Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation
In the heart of Louisiana, about 100 miles north of Baton Rouge, lies the rain-soaked farm that lured Konda Mason away from California in 2020. Reflecting on her journey to the South, the entrepreneur and spiritual teacher has no regrets about relocating from Oakland to the small city of Alexandria to start growing rice. She chuckles while explaining how she got there: in an RV with two loved ones and two dogs. But a hint of frustration creeps into her voice when she talks about the weather. Planting the Seeds of JusticeThis article is part of our ongoing series, Planting the Seeds of Justice, in which we focus on the connections between climate, health, soil health, and equity for farmers of color. Read all the stories in this series: A Black-Led Agricultural Community Takes Shape in Maryland An urban farm trailblazer begins building a Black agrarian corridor in rural Maryland, fostering community and climate resilience. Land access was the first step. Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation Jubilee Justice grows rice regeneratively while reclaiming the past. “Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.” Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps small-holder Black farmers in the South grow specialty rice with the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a “dry-land” method developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of growing rice in flooded paddies to prevent weeds from overtaking the crop, SRI farmers treat rice like a vegetable, irrigating it as needed and using other weed control methods. “What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.” Created on Madagascar and practiced in about 60 countries today, SRI has been shown to increase grain yields, sometimes twofold. The method also tackles the significant climate impact of conventional rice production. Methane emissions created by flooded rice paddies account for about 10 percent of global agricultural emissions. That’s because so much rice is grown around the world: Roughly 11 percent of all arable land is devoted to this crop, a daily staple for half the people on Earth. Per calorie, though, rice produces fewer emissions than most staple foods, including meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and even other grains like wheat and corn. And growing rice with SRI can cut those emissions nearly in half. (Rice has other issues, namely that it can contain high amounts of arsenic, depending on the variety and where it’s grown; however, rice grown under drier conditions, like SRI, likely has less arsenic.) Despite all the advantages of SRI, it’s scarcely practiced in the U.S. because it requires specialized equipment, involves a lot more labor, and is extremely difficult to pull off. “That’s why people think we’re crazy,” Mason said. But she has powerful reasons to focus on rice despite the challenges. For Mason, rice represents a way to transform lives and reclaim the past, offering a path toward racial, economic, and climate justice. A Flow of Knowledge Jubilee Justice’s rice program, called the Black Farmers Cohort, currently consists of 10 farmers from Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Collectively, they cultivate seven different varieties, including the organization’s signatures: “Black Joy,” “Creole Country Red,” “Black Belt Sticky,” and “Jubilee Justice Jasmine.” The team in Alexandria is testing 20 more varieties at their 17-acre farm, located on a former cotton plantation that serves as the central research hub for crop and equipment trials. Mason notes that knowledge flows out as much as it flows in, because everyone is learning. At the Jubilee Justice farm in Alexandria, Louisiana, rice is farmed with a “dry-land” method called System of Rice Intensification (SRI). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice) “We are basically figuring it out year by year,” explained Erika Styger, director of the Climate-Resilient Farming Systems Program at Cornell University. A leading provider of SRI technical assistance to small-holder farmers worldwide, Styger has been a Jubilee Justice advisor since the Black Farmers Cohort began in 2019. Jublilee Justice is the only organization in the U.S. “actively implementing and systematically researching the [SRI] method organically, regeneratively, and in collaboration with multiple farmers,” she said. Essentially, these farmers are the vanguards of a grand Southern experiment—part of what makes their work so challenging. SRI can take years to adjust to a single farming operation and microclimate, Styger said, and having farmers around who have already done it successfully and can share their wisdom minimizes a “difficult” and “fragile” learning period. Being the first ones to pursue SRI on U.S. soil, Jubilee Justice doesn’t have this option. “It takes a lot of knowledge and fine-tuning, and you need to be ready to adapt to different situations,” she added. Styger thinks the growing pains are worth it, though: “In the long run, of course, you’re building a much-improved system that will be able to withstand climate change much