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.
AltieriMANichollsCI (2017) Agroecology: A brief account of its origins and currents of thought in Latin America. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems41(3–4): 231–237.
2.
AndersonCRBruilJChappellMJ, et al. (September 25, 2019) From transition to domains of transformation: Getting to sustainable and just food systems through agroecology.Sustainability11(19): 5272.
3.
BarraMP (2023) Plotting a geography of paradise: Black ecologies, productive nostalgia, and the possibilities of life on sinking ground. Transforming Anthropology31(1): 15–28.
4.
BledsoeA (2017) Marronage as a past and present geography in the Americas. Southeastern Geographer57(1): 30–50.
5.
BullardRDWrightB (2012) The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities. New York: New York University Press.
6.
CampbellB (2010) Beyond cultural models of the environment: linking subjectivities of dwelling and power. In: GuneratneA (ed) Culture and the Environment in the Himalaya. New York, NY: Routledge, 186–203.
7.
DanielP (2015) Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
8.
DavisJMoultonAAVan SantL, et al. (2019) Anthropocene, capitalocene, … plantationocene?: A manifesto for ecological justice in an age of global crises. Geography Compass13(5): 1–15.
9.
DeLoughreyE (2011) Yam, roots, and rot: Allegories of the provision grounds. Small Axe15(1): 58–75.
10.
DotsonKWhyteK (2013) Environmental justice, unknowability and unqualified affectability. Ethics and the Environment18(2): 55–79.
11.
DouradoGFGiraldoOFDonato JuniorRRossetPMCardosoIMCachoMMYTG (2025) Territorialization of agroecology. A dialog between two regions with abundant agroecological experiences in Minas Gerais/Brazil and Chiapas/Mexico. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems50(3): 540–570.
12.
FranzenS (2017) Reality education: Agricultural knowledge exchange in the US south.Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development7(2): 69–83.
13.
FranzenS (2018) Framing nature: Visual representations of ecological paradigms. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems33(3): 256–258.
14.
FrazierCM (2016) Troubling ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, and Black Feminist interventions in environmentalism. Critical Ethnic Studies2(1): 40–72.
15.
FreshourCWilliamsB (2022) Toward “total freedom”: Black ecologies of land, labor, and livelihoods in the Mississippi Delta. Annals of the American Association of Geographers113(7): 1563–1572.
16.
GarthHReeseAM (2020) Black Food Matters: Racial justice in the wake of Food Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
17.
GilbertJSharpGFelinMS (2002) The loss and persistence of black-owned farms and farmland: A review of the research literature and its implications. Southern Rural Sociology18(2): 1–30.
18.
GiraldoOFRossetPM (2017) Agroecology as a territory in dispute: Between institutionality and social movements. The Journal of Peasant Studies45(3): 545–564.
19.
GlissantE (1997) [1990] Poetics of relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
20.
Gordon NembhardJ (2014) Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
21.
GrimV (1995) The politics of inclusion: Black farmers and the quest for agribusiness participation, 1945-1990s. Agricultural History69(2): 257–271.
22.
GrimV (1996) Black participation in the farmers home administration and agricultural stabilization and conservation service, 1964–1990. Agricultural History70(2): 321–336.
23.
GruppusoPWhitehouseA (2020) Exploring taskscapes: An Introduction. Social Anthropology28(3): 588–597.
24.
HalpernO (2015) Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945. Durham: Duke University Press.
25.
HawthorneC (2019) Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty-first century. Geography Compass13(11): 1–13.
26.
HeynenNYbarraM (2021) On abolition ecologies and making ‘freedom as a place.’. Antipode53(1): 21–35.
27.
HosbeyJLlorénsHRoaneJT (2022) Introduction: Global black ecologies. Environment and Society: Advances in Research13: 1–10.
28.
HuntS (2013) Ontologies of indigeneity: The politics of embodying a concept.”. cultural Geographies21(1): 27–32.
29.
IngoldT (1993) The temporality of the landscape. World Archaeology25(2): 152–174.
30.
IngoldT (2011) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledege.
31.
IngoldTKurtillaT (2000) Perceiving the environment in Finnish lapland. Body & Society6(3–4): 183–196.
32.
KareraA (2019) Blackness and the pitfalls of anthropocene ethics. Critical Philosophy of Race7(1): 32–56.
33.
KnudsenJ (2016) Beyond cultural relativism? Tim Ingold’s ‘ontology of dwelling’ revisited. In: BertelsenBEBendixsenS (eds) Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 181–201. 10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_8.
34.
KohlEMcCutcheonP (2014) Kitchen table reflexivity: Negotiating positionality through everyday talk. Gender, Place & Culture22(6): 747–763.
35.
McGeeLBooneR (1979) The Black Rural Landowner–Endangered Species: Social, Political, and Economic Implications. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
36.
McInnisJC (2025) Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
37.
McKittrickK (2006) Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
38.
MoultonAA (2024) Plotting a new course for environmental humanities. Environmental Humanities16(2): 271–290.
39.
MoultonAASaloI (2022) Black geographies and black ecologies as insurgent ecocriticism. Environment and Society: Advances in Research13(2022): 156–174.
40.
MurphyMWWeddingtonGRio-GlickAJ (2021) Black ecology and critical environmental justice.”. Environmental Justice14(6): 393–397.
41.
NadasdyP (2021) How many worlds are there?American Ethnologist48(4): 357–369.
42.
National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) (2019) Census of Agriculture Highlights: Black Producers. ACH17-9. Washington D.C.
PennimanL (2018) Farming While Black: Soul Fire farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
45.
ReeseAM (2019) Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, DC. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press Books.
46.
ReynoldsBJ (2002) Black farmers in America, 1865-2000: The pursuit of independent farming and the role of cooperatives. Rural Business Cooperative Service. USDA Report194: 1–25.
47.
Rivera-NúñezTFargherLNighR (2020) Toward an historical agroecology: An academic approach in which time and space matter. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems44(8): 975–1011.
48.
RoaneJT (2018) Plotting the Black commons.Souls Journal20(3): 239–266.
49.
RoaneJTHosbeyJ (2019) Mapping black ecologies. Current Research in Digital History2(23). 10.31835/crdh.2019.05.
50.
SundbergJ (2013) Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies21(1): 33–47.
51.
ToddZ (2015) Indigenizing the anthropocene. In: DavisHM (eds) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press, 241–254.
52.
WattsV (2013) Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-humans (first woman and sky woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society2(1): 20–34.
53.
WhiteMM (2019) Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
54.
WilsonKD (2020) Who’s Man Is This? Black Radical Ecology and the Anthropogenic Question. Web log. Red Voice (blog), January 16, 2020.
WoodsCA (1998) Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.
57.
WrightWJ (2020) The morphology of marronage. Annals of the American Association of Geographers110(4): 1134–1149.
58.
WrightWJ (2021) As above, so below: Anti-black violence as environmental racism. Antipode53(3): 791–809.
59.
WynterS (1971) Novel and history, plot and plantation. Savacou5: 95–102.
60.
WynterS (2003) Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review3(3): 257–337.
61.
YusoffK (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes of None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
