Queen Anne’s lace is a wildflower both delicate and lively. An ancestor of the wild carrot, its many clusters of flat white petals bloom large above hairy stems. Bunched together, standing up to four feet tall, they appear as cloud-like tufts amidst a sea of green. In Detroit, MI, where we have spent the past week, they are a wonder to spot sprouting unrestrained through vacant lots.

This is a plant that embodies contradiction. Its rapid growth has earned it a reputation as an invasive weed. A non-native species to North America, it can crowd out native plants that struggle to match its vigor. At the same time, it has adapted to the local ecosystem: hosting swallowtail caterpillars, feeding native animals, and providing nectar for bees and other insects.

But the true spirit of Queen Anne’s lace shines in all that is not seen—slender, tenacious roots that penetrate deep to form a drought resistant system. And it is self-seeding. Every two years, its petals fall to the ground and begin a process of rebirth. Agriculturalists perceive its complexity as strength.

Travis Peters, a local farmer, considers the plant’s presence a worthwhile sign—one that coincides with his own revival.

Born and raised in Detroit, he began his career in the military. The plan was to save money for college and experience the world beyond his hometown but the experience ultimately ignited a desire to be of service. After completing an eight-year obligation, Travis settled back home and spent the next 19 years as a driver with the United Parcel Service. But past trauma from his tour of duty eventually came to occupy the present. “I couldn’t mentally or physically keep up with the demands of being a UPS driver,” he recounts. “I struggled with trying to find some accommodating measures; it was like nothing they [could] do. So I felt what a lot of veterans feel, tossed aside after you’ve given your best and your all—the best part of your life, so to speak… the rug was pulled from under me.”

As we talk, Travis’ commitment to those pushed to the margins—championing their experience of a whole, valued life—is infectious. Portions of our conversation are punctuated by his hearty laughter and a smile that spreads easily from ear to ear. Other moments carry a sincerity just as forthcoming. Like many veterans, Travis manages each day with the effects of PTSD, anxiety, and depression. He found solace in soil and seeds. 

His grandparents migrated to Detroit from Arkansas and planted a community garden in their backyard. Growing up, Travis watched them, and later his parents, tend to the land. He was often called upon to water the plants and pick their fruit. Farming was an intuitive response when it became hard to find work that considered his needs.

In search of stable housing and a way to feed his family, Travis envisioned a solution in three vacant city plots on Southfield Road, nestled just a few blocks over from where he grew up. “I was led to acquire some land because I wasn’t able to eat,” he shares. “So I thought… 'What can I do to [sustain] myself?’ I wanted to get enough food to give away, enough to feed my family, and enough to take to market. And that’s where this was born.” He gestures around the plot of land we sit on, brimming with all manners of life: sunchokes and collard greens, nardello peppers and eggplant, lemon thyme and sungold tomatoes. This is Green Boots Veteran Horticulture Marketplace, the community space Travis started in August of 2019.

Located on Detroit’s west side, the farm is an educational site that supports two initiatives. Project Green Boots is the for-profit arm of the endeavor. The food grown on Travis’ land is sold at local farmers markets, as well as once a week on the Green Boots farm. It supplies the community with healthy food options, providing discounts for veterans and accepting benefits from EBT, WIC, and SNAP programs. There is also a membership program available where Green Boots will grow food for members, making it easier for the community to incorporate nutritional foods into their diets.

The second initiative is the non-profit firm Greenthumbz Consulting. About 15% of farms in the US are veteran-run. Through Greenthumbz, Travis consults with veterans on careers in urban agriculture. They are invited to the farm to learn about community-focused work that offers a flexible schedule and contributes to their well-being. As we tour the farm, Travis hands us pieces of chocolate mint with instructions to rub the herbs between our hands, bring it to our nose, and sniff. The scent, an invigorating mix of sharp, sweet, and earthy notes, refreshes my senses. My body rests at ease. He leads the veterans in a similar practice, teaching horticultural therapy as a method to alleviate stress and common triggers. For those dealing with the remnants of active combat, grounding comes by way of reconnection to the earth.

Green Boots is a space birthed from necessity and imaginative prudence. What Travis saw in the early days was simply a field of wildflowers. “The space was overrun with Queen Anne’s lace and clover,” he remembers, “so I knew the land was pretty good.” Many of the native plants, including poke greens, golden rye, and mullein, have been left to grow undisturbed alongside sellable crops. A promise of new life.