better.” With SRI, farmers can cut by half the typical 800 to 5,000 liters of water used to grow one kilogram of rice, resulting in a 43 percent reduction in methane emissions, according to a brief by Styger and her Cornell colleague Norman Uphoff. While SRI may slightly increase nitrous oxide emissions, Styger and Uphoff found its advantages outweigh the potential downsides: SRI has been shown to lower the global warming potential of rice production by 25 percent on average. Caryl Levine, co-founder of Lotus Foods, a California-based company specializing in SRI with farmers in Asia and Southeast Asia, says dryland rice farming is gaining popularity because “it’s much more regenerative” than conventional flooding. Still, it’s taken decades for the practice to spread. Lotus Foods primarily works with farmers overseas, but teamed up with Mason to work on bringing Jubilee Justice rice to market. “It was a long-term goal of Lotus Foods to work with domestic farmers who are willing to use SRI practices,” Levine has said. With as many challenges as successes these past four years, the Black Farmers Cohort has yet to meet the volume threshold for Lotus to put their rice on grocery store shelves. Mason remains optimistic, though, saying, “We’re getting there.” In November, her farm in Alexandria achieved a milestone by harvesting its first full acre of rice after three years of smaller trials, marking their best harvest yet. Jubilee Justice supplies farmers who are a part of the Black Farmers Cohort with everything they need to get started with SRI, including seeds, equipment, minerals, fertilizers, labor support, and technical assistance. In addition to funding from small family foundations, the organization received a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2021. MacArthur described the organization as “transformative,” providing support to “Black farming communities through new models of regenerative farming, cooperative ownership, and access to new markets by restoring and accelerating Black land ownership to create generational wealth.” Honoring Their Ancestors Mason started forming the Black Farmers Cohort and bringing in a network of experts to ensure their success about eight months before she left California. She’d already had multiple careers, managing a Grammy-nominated musician, producing an Academy Award-nominated film, and founding a co-working space in downtown Oakland, Impact Hub, an incubator for entrepreneurs, creatives, and environmentally conscious organizations. Jubilee Justice Specialty Foods co-op members. Top row, left to right: James Coleman, Roy Mosley, Hilery Gobert, Collie Graddick, and CJ Fields. Bottom row, left to right: Jose Gonzalez, Konda Mason, Bernard Singleton, and visiting farmer Rodney Mason (not a member of the co-op). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice) Mason’s choice to focus on rice was an intentional nod to America’s intertwined racial, economic, and environmental histories: Around the end of the 17th century, before “king cotton” blanketed Southern fields, American colonists in the South Carolina Lowcountry recognized the potential to profit from cultivating rice along coastal waterways. “But the American colonists had no experience with the cultivation of rice, and they needed African slaves who knew how to plant, harvest, and process this difficult crop,” writes anthropologist Joseph A. Opala. The colonists set their sights on the peoples of Africa’s “Rice Coast,” from present-day Senegal down to Liberia, who had developed sophisticated rice cultivation systems. Opala says plantation owners were willing to pay higher prices for dragging these expert farmers across the Atlantic into North American slavery. Over two centuries, hundreds of thousands of acres were cleared to establish rice plantations, shaping the Southern economy and landscape. “After emancipation, Black folks left and walked away from our birthright to be rice farmers,” said Mason. “What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.” Even the name Jubilee Justice suggests reclamation and restoration. Mason was inspired by the “Jubilee Year,” referenced in the Bible, signifying a cycle that occurred every 50 years when “land that was taken goes back to its original owner, debts are forgiven, and people who have been enslaved are set free,” said Mason. “It’s a year of reboot and equity and justice.” Challenges of a Changing Climate Louisiana is known for being a wet state, but this year’s unusually long and rainy spring prevented Mason’s team from planting rice until summer, putting their young crops at risk of wilting in the field. Across the Black Farmers Cohort, many attribute their climate challenges to relentless rains and intense heat. In 2023, Louisiana got so hot that its governor declared a state of emergency. “It’s like the spigot turned off, which was the rain, and the heat turned up,” said Donna Isaacs, who runs Campti Field of Dreams, a nonprofit with a 43-acre organic farm in Campti, Louisiana. “You would walk on what was supposed to be grass and you heard crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. That’s how bad it was last