He had overheard Desmond discussing seeds with his neighbor. “People have hung on to seeds even when they aren’t actively planting and tending them,” says Desmond. “They hold memories and are cherished as story and timekeeping objects.”

Agriculture has been a way of life and a source of meaning and pride for Black and Indigenous people for centuries, shaping rituals, beliefs, and traditions. Slavery and colonialism exploited their agricultural knowledge and shattered their lives. The heirloom gardens project, a collaboration between Princeton University, Spelman College’s Food Studies program, and Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, aims to memorialize their long-held expertise and culturally meaningful foods.

For two years, students and faculty are collecting the oral histories of community members in the southeastern United States and Appalachia who are preserving their agricultural, culinary, and medicinal traditions. Oral history is a natural vehicle for these stories. For centuries, most Black Americans were denied learning to read or write, and passed information through the spoken word instead.

The HGP is not a traditional research project, says Hanna Garth, an assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton and a principal investigator with the group. It publishes the memories as raw transcripts rather than presenting them through an academic lens. “It’s how [the subjects] see their own lives,” she explains, “rather than someone from the outside reflecting on how we might see their lives.”

The transcripts are housed in an easily accessible public archive. Researchers hope the knowledge they contain will be used in various ways—for example, to create a community garden with culturally significant plants, to further explore people’s experiences, or to dig deeper into issues related to land access, gardening, farming, and food access and sovereignty.

The HGP grew out of the pandemic’s early days, when Ujamaa, a collective of heirloom seed growers, held a Zoom series with grandmothers discussing their culinary memories—including what their own grandmothers ate and grew in their gardens.

Garth and Desmond, a research scholar at Princeton and an Ujamaa board member, and HGP’s other principal investigator, then won a two-year grant from Princeton to develop the project. Once 150 interviews have been completed, Ujamaa members will be trained to continue the work and to expand its geographic reach.

Ujamaa is also tracking down the seeds mentioned in the interviews so it can provide them to farmers for growing more seeds. Seed farming offers farmers an additional revenue stream with a lighter lift than market farming, with less field time, lower seed costs, if any, and a ready market as demand for seeds outstrips supply.

If a farmer can become established as a grower of certain types of seeds, larger seed companies are more likely to contract with them to provide those seeds to a wider market. Ujamaa’s mission is to cultivate and create agency for BIPOC farmers and give their communities easy access to the foods important to them.

Civil Eats recently spoke to two of HGP’s key figures, Ujamaa  co-founder Bonnetta Adeeb and Desmond, about how HGP democratizes seed collection and knowledge-sharing while supporting diversity in the seed industry. We’ve included audio samples of oral histories from the project.

How do you decide what is a culturally meaningful food?

Adeeb: During COVID, when we lost so many seniors, we were hustling to interview elders about what was culturally meaningful. They would talk about what was in their grandmothers’, their ancestors’ gardens, what was important. What did they eat? What was medicinal? What exactly was being grown there? For about nine months, we [asked these questions] across the diaspora. We gathered this data. It was grandma approved, so our authority comes from the elders. This work is central to who we are and to having the authority to answer the question, What is culturally meaningful.

What does it mean when culturally important plants are lost?

Adeeb: African American history is being outlawed in Florida’s public schools. That knowledge is power. It’s super important [to others] to take that power, that knowledge, away, because without it, you don’t realize the strength on whose shoulders you stand.

Recently in Baltimore, there was a USDA person telling Black farmers that cowpeas were not safe for human consumption. We’re talking about black-eyed peas, one of the most important foods. It’s incumbent on us to reclaim that.

Civilization is built on the back of successful agriculture. We’re reclaiming that tradition, honoring our ancestors. Agriculture is culture. And how could you not feel better about yourself when you realize the genius of your ancestors? It was their I     ndigenous knowledge that created the benefits we have. As we celebrate them, we celebrate ourselves. It builds pride, strength, and courage, and enables us to fight another day because we ate a good meal.

Ujamaa, a Swahili word which means cooperative economics, wants to increase diversity in the seed industry and bridge the gap between prospective growers and seed companies. How will the oral history project support that? 

Adeeb: There was a loss of farmland, farm traditions, knowledge, and skills being passed from one generation to the other due to migration. A lot of our work is restoring the basic knowledge and traditions. We’d like to take that further and look at the Indigenous seed-keeping skills and technologies that develop the ‘crops’ we have today. That’s an important part of our work.

