Agricultural Education A Love Story
i
love food i’m sure it’s noticeable right
me and food have a deep relationship
deep like the fibrous root hairs
extracting nutrients from the soil
embedding in them to the plant to give
me nourishment kind of deep
i like to plant it prepare it
eat it and talk about it
heck even my degree is in talking
about food but one thing that breaks my
heart
is the disconnect that the black
community
has with the very industry that sustains
us
agriculture
my love of food goes all the way back
to my paternal great grandfather
miles moser milos was the product
of his slave mother and his white owner
father
born in slavery after emancipation my
great-grandfather was given land by his
white siblings
he then took that land and bestowed it
upon his own children so that they could
grow
their own families one of which was my
papa harold
my papa herrera was able to use that
land and leverage it
to get even more land to be able to grow
his own family
unfortunately my papa herald passed away
in 1986
but my grandma eliza stewarded his land
for many years
i remember going to her house in
taylorsville north carolina
and walking in the door and smelling
flowers cut from her own garden
the sweet smell of tobacco because she
packs enough
and always something delicious
in the oven like a
blackberry cobbler or better yet
persimmon bread
made with persimmons that she foraged
and picked
with her own hands
behind her house was a smokehouse and
then my personal favorite
the greenhouse i was
always so in awe of my grandma eliza
and this woman who had a room devoted to
fancy hats and gloves
was also the same woman who would put on
jeans
a t-shirt throw a scarf on her head and
was on her knees
working in the ground
i think that was when i fell in love
around the time i was about 10 years old
she developed alzheimer’s
and that was also about the time that my
parents decided to dig a garden
in our backyard on the south side of
columbus
i remember coming home from school going
in the backyard picking a zucchini
slicing it
sauteing it and making it for my after
school snack
the power to be able to grow and prepare
my own food at that age
made me feel like i had super powers
a few years later on a trip to ghana
west africa with my auntie malika
i remember that we visited a cocoa farm
and there was the cocoa beans being
processed
to turn them into chocolate and
something that struck me so hard
was the fact that the people who are
working
in that garden and on that farm were
unable to afford
the end product a simple chocolate bar
the relationship was broken
and that’s when my auntie malik reminded
me
he who feeds you controls you
so that’s when i made the decision to
pursue my degree
in agricultural communications and
economic and social development
i told you i had a degree in talking
about food
and i was so excited after graduation
to be able to land a job at a local
settlement house
and their award-winning garden working
for their summer
teen employment program i was so excited
to share with those kids my love
of food and what i noticed
was that the kids as they came into that
garden they thought of it
as slave work
i was appalled that someone would think
that something that i loved so
much was slave work
so i vowed to be able to teach those
kids
to fall in love with food the same way
that i did
so the following year i worked with the
teacher and we developed a curriculum
i wanted to show these kids how their
world connected with food everything
from
food to fiber to fuel within agriculture
and teaching these kids that this wasn’t
slave work that this was the work that
made our ancestors resilient
this work was done centuries
proceeding in our enslavement this was
the work of growing
okra and sorghum and rice and yes
even cotton and with this knowledge
those kids came back year
over year
and i was on to something and i realized
we need to switch the narrative and if
we can teach these kids
that he who feeds us controls us we need
to switch that narrative
into thinking and reminding ourselves of
our rightful place as the masters
of this work
the agricultural industry is a more than
one trillion dollar industry in the
united states
of that there are about 2.2
million farms of those 2.2 million farms
only 5 are minority owned of that
2 percent are black owned now we know
that that black ownership has a lot to
do with land ownership but that’s a
different ted talk for a different day
but when i realized this i thought of a
saying
from a friend of mine named javier
sanchez he says
i don’t want a piece of the pie i want
the recipe
and the recipe is agricultural
education where do kids
spend most of their waking hours but in
school
heck the school year was predicated on
the agricultural calendar
so we’re best to sow the seed to be able
to connect our youth
to food to fiber and to fuel
and understanding their food system than
in
the science curriculum and then
utilizing those school grounds to be
able to have learning gardens
where best can we connect black and
brown students
to become and to know about the george
washington carvers
who developed amazing sustainable
agriculture systems
as well as developing more than 200
products with peanuts
or teaching them how to be profitable
like booker t
watley who is the father of the oh so
love
community supported agriculture program
my kids loved the work that they did
the ownership of the land and the
knowledge that they
learned and instilled in their peers and
younger students
was invaluable
some of them even fell in love too
going on to pursue careers in food
service
and in landscaping
but without a mere introduction
into the education and understanding
how their world connects and grows
they won’t have that ability to fall in
love
and so i ask that we petition our school
districts especially our urban school
districts
to be able to connect those students
through the science classroom
and if you’re like me and you’re
teaching at home
start saving food scraps and using them
to grow your own soil with composting
or if you’re an educator being able to
show
your students the power of growing their
own
only takes one
single seed i told you
i i love food
i love how it brings people together
and when i think about having faith the
size of a mustard seed
i feel that because i have that same
faith that when you grow and instill a
seed
of agricultural education into our black
and brown students
connecting them so that they know where
their food comes from
how it’s grown how to sell it for a
profit
that those students will take that
knowledge
to be able to grow thriving food systems
to sustain our communities
and for our future because
we all got to eat right