Tamarya Sims makes themself heard above the din of August in western North Carolina, no small feat. Their laughter bursts gleefully across the grinding, metallic whir of crickets and static, and their cat’s ears poke up along the bottom of the screen. “I’m not trying to buy land, I’m trying to attain land without being in debt.” No small feat, either.
Sims (she/they) is a Black farmer, ecologist, and land steward whose dream is to acquire farmland where “folks can come to heal and learn without judgment.” When they’re not helping manage ecosystems at the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy and teaching at their 140-acre Community Farm, Sims stewards their own LLC, Soulfull Simone Farm. In a backyard space smaller than a soccer field, they grow flowers for their local community-supported agriculture program and a formidable collection of herbs that they process and sell for medicinal purposes. Yarrow, motherwort, hibiscus—everything they’ve cultivated has come from a place of reclamation and healing. Right now Sims is leasing their land, but they hope one day to acquire 60 acres. To achieve that goal debt-free, Sims is pursuing alternative methods of raising capital, ones that rely on community and reciprocity, like a GoFundMe.
Even without land to call their own, Sims uses their expertise to create space for people of color to explore land stewardship and community healing, all while nurturing healthy ecosystems. As we talk, we each recall the uneasiness of being the only people of color in environmental spaces, smirk at the askance scrutiny of our Black and Brown bodies doing land work. Far from feeling defeat, Sims draws upon their experiences in a predominantly white field to inform their philosophies on land and ownership. They revel in the ancestral traditions that ground their values and goals as a Black land steward. It’s a noble, laughable pursuit in the era of late capitalism. It renders us both giggly and furious.
“The system or process of owning land is a lot like owning people, and a lot like owning animals, and so is very white supremacist,” Sims says. “And I don’t like the idea of owning land, but at the same time I want my name on a deed so nobody can take it from me in this system that I’m playing in right now. But one day, I don’t want that to be a thing.”
Acquiring land isn’t about possession or profit for Sims. They recognize the ways white concepts of ownership have led to the disenfranchisement of Black farmers, the displacement and erasure of Indigenous nations. It’s clear that they have fielded questions of “why” over and over again when it comes to owning land. Ninety-eight percent of rural land in the United States is owned by white landowners. If this land distribution seems as unlikely as it is unbalanced, it becomes clear after a quick refresher in US history post-Emancipation. Lincoln’s infamous proposal for reparations, “40 acres and a mule,” would redistribute 400,000 acres of southern land for newly freed Black families to pursue self-sufficiency and accrue personal wealth after generations of forced labor. This land did not stay in Black ownership for long. After Lincoln’s assassination, his successor Andrew Johnson repossessed and returned the land to its “original” white owners.
Since then, Black farmers have had to fight for a fair share of fertile land, and have been progressively pushed further and further to the margins by white landowners and corporations. Where a century ago, Black farmers tended 41.4 million acres of land, today Black farmers work 4.7 million acres, a 90 percent loss. The numbers of Black farmers have decreased as well, making up 1.4 percent of all farmers nationwide. Of such a small number, 85 percent of Black farmers own fewer than 180 acres.
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Sims bases their landwork out of Asheville, North Carolina. A city rooted in the ancestral lands of the Eastern band of Cherokee and the Yuchi people, Asheville is, as local historian Roy Harris puts it, a city that embodies “the worst of everything and the best of everything.” Surrounded by rural land in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville has drawn over 10,000 people in the past decade, on the heels of an urban renewal movement that started in the 1960s and, like so many across the country, eradicated almost exclusively Black and Brown neighborhoods. This movement claimed 500 acres of city land and displaced once bustling communities into public housing. Communities of color saw the closing of local businesses, groceries, and elementary schools in their gentrifying neighborhoods.
Asheville is also one of the only cities to unanimously commit to a Reparations Resolution, a plan designed to uplift the financial, social, and communal well-being of Black communities and atone for a long national history of racial inequities. Harris, who preserves Asheville’s stories, histories, and legends, looks to the younger generation for how best to utilize this long overdue recompense. “Land and education. Getting elementary schools back, grocery stores back, replacing urban renewal land with vegetables and farm land,” says Harris. “Supporting young people to do things that help a community survive, to get some of that back.”
Enter Sims—ecologist, conservationist, farmer, healer, educator, storyteller, environmental translator. Modern industrialized agriculture has emphasized land as a “natural resource” rather than an entity that is as alive as the people who live off it. Subsidized monocultures like the vast soy and cornfields endemic to American rural areas, chemical augmentation to ensure perfect produce or fatty livestock, even the newer, nebulous criteria characterizing organic and free-range, they all maintain the same illusion: that human needs and nature’s needs are separate, that they don’t deeply rely on each other. The result has been practices that are both extractive and unsustainable.