The industry is consolidating. We need to develop seed companies like ours that focus on the foods that are important to [our] communities. Who better than the farmers themselves to grow what’s culturally meaningful for them?

A lot of Black and Indigenous farmers are working full-time jobs and farming on weekends and at night. Growing heirloom varieties—seeds that reproduce like their grandparents, otherwise, we’re not eating the food of our ancestors—will create revenue and give our growers a way to hold on to their farms and increase their control.

Desmond: People have known that knowledge is valuable for a very long time, but it has been systematically diminished. Some of the most exciting stuff happening in the urban local regional food system is led by people of color. Ancestral knowledge is with the people who stayed in the rural areas who are aging out.

We want [other growers] to know how Miss Birdie May from Farmville, North Carolina, developed this really awesome system when her collards go to seed. That’s how the oral history project is growing BIPOC growers, acting as a bridge across this huge geographical divide that is the product of the Great Migration and aggravated by that history.

It sounds like the stories themselves are like seeds, germinating new information and understanding.

Adeeb: We’ve found seeds bred by incarcerated people. How could you not want to follow that story? Boleiti collard is one. I recently heard about the boleiti being important to the Lumbee [Tribe of North Carolina], who have made these delicious collard greens sandwiches out of it. That got me really excited. Even the industrial prison complex recognizes skills within the community. They knew these foods were important.

Desmond: Some might think, “Oh, this was bred in a jail. How horrible.” Then you meet the teacher of the horticulture class, and he had incredible pride. The way he tells it, folks are excited to work and be on the farm and out of their cells. They’re expressing a real creativity in plant selection are proud of the variety that they’ve developed over time. They sent collard greens to the governor’s mansion, [which] were served at a meal. …the seeds offer opportunities to find these stories, get really deep into the details, and humanize everybody involved.

Voices From the Gardens

Excerpts and audio snippets from the Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project. Text transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity.

Eulalia Williams, Farmville, North Carolina
Founder of the Farmville Community Garden. Raised in Farmville and Compton, California.

I would follow Granddaddy out to the garden that was plowed by the mule. We plant corn, plant fish heads under the corn. My mother would go out with the saltshaker in the morning and we’d pick tomatoes and eat those. We would harvest things in the morning, prepare them, and they’d be on the table for 3 o’clock. It was comforting to me. I wanted it and fresh vegetables again. That’s what got me into community gardening. It wasn’t community gardening—it was backyard gardening. Everyone had one.

But when I came back [to Farmville] in 2014, there were none. It’s like, “Wait a minute. We used to grow our own food here. We didn’t have to go to the grocery store.”

I hope the [community] garden encourages people to realize that you are what you eat. They have control over that. They don’t have to just settle for what can be found in the grocery store. Take that control and use it to grow up bigger, stronger, and help other people. We can do a revolution here. We can make a difference.

Vivian Fields, Farmville, North Carolina
Lifetime resident and longtime gardener.

It wasn’t integrated at the time, so we grew up hard in Farmville. We couldn’t hardly come across Main Street without being with the white. We fought all the time.

We always had to come to the north side to get groceries and everything. We didn’t have much money, so we all were raised on garden food and stuff. Whatever we didn’t have, we had to go to the white man and ask for it. If he didn’t OK it, we didn’t get it. I thought that was very wrong because we all were supposed to be equal.

On my side, we had chicken, hogs, turkey, and the hogs had barbecued pork and all of that. Collards and cabbages, potatoes, white potatoes, squash, and black-eyed peas was coming from the garden, so we had plenty of that.

That’s the only thing we ate was garden food. We very seldom [went] to the store and bought anything unless it was milk and bread.

Jennifer Kanyamibwa, Atlanta, Georgia
Co-founder of Plant Lady Juice Co. Born in Rwanda.

I think whether directly or indirectly, especially if you’re a Black farmer, you’re coming from a tradition where this is something that has been passed on. Growing things is the most human thing you can do. If you go throughout Africa, you see how people use herbs and food as medicine and as celebration. It is something that’s so intrinsically African and Black and Indigenous about growing your own vegetables and plants.

A lot of the farmers we work with are very, very committed to growing things that are natural to the surrounding environment and have a lineage and a thread to things you can trace back to Africa.

Folami Harris, Covington, Georgia
Woman farmer who grows vegetables and fruits that complement African cuisines. Raised in Kingston, Jamaica.

