How LGBTQI Folks Are Reclaiming Space on the Land
These queer farmers and land stewards put community first
By Ryan MacDonald | Reading time: 4 minutes | Jun 25 2022 | Sierra Magazine
It’s the middle of spring, and Arleen Jenson has a few things on their mind. A lack of recent rain, for one. And, the bottleneck of greenhouse crops that still need transplanting.
Jenson, who is trans and nonbinary, co-operates and co-runs SisterLand Farms, a no-till, one-acre farm in Port Angeles, Washington. Springtime brings an endless-seeming list of farm chores. This season, Jenson and their fellow farmers are also finalizing logistics for a countywide kitchen composting program. Soon, they’ll be picking up their community’s food waste and hauling it to the farm to turn into compost.
“We’re the only people doing this in the county, which is not a revolutionary thing elsewhere,” they said. Last year, SisterLand workers hauled away nearly 20,000 pounds of waste that would have ended up in a landfill. This year, Jenson hopes to collect 35,000 pounds.
It’s this type of social activism and community engagement that Jenson had in mind when they founded the farm in 2018. With a mission to “grow radically,” SisterLand Farms is rooted in an understanding that “you can’t just isolate the cultivation of food,” they said. Their priorities as a farm owner include paying workers a livable wage, offering educational opportunities to the community, and creating summer camps for LGBTQI adults.
“A lot of what SisterLand does seems unrelated to providing lettuce and cucumbers,” they said. “Because community comes first.”
That perspective aligns Jenson with a vibrant cohort of LGBTQI farmers and land stewards, including many people of color, reimagining their work in more sustainable, communal, and intentional ways. “What we’re trying to bring back up to mainstream collective society is this Indigenous notion that land can only be healthy if communities are in intimate relationship with it,” said Niko Alexandre, one of the cofounders of Shelterwood Collective, a Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQI-led healing retreat center in Northern California that takes a community-centric approach to land care.
Alexandre and Shelterwood Collective cofounder Layel Camargo have spent the last year tending to 900 acres of forest near the Russian River—it’s unceded Kashaya and Southern Pomo territory—while renovating long-neglected infrastructure. This summer, they will host student fellows and community organizations for workshops and learning sessions on topics including forest ecology and chainsaw skills.
“A big piece of our work is around reclaiming practices that are often unsafe for us to access as queer folks and people of color,” Alexandre said, noting that many of these skills are typically taught by cisgendered, white men in places that can be unwelcoming. “We are hoping that in 10 to 15 years, we can see many BIPOC land groups that are doing the large-scale land management that we are doing now,” added Camargo.
But land access remains a common barrier for many LGBTQI and BIPOC individuals. Prices can be prohibitive. “There was a three-acre farm that went up for sale, and it was sold within a day, and it sold thousands and thousands of dollars over asking,” recalled Anita Adalja of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Adalja and their fellow queer farmers run Ashokra Farm in Albuquerque’s North Valley. Together they have two decades of farming experience. Still, they lack the financial resources to purchase enough land to grow on a large scale. It can rankle to watch other farmers acquire property more easily. “We’ve farmed for other people who are cis-white men and have no trouble getting land,” they said. “People are just throwing land at them, or so it seems.
Today, Ashokra Farm operates as a patchwork of plots spread out across several private residences and a community garden. They grow everything from radishes and cabbages to 13 different varieties of okra. But the logistics of managing dispersed parcels are not easy. (“I mean, I can’t tell you how many times we forget a tool somewhere,” Adalja said.) Since the US Department of Agriculture doesn’t include LGBTQI individuals in its category of “socially disadvantaged farmers,” they aren’t eligible for the federal assistance that could offer a leg up.
“There’s really important policy that is made at the federal level based on the federal government’s understanding of marginalization in agriculture,” said Dr. Ike Leslie, an environmental sociologist and postdoctoral research associate at the University of New Hampshire. Leslie, whose work specializes in social justice, environmental sustainability, and food systems, argues that the government’s understanding is flawed. They praised organizations including the Northeast Queer Farmers Alliance and La Via Campesina for a recognition that conversations about land access and food systems must come from a multiracial, intersectional stance, something the 1960s-era “back-to-the-land movement” largely failed to do. “The same forces that make racism systemic to the food system are the same forces that are starving LGBT+ people,” Leslie said.