These farmers dug an intricate irrigation system of dikes and canals to move fresh water. They planted seedlings on the mounds and rice in the trenches.6

  The heart of the drip irrigation system: grit screen, pressure reducer, and fertigation line. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.

  Drip irrigation tape installed in a bed, ready to deliver water directly to the plant roots. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.

  Drip irrigation can also be used with a gravity system. We are currently constructing a method to pump water from our pond up to a 1,500-gallon (5,700 L) poly storage tank at the top of one of the fields. The drip irrigation system that we will connect to the storage tank will essentially be the same as the one currently connected to our pressure tank, less the pressure reducer. The one downside of drip irrigation is that is does generate a fair amount of plastic waste once the lines are spent after a season or two.

  These systems do not preclude the need for hoses and direct watering. Even with the sprinklers and drip irrigation, we still use hoses for transplanting, spot watering, and cleaning crops and equipment in the field. We have hundreds of feet of hose carefully laid out across the farm such that it can reach even the farthest corner of the crop beds as well as avoid being mowed by the tractor or impaled by a soil fork. At the barn, we have a hose manifold with shutoff valves to control each of the four to six main hoses departing from that junction. We then have a series of splitters allowing hoses to further branch off into the field. Spray nozzles are installed at the end of each hose.

  Weeding and Crop Maintenance

  The sprawling cucurbits and tidy brassicas stay low to the ground and are able to support their own weight into maturity. However, plants whose wild ancestors were accustomed to vining up trees and grasses require supports in order to thrive, as do those crops that we have bred to be so laden with heavy fruits as to bend. Trellising can be as simple as gathering three long sticks from the forest, setting them into a tripod shape, lashing them together at the top, and planting your climbers around the base. For a small-scale garden, this method is more than adequate, but once you scale up, a more streamlined trellising approach is needed.

  For our crops in the field, we like to set a trellis fence of 6-foot-tall (1.75 m) 2-by-4-inch (5-by-10-centimeter) welded wire down the middle of the bed, supported with 7-foot-tall (2 m), rot-r
esistant white oak garden stakes woven in every 6 to 8 feet (1.75 to 2.5 m). We then plant the peas, pole beans, cucumbers, or tomatoes on either side of the trellis fence, such that there are two crop rows in the bed. As the plants grow, we reinforce the trellis by weaving a length of twine around the plants and looping it to the fence every 8 feet (2.5 m) or so. Once the plant is fully mature, it may have three to five lengths of twine holding it up against the fence.

  A fence made of welded wire and garden stakes is useful for supporting pole beans, peas, and other climbing crops. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.

  Tomatoes and tomatillos can be trellised outdoors using a basket weave of garden stakes and twine. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.

  We use specialized clips to attach tomatoes to the trellis string. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.

  For tomatoes and tomatillos grown outdoors, we use a basket-weave trellis. First we pound garden stakes into the row of established tomatoes every 4 to 6 feet (1.25 to 1.75 m). We then weave twine around the plants, so that they are sandwiched between the supportive string on either side. A pass of twine every 18 inches to 2 feet (45 to 60 cm) will provide adequate bracing, and you should continue to add passes as the plant grows. The Immokalee workers, a coalition of Mexican, Guatemalan, Haitian, and Caribbean tomato pickers, also invented a basket-weave trellising tool. According to Larisa Jacobson, the tool is a 2- to 4-inch-long (5- to 10-inch-long) wooden dowel with two screw eyes on one side of it. You run the trellis line through the screw eye guides and tie to the end post. Then you can scoop up plants and basket-weave very quickly and much more tightly. You clip the tomato twine box to your belt with a carabiner or tie it to a belt loop with a loop of twine. You use a gloved left hand (if you’re right-handed) to tension the line, scooping up wayward branches with the taut line itself, jam the end of the dowel against each stake as you move down the row, tension the line with other hand, and let the dowel spin freely on its own around each stake to rotate back to you, then repeat on down the row and back down the other side.

  Selecting the right tool for the job is essential. Here the farmer demonstrates the incorrect tool selection for weeding, but the correct one for looking fly. Photo by Jamel Mosely.

  Inside the high tunnel, we find it simpler and gentler on the tomato plant to hang trellis twine from the overhead purlins or wires of the tunnel. The twine hangs from the ceiling almost to the earth; as the plants grow we secure them to the twine using specialized tomato clips.

  In addition to providing structural support to the plants as they grow, it is crucial to weed out their competitors. Many of these “weeds” have edible and medicinal properties, to be discussed in a later chapter, and the process of removing them can double as harvest. Of course, weeds can be removed by hand: Grab them firmly from the base and offer a smooth tug to dislodge the roots. A hand cultivator can assist the hand-weeding process when the roots you are trying to remove are more resilient. However, hand weeding is time consuming and not feasible for market gardens and farms. If you time your workflow to catch weeds when they are young, at two true leaves or fewer, you can use a J-hoe, collinear hoe, or stirrup hoe to quickly scuffle them away. These hoes employ a short-stroke back-and-forth motion that cuts the roots right below the surface. They are compact tools that allow you to work between plants, even when tightly spaced.

