Farming with care: Naming, protecting, and sustaining Black farm practices in the US South

This paper emerged from multiple conversations between a researcher and two community-based organizers. The authors engage with the distinctive ways Black farmers practice sustainability and express care with plants, animals, history, heritage, and people dead, alive, and yet to come. These expressions deal with the anti-black context in which they were formed while pursuing a world that could be otherwise. Agroecology is a term that the organizers use to help legitimize and protect these practices. But do such expressions fit with the idea of agroecology, and is the term able to account for the fullness of these practices? The aim of this paper is not to definitively categorize Black farmer practices, but to consider the ecological frameworks used by farmers to consider what is at stake in labeling, legitimizing, or veiling such practices for a wider audience.