Farm From the Future: A Trip to the Black Belt

FARM FROM THE FUTURE:

A Trip to the Black Belt

CO-CREATORS SEMIAN ODOM JOY L. RANKIN CECLEY HILL THANDI NYAMBOSE POLLY SINCLAIR

TABLE OF CONTENTS 01

2030: Grandma’s childhood

02

2038: Grandma goes to college

03

2090: Exploring the food and fiber hub

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This imaginative future-facing narrative was created for and with the Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates (DDSAE), led by the notable design activist, artist, and community developer Euneika Rogers-Sipp. Thanks to Euneika, the DDSAE youth elders, namely Joy L. Rankin and Semian Odom, Lily Song and the Co-Design teaching team, as well as our many other partners.

Without these shared experiences this would not have been possible.

CHAPTER 1

ke y te rm s BLACK BELT

The crescent of rich, dark soil stretching from the Atlantic seaboard through Georgia and Alabama up to northeast Mississippi.

Food Desert An area with limited access to affordable and healthy food. options.

Learn More Here

Supply Chain

BIG

Agriculture

A term that refers to large coorporations who control a majority of decisionmaking power and profit in the food & fiber sector.

In a dusty attic with hoards of books, fabric, and miscellaneous relics. 10 year old Jo, a NY native, is staying with grandma for the ummer and stumbles on a scrapbook of their granny’s highlights and accomplishments.

Jo: Grandma, what’s this old book?

Granny: Oh! Geeze, I haven’t seen this thing in years.

Come here and sit down with me for a bit and I’ll tell you about how this old thing came to be.

Believe it or not, nearly 70 years ago back in 2030, when I was just about your age, we got all our food from the corner store…

Jo: Everything?!

Granny: Just about! Growing up in La Grange, Georgia, we got everything we needed from Pop’s shop down the road since we would have to walk five long, hot miles across a highway to get to the nearest supermarket!

Plus if we did make the trek, there was no guarantee you could even get a fresh tomato, let alone a bag of lettuce that wasn’t already half wilted. Most of the restaurants were only selling fast food, and local farms were selling to big agriculture companies like Tyson and Nestle, and most of all, Bayer-Monsanto.

CHAPTER 2

Key Terms

HBCU

Historically Black Colleges and Universities located across North America.

Reparations Direct Sales Genealogy Land Trace Center

Compensation or payment for harm and damages caused by the state.

Selling products directly to customers without a middleman.

An imagined national resource that allows African Americans and other people of color to trace your roots back to previous lands their families occupied or owned.

Flashback to 2038 when Grandma goes to college, meets her fashion roommate, and dedicates her life to grassroots community organizing.

Granny: It all started to change when I went off to Tuskegee University.

When I got there, the government was offering a $3,500 stipend to any HBCU student who interned with a family-owned farm, so I figured - why not? That’s where I learned about soil and growing methods! Us interns even got to travel around Alabama with our electric agriculatural wagon, a mobile farming school modelled after a man named George Washington Carver!

We got to go all over the Black Belt too!

Jo: Wait, uh...what’s a black belt? You did Karate too??

Granny: Oh baby no! The Black Belt is the homeplace of your ancestors and the soil from which everything you’re made of grows!

TUSKEGEE U “AG-WAG”

Jo: Nah that’s mad cool Grandma, I didn’t realize that at all! I knew we were from here since our school sistered with the Genealogy Land Trace Center last year and got to find our old ancestral lands, but I guess I didn’t know what that really meant in terms of the environmental stuff.

Ok ok, so back in college, is that where you met Auntie T?

Granny: Oh, yes, Trixie was studying both business and agriculture so that she could pursue her first love of fashion. I mean she knew alllllll about making clothes, from growing the cotton to sewing! What made her ideas so special though was that she really wanted to reduce fast fashion, which back then was the primary production method for clothing. Big companies used to buy materials from farms like us in the south, then send that to manufacturers who would exploit workers and the environment in order to make cheap clothes quickly.

Trixie’s idea was to instead engage local farmers and creators to tackle the textile manufacturing processes themselves with the right tools and support.

Jo: Well, what did that support look like?

No more Big

We demand fair acce

NO Granny: Well, way back in 2021 the government passed the American Rescue Plan which dedicated $5 Billion dollars for farmers. This with the Justice for Black Farmers, passed due in large part to another prolific farmer, John Boyd, along with the #BoycottBayer movement became huge. People started to realize that protest movements needed to think about the land too.

And more young people started to realize how many economic opportunities are available through farming.. from crop production to digital marketing, distribution, and small business creation.

g Agriculture!

ess for food and fiber

OW! With all this momentum, together, Trixie and I developed a local farm registry for black and brown farms, sponsored workshops and got local institutional anchors to help all the local farms we could find become better positioned to engage in direct sales if they wanted to. That was just the first step though…We then had to think about how to shift the wholllle industry supply chain.

