|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The link between climate and food profoundly impacts agriculture, especially for Black and Indigenous urban farmers utilizing regenerative farming techniques. Leaders like Anan Lololi and Leah Penniman have embraced regenerative farming to foster environmental resilience.
In 1995, Lololi founded Afri-Can FoodBasket in Toronto—Canada’s first Black-led, Black-serving and Black-mandated (B3) organization. Afri-Can FoodBasket’s mission is to reduce hunger, improve access to culturally relevant foods, and boost wellness through food programs tailored to the Greater Toronto Area’s African, Caribbean, and Black communities.
“From the beginning, we’ve focused on ecological, regenerative farming and growing food organically,” says Lololi. “By 2011, we had fully embraced our identity as a Black food sovereignty institution.”
After earning a master’s in environmental studies with a focus on community food security, Lololi expanded into urban agriculture through schools, community gardens, church gardens, and urban farms.
Afri-Can FoodBasket prioritized creating community gardens in underserved, low-income areas and worked closely with young people to build food security for Toronto’s Black community, one of Canada’s largest and most food-insecure.
“Recognizing the high cost of culturally important foods like Jamaican yams and callaloo, we started a cooperative food buying club to provide nutritious, affordable options,” Lololi says.
“We launched urban agriculture programs, offering hands-on gardening experiences to youth. As executive director, I led these programs rooted in sustainable, regenerative farming techniques to protect people’s health and the environment. Nearly 30 years of ecological, organic practices have empowered our community and built a resilient food system.”
Regenerative Farming Techniques
“Regenerative agriculture is a system of agroecology that aims not only to sustain production but to restore land and ecosystems to their pre-colonial health,” says Leah Penniman, founder of Soul Fire Farm.
“This approach sequesters carbon, increases organic matter, boosts biodiversity, and enhances soil and plant health. What’s amazing about regenerative agriculture is that it’s ancient. It’s been practiced for thousands of years by Indigenous communities worldwide. Regenerative farming techniques like no-till, mulching, cover cropping, perennial polycultures, animal grazing, and controlled burns have long been used.”
She continues, “The father of the modern regenerative movement is Dr. George Washington Carver, who worked at Tuskegee University in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He was an incredible scientist and agronomist who recognized the severe depletion of Southern soils caused by decades of monocropping plantations. To restore soil health, he introduced sustainable practices like cover cropping, swamp reclamation, and crop rotation, which were uncommon at the time. Through these methods, he successfully preserved a generation of Black farmers.”
Lololi notes that Afri-Can FoodBasket has always embraced regenerative farming techniques. “Traditional farming was community-focused, so farmers avoided heavy chemical use, used beneficial weeds, and implemented minimal soil disturbance,” says Lololi. “But today’s agriculture prioritizes profit over sustainability.”
- Leah Penniman Nourishes Land and Community at Soul Fire Farm
- Roots of Resilience: Amanda David’s Fight Against Racism on Her Land in New York
He states that soil health is “absolutely essential” and that Afri-Can Foodbasket uses part of its farm to train young Black adults in regenerative farming techniques. “The first thing they need to do is prepare the soil by adding compost and compost tea,” he explains.
“Compost tea is created by steeping compost in water, allowing nutrients from the compost to infuse the liquid, which can then be applied to enrich the soil. Before planting, it’s essential to add compost to the soil to ensure healthy growth for any seedlings or seeds.”
He continues, “Another beneficial practice is leaving parts of the field fallow and planting cover crops, like beans or other greens, to increase nutrients naturally—beans, for instance, help boost potassium levels. These cover crops can then be tilled back into the soil, creating a healthy nutrient cycle. By testing the soil, they can determine what nutrients are lacking and enrich it with a blend of compost, compost tea and green manure. As I mentioned, soil health is everything.”
Penniman agrees. “Regenerative agriculture has the capacity to capture carbon and put it back into the soil,” she explains. “A lot of people don’t know that within just one generation of settler colonizers farming in the Great Plains, they destroyed 50% of the organic matter in the soil—that’s half of the carbon in that top layer. When you use regenerative farming techniques, you increase the organic matter, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back into the soil.”
She goes on, “For every 1% increase in organic matter, we sequester roughly 8.5 metric tons of atmospheric carbon per acre. If we could scale these practices globally, we’re talking about putting 100 gigatons of CO₂ back into the soil where it belongs. This isn’t the entire solution but is a significant piece of addressing anthropogenic climate change.”
Promoting Diverse Crops
Penniman says that Soul Fire Farm has always used ecologically sound regenerative farming techniques, but their approach also emphasizes the spiritual connections embedded in these practices.
“If you Google ‘regenerative agriculture’ and look at mainstream definitions, you won’t find much about culture or colonialism. You’ll see important techniques like no-till farming and cover cropping, but that’s only part of the picture. For us, regenerative agriculture is Afro-Indigenous; it’s cultural.