Land stewardship, by contrast, relies on cultivating equitable relationships with the natural world. Permaculture, polyculture, low-impact sustainable ecological design—they all derive their language, philosophy, and technology from land stewardship as developed by Indigenous cultures across the globe, far preceding agriculture in its most modern form. Farmers like Sims are among a vanguard of young Black, Brown, and Indigenous land stewards who embrace farming not just as a means of production but as a way of creating avenues for sustainable life.
“I’m an environmentalist before I’m anything else,” Sims says. “I’m an ecologist before I’m anything else, and that’s kind of how I run my life, and I think farming is one of the branches that comes off of it.”
By adapting their operations to align with generations of Indigenous knowledge, Sims prioritizes an ecosystem that thrives on interdependence, community, and regenerative cycles of growth, adaptation, and rest. For Sims, land stewardship isn’t just about what they grow or how they grow it, but ensuring that they cultivate a safe space for their community to explore their relationships with land.
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“Energy to energy, I’m farming with my ancestors, and that’s what people should know,” Sims says. This ancestral relationship guides their growth as an ecologist and farmer; they recollect ethnobotanical stories and Indigenous remedies they’d hear in their UNC ecology classes and wonder, “Why doesn’t my family know these stories?” Sims approaches their conservation and ecosystem work with their family in mind, seeking to create more avenues of connection to the land that they have lived on for generations.
“We are re-learning our history, and I think that that heals some trauma of feeling lost or like you don’t belong, and that’s just because your story has been erased or been stolen from you,” Sims says. “I feel like as we re-teach that history we are going to feel that trauma.”
Sims has made a point of creating healing opportunities by sharing their knowledge with their community, and holding a space at their farm for people to work through trauma. Recognizing how the relationships people of color have fostered with the land have historically been stolen or erased, Sims creates opportunities to safely explore land stewardship in solidarity with those who know what it’s like not to feel fully safe in environmental spaces. Far from being somber or harrowing, these gatherings are joyous affairs. And none more so than their youth-focused workshops at the SAHC Community Farm. Whether exploring the ethnobotanical history of plantains or examining ecosystem health through the lens of a salamander, Sims is nothing but intentional when creating learning spaces for children and young adults. “It’s definitely spiritual to me, and also experimental and experiential.”
Ever the ecologist, their farming methodology reflects this emphasis on healing, community, and experimentation. Wary of falling into terminologies, Sims describes their practice as “systems benefiting systems.” Once they established and irrigated their herb and flower plots, they took a step back to observe. It’s all intentional; how the seeds they planted grow into the space, how they rehabilitate the soil, provide food for pollinators and habitats for pests and prey alike. Sims’ growing practices stray from the tidy, monocultural rows of tobacco and soy that comprise some of North Carolina’s top agricultural exports. They take pride in stewarding a space whose healing, layered ecosystem has yielded such abundance. They’ve even started a mobile orchard, growing perennial fruit shrubs and trees in bags because “it would be cool if it were permanent, but it’s not.”
Sims makes it evident through their body of work that owning land is not the most crucial component of being a farmer. In fact, it may not be the point at all. Sims resists the narratives around farming that push them to assimilate and compromise.
“That is something I’m always trying to break, is how digestible I am and how that’s been my whole life of trying to just skate by and blend in. I don’t want Black and Brown youth to see me and see like, ‘Oh, this what I have to look like or act like to be in this field.’” Sims says. “I think there are many ways you can consciously play into the food system without being a farmer, a chef, a restaurant worker, a person who composts, or a waste collector. Critical thinking, environmental literacy, decisionmaking, I think all of that plays into it. I also feel like once you have tried to grow something, you see all the energy that gets put into it, and you appreciate it a lot more.”
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This is at the heart of Sims’ quest for land. The opportunity to foster growth, to observe energy as it transfers between people and land, and the relationship that exchange begets. It is as scientific as it is intimate. Sim positions access over possession; their vision for 60 acres contends that by dispensing with such language as ownership, we can prioritize building a relationship with land that will do more to address human wants, needs, and desires. To Sims, not every farm needs to solve world hunger, and not everyone should be a farmer. Everyone does, however, have a role to play, and Sims creates opportunities for Black and Brown people, youth, and displaced communities, to begin exploring where they’ll best flourish. When I ask them how they navigate the cognitive dissonance of living within oppressive systems while creating “systems that benefit systems,” they chuckle and shrug. “I think it just has to do with what kind of person you are, are you a top down or a bottom up, and I think I’m a bottom up because I think we’re in a system, and I keep tryna make it better while I’m in it.”
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