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"Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation"

"Jubilee Justice grows rice regeneratively while reclaiming the past."

"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.

“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."

Nicole J. Caruth reports for Civil Eats December 17, 2024.

Source: Civil Eats, 12/19/2024