In 1950, Detroit housed a population of almost two million people. That number is now closer to 600,000. In the aftermath of riots flared by racial tensions, the decline of the auto industry, a recession, and a declaration of bankruptcy in 2013, empty homes, schools, and land lie in the wake. For those on the outside, the perception may be skewed towards abandonment. But Detroit’s story should center much more than that. It's really about what remains and what is to come. As the second largest region in the Midwest, Detroit has all the elements one would expect of a major city: notable arts institutions, James Beard awarded restaurants, research universities, craft coffee, and a musical legacy like no other. It embraces a spirit of determination that continues to make a way. Detroit is unique by that standard, especially as it defies thoughts of what constitutes a metropolis.

The instinct with a city landscape is to describe it in terms of density, like a jungle. That image doesn’t work as well when picturing Detroit. What’s different here is that there is space. Wide streets are bordered by gothic revival homes or one to two story buildings. The sky is seen clearly and the land is mostly flat, dotted with large patches of vacant lots. An urban prairie might be the better descriptor, as it can resemble a rural setting in some areas. With enough room for three times the population, residents took to cultivating the land to breathe new life into their surroundings. And one organization, the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund, is encouraging farmers like Travis to take ownership of the lots they tend.

Travis’ farm, an awardee of the Land Fund, is but one testament to their vision of urban farming in Detroit. It has been a prominent practice in the city’s history since the 19th century, starting as a way to supplement basic needs. It is now central to a push towards food sovereignty. Forging local, sustainable production and distribution systems ensures that fresh, whole foods are made available to all residents—especially amidst turbulent times—and that residents are empowered with an equitable stake in the decisions concerning what they eat. At the forefront of this movement are Detroit’s Black and brown farmers. About 85% of the city’s population is Black—long-time residents who have weathered the city’s near-constant changes and committed themselves to shaping its future. But these leaders were not always landowners.

“We have so much land that people were just pulling up at a vacant lot,” says Tephirah Rushdan, Detroit’s Director of the Office of Sustainability. “Not necessarily purchasing it, or getting the proper permits… but just, ‘I want to do something good for my community.’ This included me. I had a community garden on a vacant lot; it was just the way people were doing things.” Tephirah previously served as the Co-Director of Keep Growing Detroit, a local organization that equips all who are interested in gardening with the resources needed to start: seeds, tools, and educational courses. One of her projects included auditing how many farmers actually owned their land in the city. “Right now, we’re at like 2,500 farms—gardens and backyard farms, and people that are growing on vacant lots. So there was quite a bit, right? We looked at the numbers and knew all of these gardeners; we had potlucks with them. So anecdotally, we could see that the folks who own their property were majority white in an 85% Black city,” notes Tephirah. Black farmers growing on vacant lots have done so largely undisturbed, some people having done so for up to 10 years. But the risk factor kept rising. If a leasing agreement was on the land, developers were often offered first rights of refusal upon an owner selling. In some instances, farms have been mowed over because the city wasn’t aware of its existence. And if land was for sale, speculative development ballooned the property value.

The year 2020 became a turning point. The sovereignty and flourishing of Black life in America has been hard fought for more than 400 years. That need was magnified as outrage swelled throughout the nation around the murder of George Floyd and the disproportionate effects of COVID. Four women from three long-standing urban farming organizations launched the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund on Juneteenth of 2020. With liberation through land security and food sovereignty already a part of their individual work, they organized DBFLF together to aid Black farmers who grew food on land that was cost-prohibitive to purchase. Each co-founder bears the title of “Mama” in their community: Dr. Shakara Tyler and Erin Johnson of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network, Jerry Hebron of the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, and Tephirah Rushdan.

Since its founding, the organization has distributed more than 200 awards for land purchases and infrastructure build outs. Eighty of the awardees are now landowners, having secured a collective total of 19 acres in the city. The Land Fund is charting a path that esteems the work of both Black farmers and land stewardship. In their first annual report, Jerry Hebron sums up the impact the awardees have on the city: “Detroit is the mecca of urban agriculture.”

How the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund undertakes their work is just as impressive as the work itself. As they help individual farmers purchase land, their efforts reveal a lesson in interdependence.

