Minkah Taharkah, Multidisciplinary Artist, Land Steward, and Environmental Justice Advocate

In this episode, Jordan sits down with Minkah Taharkah — multidisciplinary artist, land steward, and coordinator for the California Farmer Justice Collaborative — for a wide-ranging conversation about food, equity, and what it means to put down roots in Fresno.

Minkah traces her relationship with ecology from her childhood on Crenshaw Boulevard, where she watched the city cut down a boulevard full of trees to make way for the Space Shuttle, to her years farming with Black Earth Farms in the Bay Area, to her current work supporting BIPOC growers across California. Along the way, she and Jordan dig into the real barriers to agricultural equity — from a farmer driving refrigerated produce from Fresno to San Francisco each week just to make ends meet, to the challenge of getting small farms the marketing support they need to sell local.

They also get into it on permaculture and regenerative agriculture (and why the definitions matter more than people think), the spirituality of planting a seed and trusting it to grow, and what happened when the city of Fresno sent Minkah a complaint about her front yard garden — which she promptly got certified as an official wildlife habitat. 

Links

• https://www.natureoftrust.org/
• https://www.farmerjustice.com/
• https://www.thebutterflymovement.com/#/
• https://www.instagram.com/walkroftheskeye/
• www.linkedin.com/in/minkah-taharkah-smith-256457112

Books recommended:

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard