Written in December 2021
When I enter Deep Roots Farm I’m greeted by the cosmos.
Star, Moon, and Jupiter bound down a long gravel driveway, the hot afternoon sun bouncing off their white coats. From a distance, the three Great Pyrenees dogs seem imposing but as they approach, it’s clear that they’re just puppies at play. I later learn that they’re all under three years old, still in training to become livestock guardians. For now, they’re getting the lay of the land, learning all 53 acres alongside their owner Ann “Farmer Gale” Sutton.
Sutton, emerges shortly after her welcome committee, rumbling over the road in a Kubota gator cart. She waves me over to follow her toward a large green barn and after a warm, short introduction grabs a box of freshly picked bell peppers and gets back to work. She moves in and out of the barn, sorting, cleaning, packing, explaining her setup as she goes. Pointing through a window she tells me, “This is my home right now. The RV. When I bought this property there was nothing. No electricity, no well, no water, no nothing.” Carrying the newly packed peppers, she crosses the room to flick on the light in the refrigeration room — at once a small act and glowing testament to the work she’s put in over the past year and a half.
Last April, Sutton purchased the former tobacco farm in Upper Marlboro, MD at a steal. Under the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Rural Legacy Program, parcels of land over fifty acres are eligible for a type of conservation compensation known as an easement agreement — a one-time payment for an owner’s development rights to preserve the state’s natural landscape. Factoring in the money they’d already made from the easement, the previous owners listed the tract at half the market value. But even at the reduced rate, decades of neglect had left the land in shoddy condition, scaring off potential buyers. “It was sitting out here for years on the market and no one wanted it. No one had the foresight or the vision. I had farmer friends that looked at it too. They were like, ‘yeah, that was too much work, we had to pass’….but I saw the potential.”
Done in the barn for now, Sutton throws a hat on over her tightly braided cornrows and revs up the cart to take me on a guided tour of her homestead. The structure we’re departing was completed in February by a team of Amish contractors after Sutton with a small squad of friends and part-time staff cleared the land by chopping trees and removing brush. We ride towards a towering wooden barn, run-down and covered in ivy but still standing tall. One of today’s volunteers is an architecture professor at the University of Maryland who’s creating a rendering to redevelop the barn into an educational center and event space complete with a commercial kitchen. Further down the road, we make a stop at the propagation house where new life begins on the farm. Perennial plants, lemongrass, rosemary, mint, ginger, and turmeric are all currently in residence. Each portion of the land seems to hold three vistas in one — past, present, and future.
Winding back towards the front, Sutton gestures towards an empty expanse near the entrance where she plans to build a house. The project has just recently been approved after a lengthy permitting process. What was initially conceived as a one-level Deltec eco-home has now become two stories, primarily to accommodate her aging mother, Mama Dee, who Sutton anticipates moving in with her in the coming years.
Sutton and Dee are close, sharing the special bond often found between immigrant mothers and daughters — a relationship forged by a uniquely symbiotic nurturing with the child guiding their parent through cultural assimilation and the parent grounding their child in the truths and traditions of the homeland. Originally from Guyana, they moved to the US along with Sutton’s grandmother in the early 1980s first landing in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, an area known as “Little Caribbean.” Among the lesser-known countries in the region, Guyana is a small nation on the northern coast of South America that boasts one of the highest levels of biodiversity in the world. But the environmental richness isn’t mirrored in the economy with an estimated 35% of the population living in poverty.
Since Sutton arrived at age seven, she’d followed the track of immigrant girl made good. After a few years in the city, the trio left the urban Northeast for the suburban Mid-Atlantic spending her teenage years in Prince George’s County at Largo High School. She went on to earn a finance degree at a local university and secured an accounting position with the federal government. When she gave birth to her daughter, Jazz, in 1994, she was able to move to the wealthier Montgomery County for their better public schools. By the time Jazz reached high school, Sutton had checked all the boxes that Mama Dee had hoped for her when she leaped to the US. But the higher she climbed, the further away from herself she felt.
Our tour pauses and the cart idles as she tells me about her breaking point in 2008, “I just wasn’t happy doing it anymore, to be honest. It had gotten really bad to the point that I was struggling with seasonal depression. I just hated my job so bad.” She’d found herself living out a model of success that she’d ascribed to but had no hand in designing.
Like many first-generation farmers, Sutton began shading her green thumb in backyard pots, then graduated to a community garden plot, then two. Working in the soil slowly lifted the weight of her depression. “I felt at such peace and such happiness being out there growing my little vegetables. I just loved being outside. I realized that being outside I felt so much better. It felt therapeutic! I could truly see how doing this work can be a therapy for some people because I was there.”