How do I grow things that bring us back to our roots? Because it’s more than just the taste. It’s also the memories and the possibilities for intercultural connections.

Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve been a kidnapper of seeds. There were always seeds in my luggage that I hoped Immigration would never uncover. I was always intrigued by how we took food from one place to another and how we use them differently. We never ate sweet potato leaves, but in Africa, they were interested in the sweet potato leaves. Food, its history, and the diverse ways in which we use it are very intriguing to me.

It’s my hope that as we are able to boost production, we are able to create a more vibrant impact on what everybody eats, because it will be of interest to everyone, but first and foremost to us, and maybe it will revive interest in African diaspora cuisines. When we started, there was no “High on the Hog,” no “Searching for Soul Food.” When I watch that stuff, I’m so happy.

Emmanuel Fields, Frankfort, Kentucky
His grandmother’s sharecropping experience made him turn away from a connection to agriculture and community. Creating a Master’s thesis documentary about the Kentucky’s Black farmers transformed him into a seeker of stories and steward of the land.

Once I started the documentary, everything changed for me. It was not just to show and shed light on stories of inequalities, but to show essentially an amazing triumph. I learned [that] our history here, especially with growing things, is not completely wrapped up in slavery, in negative mindsets, or ways that are meant to attack and push you down.

Instead, those same things are used for triumph . . . and to show you exactly how strong you are and what you’re capable of doing.It rewrote a lot of things that I had solidified in my own head about my own history, my people’s histories. A new narrative has changed a lot of the way I see and move through the world.

These are things I can attribute to being completely centered around food and farming. If I can have a positive impact on one person who could be struggling like I was at one point with a lot of deep generational racial trauma and things that are passed down, I feel I would have helped.

Tiffany Bellfield El-Amin, Madison County, Kentucky
A third-generation farmer who stewards her grandparents’ land at Ballew Estates, where she was raised.

Grandma would have napkins—pawpaw tubes just full of seeds—from where we had brought stuff off our farm to eat, slices of tomatoes or cucumber. They would save the seeds in a napkin, come home, dry them out. That’s what you’re supposed to do after you eat the fruit: Take the seed and do it again. There would be a countertop full of seeds, cantaloupe, melons, watermelon. They were efficient people. I was born in ‘84, but I grew up with this lifestyle of, “You want watermelon, you better grow it.”

I feel like [my grandma] was like a botanist. She would make these tomatoes. They were juicy. Sometimes they’d get so big they’re mushy, but they were good. She would save those seeds and keep growing those.

This is the first time in a while where I’ve sat and thought, “You really ain’t got no seeds of your grandma’s.” They had all dried out. I have to cultivate something that produces seeds, so my grandchildren, godchildren, and kids can keep that going, because it’s so important.

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On Instagram, urban farmers and gardeners began to express anger and frustration. Some commented on media company posts; others posted their own critiques. In February, students at the University of Michigan, where the study was conducted, organized a letter to the researchers pointing out issues with the study.

The issue most cited across critiques was simple: When urban farms were separated from community gardens in the study, the higher rate of greenhouse gas emissions reported essentially disappeared.

Now, two months later, national advocates for the multi-faceted benefits of growing food and green spaces in cities are working to counter what they see as harmful narratives created by a study they say had design flaws to begin with and was then poorly communicated to the public. Of special concern is funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) fledgling Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production, which Congress has been shorting since it was established. A coalition of groups have been pushing to change that in the upcoming farm bill.

“We hope the damage isn’t already done, but we fear that publicity around this paper will minimize the advocacy of urban farmers and partners over the past many years and possibly undermine the continued and necessary investment in urban agricultural communities,” reads a letter sent to the study authors by Michigan Food and Farming Systems, the Organic Farming Research Foundation, Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, and the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association.

Their overall critiques of the study start with the sample set of “urban farms.”

In a conversation with Civil Eats, lead author Jason Hawes, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, said this his team compiled “the largest data set that we know of” on urban farming. It included 73 urban farms, community gardens, and individual garden sites in Europe and the United States. At each of those sites, the research team worked with farmers and gardeners to collect data on the infrastructure, daily supplies used, irrigation, harvest amounts, and social goods.

That data was then used to calculate the carbon emissions embodied in the production of food at each site and those emissions were compared to carbon emissions of the same foods produced at “conventional” farms. Overall, they found greenhouse gas emissions were six times higher at the urban sites—and that’s the conclusion the study led with.

