To kick off Black History Month, we look towards the Black farmers making history in North Carolina.
Every day for the past three years, Clarenda “Cee” Stanley has driven 52 minutes through the North Carolina countryside—past homes that still fly Confederate flags and hang flaccid “Trump for President” banners on the hulking barns of their farms—to the 14.84 acres she calls her own.
Green Heffa Farms, as it’s known, is not just a farm. In Stanley’s words, it’s a tea company, a natural health brand, and a place for education. But what Stanley doesn’t tell me—at least not outright—is that Green Heffa Farms is, perhaps most of all, an homage to the two people who taught her the inherent healing power that comes from growing a little goodness wherever one can.
A native of Wilcox County—888.5 square miles in Alabama’s Black Belt—Stanley was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents, both growers themselves. Even now, she fondly remembers the herbal antidotes her grandmother (“a real Southern belle,” as Stanley affectionately remarks) carefully concocted in their kitchen and administered with a certain tenderness whenever a young Stanley was plagued by an ailment. As she grew up, becoming a mother herself at the age of 15, Stanley maintained a reverence for the medicinal value of plants yet never quite fancied herself a farmer. Instead, she got married, raised three children, became a grandmother of four (with another on the way), and maintained a successful fundraising and marketing career at The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental organization. But a few years ago, she found herself entering the agricultural industry after her then-partner had an idea.
“He told me he wanted to grow cannabis,” Stanley recalls plainly. “To me, that translated to buying some land and starting a farm, right? So I went out there looking.”
What she found, however, was far more than a solution or a matter of circumstance. It was, Stanley now believes, nothing less than fate. One day in January 2018, while driving to a parcel of land she’d found online, Stanley’s GPS seemed to break, leaving her amid the bucolic backdrop that would soon become her new home. She was in unfamiliar territory, panicked and prepared to simply turn around, when the GPS abruptly returned to working order and announced that the address she’d entered was actually closer than she’d thought. Just a turn and 200 feet away, in a town aptly called Liberty, Stanley would learn just how deep the roots of her harvesting heritage stretched.
“I turned and saw this field full of the most brilliant purple flowers,” she says. “Now, purple is not a color to me. It’s a vibe, it’s an energy. I feel the color purple. My favorite movie is The Color Purple. At home, I’m surrounded by purple things. I knew then it was a sign.”
But as Stanley began to work on developing a business plan and a brand to fit their no-longer-hypothetical hemp farm, the universe dealt a very different kind of hand—one that would culminate in a divorce and leave her with more liberty than she’d bargained for: nearly 15 acres of land rife with possibilities.
“I thought, ‘What am I supposed to do with this? I have a full-time career as an environmental fundraiser,’ ” Stanley says. “At the most, I thought I’d handle the business side of things, but I didn’t have time to actually be in the fields.”
There was research and then reflection. As a descendant of longtime growers, and a witness to the enduring, evolving pains the Black farmers of her ancestry experienced at the hands of the industry’s white male majority, Stanley was skeptical of the industry and the patriarchal politics of it all. Until she recalled the demand for her grandmother’s herbal teas and rubs.
“Being sick in the Black Belt of Alabama as a Black person wasn’t good. Going to the hospital was a death sentence. They were probably going to perform some surgery on you, or you were going to end up with astronomical medical bills,” Stanley says. “At best, you were just going to be treated poorly.”
Suddenly, the notion of a new beginning and a rare opportunity to start something of her own—from the ground up—was too enticing not to try. With grief and the memories of her grandmother’s remedies as her guide, Stanley got to work.
“Seeing the impact that irresponsible, white male–led agriculture has had on this planet, and the inequities that exist in land ownership and stewardship, I knew there was a place for me, where my voice could help,” she says.
It’s worth noting that in 1920, nearly 1 million Black farmers worked the land across the United States. Today, of the country’s 3.4 million farmers, only 45,508 are Black, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture released in 2019. Black farmers now own a mere 0.52 percent of America’s farmland and earn less than $40,000 annually, compared with more than $190,000 earned by white farmers, who own 95.4 percent of the farmland.
Now, just three years after she assumed ownership, Stanley is one of only a few registered Black female farmers in the state of North Carolina and the first to earn the coveted certified B Corporation status. At the time of our interview, every offering of her tea blends—from Rich Auntea, a mix of cannabinoid-rich hemp flower that boosts metabolism and enhances sexual well-being, to Brenda’s Balm, a dose of holy basil with anti-inflammatory benefits—is sold out.
Stanley, who kept her day job while developing her farm, is now something of a potent blend herself. She has long-term visions of expanding her farm to include a home for herself, her children, and her grandchildren, all of whom take part in the farm’s day-to-day operations, in addition to several smaller structures to serve as Airbnbs for everyone from aspiring farmers to creatives seeking a quiet place to stay.