  Harvest

  I admit that we might have been a little too informal in our harvesting procedures in our early days. We did not have access to a refrigerator or cooler for our produce, so we harvested into clean bedsheets doused in water and allowed the evaporative cooling to preserve the freshness of the leaves until distribution. We left the washing to the consumer, only hosing off soiled roots before packing them into boxes.

  Because we are comparatively small and distribute all of our produce through a CSA, we are exempt from many of the rules under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), but we are updating our procedures around the farm to comply with these important health and safety standards. The produce rule for FSMA ensures that water and soil that come in contact with the vegetables are uncontaminated, that we as workers wash our hands and don’t work when sick, and that the storage vessels we use are clean and sanitary. We recommend that you spend some time reading these rules and signing up for a training course or webinar.

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  US Black Farmer Patents

  Black farmers have made significant technological contributions to agriculture in the United States. Many of us are familiar with the story of Eli Whitney’s invention of the mechanized cotton gin (1794), which catalyzed an industrial boom and led to the expansion of slavery. What is less often told is the fact that the person who gave Whitney the idea for the cotton gin was an enslaved farmer known to history only as “Sam,” and that the basic principle of Sam’s gin was rooted in African technologies dating back to the 5th century CE.7 Enslaved people were not granted patents by the government, so records of their myriad antebellum inventions are lost. In 1834 Henry Blair, a free Black man, became the first African American to be identified on a US patent application. He was awarded a patent for his invention of the corn planter, which combined plowing, placing the seeds, and covering the seeds with soil.8 A slew of inventions by Black farmers followed, including: Norbert Rillieux’s sugar refiner (1846), Alexander P. Ashbourne’s coconut oil refiner (1880), Joseph Lee’s kneading and bread-crumbing machines (1890s), George W. Murray’s eight agricultural patents for planters, cultivators, and fertilizer distributors (1890s), Peter Smith’s potato digger (1891), John T. White’s lemon squeezer (1896), Joseph Smith’s lawn sprinkler (1897), William H. Richardson’s cotton chopper (1899), John A. Burr’s lawn mower (1899), and Leonard Julien’s sugarcane planter (1966).9

  Prior to the onset of Western patenting, Black farmers invented myriad hand tools for agriculture, including the cutlass (sub-Saharan Africa), the banana cutter (Uganda), the socketed ax (sub-Saharan Africa), the transpierced ax (sub-Saharan Africa), the curved sickle (Sahel region), the lateral sickle (Mali), and the plow (Ethiopia).

  We harvest all of our crops by hand, using a harvest knife or scissors for the crops that cannot be picked directly. We bring a garden cart out to the field with us, stacked with hard plastic harvest crates and carrying a small bucket with the knives and rubber bands we will need. It is best to harvest directly into these clean crates, close them, and put them in the cart under a clean damp cloth while we continue with the harvest. Certain crops, like tomatoes, do not tolerate being stacked in deep containers, so we harvest them into shallow open crates that are stackable. Once the cart is full of packed crates, we transport the crops to the barn where we label them with the date and contents on the exterior and leave them at ambient temperature. This small step of labeling saves a lot of time when it comes to distributing the produce later on. Crops like broccoli benefit from being dunked in cold water and “hydrocooled” right after harvest, which greatly increases their freshness and storage potential.

  Most crops are harvested directly into these durable, stackable bins.

  Dunking certain vegetables in cold water immediately after harvest helps preserve freshness and increase storage life. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.

  Farmers crowd into the cooler to see how the CoolBot tricks an air conditioner into maintaining low temperatures. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.

  Most of our crops are stored in a homemade walk-in cooler, which is an 8-by-8-foot (2.5-by-2.5-meter) insulated box with an insulated door and wooden shelves. It stays cool via a CoolBot device, invented by farmers in the Hudson Valley, New York. The CoolBot “tricks” a standard off-the-shelf digital air conditioner into maintaining the desired low temperatures needed for storing vegetables. The system is much less expensive than a commercial walk-in cooler and has needed no maintenance for us in its 5-plus years of continuous use on our farm.

  When it’s time to distribute our produce to the community, we divvy it out into 11/9-bushel cardboard boxes that c
an easily stack in our van. We assemble and lay the boxes out in the barn and then pack them, with the heavier items on the bottom. Some of our crops, like beans, peas, and lettuce mix, are bagged before we box them. We use grocery-store-brand gallon-sized plastic storage bags and brown paper lunch bags as containers. We also have both a hanging scale and a bench scale to help us accurately and fairly divide the produce among the number of shares.

  Apparel and Gear

  The sum total of all the equipment and supplies mentioned in this chapter does not exceed the value of your labor as the farmer. Taking proper care of your health and well-being and setting yourself up for success with protective work gear are both essential to the success of your farm. Experienced farmers can recognize one another right away by what they are wearing, and it’s not generally skinny jeans and a fedora.