But not only is 73 a tiny number compared to the data that exists on conventional production agriculture, said Omanjana Goswami, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), but lumping community gardens in with urban farms set up for commercial production and then comparing that to a rural system that has been highly tuned and financed for commercial production for centuries doesn’t make sense.

“It’s almost like comparing apples to oranges,” she said. “The community garden is not set up to maximize production.”

In fact, the sample set was heavily tilted toward community and individual gardens and away from urban farms. In New York City, for example, the only U.S. city represented, seven community gardens run by AmeriCorps were included. Brooklyn Grange’s massive rooftop farms—which on a few acres produce more than 100,000 pounds of produce for markets, wholesale buyers, CSAs, and the city’s largest convention center each year—were not.

And what the study found was that when the small group of urban farms were disaggregated from the gardens, those farms were “statistically indistinguishable from conventional farms” on emissions. Aside from one high-emission outlier, the urban farms were carbon-competitive.

“They call out the fact that that tiny sample of seven urban farms that are actually production-focused, competitive with conventional agriculture, but that one line just got buried,” said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). This aspect was especially frustrating to urban farming advocates because, as the groups who sent the letter point out, one of their biggest challenges in working with policymakers in D.C. is to get them to “regard urban farming as farming.”

Hawes said he found the critiques around lumping community gardens and urban farms together “reasonable” but that he stood by the method. He hadn’t considered including backyard gardens in rural areas in the sample, he said, even though city gardens were. “We were not necessarily attempting to compare urban and rural food production,” he said. “In fact, we chose to use the word conventional specifically because it pointed to the sort of ‘conventional food supply chain,’ which is often what urban agriculture producers are attempting to intervene in.”

Not only did taking the community gardens out of the picture change the emissions results, the researchers also found that 63 percent of carbon emissions at all of the sites came not from daily inputs or lack of crop efficiency but from infrastructure, such as building raised beds and trucking in soil. But using recycled materials for infrastructure cut those emissions so much, that if all the sites had done so, that would have been enough for them to close the gap and be competitive with conventional agriculture on greenhouse gas emissions.

“That problem can of course be solved by upfront funding,” said Goswami. “Then, bingo, according to the authors, you have systems with very comparable climate metrics.”

Overall, Hawes said he did regret some of the ways media coverage framed the study’s results but that he didn’t feel the framing of the study itself was problematic. “In my opinion, the most important sustainability challenge of our time is climate change, and if we’re gonna talk about sustainability in the context of urban agriculture, we have to talk about carbon emissions,” he said.

However, while climate scientists and sustainable agriculture advocates agree that addressing the food system’s 22 percent contribution to global greenhouse emissions is critical to meeting climate goals, whether carrots are grown in gardens in Detroit and Atlanta or only on huge commercial farms in the Salinas Valley (or both) won’t likely be a deciding factor.

At an event to kick off a new focus on food and agriculture last week, Project Drawdown launched a new series that will focus on food system solutions to climate change. There, Executive Director Jonathan Foley pointed out that the vast majority of food system emissions come from a few big sources: meat and dairy production, deforestation and other land use change (a large portion of which is linked to animal agriculture), and food waste.

As Goswami at UCS noted, that broader context is essential. “The authors . . . don’t at all zoom out to compare this to agriculture’s broader footprint,” she said, so even if there weren’t clear climate benefits to urban farming—which many say the study didn’t clearly conclude—prioritizing other benefits of growing things in cities might still make more sense. Especially given the climate resilience built into decentralizing and diversifying the food system.

Land use is particularly interesting, Quigley at NSAC said, because city farmers and gardeners often reclaim spaces that might otherwise be paved over and developed, adding carbon-holding trees and plants. “Folks who are maintaining community gardens and green spaces in cities to help with water run-off and urban heat island effect providing safe places for community gatherings . . . these are probably people that would be very concerned with their climate impact,” she said. “Can you imagine if they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh my god, should I not be gardening?’”

While NSAC did not sign on to the initial letter sent by the coalition of groups, Quigley is working with those farm groups and the members have since talked to Hawes. Disagreements on the study framing still abound, but they’re now working together on policy briefs that will be available to lawmakers if the farm bill process ever picks up again and conversations around funding urban farms are once again on the (picnic) table.

