Bad Day at Black Seed
An arson attack on a local farm
On Friday, July 19, an arsonist set fire to growing and processing equipment belonging to Black Seed Farm, a few miles from my home on Whidbey Island, just days before their grand opening.
In the words of founder Adasha Turner:
What upsets you about what you see happening? Is it the unity, the absence of dysfunction, humans feeding and caring for each other without fear? Seeing our future flourishing with black, brown and white kids together? I will NOT let this stop us. Whidbey Island you are better than this!
Local police and fire and investigators from surrounding counties spent fourteen hours at the farm and will be working to find the perpetrator. $250,000 in brand new equipment, including a hydroponic lab, was destroyed.
Farmland in the Pacific Northwest is overwhelmingly under white ownership. I first wrote in February 2024 about Black Seed Farm’s role in redressing that balance.
I discussed how the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 stated:
[...] That to all white male citizens of the United States [...] emigrating to and settling in said Territory between the first day of December, eighteen hundred and fifty, and the first day of December, eighteen hundred and fifty-three, [...] there shall be, and hereby is, granted the quantity of one quarter section, or one hundred and sixty acres of land, if a single man; or if married, [...] the quantity of one half section, or three hundred and twenty acres, one half to the husband and the other half to the wife in her own right [...]. (Full text here.)
Black and indigenous Americans, with the exception of "half-breed Indians" were excluded. Much of that land has remained in the same families, or of others who were in a position to buy it.
In 2019, Caroline Gardner gifted her ten-acre farm on Whidbey Island to Puget Sound Washington Agrarian Commons, in what would be The Local Land Gift that Seeded a National Movement.
Black-led Modest Family Solutions was selected as the long-term leaseholder and steward for the Puget Sound Agrarian Commons farmland in February 2022. Adasha Turner, founder and director of Modest Family Solutions is the long-term leaseholding steward and is launching Black Seed Agroecology Farm Village on the land.
Black Seed is already receiving support from the Whidbey Island community to help recover and rebuild. Volunteers have already shown up to clear away the debris. The director of our Shakespeare in the Park theatre company is making time even as her busy season starts to organize more work parties (Whidbey Island readers, DM me for details).
Adasha Turner has started a GoFundMe: Support BlackSeed Farms After Devastating Fire. I’ve already donated a month’s worth of this newsletter’s subscription income. If you’d like to couple a donation with a paid subscription to this newsletter, I’ll pass on the first payment of any new subscription I receive this month to the fundraiser.
As America considers a Black woman president, this attack on a Black woman farmer is sobering. Let us show we are better than this. Please check your candidates’ values and vote, all the way down the ticket, for the kind of future you want to see. Let’s make Bad Day at Black Rock a movie again.
John, thank you for sharing with all of us this heartbreaking and important information. We see the patterns, we see the eruptions of hate and desire for oppression. And we see the people coming together over and over to resist and repair. I can't imagine how exhausted many people in your island community are. Sending them all a lot of love and all the solidarity.
God, I just finished reading Parable of the Sower this weekend and wow, the parallels. I have been following Black Seed with interest. Crap. What a terrible act of cruelty.