year.” Most of Campti’s land is dedicated to livestock, including sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, while 2.5 acres are reserved for vegetables. (The farm is working toward organic certification.) Only a fraction of the land, around a quarter acre, is devoted to rice. Isaacs had never grown rice before meeting Mason and thought the crop was a money suck. “My understanding of rice at the time was, you were only getting a few cents per pound, so growing it was not cost-effective,” Isaacs explained in her Jamaican accent. When Mason told Isaacs there was no financial outlay to join the Black Farmers Cohort, it was easier for her to take a chance on rice. Isaacs’ face lit up as she reminisced about their “amazing” first harvest of four varieties. Last year was different, though: Campti lost most of its rice crops to drought and heat. Half their livestock died, too. This spring, they encountered the opposite problem, facing the same cold and wet conditions as Mason’s team, which left them unable to plant rice at all. In Richmond, Kentucky, near the foothills of Appalachia, cohort member Brian Chadwell had no trouble planting rice this year. But he’s been battling heat and weeds ever since. Chadwell lost about half of his rice crops to weeds last year, which was Kentucky’s fourth warmest on record. State climatologist Jerry Brotzge told Civil Eats that Kentucky is on track to surpass that record this year. Chadwell dreams of establishing a wholly organic SRI operation. For now, he’s reluctantly laying plastic mulch and spraying Roundup to suppress weeds. He’s learned how to make gradual shifts in his operation with guidance from Jubilee Justice and his idol, Nazirahk Amen of Purple Mountain Organics, a Louisiana-born farmer and naturopathic doctor living in Takoma Park, Maryland. Amen isn’t part of the Black Farmers Cohort because he’d been growing rice regeneratively for years by the time Jubilee Justice got started. Still, he faces some of the same challenges. He anticipates that of the 1.5 acres he devoted to growing rice this year, approximately 80 percent of his red rice and 20 percent of another variety will be lost to blast, a fungal disease he says is worsened by the drought conditions his region experienced this summer. “Like, why do I farm?” Amen said, laughing. “At some point, I was telling people that I feel like [the biblical character] Job. Like, I don’t know what else could go wrong.” Driven by the healing power of nutritious food for his family and patients, Amen continues doing what farmers do best: adapting. “We’re not doing true SRI,” Amen said about Purple Mountain Organics. “We’re doing practical SRI.” He’s adjusted some of the principles to make the system work for him. At one point, he imported two combines from Japan specifically designed for rice. “They have a system of production that we don’t have [in the U.S.],” he noted, pointing out that their combines are well-suited to SRI because their plant spacing is similar to the 25-x-25-centimeter spacing that SRI recommends, giving plants more space to grow. When Mason visited Amen in 2021 to learn about his operation, he sold her one of his combines and delivered it personally. “I’m so grateful,” Mason said. “He saved my life.” Experience has taught Amen that it’s advantageous to diversify his crops so that if one fails, another might thrive. (He was pleased to hear that the Black Farmers Cohort is doing the same; they’re currently experimenting with red wheat, black corn, indigo, and more.) But given the overall risks involved in specialty rice farming, he believes the only way to survive is to account for losses by raising consumer pricing. “I don’t think it’s possible for farmers to do this below $6 or $8 or $10 a pound—even in the South,” he said. Drying rice at the Jubilee Justice mill, November 2024. (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice) Despite the losses Isaacs experienced, she estimates that her farm in Campti could save $10,000 a month by growing SRI rice and other grains they can use in livestock feed. Building up soil health and improving its water-holding capacity to better withstand climate events will be an added benefit. “What started out as a quarter of an acre of rice may end up becoming 10 acres twice a year,” Isaacs said. To avoid potential barriers to planting next year, the Campti team is planting cover crops early and building new infrastructure—investments that she estimates will cost over $20,000 and incalculable sweat equity. Rice, Racism, and Repair Many Black farmers face challenges in securing the credit essential for operating their farms, let alone preparing for climate-related disasters. Barriers to owning, operating, and modernizing farmland date back over a century. In 1910, Black farmers were 14 percent of the U.S. farming population but account for only 1.4 percent today. Black farmers lost 90 percent of their land between 1910 and 1997, due to a combination of racial terrorism, forced property sales, and discriminatory USDA policies that the agency has said were “designed to benefit those with access, education, assets, [and] privilege rather than for