“Ultimately, one of the motivations behind this study was the fact that urban agriculture is largely discussed as a really useful sustainability intervention, and this study does not take away from that conclusion,” Hawes said. “I also think that to the degree that this starts conversations about the availability of resources for urban agriculture and the support that is available to urban farmers and gardeners for creating low-carbon solutions—I’m happy with that.”

Read More:
Congress Puts Federal Support for Urban Farming on the Chopping Block
Urban Farms Are Stepping Up Their Roles in Communities Nationwide
The IPCC’s Latest Climate Report Is a Final Alarm for Food Systems, Too

Supply Chain Impacts of the Key Bridge Collapse. One of the most iconic elements of Baltimore’s harbor is the illuminated Domino Sugar sign, below which the sweet stuff can often be seen piled high on massive ships. Now, the sugar refinery is one of many food and agriculture companies that will likely be impacted by last week’s collapse of the Key Bridge, which shut down the shipping channel that leads to the city’s busy port. The port also handles imports and exports of commodity grains, coffee, and farm equipment. On Friday, representatives from the White House and USDA met with more than a dozen farm and food stakeholders including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Sugar Alliance, and Perdue Farms to discuss impacts on the industry. On Sunday, officials announced they are working on opening a temporary alternate shipping channel to get the port back open while the clean-up of the bridge and the stranded ship continues.

Read More:
Walmart’s Pandemic Port Squeeze
The Last Front to Save the ‘Most Important Fish’ in the Atlantic

Climate-Friendly Rice. “My dad taught me to continuously flood a rice field. If you saw dry ground in a rice field, you were in trouble,” said fifth-generation Arkansas farmer Jim Whittaker at a USDA event last week. Now, Whittaker practices a technique that alternates his rice fields between wet and dry, a system he said has cut water use and methane emissions in those fields by 50 percent. Whittaker is one of 30 farmers whose rice is now available in a two-pound bag sold by Great River Milling. It’s the first product to officially hit the market as a result of funding from the USDA’s $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities project, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at the end, holding up one of those bags. And the debut comes at a time when some lawmakers and environmental groups are lobbing criticism at the agency over its broadening definition of “climate-smart.”

Read More:
Could Changing the Way We Farm Rice Be a Climate Solution?
The USDA Plan to Better Measure Agriculture’s Impact on the Climate Crisis

Slaughterhouse Rulemaking. More than 800 comments were submitted before the comment period on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) contentious proposal to increase the regulation of water pollution from meat processing facilities closed last week. On one side of the issue, 45 environmental, community, and animal welfare organizations joined together to make a case for the most restrictive set of regulations proposed, arguing that the weakest option, which EPA has said it prefers, is “inconsistent with federal law.” “We call on the EPA to rise above Big Ag’s push to weaken this plan to reduce harms from the millions of gallons of pollution slaughterhouses and animal-rendering plants are spewing into our waterways,” said Hannah Connor, deputy director of environmental health at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a press release. Meanwhile, farm and meat industry groups including the Iowa Farm Bureau and the Meat Institute filed multiple sets of comments asking for an extension of the comment period and arguing for additional flexibilities to even the least restrictive regulatory framework proposed.

Read More:
Should a Plan to Curb Meat Industry Pollution Consider the Business Costs?
EPA to Revise Outdated Water Pollution Standards for Slaughterhouses

The post Despite Recent Headlines, Urban Farming Is Not a Climate Villain appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/04/03/despite-recent-headlines-urban-farming-is-not-a-climate-villain/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/01/09/a-ted-talk-put-ron-finley-on-the-map-10-years-later-the-gangsta-gardener-is-going-strong/ https://civileats.com/2024/01/09/a-ted-talk-put-ron-finley-on-the-map-10-years-later-the-gangsta-gardener-is-going-strong/#comments Tue, 09 Jan 2024 09:00:34 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=54937 Finley has become famous for planting avocados, bananas, mangoes, and sugar cane in and behind his house in a spot where there was once an Olympic-sized swimming pool and making it available to community members in exchange for small donations. He organized against regulation that prevented Angelenos from curbside gardening, and went on to launch […]

The post A TED Talk Put Ron Finley on the Map. 10 Years Later, the ‘Gangsta Gardener’ Is Going Strong. appeared first on Civil Eats.

