A Pig and a Garden

Urban Farm DB summary

Using historical methods to analyze extensive archival records, this chapter examines Freedom Farms Cooperative, a 680-acre agricultural cooperative that activist Fannie Lou Hamer started in 1969 in Sunflower County, Mississippi, which included a pig bank, a Head Start program, community gardens, a commercial kitchen, a garment factory, a sewing cooperative, a tool bank, and low-income affordable housing as strategies to support African Americans who had been fired and evicted for exercising the right to vote. Freedom Farm offered sharecroppers and tenant farmers education, retraining, health care, and disaster relief for those who wanted to remain in the Mississippi Delta, and the chapter presents it as a historical model of collective and shared ownership for rebuilding communities around food production.