“When we build a raised bed, we honor the Ovambo people of Namibia, who developed rectilinear raised beds like the ones we use. When we create compost—especially pyrogenic compost with ash and charcoal—we pay homage to the African dark Earth crafted by women in Liberia and Ghana. When we plant polycultures on slopes with trees and herbs, we draw inspiration from Haiti’s Jaden Lakou systems,” she says.
“From our perspective, agriculture cannot exist without culture because culture is essential; the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ behind these practices are deeply meaningful. Farming has always been intertwined with spiritual practice for our communities because the Earth itself is divine. The farm is divine. Orisha Oko is divine. These plant medicines are sacred—they are Osanyin. When you view the environment as part of the sacred, practices like prayer, meditation, offerings, gratitude, and connection naturally follow. Through regenerative agriculture, we’re restoring soil and reviving culture.”
For Lololi’s Afri-Can Foodbasket, the cultural connection is present as well. Toronto’s Black community represents over 125 countries and 200 distinct cultural backgrounds of African descent. Yet, Lololi says the food system is mainly European influenced.
“Many African, Caribbean, Latin American and Southern U.S. crops can thrive here, even if tropical crops like mangoes and bananas won’t survive. Integrating African crops like Ethiopian kale, Jamaican callaloo, and long beans into the food system can connect generations of Black residents to their food heritage,” Lololi says.
“Newcomers often plan to return home but stay for generations. We promote these diverse crops through ecological and regenerative farming techniques like crop diversification, green manure, and seed-saving. Over the years, I’ve seen many young Black farmers adopt ecological and organic farming methods. We operate two urban farm incubators to bring more young Black farmers into agriculture, especially in urban areas. These incubators teach them to farm ecologically and apply organic principles in managing their farms.”
Silvopasture is another regenerative farming technique that Penniman uses, though she notes it’s less common. “Silvopasture combines forests with pasture, where the grass and forbs provide food for livestock,” Penniman says.
“Typically, you’d see either an orchard or a grazing pasture, but silvopasture integrates both. On our four-acre silvopasture, we grow apple, peach, cherry, plum, and apricot trees, with diverse shrubs and herbs like elderberry, currants, comfrey, mint, and yarrow beneath. Between the rows of trees, there’s a 40-foot pasture of grass and clover, where we rotate chickens and goats through eight paddocks.
“This system is highly efficient: goats naturally mow the grass, while manure from both animals fertilizes the orchard. As trees mature and drop fruit, they provide supplemental food for the livestock, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem.”
She adds, “Project Drawdown ranks silvopasture as a top climate solution for its carbon-sequestering roots and efficient use of space, blending animal farming with fruit orchards to benefit both land and climate.”
RELATED: Black Environmentalists on the Frontlines – 1:1 with Dr. Gregory Jenkins
The Impact of Healthy Soil and Land
For Penniman, Soul Fire Farm has reclaimed this connection and continues passing these teachings and techniques to new and veteran farmers. “For our 2025 strategic goals, we’re tracking typical metrics like yield and crop health,” she says.
“But we’re also focused on soil health, aiming to maintain a soil organic matter level above 10%. We’re committed to sustainable practices, as evidenced by our Natural Resources Conservation Service program participation. We strive to maintain a high rating in their sustainability assessment. Additionally, we’re dedicated to adhering to the Certified Naturally Grown program standards.”
She continues, “On a spiritual level, we use the Ifa divination system to assess our relationship with the land and its spirits. Recent divination affirmed our positive impact on the land and suggested specific corrective measures. We’ve realized the importance of fostering a sacred connection to the land, even for external contractors who work on the farm. Ultimately, our metrics are rooted in ecological principles. We’re not just focused on what the land can provide but also on what we can give back to it.”
Lololi highlights a strong connection between regenerative farming techniques, Black food sovereignty, social justice and anti-racism. Historically, Black, Indigenous, and African farmers practiced regenerative agriculture, minimizing waste and producing quality crops. However, the trauma of enslaved labor in agriculture led many to abandon farming after emancipation.
“Many of our grandparents didn’t want us involved with food or farming,” Lololi explains. “We gave up the land because of painful memories tied to it. As Leah Penniman says, ‘The land is the scene of the crime, but not the criminal.’ We’ve always been food sovereign as a people. We’ve always had our own food systems. It was the transatlantic slave trade that put us in this position of dependency on white folks. We must reclaim our connection to the land, viewing Black food sovereignty as our future.”
Follow Anan Lololi and the Afri-Can FoodBasket on Instagram and Facebook. Check out Soul Fire Farm on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Follow Leah Penniman on Instagram and read her book, Farming While Black.