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It has been 10 years since Ron Finley, the “Gangsta Gardener,” changed the trajectory of his life with a TED Talk about food apartheid in his community, South Central Los Angeles. The talk has been viewed nearly 5 million times since then, and one of its most memorable lines—“Growing your own food is like printing your own money”—has since become the seed of Finley’s burgeoning philanthropic work.

Finley has become famous for planting avocados, bananas, mangoes, and sugar cane in and behind his house in a spot where there was once an Olympic-sized swimming pool and making it available to community members in exchange for small donations.

“This all started because I needed some healthy food.”

He organized against regulation that prevented Angelenos from curbside gardening, and went on to launch a nonprofit, the Ron Finley Project. And yet he says he’s still amazed by the impact of the TED Talk and the number of doors it has opened for him and his work.

In recent years, Finley has become one of the most popular teachers in the online education series MasterClass, and he has been invited to speak in a wide range of far-flung places including Greece, Sweden, and Denmark. And in 2024, Finley and his staff will curate an art show called “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

“Who could plan it? Because I planted some food, I get to speak at Sheffield University in London,” Finley told Civil Eats. “The audience is not comprised of academics, so I bring this down so that everybody will understand. [People] don’t understand how big a compliment it is to me when I get told that me being real is what resonates.”

A Campaign to ‘Plant Some Money’

In late 2022, Finley collaborated with the national advertising company BBDO on a short promotional film, “Plant Some Money,” about gardening as a solution to food apartheid. The film, which was awarded a Bronze Lion award at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, captured a day when Finley and dozens of advocates marched three miles from the Anacostia Park to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The distance marks the average stretch that those living in economically marginalized U.S. communities must travel to access fresh produce.

Following the march, Finley planting seeds attached to paper “money” printed especially for the event outside of the Federal Reserve. The bills had the Gangsta Gardener’s face on them and included the total value of the produce that could be grown with the seeds: $20 worth of rainbow carrots, $25 of arugula, $100 of collard greens, and $150 of cherry tomatoes.

In addition to the march and the short film, the Ron Finley Project has been offering folks who live in food deserts a chance to sign up for a free starter gardener kit that includes the bills with seeds attached and instructions on how to plant them. Since March 2023, the campaign has distributed more than 2,000 bills around the U.S. and beyond. And while it’s hard to say how many of those seeds were planted, the Ron Finley Project estimates the produce that they yielded could add up to $290,000 saved on produce.

“We hope that the people struggling to have access to fresh produce across the country can get inspired by Ron and start growing their own food not only as a means of sustenance but also as a form of protest against a system that perpetuates food inequality,” added Rafael Gonzaga, BBDO LA’s executive creative director.

A Web of Projects and Impacts

While seated on a bench inside his Los Angeles farm, Finley reflected recently on his journey with a combination of swagger and humility.

Finley, a father of three, grew up in South Central and has worked as a fashion designer on and off for years. According to Vogue, he designed clothes for Will Smith, among other L.A. celebrities and launched a brand of his own in the early 2000s. But he turned to gardening when his career hit a rocky period. “This all started because I needed some healthy food,” he said.

Now, educators often turn to Finley for inspiration. Take Hailey Wolfe, a kindergarten teacher at Vollentine Optional Elementary School, in North Memphis, Tennessee. The school is the alma mater of rapper Juicy J and not known for its test scores or affluence. In the last year, however, Wolfe and her class have garnered statewide attention for an urban gardening-focused curriculum that she developed based on Finley’s work and introduced to her class during Black History Month.

“The goal was to teach a lesson on plants and animals—super redundant and boring,” Wolfe said. “I wanted to find a newer, relevant person who was changing the world of gardening. Our art teacher told me about Ron, and I reached out [on social media]. He was ready to help.”

Wolfe began learning about Finley’s gospel on gardening over the phone. Then he made appearances in her classroom virtually and his team sent seeds to her classroom.

“If you’re living in a food desert, you just have the corner store,” Wolfe said. “I would have to tell them [to eat] just one bag of Takis, not two. But once they started learning about Ron, they were excited about growing arugula, tomatoes, and kale. The parents even started wanting their own plants and my fruit salad recipe. . . . The main thing we’ve learned from Ron is that you don’t have to be a gardener. You can just [focus on accessing nutritious food] for your community and for yourself.”

Self-reliance is a key part of what Finley seeks to impart. He has often set his own rules and brings a sense of optimism to everything he does. Training children to see themselves and the world differently is an essential part of that work.