those without.” All that acreage, most of which was in the South, is worth roughly $326 billion today, according to a 2022 study. Recent federal efforts to repair this history of anti-Black harm have faced backlash, with claims of discrimination against white farmers. In response, Congress opened discrimination payments to farmers of all racial backgrounds. In July, the USDA announced it had distributed about $2 billion to more than 40,000 farmers who endured past discrimination. To date, the agency has not shared what percentage of these payments went to Black farmers, although more than half of the recipients were in Mississippi and Alabama, states that boast the largest populations of Black agricultural producers. In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations. Recognizing that Black farmers are often under-resourced and need forms of capital beyond what Jubilee Justice provides, Mason and Mark Watson, former managing director of the Fair Food Fund, co-founded a sister organization called Potlikker Capital in 2020. Potlikker Capital provides grants and loans meant to “nourish farmers, not to be extractive,” as Mason put it. (A potlikker recipe in a cookbook by her friend, the renowned chef Bryant Terry, inspired the name.) According to Watson, Potlikker invests in rural Black, Indigenous, and farmers of color through a mix of grants, loans, and equity. Instead of making decisions based on credit scores or tax returns, Potlikker takes a “relational” and “holistic” approach to funding by visiting farmers regularly and building relationships with them, reviewing their business plans, and making introductions to distributors and lawyers “to create more supportive ecosystems for BIPOC farmers to thrive,” Watson said. In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations. During an earlier Jubilee Justice program called “Our Ancestral Journey,” Mason crossed paths with Elisabeth Keller, whose family owns the former plantation in Alexandria that now serves as the Jubilee Justice headquarters. Their relationship deepened over the course of the two-year program, which brought together people from different backgrounds to delve into their genealogical roots and reimagine capitalism, “healing backwards in order to heal forward,” as noted in an annual report. Mason and Keller found an affinity in the work they wanted to do: Keller had transformed part of the plantation into an organic farm but hadn’t figured out how to “heal the land” from the trauma inflicted on the enslaved peoples and sharecroppers who’d labored there. When Mason came up with the idea for the Black Farmers Cohort and was still looking for a place to begin, she remembers Keller saying, “Konda, bring Jubilee Justice here to this land.” Farmer Donna Isaacs, part of Jubilee Justice’s Black Farmers Cohort, with harvested rice at her farm in Campti, Louisiana, August 2021. (Photo courtesy of Donna Isaacs) Jubilee Justice recently expanded its initial lease from 5 acres to 17, which now includes Elisabeth Keller’s organic farm. In 2022, the Keller family gave the organization the deed to a piece of land with a building that now houses the first cooperatively Black-owned rice mill in the U.S., enabling Black farmers to cut out middlemen and own their means of production. Mason’s journey bears a striking resemblance to that of Charley Bordelone West, the mill founder in the television series Queen Sugar, though the show predates Jubilee Justice. (It’s worth noting that Natalie Baszile, who wrote Queen Sugar, is now on Mason’s board of directors.) Like Bordelone, Mason is out to build a durable model of Black self-determination. Taking a break at the mill during the busy November harvest, Mason voiced her fatigue after an equipment failure left her team to manually process 3,000 pounds of rice by spreading it out on tarps and using fans and rakes to dry it. It was the fourth day of grueling shifts, and her weary eyes reflected both exhaustion and pride in the farmers’ accomplishments. The cohort was scheduled to arrive the following week to decide on their path forward. Despite the rollercoaster nature of their startup journey, Mason felt invigorated by their progress. “There’s so many people waiting for the rice—and nobody more so than me,” said Mason. “I’m hoping that we’ll get all the channels that are available to us.” Mason stressed that Jubilee Justice is not a project but a legacy, meant to live beyond her. “This is not about me. It’s not about condemnation . . . This is justice work and healing work.” For Mason, producing rice organically and regeneratively, with Black farmers in the South, goes beyond climate action. Rice is a conduit for honoring ancestral practices and the long-existing bond Black people have with “the land and earth and interconnectedness of all life,” she said. “Nobody can take that away.” The post Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation appeared first on Civil Eats.
“Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.” Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps […] The post Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation appeared first on Civil Eats.
