Shifting Ground: Farming, Land Use, and Food Sovereignty

Himanee Gupta-Carlson, a writer and professor with SUNY Empire State College, will be writing a series of articles over the next year about moving the farm she and her husband Jim Gupta-Carlson own and operate from a small piece of land in Saratoga County to a much larger parcel in Washington County. The articles in the “Shifting Ground” series will reflect on the journey as well as the couple’s commitments to cultivating food security on a regional level through regenerative agricultural practices and participating in food sovereignty movements worldwide. This article lays out the terrain that future writings will explore, and draws on remarks that Himanee made during the North County Art, Land, & Environment Summit’s September 16 panel on Food Sovereignty in the Time of COVID-19.

Welcome. 

I greet you from two farms, both of which sit on the lands of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and specifically those of the Mohawk.

I greet you as a writer, professor, farmer, daughter of immigrants from India, and a self-acknowledged settler. A series of events in America’s colonialist history place my present farm in Saratoga County, New York. A series of racialized protests against our regenerative farming practices in our community have prompted my husband and I to move away from there and bring our farm to lands we recently purchased along the Hudson River in the area known today as Washington County. As a settler, I honor the original caretakers of both lands and offer respect to the Haudenosaunee who are here, in body and in spirit. I seek to learn more of their history and land use practices in an effort to develop respectful relationships with my indigenous neighbors and the land.

From April 2019 until September 2020, my husband and I were embroiled in a local dispute over whether we had a right to farm on our land. That dispute led me to reflect on what might constitute appropriate land use, and how much such factors as irate neighbors and the sudden invocation of rarely enforced zoning codes played into who got to decide what uses were best. 

It also instilled in me a resolve to become a better steward of the land I was working. I sensed instinctively that the land also was working me — healing me and educating me. That effort at more conscious stewardship has come to represent my space within the food sovereignty movement, as I discussed during the September 2020 North Country Land, Art, and Environment Summit. 

Learning to Farm

Our farm is Squashville Farm. It is named after the road in Saratoga County where my husband Jim and I moved to in 2011. We moved to upstate New York from Seattle — Duwamish and Salish country — in 2010, and started the farm as a backyard garden shortly after purchasing our house. 

How the garden became a farm has a lot to do with the soil we discovered in the backyard when the snow melted. It was literally dead. The land had been hunting and fishing grounds for the Haudenosaunee. European settlement shifted the use to dairy production until about the mid-1950s, when red and white pine cultivation took over to create lumber and paper. Beginning around the 1970s, these industries died out, and the land fell mostly into disuse. 

The previous owner of the property was a single mother with two boys. One of them — a teenager — rented or borrowed a Kubota tractor and dug out most of the yard to create a race track for dirt bikes. Repeated runs over the track’s bumps, hills, and ditches killed the life in the soil, which caused nearby trees to die. 

I had had some experience of gardening with raised beds. I suggested to Jim that we turn the track into a series of winding raised beds. With goat and sheep manure, green manure from an overabundance of zucchini we planted, and hundreds of dollars of topsoil, that is pretty much what we did. By the end of 2011, we had renamed the race track the garden circle. 

Jim began learning how to rebuild the soil further by rotating crops and introducing animal grazing into the rotation. We got chickens, then goats, and later ducks, then geese. Jim also began learning how the soil would heal if we ceased such practices as mowing and tilling. 

We stopped mowing in 2014. By 2019, our backyard was full of flowering weeds that attract bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and other pollinators. Our gardens were producing at least 20 times the amount of food that we ourselves could eat, and our animals were providing us not only with eggs and meat but also manure that feeds the soil and reduces reliance on organic fertilizers. The animals and the land also were giving us good health, vigor, and joy. 

Since then (and before then) we have been donating vegetables and eggs in the peak seasons to a local food pantry, a grassroots Black Lives Mamas movement, and a group home on our block. Since 2015, we have maintained a CSA for eggs and have sold our products at farmers markets in Saratoga and Schenectady counties. I also have been coordinating a garden at a Saratoga food pantry and facilitating a partnership between the pantry and one of our farmers markets through which products from the market’s vendors are brought to the pantry for distribution to elderly and lower-income consumers. 

As we prepare to shift our operation from our current site of 3 acres to our new one of 48 acres, we look forward to more.

Our Identity and Purpose 

As our lives have evolved from being gardeners to farmers, I have tried to define our identities and roles. For instance, from about 2013 to 2015, I struggled to define what was happening in our backyard. Were we creating a garden? Or was it a homestead? Or was it a farm? I looked up the terms and discovered that the USDA defines a farm in capitalistic terms. A farm is a space where products such as foods are created for the purpose of selling. A farm, in essence, is a business that seeks profit.

