It’s late afternoon and the grey cloud that blanketed the sky this morning is now undetectable. I’m sitting at the helm of a small fishing boat, on Loch Euport, North Uist, as it casts a reflection in the mirrored stillness. Sam Cooke sings “You Send Me”, booming through a speaker over the loch, as Alexander Thompson-Byer steers the motor, guiding us smoothly across the water.

The loch is a maze of islets, inlets and islands. We scour its surface for the heads of otters, and we watch the land for families of deer. Alexander points to the buzzard soaring over us. It is a magical ending to a hard day’s toil on the loch shore cutting seaweed.

Alexander has worked the land for decades as a gardener and permaculturalist, and now works the sea as well, hand-harvesting seaweed that is sold to be used as an addition to cattle feed, which reduces the levels of methane they are known to exude when digesting grass. I’ve come to talk to Alexander about his relationship to land and farming. In a country where land working and environmental professions are the least racially diverse occupations, Alexander, a Black British Londoner, has been long aware of how he sticks out. He tells me he was profiled by the police while running along a street, as young as fourteen, and these early experiences have stayed with him.

Alexander is one of many people I spoke to as part of the Jumping Fences project, which seeks to understand and address the barriers to access to land for agroecological farming for Black people and people of colour (BPOC) in Britain. The project is led by Land In Our Names, in collaboration with Ecological Land Collective and the Landworkers Alliance. Many of those I encountered through the project were accidental trailblazers, following a path of farming sometimes as an act of defiance. However, as I came to know these people, I understood that they pursued farming much more so as an act of love for land, nature and her harmonies.

Owning land counts for a lot. It is a marker of wealth and class, and it bequeaths power. Inherited land also comes with inherited histories of exclusions, enclosures and colonial ties. If you don’t inherit land then you have to buy it. And that is the case for many of the BPOC farmers in the UK.

Despite this, land here is a powerful source of healing. BPOC can trace their heritage through pathways of migration, with various peaks in movement occurring within the last century, including migrants of the Windrush era (migration from the West Indies to the UK following the second world war), refugees fleeing conflict, and workers invited to contribute to various industries. Many of these pathways carry with them traumas of dispossession, racial violence, and unwelcoming arrivals.

For Anthony Manrique the land has been an important site of healing from past traumas. They own a mushroom business in Wales with their partner. They talked about how the land where they live has offered solace from the race-based violence experienced at different stages of their life: “Whilst I see this piece of land as my space of healing, for sure, in a way that I’ve never experienced in my life before, I still have reminders… so I’ve got this thing where the land itself is, on the whole, a safe space. But with intrusions. And then the wider community: I have a very good, strong close network of friends. A lot of them don’t understand what it’s like to be my skin tone and have my heritage whilst living [here].”

Their time in rural Wales has also been marred by microaggressions, racism and physical violence: “I stand out because it’s a predominantly white area, and I often feel I’m condescended to... called stuff like ‘boy’.”

Generally in these interactions Anthony has not confronted the perpetrator, due to the cost that might have on their own mental health. “I sort of just shut off, go blank, do the bare minimum to get through the conversation,” Anthony explains. “I guess I feel afraid [we’ll be] getting a reputation in a very small way. I don’t have the strength… I don’t often feel equipped to manage what an escalated situation could be like.”

Through all this, reconnecting with a rural way of life has been important to connect to their Colombian heritage. For the past two years, nature has helped them as they recover from long Covid, going for short walks around the garden with the ducks, allowing them to take on nature’s slow pace and be guided gently back to health. Late at night, they can hear the call of owls behind their home, in a field that they have allowed to return to tussocky grassland now populated with mice and voles.

I have had numerous encounters with first generation migrants who come from farming backgrounds in their country of origin, and now find themselves entirely separated from accessing land. Instead of farming, you might be more likely to find them as nurses and social workers, taxi drivers, selling at market stalls and restaurants, or working in IT. Their experience is subtly different from those that have been in this country for generations, and I have found it is often tinged with disbelief and incomprehension as to how and why they are so cut off from working on the land. I did not get to meet David Mwanaka, the first large-scale white maize grower in Britain, but I have heard him describe the structural barriers in a farming system that did not expect his participation, where he was repeatedly reported to the police for theft while he harvested his own crops. He supplies culturally familiar food for the Afrodiaspora in Britain. Where David persisted with his vision, there are many people for whom those barriers to entry are so exasperating and prohibitive that they drop any idea of a farming career. The story of these landless farmers in the UK is little told.