In the heart of Louisiana, about 100 miles north of Baton Rouge, lies the rain-soaked farm that lured Konda Mason away from California in 2020. Reflecting on her journey to the South, the entrepreneur and spiritual teacher has no regrets about relocating from Oakland to the small city of Alexandria to start growing rice. She chuckles while explaining how she got there: in an RV with two loved ones and two dogs. But a hint of frustration creeps into her voice when she talks about the weather.
This article is part of our ongoing series, Planting the Seeds of Justice, in which we focus on the connections between climate, health, soil health, and equity for farmers of color.
Read all the stories in this series:
- A Black-Led Agricultural Community Takes Shape in Maryland
An urban farm trailblazer begins building a Black agrarian corridor in rural Maryland, fostering community and climate resilience. Land access was the first step. - Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation
Jubilee Justice grows rice regeneratively while reclaiming the past.
“Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.”
Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps small-holder Black farmers in the South grow specialty rice with the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a “dry-land” method developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of growing rice in flooded paddies to prevent weeds from overtaking the crop, SRI farmers treat rice like a vegetable, irrigating it as needed and using other weed control methods.
“What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.”
Created on Madagascar and practiced in about 60 countries today, SRI has been shown to increase grain yields, sometimes twofold. The method also tackles the significant climate impact of conventional rice production. Methane emissions created by flooded rice paddies account for about 10 percent of global agricultural emissions. That’s because so much rice is grown around the world: Roughly 11 percent of all arable land is devoted to this crop, a daily staple for half the people on Earth.
Per calorie, though, rice produces fewer emissions than most staple foods, including meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and even other grains like wheat and corn. And growing rice with SRI can cut those emissions nearly in half. (Rice has other issues, namely that it can contain high amounts of arsenic, depending on the variety and where it’s grown; however, rice grown under drier conditions, like SRI, likely has less arsenic.)
Despite all the advantages of SRI, it’s scarcely practiced in the U.S. because it requires specialized equipment, involves a lot more labor, and is extremely difficult to pull off. “That’s why people think we’re crazy,” Mason said.
But she has powerful reasons to focus on rice despite the challenges. For Mason, rice represents a way to transform lives and reclaim the past, offering a path toward racial, economic, and climate justice.
A Flow of Knowledge
Jubilee Justice’s rice program, called the Black Farmers Cohort, currently consists of 10 farmers from Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Collectively, they cultivate seven different varieties, including the organization’s signatures: “Black Joy,” “Creole Country Red,” “Black Belt Sticky,” and “Jubilee Justice Jasmine.” The team in Alexandria is testing 20 more varieties at their 17-acre farm, located on a former cotton plantation that serves as the central research hub for crop and equipment trials. Mason notes that knowledge flows out as much as it flows in, because everyone is learning.
At the Jubilee Justice farm in Alexandria, Louisiana, rice is farmed with a “dry-land” method called System of Rice Intensification (SRI). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice)
“We are basically figuring it out year by year,” explained Erika Styger, director of the Climate-Resilient Farming Systems Program at Cornell University. A leading provider of SRI technical assistance to small-holder farmers worldwide, Styger has been a Jubilee Justice advisor since the Black Farmers Cohort began in 2019.
Jublilee Justice is the only organization in the U.S. “actively implementing and systematically researching the [SRI] method organically, regeneratively, and in collaboration with multiple farmers,” she said. Essentially, these farmers are the vanguards of a grand Southern experiment—part of what makes their work so challenging.
SRI can take years to adjust to a single farming operation and microclimate, Styger said, and having farmers around who have already done it successfully and can share their wisdom minimizes a “difficult” and “fragile” learning period. Being the first ones to pursue SRI on U.S. soil, Jubilee Justice doesn’t have this option.
“It takes a lot of knowledge and fine-tuning, and you need to be ready to adapt to different situations,” she added. Styger thinks the growing pains are worth it, though: “In the long run, of course, you’re building a much-improved system that will be able to withstand climate change much better.”