The seed for the Land Fund propagated from a single community effort. A local farming couple, one of the city’s highest food producers, was facing land insecurity. In response, the would-be founders considered throwing a fish fry in support of their friends. Black communities have been sustained through mutual aid for generations. Whether it was neighbors throwing rent parties to combat predatory housing costs, women in the Black Panther Party preparing free meals for children to eat before school, or residents of Montgomery, Alabama carpooling to protest discriminatory hiring practices, it all reflects a collaborative, unified vision: bear the burden together.

Eventually the founders' plan shifted slightly, moving the model of community collaboration to a digital format. “We said, ‘Let’s make a GoFundMe. Let’s try to raise $5,000 for these folks so we can help them purchase their farms,’” remembers co-founder Erin Johnson. Their singular ask became a viral moment with an immediate response from around the world. “We raised $5,000 in a day,” she continues. “I think very much because of the time we were in—everyone was locked down [due to COVID restrictions], everyone was tuned into social media and the internet in a way that I don’t think they had been prior.”

Within one week, the group raised $60,000, “well beyond anything we could have ever imagined,” Erin admits. Suddenly, they were responsible for allocating 12 times their original ask. That first donation was distributed to 30 farmers for land purchases and allowed the founders to formally structure the fund. Having started with nothing more than a desire to help a friend, they quickly pooled their resources to create a lasting infrastructure. The work required many hands, so “everybody stepped up to do what they were good at,” says Erin.

In many ways, the unofficial start of the land fund mirrors the spirit of the farmers they serve. Many of them farmed and stewarded vacant lots years before they were actually theirs, driven only by the impulse to fill the gaps they saw in their communities.

Mark Covington would say he started his farm, Georgia Street Community Collective, by mistake. In 2007, he lost his job and moved back into his childhood home. Being in a new routine allowed him to see his neighborhood in a fresh way. “In February 2008, I decided I was going to walk to the grocery store and I saw—I don’t know how I didn’t pay attention to it before—people had dumped a bunch of garbage on the corner across the street. I was out there with a stick because there was snow melting and it was kind of flooding because some of the trash was in the storm drains. I was digging it out and I said, ‘Imma clean it up when it starts warming up.’” 

He did indeed come back in the summer, bringing his nephews and family friends with him. “As we were cleaning up, some of the seniors that lived on the next block… saw us and started asking me questions,” he recalls. “At the time, I decided I was going to plant a couple rows of vegetables, keep the grass cut, add some flowers to make it look nice. When I told them what I was trying to do, they said they thought it’d be nice if they could come and pick some vegetables and it’d help supplement their budgets.” 

Mark’s initial thought for the lot was a beautification project, but it has turned into an entire community center that hosts backpack drives, youth enrichment programs, and provides the sole option for fresh vegetables in the neighborhood. He has also become a mentor to many of the local boys, modeling vulnerability in taking part in community. All this from a walk and a closer look.

Mark has served on the fund’s voting committee, reviewing applications to determine awardees for the upcoming year. There is also the opportunity to be a land consultant, checking in on new landowners to see how they are doing. Brenda Mae Foster has found this to be one of the most rewarding experiences in her connection to the Land Fund. She describes it as an honor: “They allow me to walk people through the process.”

Brenda owns the Foster Patch Community Garden, a space open to anyone in the neighborhood. Originally from Chicago, she moved to Detroit in 2003 and watched neighbors leave during the 2008 housing crisis. Without a full population, the area’s trash services were suspended. Having started a garden in her backyard, she looked into acquiring some of the vacant plots that surrounded her home. “The city said, ‘Absolutely not. We’re not selling this land; it’s for city project planning,’” remembers Brenda. “I said, ‘Ain’t nothing been planned over here for a long time.’ But eventually a program came along where [the city] said you can buy the lots behind your house.” She and her husband started their farm with two lots, and have purchased five more through a financial award from the Land Fund. Foster Patch is a welcoming place that now takes up two blocks. The green space is large enough for a hoophouse overflowing with the sweetest tomatoes, a section for community events, and a free tool rental outpost for Keep Growing Detroit.

Poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks once conceived that “we are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business.” The way the Land Fund was founded, and the collaboration involved with each of the farmers, personifies this declaration. The potency and power of ‘community’ is lost without a daily practice of mutuality—we must see our well-being as tied to that of the collective. The Land Fund stands as a prime model.

