Sowing justice: When farming is about more than food

Aliyah Fraser has always been fascinated by the powerful simplicity of growing food. It started in her grandmother’s garden in Toronto where she’d watch in awe as tomatoes, pumpkin, and squash would swell. “I’d just run around like a little rascal, eating all the ripe raspberries,” she says. “That garden has always been my safe space.” 

But it took a long time – a pandemic and a social justice movement – to consider farming as a viable career. “I just never really saw myself as a farmer. I never saw farmers that looked like me,” she says, plunging a homemade, wooden dibbler into the earth, planting garlic on a chilly afternoon in rural Ontario. 

It’s about as mundane a task as any farmer does. But the larger objective, as she begins her second season as the owner of Lucky Bug Farm, is far less prosaic. “What I’m trying to model with Lucky Bug Farm, as a socially just, environmentally sustainable, and financially solvent farm that is run by a Black woman shouldn’t be so radical, revolutionary, or never seen before. But it is.”

She joins other farmers, agricultural groups, and justice advocates pushing to diversify food production in Canada – and enable underserved communities to have more control over the system. Amid scarcity brought by pandemic disruptions and soaring inflation, that work is helping to shift the conversation about food insecurity from one that hinges on charity to alleviate hunger to a longer-term goal of Black empowerment and food sovereignty. It’s part of a growing movement across North America. 

“The normal way of measuring food insecurity is to ask people about how often ... they must go hungry,” says Winston Husbands, a food justice activist at Afri-Can FoodBasket in Toronto. “Those are good indicators, and some of the instruments that people use to address food insecurity work in the short term. But they do not generate food sovereignty.” 

“To get where we want to go to address the inequities that we experience and that hold us back or keep us down,” he adds, “we need to be in a position to exercise some kind of stewardship of the food system for our own needs and in our own interests.”

Changing the narrative

In Toronto, Black families are 3.5 times more likely to face food insecurity than white families, according to city figures, with 36.6% of the city’s Black children living in food-insecure homes.   

Paul Taylor, executive director of FoodShare Toronto, a nonprofit leader in community food justice, says that to address the disparities, the narrative needs to be challenged and the structural racism at play understood. “Black folks aren’t inherently more vulnerable to food security,” he says. “Our response as a country has been to collect other people’s leftovers or corporate waste to redistribute without ever saying, ‘Why are these corporations that are producing waste not paying living wages?’”

FoodShare Toronto, which also helped launch Flemo Farm in 2021 to bring underrepresented community members into urban agriculture, led a petition in Toronto for a new food charter to address inequalities in the system – which the City Council adopted in April. The city also approved a five-year Toronto Black Food Sovereignty Plan in October to support Black-led food security initiatives, including more access to green space for urban farming, markets, and distribution.

Afri-Can FoodBasket, which helped push through the citywide initiative, has been advocating for food justice since the ’90s, says Dr. Husbands, an associate professor at University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. But scarcities in the wake of the pandemic, which disproportionately impacted Black and Indigenous communities, and a societal awakening after the murder of George Floyd have helped catalyze the issue.

Broadening the face of farming

Groups like the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario have shifted their own thinking about the role they play in the fight for equality. Last year they hired Angel Beyde as their equity and organizational change manager – an effort to put an anti-racism lens on all of their work and help lower the barriers for underrepresented farmers, including access to land and capital, education and mentorship, and representation, says Ms. Beyde. 

It’s not that the farmers association didn’t stand behind those values before, says Ali English, the group’s executive director. “But we used to think this social justice work was the work of other organizations,” she says. “And it’s become very clear to so many of us that doing equity and anti-racism work is something we all have to be doing actively, and that if we’re not, we’re very much complicit.”

Many of the obstacles for Black farmers trace back to historic government action and policy, and many Canadians remain unaware of their country’s history of slavery and racism, says Ms. Beyde. “There were once thriving Black communities that owned their own land and farms, and then a series of systematic, racist actions, many of which came down from the government, disenfranchised those folks and removed them from their land,” she says. 

Today, stigmas and perceptions remain throughout agriculture. Many simply hear the word farmer and picture a white man, says Ms. Fraser, who previously worked as an urban developer but became disillusioned by the lack of social and environmental justice in that work. She also says Black farmers face stigmas in their own communities, which she says span back hundreds of years to traumas of slavery. “When I told my family, ‘I want to be a farmer,’ they were like, ‘You had a good office job. Why would you want to give that up to do hard field work?’”

But she had come across a program called Growing in the Margins, a nonprofit that mentors Black and Indigenous youths to become farmers in the Toronto area. It gave her the confidence to set out on her first season – growing curly kale, cherry tomatoes, and collard greens. For her second season, she is renting a quarter-acre farm in Baden, Ontario, and sells her produce at a weekly farmers market in Kitchener. It’s a steep learning curve, but she feels she is playing a small part in changing the paradigm. 

“I think local agriculture is important, I think urban agriculture is important, I think sustainable ecological agriculture is important, but something that I find often gets missed is making sure that the food system represents the people who live in this province,” she says, “and understanding it’s not working for everyone, and it marginalizes a large number of people.”