Farming is Medicine

In 2012, after publishing my album BUILD which was an homage to farmers, land stewards and movements countering empire around the world, I started to imagine what it would look like to heal in the region where I was born and raised—the occupied and unceded Ohlone territories, what is now called the San Francisco Bay Area. Understanding that soil is a living entity that holds memory, I developed an understanding that a society cannot be well if it is eating food grown in soil that holds the trauma of genocide, in land that misses the people and animals who were there for tens of thousands of years, living in reciprocity with the land. What it would be like to create a culture where we worked together to heal what happened here and to build another way of being together in this land, not through violence and domination but through mutual support, cultural exchange, kinship and healing?

What started as a dinner conversation with three incredible Indigenous grandmothers has turned into a full journey of land return and food systems reimagining. Through those imaginings has come the Farming is Medicine program, a core project of the Deep Medicine Circle, an organization where I am proud to work alongside so many critical thinkers, farmers, healers, movement workers, artists, land stewards, teachers, Indigenous, Diaspora, elders, youth and middle agers. When Covid hit and I was woking in the hospital wards, watching malnutrition sending the most marginalized people in the Bay Area straight to the ICU, I knew it was time to start putting these ideas into motion. With the help of so many incredible partners we started the Farming is Medicine program.

Farming is Medicine flips the food system on its head and innovates what a food system based in care would look like and how it could operate.

We take this:

And turn it into this:

The data we are seeing in our soil, in our people, in our stories are resounding with health, so much so we call this Whole Systems Health. It’s like the other side of the Tipping Point. When you start to create a certain amount of harmony between systems, the whole thing moves with the higher intelligence of a system in balance. Health emerges systemwide. It’s exciting stuff. When I get down about Nazi saluting billionaires in the White House robbing our common wealth, I just put my hands in the dirt and remember we are feeding our community (over 50,000 lbs of free organic food a year) and we are supporting the Confederation of Ohlone People in concrete ways so that they can heal from genocide and reconnect. When they are well, we will all find our way into better balance.

Here is a short cut of the documentary we made about our work with Colorfool Films, the production company of the incredibly talented Masha Karpoukhina. We are screening the full film in private screenings, and it is hitting the festival circuit. Enjoy! And if you are inspired, support the work of Deep Medicine Circle so we can continue to move this model into policy.