With SRI, farmers can cut by half the typical 800 to 5,000 liters of water used to grow one kilogram of rice, resulting in a 43 percent reduction in methane emissions, according to a brief by Styger and her Cornell colleague Norman Uphoff. While SRI may slightly increase nitrous oxide emissions, Styger and Uphoff found its advantages outweigh the potential downsides: SRI has been shown to lower the global warming potential of rice production by 25 percent on average.
Caryl Levine, co-founder of Lotus Foods, a California-based company specializing in SRI with farmers in Asia and Southeast Asia, says dryland rice farming is gaining popularity because “it’s much more regenerative” than conventional flooding. Still, it’s taken decades for the practice to spread.
Lotus Foods primarily works with farmers overseas, but teamed up with Mason to work on bringing Jubilee Justice rice to market. “It was a long-term goal of Lotus Foods to work with domestic farmers who are willing to use SRI practices,” Levine has said. With as many challenges as successes these past four years, the Black Farmers Cohort has yet to meet the volume threshold for Lotus to put their rice on grocery store shelves. Mason remains optimistic, though, saying, “We’re getting there.” In November, her farm in Alexandria achieved a milestone by harvesting its first full acre of rice after three years of smaller trials, marking their best harvest yet.
Jubilee Justice supplies farmers who are a part of the Black Farmers Cohort with everything they need to get started with SRI, including seeds, equipment, minerals, fertilizers, labor support, and technical assistance. In addition to funding from small family foundations, the organization received a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2021.
MacArthur described the organization as “transformative,” providing support to “Black farming communities through new models of regenerative farming, cooperative ownership, and access to new markets by restoring and accelerating Black land ownership to create generational wealth.”
Honoring Their Ancestors
Mason started forming the Black Farmers Cohort and bringing in a network of experts to ensure their success about eight months before she left California. She’d already had multiple careers, managing a Grammy-nominated musician, producing an Academy Award-nominated film, and founding a co-working space in downtown Oakland, Impact Hub, an incubator for entrepreneurs, creatives, and environmentally conscious organizations.
Jubilee Justice Specialty Foods co-op members. Top row, left to right: James Coleman, Roy Mosley, Hilery Gobert, Collie Graddick, and CJ Fields. Bottom row, left to right: Jose Gonzalez, Konda Mason, Bernard Singleton, and visiting farmer Rodney Mason (not a member of the co-op). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice)
Mason’s choice to focus on rice was an intentional nod to America’s intertwined racial, economic, and environmental histories: Around the end of the 17th century, before “king cotton” blanketed Southern fields, American colonists in the South Carolina Lowcountry recognized the potential to profit from cultivating rice along coastal waterways.
“But the American colonists had no experience with the cultivation of rice, and they needed African slaves who knew how to plant, harvest, and process this difficult crop,” writes anthropologist Joseph A. Opala. The colonists set their sights on the peoples of Africa’s “Rice Coast,” from present-day Senegal down to Liberia, who had developed sophisticated rice cultivation systems.
Opala says plantation owners were willing to pay higher prices for dragging these expert farmers across the Atlantic into North American slavery. Over two centuries, hundreds of thousands of acres were cleared to establish rice plantations, shaping the Southern economy and landscape.
“After emancipation, Black folks left and walked away from our birthright to be rice farmers,” said Mason. “What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.”
Even the name Jubilee Justice suggests reclamation and restoration. Mason was inspired by the “Jubilee Year,” referenced in the Bible, signifying a cycle that occurred every 50 years when “land that was taken goes back to its original owner, debts are forgiven, and people who have been enslaved are set free,” said Mason. “It’s a year of reboot and equity and justice.”
Challenges of a Changing Climate
Louisiana is known for being a wet state, but this year’s unusually long and rainy spring prevented Mason’s team from planting rice until summer, putting their young crops at risk of wilting in the field. Across the Black Farmers Cohort, many attribute their climate challenges to relentless rains and intense heat. In 2023, Louisiana got so hot that its governor declared a state of emergency.
“It’s like the spigot turned off, which was the rain, and the heat turned up,” said Donna Isaacs, who runs Campti Field of Dreams, a nonprofit with a 43-acre organic farm in Campti, Louisiana. “You would walk on what was supposed to be grass and you heard crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. That’s how bad it was last year.”