There are deep set narratives of what a farmer should be like in the UK - white, gilet-wearing, landed, older. A young Black farmer, Diego*, told me of his experience going to agricultural college: “People would say, ‘Aren’t you supposed to just be rapping? What are you doing farming, you’re wasting your time on farming.’ That was mentioned to me a lot of times where it was like, ‘No, you shouldn’t be doing this, why are you wasting your time?’”

This was reiterated by Anthony, who also struggled to be taken seriously as a farmer: “To speak more plainly, there is a very middle, upper-middle class white narrative around the back to the land movement. We bought into it, to be honest, and I guess if we hadn’t, then we probably wouldn’t have risked coming out and bumbling our way into where we are now. But I feel naive for what I believed. And I wish there was better information.” They explained that on top of the exclusive stereotypes around farming, the cost of land makes it an expensive profession to enter.

Yet despite the hurdles, a new generation is changing the face of farming. Many BPOC farmers want to transform the profession into one that embeds a nature-loving, soil nurturing ethic at its core.

Cel Robertson is a flower farmer in Suffolk. Her mother is white British and her father is afro-Guyanese. She grew up in a working class family in East London. Her mother grew up on the 12th floor of a block of flats and was therefore somewhat disconnected from nature; and so Cel and her siblings were also brought up in a context that was far away from nature, land and farming.

Her Guyanese family heritage traces back through lines of farmers, but some members of her family were horrified that she was working as a gardener because they didn’t value it as a profession. Cel notes that there is a need to shift narratives so that this work is seen as more valuable and skilled. Since she has written a book, Cut Flowers, her family have been more accepting due to the prestige that comes from being a published author. “I don’t think it’s something as easy as, you know, giving everyone money to go on a bursary or something. It’s like that relationship with my family. If there was a higher status applied to horticulture, it wouldn’t have been so much of an issue.”

Despite the fact that not all her family understood her desire to pursue horticulture, Cel says: “I feel more connected with my heritage, certainly on my dad’s side, because even though our ancestors may have been enslaved, they worked with the land. And I’m working with the land. Even on my mum’s side, if we found out more about that side of the family as well, they would have been farmers, or would have worked on the land.”

The agricultural knowledge and skill that enslaved Africans carried with them has been
overlooked in the recounting of the slave trade, and their plant knowledge was taken and recorded by colonial botanists. While it is easy to see enslaved people as powerless victims, devoid of agency, it is important to remember that many were chosen because of their agricultural aptitude as much as their physical strength because Europeans were not so well versed in farming in the warmer climates of the Americas.

For those of us descended from lineages of enslavement, there can exist an uncomfortable complexity around landwork. Our ancestors exist in tight relation with nature and farming, but labouring the land was mobilised as a violent tool of their oppression.

Contemporary agroecology and organic farming are fraught with issues of labour exploitation, and farm workers are beginning to unionise in the UK to combat this, with the emerging Solidarity Across Land Trades union. But there is a type of labour that is not only there to feed a profit-making machine. That feeling of working in the soil can be healing and nurturing for many people of colour, and can help cultivate notions of belonging in unfamiliar landscapes. Sarah* runs a rural community medicinal herb garden. Of Somali heritage herself, she holds spaces for BPOC and refugees to reconnect with the medicinal and healing properties of plants, even in an unfamiliar land. “It’s a bit more intercultural and a bit more diverse,” she explains, “which is different, because everyone is pretty white around here.” People feel that they’ve got that space to come along to, where they can chat and cultivate belonging.

We are living through a multi-century long period of intensive labour exploitation, but labour does not have to be disconnected from love, there can be a real reciprocity: ”It’s hard, but [farming is] something that we love. It’s that thing where it doesn’t feel like work,” says Anthony.

As we pull ashore and begin unloading the nets, Alexander tells me: “I love that feeling of aching because you know your body has been working.” He finds that the calmness of the outdoors is important for rest and wellbeing. “It gives me time to think and just focus - the serenity of countryside living. I can’t remember the last time I heard a siren - in London you hear them, and then there’s all the associations that come with that - the police, a fight.”

Hebridean sheep are a deep brown-black, with coarse wool and lean limbs. They watch us with caution as they graze nearby; otherwise the lakeshore is nothing but ease.

Farming in Britain can be an isolating experience for BPOC. Organisations such as Land In Our Names are helping to shift narratives, and Landworkers’ Alliance has a Racial Equity Abolition and Liberation group, which aims to build stronger networks. Organisations like Ecological Land Cooperative and Shared Assets are reimagining and creating new models of land stewardship. A mounting call for land reparations carries with it an intention of repair that connects the material healing of damaged lands with an opportunity to cultivate healing for ourselves.

*Name changed to protect identity