Also mention that there were food hubs and there were fiber hubs, but no one was really tackling both, and certainly not at a regional scale!

Jo: Uhhh.. *confused blank stare* Granny: Ok, remember when I mentioned those companies like Nestle, Tyson, Cargill and Bayer? Well, those are the people who controlled most of the money, decisions, and power in the agriculture world.

So, in order for me, Auntie T and our friends to get our supply chain going, we had to think about how to disrupt theirs!

“Big Ag” Supply Chain

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

A class action di scrimination suit between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (U SDA) and black farmers, illus trating that the ag ency had discriminated again st black farmers on th e basis of race and failed to investigate or prop er ly respond to complaints from 1983 to 1997.

Pigford V. Glickman 1997

Chile, 2018

All of our grassroots efforts around challenging ‘big agriculture’ corporations paid off as local, state, and federal politicians came to advocate for policy changes like the 2040 Remote Operator Tax Act, that ultimately put lots of farmland back in the hands of families whose ancestors were dispossessed.

Through sistering with other place-based organizers and growers throughout the Black Belt, we also saw an increasing number of small farmers elected to public office, where they made sure that government funding supported food security and strong regional networks of producers and consumers.

CHAPTER 3

ke y te rm s

USDA USCA

Established in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, this is a federal department that oversees the forestry and farming industry, and administers many social services related to food provision.

Our future food & fiber sector centers minority, queer and women led leadership. So, we’ve replaced the USDA with the US Coalition of Agriculture.

This is an elected body of multi-generational residents from across the US who advocate for sector issues on regional scales.

A NOTE FROM THE NARRATOR: In this reparative planning framework, the majority of food and fiber is produced locally. The USDA has been dissolved as of 2050, and replaced by the US Coalition of Agriculture. The Green New Deal guaranteed a living wage for farm families based on the median non-farm family income in surrounding geographic areas. Subsidies were shifted to compensate farmers for locally-oriented, climate-beneficial practices. HBCUs operated as a platform to train young farmers to join the federation of farm and cottage producers. The 2040 Remote Operator Tax Act returned farmland to their ancestral owners. Indigenous groups and Black and brown farmers throughout the Black Belt took advantage of these policy shifts to honor ancestral knowledge of land and crops, and create a shared seed vault.

Granny: After college, we got the idea to transform these empty old mall buildings around Georgia (malls were where people used to buy clothing and products made from all around the world) into food and fiber hubs. We took off half of the roof and turned the rest into solar panels.

The malls were just sitting around empty! They were so big that there was enough space for all different modules: bee hives, a food forest, labs, and even an aquaponics pond.

Granny: come outside, I’ll give you a tour of the space. We’ve been on this land since 2050. Now I’m on the multigenerational leadership board of the federation of farm and cottage producers.

And you could be too, someday…

ES

BE

IV EH

When the USCA took over, they kept federal control of things like climate regulation, but local officials started having a lot more power, esecially when the government acknowledged farming as being economic development. One of the first things our local USCA reps did around here was to advocate for new zoning laws so smaller families and communities would get tax breaks and bonuses for their own home or backyard scale food and fiber operations. Just like George Washington Carver did with the mobile farm school, the hubs became places where people could learn about the systems and then replicate them in their neighborhoods, yards, or even windowsills.

Granny: All the plants are watered with gravity systems, drip irrigation, and other methods that reduce waste, save energy, and use just as much of precious water is needed to thrive.

You can even scan your apple watch on the digital billboard to see what crops are available today!

CABBAGE

Created by Laymik from the Noun Project

GRANNY’S FOOD & FIBER HUB PLAN Path network from neighborhoods to food and fiber hub Food Forest

Backyard gardens for most family food needs

This plan is drawn over an existing mall outside of Atlanta, GA.

Co m m un ity to ol sh ed

Crop rotations

Outdoor Classroom

Solar powered affordable

F ib e r Workshop & ab In n o v a t io n L

f F e d e r a t io n o Cottage In d u s t r ie s K it c h e n L a b Rainwater catchment

Aquaponics fish pond and water distribution

Mus hro om cult ivat ion

Bee hive s

Orc har d

This strawberry patch, and the other food and fiber crops all have underground accountability sensors as part of the hub’s technology system. These sensors were actually developed here in our innovation lab. They moniter harmful pollutants, where they come from, and send us daily updates.

Back in the days when big companies polluted the air and groundwater without accountability, these sensor became crucial in coordinating with local, state, and fedral officals to change policies around farming practices.

All of the plants here at the hub are protected from harm with this fiber mesh, invented in a youth competition in 2060. Its a combination of woven hemp fibers and strong biodegradable synthetic fibers developed by students at Tuskegee University. The USCA now has biannual competitions for new technologies, and these have brought lots of funding to smaller Black Belt groups with big ideas and no funding for starting food or fiber projects.

Destination Design

pollution-repelling

May 4, 2060

ral Estates

School of Agricultu

er

protective mesh fib

USCA

Fiber Mesh