Ready to leave accounting for good, she began volunteering at Summer Creek Farms in Frederick, MD under organic farmer Rick Hood and shortly after was given the opportunity to start her own farm in West Virginia. The land was free; owned by a friend who offered Sutton the farming acreage in exchange for help restoring the property. She accepted, moving her and Jazz out of Maryland and onto the farm full time. Her eight years building Rainbow Hill farms were a textbook case of luck created at the intersection of preparation and opportunity — having five free acres to produce as a first-generation novice is exceedingly rare.
As reported by the Union of Concerned Scientists in an April publication, land consolidation is at an all-time high. Arable land is shrinking due to a century of poor land management brought on by mass industrialization, yet still large farm harvested croplands doubled between 1978 and 2017. Small and mid-sized farms are suffering under the cash crop model that prioritizes “Big Agriculture” through a slew of federal subsidies, credits, and tax breaks for operations that focus on major agricultural exports. Unable to compete, they’re traditionally forced to sell to larger operations, commercial developers, or wealthy private owners.
In June, Bill Gates became the largest private farmland owner in the US securing a total of 242,000 acres. Gates’ mammoth holding is representative of a decade-long trend towards land investment spurred in part by a demand for recession-proof assets after 2008. The financial benefits compounded by the instagrammable allure of the faux homestead (think Kim Kardashian’s Wyoming ranch) have locked land away from those looking to feed our communities.
Former Rainbow Hill volunteer and current educational program manager at neighboring Eco City Farms, Kwesi Asante is frustrated by the grim reality for his beginning farming trainees. “If you go to Anne Arundel County people have what I call “play farms.” One hundred acres with a mansion sitting on a very nice, big, manicured lawn with horses that nobody rides running around. How do you get new farmers coming in when you can’t even find a plot of land?”
Sutton was handed a ‘play farm” and brought it to life. Those five acres in West Virginia were a gift that she tended with care and pride, but the operation was less than perfect. She’s always sold her produce in Washington, DC since beginning at her small community plot. Committed to her clientele, she made the 10-hour commute to the district every week. She tells me after almost a decade it began to take its toll, “It was not fun. It was exhausting all the time being on the road like that, but it was worth it for the learning, training, and gaining experience. But I didn’t have a community out there. I just had the person I was living with and my daughter.”
Our Deep Roots tour resumes and as we silently whip past rows of sprouting winter greens, I get a wave of the peace of nature that drew her to the soil. Much of farming is solitary work, requiring long, quiet days on the land and that’s part of the allure. But solitude differs from isolation and with just 3.69% of the West Virginian population identifying as black, Sutton was a fractional minority in the state and even smaller minority in her field. Black farmers are just 1.3% of the industry despite having once been the nation’s leading agriculturalists.
Our culture makes a tacit acknowledgment to the existence of Black farmers — primarily in the pages of textbooks, depicted surrounded by cotton and surveilled by overseers. But the concealed reality is that those farmers also grew everything else. Their skill was undeniable, yielding enough food to export globally, feed the white planter class, and feed their own communities with the remainder.
After emancipation, Black farmers largely fade from our historical purview. For the indoctrinated, the story ends with 40 acres and a mule. The rest of us know that the mule died, and the acres came up short, and these agricultural experts were forced into debt peonage through sharecropping. But despite the economic violence, by 1920 Black farmers had managed to accrue 15 million acres of farmland and made up 14% of the industry. Over the last century, those numbers have plummeted to less than a million acres and just 1.3% respectively according to the 2017 USDA census.
This steep decline is in step with all small and midsized farms but is also uniquely exacerbated by racially discriminatory lending practices and outright land theft through legislation like “heirs property” restrictions and the mob violence of lynching. Largely framed as exclusively a hate crime, many lynchings were also a bloody path to property seizures for poor white men seeking land.
As an immigrant, Sutton is not a direct descendent of this legacy. But her ancestors weathered a similar struggle under British rule in Guyana and having spent the majority of her life in the States, she feels a very real kinship to the history. The African diaspora in the Americas, though varied and culturally distinct, all carry the weight of postcolonialism. With that solidarity in mind, Sutton decided to move back to PG County in 2019. “Prince George’s County being a predominantly Black county, I was a bit nostalgic about that. I want to be around my people….if I’m going to pay people to do stuff, I’m only hiring Black people.”
Leaning on decades of financial expertise, Sutton calculated a budget for Deep Roots Farm and applied for a federal Farm Service Agency loan that would cover the land purchase, startup costs, and then some. She received $800,000 in funding with favorable loan terms due in large part to the enduring influence of Timothy v. Glickman, a 1997 landmark class-action suit that blew the doors open on years of discriminatory lending practices at the USDA. 16,000 Black litigants led by farmer Timothy Glickman won their case against then-acting Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman and their near $1 billion payout remains the highest civil rights settlement to date. The fallout from the case was seismic, placing a magnifying glass on the unjust system. In an attempt at rectification, the USDA has since offered black farmers the same high-approval low-interest rates that have allowed large-cap white operations to swell.
