In the scant three seasons since Leah Penniman and her partner, Jonah Vitale-Wolff, started Soul Fire Farm, their team of dedicated volunteers has delivered nearly 4,000 boxes of fresh produce directly to families throughout upstate New York. They have collaborated with Albany County to help justice-involved teens, often young men of color charged with minor nonviolent offenses, learn farm skills and earn money for restitution instead of spending time in jail. The free workshops they offer to youth groups about food justice, civil rights, and the environment? Consistently full for the entire year of 2015.

Participants in Soul Fire Farm’s Black and Latino Farmers’ Immersion program. Photo by Capers Rumph.

So when Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) would commit $34.4 million to revitalizing local food systems last month, Soul Fire Farm seemed a perfect candidate. As an organization with no major donors and no paid staff members, their team is approaching limits of capacity that even the fiercest conviction can’t overcome. Yet despite Soul Fire’s vital contributions to local food sovereignty and their growing need for support, the new USDA grants seemed out of reach.

“Dealing with these grants is a full-time job, and I already have a full-time job doing the work on the ground,” says Vitale-Wolff, who participated in one information session before realizing the USDA program was more than he and Penniman could take on.

Applying for federal support is a cumbersome process that requires fluency in bureaucratic language, assistance from experts, and most of all, time. Months of work can go into writing a grant, followed by months of waiting with no guaranteed return. With these odds, grant writing tends to favor well-staffed, financially secure organizations that can afford to take such a risk. For farmers, educators, and organizers, navigating the world of grant writing even once can be a significant drain on already scarce resources – and it’s not uncommon to go through this process between 3 and 8 times before seeing success.

But this uneven distribution of resources is not just about individual grants: it’s also about the inequalities of land and wealth woven into the fabric of our nation’s history. Between 1910 and 1998, the number of land-owning African-American farmers plummeted by 200,000. This decline, though clearly tied to the emergence of a Jim Crow economy, has been spurred by institutional biases that continue to shape our agricultural landscape today – including countless cases of racist lending practices filed against the USDA itself.

For Penniman and Vitale-Wolff, the role of their work in unraveling centuries of discrimination is clear. Though admittedly small-scale, their programs critically consider the root causes of unequal food access, and the duo explicitly offer Soul Fire Farm as a space where people of color and women can develop as leaders in deep relationship with the land.

Soul Fire Farm is just one drop in a rising tide of community-driven food sovereignty projects poised to make their mark on these legacies of injustice. But they should not have to do this work alone. While marginalized groups can implement internal solutions to close the resource gap – like community land trusts and reduced-price produce shares – it is time for American agriculture to reckon with its moral debts. It is time to cooperate with, compensate, and actively create opportunities for the disenfranchised in our food system, particularly farmers of color.

If the US government really wants to equalize access to healthy, affordable, and ecologically sustainable food, entities like the USDA need to offer genuine support to community-driven initiatives, while seriously considering how to redress historical and contemporary injustice. From small-scale grant programs Secretary Vilsack announced last month to the multi-billion dollar subsidies paid to industrial farms each year, the USDA needs to place racial justice at the center of its policies on land and food.

The future of thriving local food economies – and the strong communities they create – depends on it.