Land ownership carries a heavy history in America. Who bears the weight? When it comes to the legacy of Black farmers, that question manifests in many ways, whether it be the loss of land, the loss of cultural connection to that land, and even the ability to see farming beyond an ancestor’s forced labor. In a time where some would prefer the brutal fact of slavery, segregation, and genocide be erased from the nation’s narrative, the existence of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund confronts that omission by upholding the Black agricultural instinct to tend and keep.

Between 1910 and 1920, America experienced the largest number of Black farmers and landowners in the country. The boom signified a triumph of resilience. After centuries of terror induced by captivity and forced labor on the land, nearly one million Black landowners were finally in a position to dictate their future for themselves and generations to come. The dream was short-lived. What was once ownership of 15% of the land is now less than 2%, with white farmers accounting for 95% of land ownership.

The factors that led to this loss of land also hit Detroit. In the 1960s, two predominantly Black neighborhoods, Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, thrived with Black-owned business districts measuring 100 acres. Residents settled here during the Great Migration, moving up from southern states to work in the auto industry. The areas were eventually razed to make room for a freeway and new park, displacing thousands of residents and the backyard gardens they nurtured thanks to the area’s rich soil.

The city’s farmers embody a deep understanding of their rootedness here.

At 91, Willie Patmon expresses a hospitality that is unmatched, eager to share the trove of wisdom he has stored. He invites us to pull up wooden chairs on the sidewalk, clearing it with his neighbor before delving into his personal connection with the land.

Mr. Willie hails from Crescent, Oklahoma, a fourth generation grower born in 1934. “I’m from 17 children. And everybody was born on the farm; we were farm people,” he shares. “They all came here with midwives. We were 25 miles from any town or doctor—Black farmers made it work.” Each child’s turn on the farm came early, picking tomato worms off the plants to debug the farm. But Mr. Willie acknowledges that the history of the land his family farmed was complex. “When Oklahoma was settled, it was Indian territory. The white settlers were taking the land, removing them from the good land, what we call bottomland.”

The Land Rush of 1889 promised free land for settlement. It is a history of Indigenous displacement that precedes the Great Migration which began shortly after. “My great grandparents came to Oklahoma in the early 1800s. On my dad’s side, they came from Georgia to Oklahoma.” By 1920, all of Mr. Willie’s family had moved to Crescent. He was raised in a tight-knit community, surrounded by provision.

“I started school in a one room schoolhouse that was originally built by a Black man who owned the land. [He] gave the land to the community, to put up the school, and he also raised food to feed the kids. The unity of it is just incredible. Because we were able to survive and everybody raised their children; everybody did well, and everybody helped everybody.”

After studying engineering in college, Mr. Willie joined the military before marrying a “Michigan girl” and settling in Detroit. His first order of business in their new home was to plant a garden. He settled into his current neighborhood around the time Black Bottom was razed. They stayed in the area until their children grew up, then moved to a surrounding suburb. But as the city underwent major economic challenges, Mr. Willie started looking at the conditions in the city. “I said, ‘This is terrible; we got to do something to help. We have an [obligation] to help in the city.' I could have stayed in the place we were living in—we lived on the East Coast—but that was not helping the bulk of our people.” Mr. Willie figured he could “do more by coming back here, helping the kids from the ground up as opposed to retiring out there.”

Mr. Willie asks us if we’d like a peach from his farm, handing us a small yellow globe of sweet, juicy flesh from his farm, WJP Farms. On 14 lots of previously abandoned plots—part of the demolition he witnessed on his return to the neighborhood—Mr. Willie teaches the youth in his local school system how to grow fruits and vegetables. It has not been the easiest journey, as the plots were filled with rocks that remain hard to remove. But with a portfolio of plots totaling one acre, he is now his own community’s model for engagement and mentorship, just like the landowner he grew up with in Oklahoma.

Many of the farms that the Land Fund has awarded have a similarly specific focus, whether it is growing crops for mass production, remembering culture through seed preservation, or teaching city youth that they can have real longevity in agriculture. These are important, as there is still a real hesitancy around Black people working on the land.

“My friend, Chris Bolden-Newsome, says ‘The land was the scene of the crime, not the crime itself,’” offers Dr. Shakara. “As Black folks that have been deeply traumatized with land and food being used against us... having that landpower means that we can not just resist, but we can build at the same time.” Land ownership is an act of reclamation for Black farmers. They walk in the footsteps of agriculturalists like George Washington Carver, Booker T. Whatley, and Fannie Lou Hamer—a justice-oriented group who saw in land a necessary key to freedom.

