Rise & Root Farm Is Inviting Queer and Trans Youth Into the Garden
It’s a space where the community can come together to dream up new ways of caring for each other and the land.
By Leah Kirts
Them
August 25, 2023
Excerpt:
Michaela Hayes-Hodge is meditating on weeds. It’s summer in the Black Dirt region of New York’s Orange County, an area known for super fertile inky-black soil that makes all plants grow well. A glacial lake bed melted here 12,000 years ago, causing the soil’s unusually high concentration of organic matter. When it rains, weeds can grow up to a foot in one day, “and that’s not an exaggeration,” they grin assuringly, tucking a strand of cropped blonde hair behind their ear.
The 51-year-old farmer is one of four cofounders at Rise & Root Farm, a QTBIPOC-centered and cooperatively-run five acre plot on Munsee Lenape land in Chester, New York. She works on the farm alongside Karen Washington, Lorrie Clevenger, and Jane Hayes-Hodge, to whom she is married.
For over twenty years, the group’s activism has overlapped across the city in leadership roles at urban farming nonprofits and in training programs as both teachers and students. But it was through the Bronx’s patchwork of community gardens that the four first learned the power of growing their own food — connecting the dots between racial justice, food security, and land sovereignty — while working with others to build New York City’s urban agriculture movement from the ground up. Starting in 2007, the farmers ran a variety of programming at Just Food and helped establish Farm School NYC in 2010. The same year, Washington and Clevenger organized the first Black Urban Growers (BUG) conference after years of being two of very few Black people at typically white-led food conferences. BUG’s success propelled Washington to cofound the Black Farmer Fund, a social impact fund for Black-owned farms and food businesses, for which she received the 2023 James Beard Humanitarian of the Year Award. Individually and collectively, the group has advocated for public access to grow culturally meaningful foods and have learned to collaborate with each other and the land despite the constraints.
