Meet the Solutionists: Soul Fire Farm’s Leah Penniman

For my new book, The Solutionists, I had the great pleasure of interviewing CEOs, entrepreneurs, and activists. In the book, I draw out new models and learnings from comparing their stories. But the interviews themselves were so awesome, I’m sharing some extracts from them as companion reading to the book.  

Leah Penniman is an activist, an author, and a farmer – though even those expansive labels don’t capture the depth and breadth of her work. It was an honor to hear her story.

Leah is one of those Solutionists – curious solvers of problems – whose journey started young. As a teenager, she spent her time working on farms across Massachusetts, reading farming books, and even visiting agriculture conferences. But, for a young girl, it was disappointing to discover that all the revered leaders in sustainable agriculture were white men.

Her own experiences later in life prompted a life’s mission. Living in Albany, New York, she couldn’t find fresh vegetables to feed her children. Her neighborhood had only a burger bar, a corner store, and a liquor store. Leah calls it food apartheid – which happens when low-income areas have too few supermarkets and long-established structural inequalities mean the same areas are also more likely to be home to people of color.

So she started farming for herself. In 2010, she launched Soul Fire Farm – an Afro-Indigenous led non-profit farm that grows organic food on mountain land in New York. It’s based on indigenous farming practices that nurture the land, and all the food grown is given at no or low cost to people who couldn’t otherwise access it. The farm also offers training, to bring more Black and Brown people into farming. Plus, the team works to drive policy change around access to land and food.

Penniman’s farm is aptly named. As she told me her story, I was left with no doubt her work is soul-led, and lit by a fire of determination to see justice for her community. Here is just some of what she told me about the real-time power of positivity, and how to become the leader the world needs.

How do you convince skeptics that sustainability or climate action is worth it?

This might seem cliché, but this is our only planet, so this is the lifeboat that we all share. I'm not going to use a capitalist argument to justify why we should have a home and why we should prioritize life for ourselves and for all of our beyond-human siblings who also have intrinsic value.

 We're at a point where we have to step back as humanity and look at our higher values, our collective values and ask ourselves what kind of world we're obligated to leave to our children, our grandchildren and all those who come after. And also just what kind of world we want to live in now. We have gone through a terrible drought this year, terrible flooding last year, wildfires impacting our community. This is not abstract. This is having real impacts on our lives, our health, our wellbeing. It's absolutely an urgent state and we need to band together to address it.

Is there anything other business leaders and changemakers should start doing?

Absolutely, oh my goodness. We need to stop with the talk about ‘net’ carbon. We need absolute carbon reduction – it's not about grabbing up forests and claiming them to sequester our carbon, we actually need to change our technologies, reduce our consumption and rethink global distribution of resources.

We must prioritize leadership or front lines communities. Those most impacted by climate change globally and regionally are the ones who have the solutions. Black and Brown communities, displaced communities, poor communities, farmers, peasants, people who work the land – they need to be in leadership, not tokenized or ignored and certainly not left to deal with the consequences of the actions of the wealthy nations. That's going to mean land reform, it's going to mean reparations, and it's going to mean really rethinking policy in a big way. We really need to start thinking about, how do we use our legislative levers in order to push for the type of behaviors that we want to see?

Are you a pessimist, optimist, realist, or other -ist?

My daughter asked me this. She is involved in Sunrise Movement and some college organizing, and she's like, 'You know, I don't think we're going to win'. And from a rational frame, I can't see that she's wrong. It's really hard not to get discouraged.

But when I take a step back – if we behave as if we will win, not only do we make that outcome possible, but we actually also improve the conditions for life in real-time.

When I make a decision to run my farm regeneratively, to act in pro-social ways, to make sustainable, ecological choices – that has an impact on air pollution in real-time, on food apartheid in real-time, on structural racism in real-time. And so there is an impact now, even if I never see the proverbial promised land.

Conversely, if we all were to decide, ‘we're not going to win, so there's no point,' and to lean into hedonism and exploitation, we're going exacerbate existing inequalities and harms. Plus, everyone would be really rotten to be around.

So regardless of how I predict the outcome in the future, I'm going to go ahead and behave as if we will win. Because I think that that is realistic if we want the world we want to see.

Learn more about Leah Penniman, Soul Fire Farm, and how to become a Solutionist in my new book, The Solutionists. Click here to pre order your copy.