Most of Campti’s land is dedicated to livestock, including sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, while 2.5 acres are reserved for vegetables. (The farm is working toward organic certification.) Only a fraction of the land, around a quarter acre, is devoted to rice. Isaacs had never grown rice before meeting Mason and thought the crop was a money suck. “My understanding of rice at the time was, you were only getting a few cents per pound, so growing it was not cost-effective,” Isaacs explained in her Jamaican accent.
When Mason told Isaacs there was no financial outlay to join the Black Farmers Cohort, it was easier for her to take a chance on rice. Isaacs’ face lit up as she reminisced about their “amazing” first harvest of four varieties. Last year was different, though: Campti lost most of its rice crops to drought and heat. Half their livestock died, too. This spring, they encountered the opposite problem, facing the same cold and wet conditions as Mason’s team, which left them unable to plant rice at all.
In Richmond, Kentucky, near the foothills of Appalachia, cohort member Brian Chadwell had no trouble planting rice this year. But he’s been battling heat and weeds ever since. Chadwell lost about half of his rice crops to weeds last year, which was Kentucky’s fourth warmest on record. State climatologist Jerry Brotzge told Civil Eats that Kentucky is on track to surpass that record this year.
Chadwell dreams of establishing a wholly organic SRI operation. For now, he’s reluctantly laying plastic mulch and spraying Roundup to suppress weeds. He’s learned how to make gradual shifts in his operation with guidance from Jubilee Justice and his idol, Nazirahk Amen of Purple Mountain Organics, a Louisiana-born farmer and naturopathic doctor living in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Amen isn’t part of the Black Farmers Cohort because he’d been growing rice regeneratively for years by the time Jubilee Justice got started. Still, he faces some of the same challenges. He anticipates that of the 1.5 acres he devoted to growing rice this year, approximately 80 percent of his red rice and 20 percent of another variety will be lost to blast, a fungal disease he says is worsened by the drought conditions his region experienced this summer.
“Like, why do I farm?” Amen said, laughing. “At some point, I was telling people that I feel like [the biblical character] Job. Like, I don’t know what else could go wrong.”
Driven by the healing power of nutritious food for his family and patients, Amen continues doing what farmers do best: adapting. “We’re not doing true SRI,” Amen said about Purple Mountain Organics. “We’re doing practical SRI.” He’s adjusted some of the principles to make the system work for him.
At one point, he imported two combines from Japan specifically designed for rice. “They have a system of production that we don’t have [in the U.S.],” he noted, pointing out that their combines are well-suited to SRI because their plant spacing is similar to the 25-x-25-centimeter spacing that SRI recommends, giving plants more space to grow. When Mason visited Amen in 2021 to learn about his operation, he sold her one of his combines and delivered it personally. “I’m so grateful,” Mason said. “He saved my life.”
Experience has taught Amen that it’s advantageous to diversify his crops so that if one fails, another might thrive. (He was pleased to hear that the Black Farmers Cohort is doing the same; they’re currently experimenting with red wheat, black corn, indigo, and more.) But given the overall risks involved in specialty rice farming, he believes the only way to survive is to account for losses by raising consumer pricing. “I don’t think it’s possible for farmers to do this below $6 or $8 or $10 a pound—even in the South,” he said.
Drying rice at the Jubilee Justice mill, November 2024. (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice)
Despite the losses Isaacs experienced, she estimates that her farm in Campti could save $10,000 a month by growing SRI rice and other grains they can use in livestock feed. Building up soil health and improving its water-holding capacity to better withstand climate events will be an added benefit. “What started out as a quarter of an acre of rice may end up becoming 10 acres twice a year,” Isaacs said. To avoid potential barriers to planting next year, the Campti team is planting cover crops early and building new infrastructure—investments that she estimates will cost over $20,000 and incalculable sweat equity.
Rice, Racism, and Repair
Many Black farmers face challenges in securing the credit essential for operating their farms, let alone preparing for climate-related disasters. Barriers to owning, operating, and modernizing farmland date back over a century.
In 1910, Black farmers were 14 percent of the U.S. farming population but account for only 1.4 percent today. Black farmers lost 90 percent of their land between 1910 and 1997, due to a combination of racial terrorism, forced property sales, and discriminatory USDA policies that the agency has said were “designed to benefit those with access, education, assets, [and] privilege rather than for those without.” All that acreage, most of which was in the South, is worth roughly $326 billion today, according to a 2022 study.
