BIPOC Farm Collective Starts Strong with Two Major National Awards

 A small farm project in Milwaukie that will provide no-cost land for BIPOC growers has received two national awards in its first year of operation.

The Strawberry Lane Collective launched in January with the aim of making the farm a land trust for BIPOC growers and beekeepers. The Practice Grant will help launch the collective’s Rotate, Graze, Grow project to place a pair of blackbelly sheep around the farm to help remove aggressive and invasive plant species, more quickly readying the land for growers. The collective was also recognized with the Garden Conservancy Award this year.

A pair of blackbelly sheep will help rid the farm of invasive plants. (Photo via Instagram, Practice Landscape @practicelandscape)
“It’s always been important to (farm owner Monica Melger) to make sure that BIPOC growers have access to that land, as a kind of reparations project,” collective member Dorian Campbell, who runs the project with Dennise Mofidi, Jasmine Barber and Dawn Cohoe, told The Skanner. “So while folks who live out there are white, they’re allowing BIPOC folks to farm or garden or grow mushrooms or work with bees out there, free of charge, knowing that land access is a big problem for BIPOC folks, and for Black folks in this area…it can be really difficult and really expensive.”

The Practice Foundation provides “direct funding to grantees for projects that expand the ways humans design and care for the land,” according to cofounder Emily Hicks.

In their application for the grant, the collective noted only 1.5% of U.S. farmers are Black, and pointed out that due to Oregon's history of violent and exclusionary racist laws, only 0.1% of farmers throughout the state are Black.

The Strawberry Lane Collective is part of a burgeoning movement to help BIPOC Oregonians access the state’s rich agricultural resources.

“Everything is no cost,” Campbell said. “Everyone out there has access to any part of the land that they’re interested in, water use, bathroom, kitchen use on the property – all for free.”

The Skanner sat down with Campbell and Mofidi to discuss their vision for the collective. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What will the Practice Grant allow you to do?

Campbell: The Practice Grant was a major game-changer for all of us. We’re all really newer, smaller projects, but we won. It’s allowed us to have money – at least for me, to do things right, as a new business owner, to not have to take shortcuts or compromise on the quality.

It’s allowing us the money to build the infrastructure to get the sheep that are going to help clear the land. By the end of the month we’ll have two sheep out there, we’re going to be rotating around to help clear the invasive English ivy and Himalayan blackberry that’s taking over the land. It’s a lot of money to get that infrastructure in place, which snowballs – fencing to get sheep, which means we’ll be able to clear more land, which means I have access to more land to grow, we have more land to offer other people to grow that isn’t covered in blackberry or ivy, so you don’t have to do a ton of labor when first you’re starting out.

It really opened things up to do things the right way, to do things at a pace that feels good and is sustainable…As Black people who are used to scraping and figuring things out, it’s nice not to have to do that.

Tell us about Otter Paws and Pharm to Body, two of the inaugural programs at the collective. 

Mofidi: Pharm to Body is run by me and Jasmine. We basically have been researching mushrooms for two years now, experimenting with growing. Now that we have it down, we know what we’re doing, we came across Dawn’s post asking if everyone wanted to use the land to grow mushrooms, and we said yes. Growing mushrooms to help rejuvenate the environment and the land, using permaculture, and now we’re working on a project where we’re using overgrown blackberries to try to grow oyster mushrooms.

Basically, our main goal with Pharm to Body is to get communities of color to take them every day because they're so good for our bodies, and just incorporating it into our diets because they help prevent major diseases (that impact) entire communities, like diabetes and heart disease.

Once we get a bigger operation, we’ll have supplements and things like that. We’ll be working with schools and food pantries around town to get our mushrooms out there into the communities we want them to go to. We can all go to Whole Foods and farmers markets and pay $20 for a pound of mushrooms, but we just really have the intention to give to communities of color.

We’re really learning our ancestors used to have this in their diets too.

Campbell: Otter Paw Herbs is a culinary and medicinal herb-growing business. I’m growing a wide array of herbs that can be used either just as-is, providing folks bulk dried and fresh herbs to use for herbalists in the community who make medicine for the community, or folks who are just interested, or folks who just want some parsley to go with their dinner that night. I think a big part of why I started this is just feeling how important it is for Black folks to just reconnect with the land and to be engaged with their food processing and just with the agricultural community in Portland and in Oregon, just so they can have more say over what they’re putting in their bodies and have more options.

I’m also working on some tea blends, some spice blends, infused salts and sugars – getting good quality products that are grown with love and intention into my community. And at prices that they can afford to have access to the things that for generations we’ve been using, and herbs that our ancestors have been using to maintain themselves and to feel good.

This is our inheritance.

It’s important we relearn all those things, and that it’s not scary or sketchy “witch stuff.”

This is knowledge that we have the right to have access to, and have the right to continue those practices because they work and are so beneficial to us. 

Are there other programs or groups doing similar things who you’re working with? 

Mofidi: Jasmine and I are in a program where we’ve been able to network with other farmers. Because growing mushrooms is so good for the soil and your land, especially the leftovers, we’ve been able to connect with other mushroom farmers or even worm farmers in the area that want to do exchange, instead of having to use capitalism, we’re echoing that.

Black Futures Farm was telling us how they used that kind of system a lot during COVID to get things built, exchanging – it’s exciting, seeing how we can operate outside the system and support farmers too with our little projects.

Campbell: The agricultural community in Portland is really big on working cooperatively so people are very down to share any knowledge or resources they have, so we’ve been getting plugged in with those, taking advantage of folks that have been very willing to offer any knowledge and information they can to help out. 

What is the significance, for you, of providing land access to BIPOC growers?

Mofidi: We’re Portland natives, born and raised, so we’ve seen a lot of land be taken away from family members and people that we know, and the neighborhood changing. I think it’s really important for us, coming from Portland, to try to get some land back. Education has always been at the forefront; with mushrooms there is so much education that has to be done. We just are very happy about being able to kind of reverse what we’ve seen going on in the past decades.

Campbell: All four of us are actually born and raised in Portland…the impacts, living through and witnessing the impacts of gentrification, and watching our community be pushed around by the government and by rich white people, even if it’s not at the forefront, that definitely informs a lot of what and why we do what we do.