I also wanted to articulate our relationships with farmers markets and community organizations that went beyond the simplistic ideas of “charity” and “business.” Through this process, I came across the terms “food security” and “food sovereignty.” After I received some commendation for contributing to the “food security” of Saratoga County, I began describing food security as one of the missions for our farm. Then, my niece introduced me to the idea of food sovereignty, which I used interchangeably with food security until I came to realize the terms are quite distinct and in some ways at odds with each other.

The United Nations defines food security as the condition of having physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. (See also these academic articles by Elizabeth Hoover and Bobby J. Smith.) The term has been deemed inadequate — and perhaps even insensitive — because it does not stipulate who produces the food and whether the food is provided in a manner that is relevant historically, culturally, socially, and spiritually to those who consume it. In a sense, food security is like the notion of tolerance: racism with a benign face. It can perpetuate systemic oppression of Black, indigenous, and other marginalized peoples by forcing upon them foods that do not meet their cultural needs.

Food sovereignty is much more than a sense of security within an existing racist and colonialist societal framework. It is a movement, a relationship, a spiritual and cultural awakening that seeks to break that framework and establish a new one where all peoples can live in an equitable way. Food is central to this movement because food is much more than something we eat. It is central to one’s identity, social relationships, and health. 

Where I stand is complex. As a farmer, I am engaged in the trading of foods for money. I might not be in it for profit, but I recognize we incur costs in producing our foods and that sales allow us to recoup those costs. Despite inadequacies in the concept of food security, I support food security efforts. I want to give some of my food to those in need because it is healthy, delicious, and beneficial. I am pleased to be a provider of such foods through my own contributions, the garden I coordinate, the weekly donations at farmers markets I collect, and the foods I sell. I also believe in food sovereignty and see it as a space for continual learning, alliance building, action and growth. 

The Effects of Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered many realities. For starters, the corporate food supply chain is weaker than the small farms, community gardens, and not-for-profit agricultural entities it has sought to suppress. When the pandemic hit, groceries didn’t have enough food because the transport networks that linked corporate farms to corporate stores had shut down. Corporate farms lost the ability to process and sell their crops and livestock. Much of that product went to waste. 

In the meantime, small farms such as ours did well. We engage in direct sales to customers on a local level only, which meant that we could still get our food to our customers and that we could assure new customers that they could trust food from us. Only two sets of hands are on our produce from the time of harvest to the point of purchase -- Jim’s and mine.In a sense, this is food sovereignty at a low level: Ownership of one’s body and peace of mind through local food, and some control over the food one eats through being a farmer and/or knowing the farmer from where the food comes. That relationship has always existed. During the pandemic, it became more apparent.

There are other, less positive realities: As the more affluent consumers have grabbed local foods, there’s a risk of less being available to those who need it — BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color) communities and the economically marginalized. There is also the backlash to success. As BIPOC farmers and other producers create structures of resilience such as gardens that become entrepreneurial farms, the white majority feels a threat. And they lash out. 

Moving Our Farm

The neighbors on Squashville Road argued that a regenerative farm like ours had no place in a rural neighborhood that was zoned residential. In doing so, they revealed themselves to be subtle allies of the corporate food supply chain. They did not want a farm in their backyards because it would mean dealing with farm life: roosters crowing instead of alarm clocks, goats bleating instead of leaf blowers and lawn mowers humming, bees pollinating, grasses growing, fewer predators because of the farm life with all of its messiness and smells.

One farmer who is white, conservative, and a believer in regenerative farming spoke in defense of our farm at a public hearing in February 2020. Those who oppose farms, he said, seem to think they don’t need to eat. Despite his sage words and those of others, the neighbors won. We were left with a choice to either stop farming or move.

In September 2020, Jim and I went to our new land to bless it. In the house, which sits literally on the Hudson River as is evidenced in its very wet basement, we offered halwa — a sweet dish used in the Hindu rituals of my religious and cultural heritage — and water from our Squashville Road well. Outside in the fields, we offered the crops we grow for nourishment and sustenance as well as in honor of the Haudenosaunee and numerous other indigenous peoples: corn, squash, and beans. 

As the fall closes out our final harvest on Squashville Road, we look forward to the season of rest and of renewing our efforts with Squashville Farm in working our new land, and allowing it to work us.

Images courtesy of Jim Gupta-Carlson.