Recent federal efforts to repair this history of anti-Black harm have faced backlash, with claims of discrimination against white farmers. In response, Congress opened discrimination payments to farmers of all racial backgrounds. In July, the USDA announced it had distributed about $2 billion to more than 40,000 farmers who endured past discrimination. To date, the agency has not shared what percentage of these payments went to Black farmers, although more than half of the recipients were in Mississippi and Alabama, states that boast the largest populations of Black agricultural producers.
In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations.
Recognizing that Black farmers are often under-resourced and need forms of capital beyond what Jubilee Justice provides, Mason and Mark Watson, former managing director of the Fair Food Fund, co-founded a sister organization called Potlikker Capital in 2020. Potlikker Capital provides grants and loans meant to “nourish farmers, not to be extractive,” as Mason put it. (A potlikker recipe in a cookbook by her friend, the renowned chef Bryant Terry, inspired the name.)
According to Watson, Potlikker invests in rural Black, Indigenous, and farmers of color through a mix of grants, loans, and equity. Instead of making decisions based on credit scores or tax returns, Potlikker takes a “relational” and “holistic” approach to funding by visiting farmers regularly and building relationships with them, reviewing their business plans, and making introductions to distributors and lawyers “to create more supportive ecosystems for BIPOC farmers to thrive,” Watson said.
In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations. During an earlier Jubilee Justice program called “Our Ancestral Journey,” Mason crossed paths with Elisabeth Keller, whose family owns the former plantation in Alexandria that now serves as the Jubilee Justice headquarters. Their relationship deepened over the course of the two-year program, which brought together people from different backgrounds to delve into their genealogical roots and reimagine capitalism, “healing backwards in order to heal forward,” as noted in an annual report.
Mason and Keller found an affinity in the work they wanted to do: Keller had transformed part of the plantation into an organic farm but hadn’t figured out how to “heal the land” from the trauma inflicted on the enslaved peoples and sharecroppers who’d labored there. When Mason came up with the idea for the Black Farmers Cohort and was still looking for a place to begin, she remembers Keller saying, “Konda, bring Jubilee Justice here to this land.”
Farmer Donna Isaacs, part of Jubilee Justice’s Black Farmers Cohort, with harvested rice at her farm in Campti, Louisiana, August 2021. (Photo courtesy of Donna Isaacs)
Jubilee Justice recently expanded its initial lease from 5 acres to 17, which now includes Elisabeth Keller’s organic farm. In 2022, the Keller family gave the organization the deed to a piece of land with a building that now houses the first cooperatively Black-owned rice mill in the U.S., enabling Black farmers to cut out middlemen and own their means of production.
Mason’s journey bears a striking resemblance to that of Charley Bordelone West, the mill founder in the television series Queen Sugar, though the show predates Jubilee Justice. (It’s worth noting that Natalie Baszile, who wrote Queen Sugar, is now on Mason’s board of directors.) Like Bordelone, Mason is out to build a durable model of Black self-determination.
Taking a break at the mill during the busy November harvest, Mason voiced her fatigue after an equipment failure left her team to manually process 3,000 pounds of rice by spreading it out on tarps and using fans and rakes to dry it. It was the fourth day of grueling shifts, and her weary eyes reflected both exhaustion and pride in the farmers’ accomplishments.
The cohort was scheduled to arrive the following week to decide on their path forward. Despite the rollercoaster nature of their startup journey, Mason felt invigorated by their progress. “There’s so many people waiting for the rice—and nobody more so than me,” said Mason. “I’m hoping that we’ll get all the channels that are available to us.”
Mason stressed that Jubilee Justice is not a project but a legacy, meant to live beyond her. “This is not about me. It’s not about condemnation . . . This is justice work and healing work.”
For Mason, producing rice organically and regeneratively, with Black farmers in the South, goes beyond climate action. Rice is a conduit for honoring ancestral practices and the long-existing bond Black people have with “the land and earth and interconnectedness of all life,” she said. “Nobody can take that away.”
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