Lately, though, she thinks often of the concept of regeneration, of reclaiming agency of a legacy lost or tainted somehow. There is something undeniably bittersweet about a defunct future she once imagined would be spent with someone else replaced with a new one all her own. Even amid this burgeoning landscape, as Stanley’s horizons seem to sprawl out in every direction, somewhere in the soil, grief still exists. For the pain of her ancestry and the unrealized visions of the Indigenous landowners who came before her. For those living today who have yet to actualize the land that will always be theirs. For an industry still tyrannized by the descendants of those who took it. And most of all, for institutions unchanging in their pursuit of supremacy.
“The thing about a seed is you’re never guaranteed to get a plant,” Stanley says. “You can have a seed that never germinates. You can have a seed that germinates but dies young in the field or in its tray. And yet, you plant each one with the hope that something good is going to come from it. Grieving is very similar to that, at least for me. On the other side of it, you have a hope that it’s going to yield something fruitful.”
Konda Mason has fashioned a career from regeneration—regenerative rice farming, that is. Mason is the founder and president of Jubilee Justice, an agricultural advocacy group that teaches alternative, sustainable methods of growing rice to BIPOC farmers in the South. When we talk, she is in the car, driving to pick up a Japanese rice combine from a farmer in Maryland.
Like Stanley, Mason has farming in the threads of her DNA. Her grandfather, a native to Alabama, maintained a popular provisions store for many years but was forced to pack up his family and abandon the fruits of his labor in the dead of night after threats from the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
“They were coming to get him based simply on his accumulation of wealth,” Mason explains. “They were stopping any Black person who was somewhat successful.”
Her father ended up in California, where he met her mother, a descendant of farmers, and raised a young Mason to live off the land. But like Stanley, she delayed her own destiny as a cultivator and instead opted for a career in the entertainment industry, where she was a Grammy-winning artist manager in London, an Academy Award–nominated film producer in Hollywood, and an off-off-Broadway theater producer in New York.
Mason now identifies as a social entrepreneur, and as an earth and social justice activist. In addition to Jubilee Justice, she is also the co-founder and founding CEO of Impact Hub Oakland, a coworking space that supports socially engaged entrepreneurs and changemakers; the strategic director of the Runway Project, of similar intent but for Black entrepreneurs; and a trained Dharma teacher. At her core, though, she sees herself as an activist who operates with deep intentionality and the same brand of passion Stanley has for redeeming the aches of her ancestry and inoculating them with a modern might. Even the hallmark crop of Jubilee Justice is a symbol of hope for the restoration of the agency that was taken from Black and Indigenous farmers.
“In the 1700s, the main cash crop was rice, and the Europeans who were settling here in this country had seen the rice production of West Africa,” Mason explains. “They intentionally captured and enslaved West Africans with the purpose of bringing them here to grow rice. Prior to cotton, the capital was rice. But following the emancipation, people walked away from the rice fields and production just stopped, especially in places like South Carolina.”
Although strides have been made in the U.S. agricultural industry, Mason has a keen understanding that things aren’t all that different today from the history it seems so many Americans tout distance from. Evidence can be found even in the media blitz surrounding the divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates. In early 2021, it was reported that one of the more curious assets being divided between the unhappy couple was a hefty acreage of farmland. Throughout the course of their marriage, the billionaires accumulated more than 269,000 acres of farmland across 18 states—more than the entire acreage of New York City—effectively making them the largest private farmland owners in the United States.
Another recent example of how the U.S. agricultural industry is hardly functioning in the best interest of smaller, independent farmers—specifically Black female farmers: In June, a federal judge blocked a move to offer debt forgiveness to Black farmers struggling throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, dubbing it “reverse discrimination.”
“We all know how Black farmers have been treated and discriminated against,” Mason says. “In blocking Black people from owning land, whether it’s redlining in cities or what’s happening in rural America, there’s this notion that land is only a commodity. But land is the basis of life, it’s not a toy. When you treat land like that, it’s racial capitalism, and when you look at where we are now in this country, with such instability in the food industry … that is a direct result of the mass accumulation and hoarding [of land] of people like Bill Gates.”
Even still, Mason keeps moving. She’s now working with 10 farmers, whom she checks on weekly. Though ranging inequities continue to pock the landscape like mines, she, like Stanley, knows the stakes are too great to become overwhelmed.
“I think about all these places where we have lifted up these amazing people and farmers in our own small way. It’s growing, and we’re going to get away from the agricultural industrial complex,” Mason says, resolute. “Together we’re marching forward, creating a parallel universe that is thriving, has a heartbeat, and that’s regenerative in every way possible.”
Images courtesy of Lem Mobley
