Editor’s note: This profile is from a story focusing on the legacy and future of Black farmers in the U.S., part of The Packer’s ongoing series about urban farming.
Pastor Bennie Brown, a Mississippi farmer, pastor and economic development director for Rootswell and But God Ministries, is leading an effort to establish a farm incubator on over 600 acres at Swan Lake Association Farms, aimed at training the next generation of farmers in the Mississippi Delta.
While the Delta is home to adverse economic and health conditions, the region has strong agricultural traditions and a rich and powerful cultural history, and it is primed for a local food system that supports health, nutrition security and cultural connectivity, Brown says.
“I was born on a farm, on a plantation. Later, my father began to lease land, and the family moved to another farm and we began to farm 50 acres of land,” he said. The land is part of the Swan Lake Association, where Black farmers could rent land instead of working as sharecroppers.
It helped having a large family, Brown says, and they were able to eventually purchase a tractor and other farming equipment.
“It took my father sharecropping for 57 years before he got into a position to rent the land,” he said. “Then in 1962, we moved to Swan Lake.”
Brown says there were probably 25 families living in similar situations at that time; they were first-generation farmers who began to build wealth because they could now grow their farms versus being sharecroppers.
The Swan Lake Association formed in 1870 through a partnership with Black-led churches in the Jonestown, Miss., area, eventually accumulating over 600 acres during the second great migration of the 1940s and 1950s.
Brown’s experience with Swan Lake led him to develop a farm incubator on the land to ensure future generations of Black farmers can learn and earn a living as his father did.
The program was critical to his family’s success, Brown says, providing everything they needed — a home, equipment, seeds — until they could afford their own equipment to run the farm.
“We made enough money that first year to reinvest back into the farming business,” he said. “We kept an area for growing our personal produce and an area for our own meat and hogs.”
It was a way for farmers to lease the land and have the tools to get started.
Now, as a farm incubator, Brown says he wants to bring back the same concept. The area has lost the generations of farmers who were coming off the plantations, he says, and as the years passed, children who were not interested in farming left home.
“So, because interest waned in farming, and the ones who had grown up with farming lost interest as time passed, the land was now being leased out to white farmers,” Brown said. “Our goal is to bring back part of it under the auspices of the Blacker farmer, and that means retraining a generation of farmers. To train them, we need something like an incubator, which will be 10 acres.”
The idea is to have 10 1-acre plots where farmers can farm one or two specialty crops.
“The goal is to retain and build a new generation of farmers, addressing the challenges of a food desert and reconnecting the community with the farming legacy,” Brown said.
The program will help these farmers get started. They’ll learn about their product, learn about irrigation practices, learn about pest control and take classes on food safety, he says.
“We can make sure that they have a market for their product larger than a farmer ‘s market,” Brown said. “They can scale up in a couple of years. They can be able to make a living.
“We’re living in a food desert here, but it doesn’t have to be,” he added. “The challenge we have is to train a new generation of farmers.”
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