During my time in Port Townsend, I was fortunate to spend a few days with Bonnetta Adeeb, Founder and President of the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance (UCFA).
Bonnetta was visiting OSA from the east coast, and Micaela had planned a series of tours around the local seed network for us during her stay. So, on the Wednesday morning, Bonnetta, Micaela, Susanna (OSA) and I set out on an epic road trip together. It was a memorable few days spent with a group of powerful women all working to restore relationship with seed. Although not based in the Pacific Northwest, Bonnetta and UCFA work in partnership with many organisations across the US, and OSA have accompanied them since their emergence during the pandemic in 2020.
The Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance is a BIPOC led collective working with and supporting emergent and seasoned growers who cultivate heirloom seeds and grow culturally relevant plants for food and healing. The alliance works to provide more opportunities and support for growers from historically oppressed and marginalised communities. They currently work with over 400 growers and 60 partners across the US, recognising the need for increased diversity in agriculture and in the seed industry specifically, and aim to bridge the gap between prospective BIPOC growers and the wider seed community.
UCFA has four main programme areas: seed grower recruitment, seed farming education, seed farming and seed sales. Through the Ujamaa Academy and the Ira Wallace Seed Seed School, they provide BIPOC growers with instruction in seed farming and seed saving via online classes and face to face learning. They then support these growers as they develop their skills, and provide a pathway for their seeds to be dispersed to the wider community through the Ujamaa Seeds catalogue.
UCFA view seeds as more than a commodity, but as vessels of culture. The dramatic decline in regional and adapted food crop diversity has also led to the loss of regional farming traditions, and culture and cuisines that accompany these crops. The Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance works to return culturally meaningful seed to BIPOC communities, and to reconnect people to their traditional foods.
As Bonnetta explained, ‘We need to make seed breeding relevant, it has to be something people want to eat…and the stories are essential.’ UCFA create space for conversation with the communities they work with, they listen to their memories of cuisines, often meals their Granny or a family member used to make. Then the work begins to deconstruct these authentic dishes and recipes to work out what the ingredients are. They then source the seed of these crops and work to up-skill farmers in lost seed saving practices.
‘We can’t just offer the grain and the seed, we have to offer the food, the stories, the traditions. Whatever we can do to restore that culture to help people have hope. So, we grow it, we clean it, but how do we cook it?’ They’re assisting growers through that process too, ‘empowering communities to feed themselves. Our reason for being is to hold onto traditional foods, that’s the catalyst for food sovereignty. That’s kind of the definition of food sovereignty, having access to these foods.’
Many of these crops that UCFA are sourcing and distributing are traditional landraces, inherently diverse populations that have been stewarded by communities of people for centuries. This seed rematriation is a step towards cross cultural reconciliation, bringing seeds home to their communities of origin and to those with a direct relationship with that seed. Bonnetta described the diversity and beauty found in many of these crops: ‘(This diversity) is there to protect us, for instance within the beautiful Nanticoke squash, some squash are very small, some are huge, all these different manifestations are in there. And they have different characteristics that they bring to us. If we destroy those crops, that landrace that had that diversity, maybe we wont have what we need as the world changes, as the climate changes, as society changes.’
Listening to Bonnetta, it made me reflect on the ancestral wisdom that is held both by humans and the seeds they have travelled with over time, a wisdom that is so often dismissed by modern society. Bonnetta regularly refers to herself as a ‘Granny’, an elder who brings wisdom and knowledge to help heal and repair. ‘The grandmother that sits in the rocking chair that you kind of ignore, well now you need her! She has a role in society again, that was stripped from her by modernity, granny is important with her stories, and her recipes, and her methods.’
Acknowledging the power in these memories, UCFA, in partnership with Princeton University, have been collecting oral histories of people who have worked to preserve Black and Indigenous seed and foodways. Often interviewing the eldest people in communities to capture their memories on what was in their grandparent’s garden. Through the Heirloom Gardens Oral Histories project, more than 100 oral histories have been collected so far, with a goal of 250 by end of this summer. The plan is to house these stories in the National Museum of African American History & Culture, to make them accessible to communities to which they have been lost and begin the process of healing relationship with the land. ‘As we tell these stories it motivates people, it touches their hearts.’
Community, culture and family are at the heart of UCFA’s work, and they uphold the spirit of cooperation within the seed movement. The alliance supports all marginalised and oppressed communities, including those impacted by the recent conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine. ‘We try to respond to a situation, and say to people it’s not too late. We can recover, we can learn and we can build this knowledge again. Our way of responding to crisis is giving them seed and letting them get started. Lets get out there and lets plant some seeds. That’s the method by which we attempt to heal communities. It seems baffling to some people that we start with seed, but whatever we have to do to help people to have the material it takes to build a new reality, a new society. Food sovereignty, the threats, what we hear in the news everyday and we see, many people are very much afraid of what the future holds in this country, but while they’re doing that, we’re planting seed and growing grain and reclaiming that knowledge and farming techniques.’
The work of UCFA is vital, through forming alliances and partnerships across the US this is very much healing work- both in this current time of social conflict and unrest but also in addressing generations of historical trauma and displacement from land, culture and seeds.
I learnt such a huge amount in my short time with Bonnetta, and I am so grateful to her for sharing her wisdom and knowledge. Our conversations led to some deep self-reflection, and the drive to further explore my own ancestral roots. Something she said on our last day together has stuck with me since we parted ways, perhaps because it so beautifully echoes the path we all choose in our relationship to seed. Bonnetta recalled how as a young child, a family member gave her sage advice: when abundance comes your way, do you choose to hold it tight in closed palms, keeping it only for yourself, clinging on, stifling and crushing it in your grasp so it withers away? Or do you choose to hold it in an open palm and give forth what you receive. Whatever it is you hold may well leave your hands, but it is free to evolve and emerge and bring joy elsewhere. With open palms you are open to bounty, and everything else life may bring your way.