Jamila Norman is the star of homegrown, a Magnolia Network show where Norman helps families start their own gardens to support themselves. She hopes that the lessons she teaches on urban agriculture will have a ripple effect on the surrounding community.
An environmental engineer by trade, Norman got into agriculture in 2010 when she and her business partner, Chef Beee, started Patchwork City Farms in Atlanta.
She became an environmental engineer because she wanted to solve climate and sustainability problems, and agriculture is no different. “Atlanta has a lot of bad air quality. So having that lush green helps contribute to positive air quality. Farming in the city was also a way that we were able to divert a lot of wood chips and compost, things that would have gone to landfills.”
She said: “Farming wasn’t just about addressing one thing, it was about creating an ecosystem of health and wellness.” Norman’s father is from Trinidad and her mother grew up on the family farm in Jamaica, where Norman’s great-grandmother produced coconut oil and her great-grandfather raised bulls. “I have reverence for how my great-grandparents lived their lives, living off the land.
“One of the things I found in the community I moved to in Atlanta was access to fresh food. Access to fresh food was virtually non-existent. There was a lot of fast food, a lot of corner stores, all of that,” Norman said. “I saw an opportunity to take unused space in the city and use it to grow food, using that space in an ecological and sustainable way.”
Patchwork City Farms sits on 1.2 acres in Atlanta, and when Norman and Chef Beee started in 2010, they were leasing the land to a local public school. But both owning the land she farmed on and making a profit were critical. The relationship that blacks from the African diaspora have with agriculture is long and rich. Still, it’s a relationship marked by Europeans forcing us to slave the land, stealing the earnings from our sweat as sharecroppers and depriving us of nutrients as so many of us are pushed into food deserts.
The farm owned by Black is also critically endangered. In the past century, the number of black-owned farms has dropped from about 925,000 in 1920 to 35,000 between 2012 and 2017, a 96% decline. Norman shows how farming can be a thriving business for blacks and encourages others to farm as he highlights the history and present of black farmers. “I’m not the first, I’m not the last,” he said. “I have no problem being visible, but I will always acknowledge and exalt the fact that this is a lineage of work that we have been doing for centuries.”
We caught up with Norman to talk about how gardens empower communities, the story of Black farmers, and how her great-grandparents’ commitment to food sovereignty has inspired her.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Red Magnolia
What are some of your favorite moments when you made people feel empowered to create their farm or garden, and how did you create a ripple effect in your community or their lives?
I have a partnership at the moment with the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance. They’re a black-led environmental conservation group here. We have been using the food we grow there to do mutual aid distributions of fresh produce to the community. The elderly people of the community are being fed weekly with fresh products. It would be wonderful to have them participate in the garden, but mobility is an issue, so we are growing and delivering direct.
And student gardens are totally fun because kids get really excited about fresh fruits and vegetables once they get involved in the garden. It is very practical and tactile for them to see something grow from a small seed. It’s like they’re pulling a secret out of the ground that they can eat.
It also helps them tap into family knowledge, like remembering, ‘Oh my gosh, my grandmother had a garden and she would be so proud of me for doing this.’
How does family knowledge impact your farming and gardening?
My great-grandmother lived to be 103 years old. I also knew my great-grandfather, but I was little. The stories I know of them come from my mother. My great grandparents raised her until she was 16, when she came to New York to meet her mom.
My great-grandparents believed in getting everything they needed, their livelihood, from the land. They raised chickens, but the main product they made was coconut oil. That’s what my great-grandmother took to the market, along with the fruits and vegetables she grew. She also used to go around different parts of Jamaica during the mango season and take mangoes to the market. That was her life that helped her support 10 of her children.
And she also raised many of her grandchildren, as her children emigrated to establish a better life abroad and finally reunited with her children later after they arranged things.
Red Magnolia
That is an important lesson that we must seize as we see the climate crisis becoming more and more catastrophic. Does focusing on food sustainability help you feel less powerless?
It is not an individual problem. However, it will require people to commit to addressing the problem. These are not new topics either. I entered environmental engineering in 1997 because these problems existed then. And they existed long before. My work has helped catalyze many other people to return to the land and manage it sustainably and beneficially. When you manage the land sustainably, you are helping to address the climate crisis. Agriculture is such a broad field, but it also has a significant impact on the environment. If we can get more and more people to transition to a more sustainable way of doing agriculture that impacts food, forestry and clothing.
What is your favorite place you have traveled to and what did you learn about its food culture?
Every time I travel, I look for the food and agriculture culture. I can’t get away from it. My favorite place I have traveled to was Zanzibar in Tanzania. The country is tropical and reminds me of my Caribbean heritage. They grow many of the foods that are familiar to me, as well as many other foods. The cuisine is incredible, incorporating African, Persian and Indian traditions. Zanzibar has a long history of a strong spice trade, which is reflected in the food culture.
How have you felt its impact as a black woman who is visible in agriculture, a field in which we have always been present, but in which we have not had much positive representation?
I’m not the ‘in front of the camera’ kind of girl. It stretches the imagination that I’m even doing this. But I jumped on the network opportunity because of the visibility my business partner, Chef Beee, and I had brought to people who gravitated toward urban farming work. They hadn’t seen themselves doing this work, so they said, ‘Wow, is this even possible?’ I wanted a platform to inspire a wider audience and gain insight into urban farming and gardening. I don’t take it lightly because I am visibly in a role that is not expected of women and has not been celebrated in the past.
Red Magnolia
People try to imply that I’m the first or that what I’m doing is radical. But there are black women here in the city of Atlanta who have been farming for decades. I admire you. The race to be the ‘first’ black person to do something in food drives me crazy.
It plays into the false idea that black people have done next to nothing in this country. To me, it enriches the work that you’re doing to say, ‘I come from a lineage of people who have done this, who know how to do this. I just carry that torch’, instead of saying you’re first. I understand why people do it and what they are looking for, but I constantly challenge them to unpack that. You don’t have to deny history to rise up. As my dad says all day: ‘There’s nothing new under the sun.’
I notice you use the word “management”. What does it mean to manage the land?
I am intentional with the word stewardship because we are here for a moment. Although there is this concept of land ownership, you do not own the land. You have the right to access it and create a space for yourself.
But the land was here before, and the land will be after. I’m just here managing it, working on it, and doing everything I can to do right by the earth and nature. Ownership and who is in control are fluid. I’m all about the Land Back movement, giving the land back to the natives in whatever way that means. The land is something I’m managing at the moment, and after I’m gone, I hope someone else will manage it in the same way or better.
