Partner Spotlight: FrontLine Farming
FrontLine Farming (FLF) enhances equity and resilience in Colorado’s urban Front Range by elevating the leadership of womxn and people of color. FLF does so by growing food, educating, honoring land and ancestors, engaging in research and data activism, policy initiatives and direct action.
For example, FLF:
Produces over 15,000 pounds of food/year while training farmers on 3 agroecological urban farms totaling under 2 acres;
Stewards 120 different crop varieties including organic, heirloom, and climate-adjusted seeds, with a focus on cultivating crops treasured by our Black & Brown diasporic and indigenous communities;
Offers a Community Share Agriculture program (plus mushroom and meat add-ons from other BIPOC-led farms) – with 50% SNAP and 100% WIC discounts – to serve 196 families; and
Runs Healing Foods, No Cost Grocery, and Farmworker Hunger Relief programs that distributed 223,000 lbs of food and essentials, signed up over 300 families a year for SNAP services, and saved over 8500 pounds of food to redistribute in our communities.
FLF also offers practical workshops about farming, seed saving, composting, mycology, apiculture, natural dying in accessible, stage-appropriate ways to community members of all ages – toddlers-through-elders. They restore knowledge of medicinal herbs and plants that support preventative approaches to taking control of one’s own health through workshops on topics such as growing your own herbs, the endocrine system, digestive system herbs, and medicines of Black captives. Additionally, FrontLine provides food justice lessons about systemic apartheid-like conditions within food systems. Finally, language justice is prioritized at FLF, which provides interpretation for each public class and public meeting in Spanish, English, and other languages as needed.
As part of FLF’s participation in EcoGather, they lead the development of a powerful course: Geographies of Exclusion and Resistance, which was designed to help learners unpack the narratives that justified the violent appropriations of land, air, and water; identify and trace the impact of economic theories which underpin and dialectically inform the social and material organization of communities; and develop their own confidence in or instincts for centering cultural and place-based knowledge, wisdom, and responses. Across its lessons, this course surveys the impact of colonialism/coloniality, capitalism, and racism as catalysts for exclusion and exploitation. It dives into case studies from the Americas, the United States, South Asia, and the African continent. It then presents Frontline Farming as a case study in modern resistance to historic and ongoing exclusion.
FrontLine Farming’s data activism and advocacy work centers the needs, dreams, and narratives of Black, Brown and Indigenous land-workers across the United States. Through and beyond their work with EcoGather, FrontLine raises awareness of and resists the systematic exclusion of BIPOC farmers from access to land, which has been accomplished through a combination of outright theft, violence, intimidation, discrimination, and heirs property laws. As a result, while BIPOC communities represent a quarter of the US population, they own less than 5% of farmland and cultivate on less than 1% of the land. At the same time, those who have historically cultivated the land and comprise the over 2.4 million farmworkers in the United States are people of color from diverse communities and foodways. They are descendants of Africans brought here, immigrants, refugees and people who have continuously brought their agricultural knowledge and skills to feed nations.
Having always farmed on land that belongs to someone else, FrontLine Farming is now actively seeking liberation by land. Founding Executive Director, Fatuma Emmad, observes that “Rented land comes with the understanding that we are not in control of our own future and that at any given time our livelihoods can be compromised.” She emphasizes that FrontLine’s efforts toward land ownership are not based on a desire to privatize or dominate. Rather, as a women and BIPOC-led organization without secure land tenure, FrontLine Farming pragmatically recognizes that its entire land-based enterprise rests on the willingness of others to allow our work to continue. “Real liberation for our community requires a place where we can honor our ancestors and uphold our culturally relevant foodways, feed our own futures, create localized economies that hold and share value in creative ways and eventually build generational wealth,” says Emmad. For that reason, FrontLine is searching and raising funds for approximately 30 acres of land with healthy soil and water rights within 20 miles of Denver, Colorado. Supporting FrontLine in this effort is reparational, aspirational, and transformational.
