Seattle’s Black Farmers Collective Nurtures Communities and Crops

By Syris Valentine

Clamoungou stood at the end of a 100-foot-long crop bed studded by the wilting leaves and sagging stalks of the last remaining collards. Transparent tarps nailed to the ends of a half-finished greenhouse whipped in the wind behind him. With his arms spread wide, he dragged in lengths of a pliable black tube — drip tape, used for slow-release watering — that stretched the length of the row, twisting his torso as he doubled the tape over on itself. Next, he planned to mow down the still-standing plants before sowing rye and vetch, cover crops that would hold the soil in place during the wet winter ahead and fix nitrogen and other nutrients in it, ready for the vegetables he’d seed the coming spring.

While the cover crops prepped the land, Clamoungou and his crew prepped themselves, along with the equipment, infrastructure and seedlings they’d need for a successful growing season. Even on a compact farm like Small Axe, which spans only four acres — the national average is 446 acres — there was much to be done: crop rotations to plan, greenhouse doors to finish, a new shed to build.

But, as part of the nonprofit Black Farmers Collective, Small Axe is more than just a place for growing food. It’s also a place for growing Black-owned farm-based businesses and helping the collective to fulfill its mission: building a Black-led food system that heals and enlivens Seattle’s Black community. The collective collaborates with Black-led markets and food banks, and brings people together to celebrate life and land, with its farms and farmers at the center of its efforts.

Prior to founding the collective, Ray Williams, its executive director, was involved in two small gardens in central and south Seattle, one of which was tucked behind the Africatown Center for Education and Innovation. Then, in 2018, the Black Farmers Collective formed to establish Yes Farm on a 1.5-acre plot in central Seattle, where organizers host volunteer days, summer cookouts, and food and gardening classes.

In 2020, Williams learned that King County was looking to lease and reactivate fallow farmland in the Sammamish River Valley. Williams and Clamoungou inspected the weed-strewn land, talked about what they could do with it, applied for the lease, and Small Axe Farm was born.

SMALL AXE helps expand the work the collective began at Yes Farm: addressing the epidemic of food insecurity in Seattle’s Black community. According to data published by Communities Count, a resource offered by Public Health-Seattle & King County, nearly a third of Black Seattleites over the age of 18 experience food insecurity. By partnering with local food banks, Black-led mutual aid networks and other community groups, the collective distributes the food it grows to those most in need.

“That’s one of the things that first brought me into farming,” Clamoungou said, “having a tangible result at the end of the work, something that literally feeds the body and feeds the souls of people.”

Beyond that, Small Axe is a space where Black food entrepreneurs can grow their businesses and prepare to one day own their own land. Getting land into the hands of Black farmers is crucial to the collective’s mission because of centuries of dispossession: Despite being the soul, spine and driving force of the early American economy, formerly enslaved African Americans struggled to acquire and hold onto land post-Emancipation.

Black people never received any land-based reparations — the commonly quoted 40 acres and a mule. Still, W.E.B. Dubois estimated that in 1875, Black farmers owned 3 million acres, less than 1% of the total farmland recorded in the 1870 agricultural census. At the time, the population of the United States was 12.6% Black.

By 1910, Black ownership of farmland had risen to 16 million acres, or just under 2% of all farmland; that year, Black people accounted for more than 10% of the population. But just over a century later, by 2017 — the year of the most recent agricultural census — Black farmers had lost most of that slim gain, owning now just 0.5% of all farmland, even though Black people comprise over 14% of the population.