On the backend of Deep Roots, Sutton parks the cart in front of a $20,000 120ft-long high tunnel greenhouse. The rumble of the engine falls silent and faint chicken squawks from a flock in the distance punctuate the quiet. Inside the greenhouse are today’s volunteers, sisters Portia and Patrice Strahan, cutting down the last of the tomato harvest. Surrounded by gently withering stalks, I learn that Portia is the UMD architect designing the barn renovation and Patrice is a former NorCal community farm manager. After years of working with food justice non-profits, Patrice had become disillusioned with the system.
“The Bay area has so many great projects focused on urban ag but none of them offer jobs where you can make a good income. It’s always a program for kids, or an operation constantly focused on securing grant money. None of them are programs where people can farm, get paid for farming, and run their farms cooperatively.”
For her, Deep Roots represents a viable future for black farmers: an independent business sustained through a mixture of fair government funding, targeted direct-to-market sales, and agritourism programming.
The farm was primed to have a strong first year, but COVID-19 threatened to derail Sutton’s operation in its infancy. Critical supply chains disruptions and labor shortages caused mass delays and skyrocketing costs of essential tools and materials. Her carefully devised pre-pandemic budget was now projected to cost up to three times more. Small and midsized farms nationwide were feeling the pressure and after a year of cries from across the industry, the government stepped in. The American Rescue Stimulus Plan passed in March included a $4 billion loan forgiveness payment program for socially disadvantaged farmers, defined as any farmer who identifies as Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, Asian, or Pacific Islander.
Sutton was eligible for the program and under its terms was slated to be forgiven for the full $800,000 FSA debt, plus a cash payout to cover any tax liability incurred from the loan. When officially absolved from loan payments, she planned to break ground on her home, cover newly heightened operating costs and pay her two part-time employees a higher hourly wage. Sutton applied and the approval process was scheduled to begin in early July, but forgiveness never came.
The program was halted in June by dozens of lawsuits alleging that the program is unconstitutional on the basis of racial discrimination. White farmers, though eligible for approximately 50% of the full 10.4 billion farming allocation, argued that they were being unfairly excluded. The lead case, Miller v. Vilsack, filed by Steven Miller a white Texan farmer makes a secondary claim that “socially disadvantaged groups” should “include white ethnic groups that have unquestionably suffered ethnic prejudice.” While the sentiment is valid, their argument is shaky at best based on the findings of Pigford v. Glickman.
Pigford proves that minority farmers of color are particularly vulnerable to industry dips due to decades of systemic federal dispossession and as such are owed special remediations today. Loan forgiveness is simply a form of reparations, the newest model to rise to prominence since affirmative action. Affirmative action, much like any sweeping shifts towards racial justice in America, was met with great pushback and is still debated today. Considering that long history of opposition, especially in white rural regions, Sutton is frustrated with the USDA’s efforts.
“You weren’t really trying to help me. If you were, you’d say we’re allocating the funds immediately. Any loans you had in place as of January 1 you no longer have to make any payments and regardless of any other situations that may come up, you are no longer liable for that amount. As of now, you just keep paying until someday it’s resolved. Where is the true relief?”
In October, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives filed a motion to intervene in the suit in the name of six black farmers alleging recent USDA discrimination and dire financial need. Currently, Miller v. Vilsack is still pending in the United States Southern District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Several other are ongoing nationwide and the American Rescue funds are tied up until they’re all resolved. A potentially quicker path to relief involves President Biden’s term-defining Build Back Better plan. The latest version of the infrastructure bill includes funding for a similar debt forgiveness program with a modified eligibility group defined as “economically distressed borrowers and underserved farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners in high-poverty areas.” The removal of racialized language narrows the scope for legal contests while still providing funding to many minority farmers, though white farmers are eligible to apply as well — ultimately decreasing the amount of money available for people of color.
The greenhouse is now halfway cleared. Sutton, Portia, and Patrice made quick work of the tomatoes, cutting and chatting with such an ease that I barely noticed how much space they’d covered until the sisters wrap for the day. Ending the conversation on failed new farms, Sutton gets to the root. “People have these misconceptions of what this work is. They don’t really understand how difficult it is. Not only taxing physically, but it takes a great deal of endurance to really do this work. And you can have the passion, but it’s only once you start doing it, that’s when you come to know if it’s for you.” The four of us climb into the cart back and ride back up to the front entrance. We say our thank yous and goodbyes and three of us hop in our cars heading back to our lives on the grid.
The Senate is set to vote on the Build Back Better bill by December 25th, but Sutton isn’t holding her breath for a Christmas miracle. Instead, she’ll be on the farm with her three dogs, two hundred chickens, fifty-three acres, and one RV plugging away, doing everything she can to keep on for another year.