Disconnection disrupts the soul. The Land Fund deals in re-memberance. Black farmers’ existence affirms a commitment to right relationship with the land, cultivating out of want and not force. Non-Black people’s support of this work is a commitment to right relationship with both the land and their fellow man. Re-membrance chooses the ache of wholeness, trusting that the past must be faced in order to build a lasting future.

Sunflowers greet visitors to Fennigan’s Farms. Their rich yellow petals and sturdy stalks are the first thing we notice pulling up to the spacious lot. They have been a recurring theme at many of the farms we’ve seen. Gabrielle Knox, the director of the Land Fund, tells us that sunflowers are as beneficial as they are beautiful. They attract pollinators and are a natural form of pest control, while their roots break up the soil to improve drainage and aeration. And they undergo a process called phytoremediation, cleaning contaminated areas by absorbing toxic metals. Their stalks can also be used to make cork-like materials. They are an abundant crop that can sustain a community in multiple ways.

Fennigan’s Farms is a sibling-run urban farm and agricultural design firm intent on building community resilience. Having studied disaster relief at Georgetown University, founder Amanda Brezzell returned home to Detroit in 2019 concerned for the best way to support communities impacted by man-made or natural calamity. “It wasn’t that people didn’t have money,” Amanda says on what they discovered about aid disbursement. “It was literally because there was somebody saying, ‘This community gets what it gets… because I see value in it for whatever reason, or I don’t.’”

Though Amanda’s studies took them across the country to Baltimore, Washington, DC, and San Francisco, their hometown became the site of their thesis. “I use Detroit as a case study of a man-made disaster. My thesis was all around pulling care and ancestral wisdom back into what we do in order to care for the earth and also build community resilience. So I’m not just looking at, ‘We need to put up shelters or tents because people are displaced.’ I’m also looking at what access to food they are going to have. Are they going to have clean water?”

These thoughts led to Amanda and their siblings designing backyard gardens for neighbors using principles of sustainability, before receiving land for Fennigan’s Farms. Many events are hosted in the space that teach emergency preparedness, including how to cook outdoors. The food grown on the farm is made available to the community at no cost; flowers, spices, and textiles are also grown for market. The solar-powered space is designed to be used in response to power outages in the neighborhood.

Their work is particularly prescient and designed with a specific group of people in mind. When disaster strikes an area, what happens to those who do not have the option to leave? “It was a man-made thing that happened here. And now this whole community is sitting in the wake of what that looks like,” says Amanda. “When white flight happened here, a lot of people left but a lot of people stayed. So what happens to the people who aren’t necessarily going to buy a high-rise in downtown Detroit, but are going to be rooted in the community where the roof is falling apart or the sidewalks are cracked, because this is their home? We design for those people; we build for community.”

“We’re really trying to maintain what’s here and give people resources who live here—who want to live here, who want to thrive here. So with that in mind, we go into neighborhoods people don’t want to go into.”

As a city, Detroit’s majority Black population has a long history of valuing what seems beyond repair—they have resisted oppressive, exploitative systems by using what is at their disposal. That is especially true of Detroit’s Black farmers. They have created the template for a life where those of African descent in America experience the fullness of their own power, and not merely survival.

Black farmers form the heartbeat of the Land Fund. The organization is a container for their collective flourishing. The application process in itself allows farmers a platform to present their dreams—to imagine their worlds for themselves. Funding is supplied with no strings attached, only encouragement and resources that empower the reality of the awardee’s vision. “It’s one of the most beautiful offerings, I think,” says Dr. Shakara Tyler. “It represents this ethic that you deserve this, just because you are alive and you are breathing.”

I am reminded of our conversation with Travis. At one point, he is overcome with emotion as he reflects on his personal journey and that of all Black farmers in America. “Hats off to the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund because there’s no other place I know of that’ll set aside some money for you to buy some land,” he says. “It’s a miracle as a Black person. We’ve been shut out since the 1920s. We’ve been shut out, run off… we’ve been forced off of our land. And the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund has come back, really 100 years later, to offer a platform where you can reparate yourself.”

Travis pauses before closing his eyes to gather his thoughts: “I’m free for the first time in my life.”