Tierra Fértil is a cooperative made up of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants in North Carolina whose pandemic-inspired food distribution network evolved into their own small farm operation on subleased land, where they also run a grassroots organization promoting food justice and racial equity in the local food and agricultural systems. Being the only Hispanic growers at the farmers markets at which they appear, they seek to offer culturally important produce and provide not just food but an important story to their customers and the general public about workers’ rights, food justice, and environmental sustainability.
Our loan in 2024 helped finance the purchase of their own land on which they can scale up and more easily offer a variety of gardening and nutrition classes to encourage members of their community to be more food-independent. They envision a “community farm” at which various people or cooperatives operate complementary farm or food system businesses on the same property, including raising livestock, composting, and performing value-added processing, as well as growing produce. In addition, they hope to provide an outdoor community gathering place and space for at least a few families to build and live in affordable housing.
Part of the financing consists of a secondary loan from the Persimmon Collective Fund that is designed to enable Persimmon to protect the affordability of the land and ensure that BIPOC farmers will have the first opportunity to acquire it should our borrowers ever decide to sell it.
Equity Trust is contributing to Persimmon’s secondary loan from our Leave it in the Land Fund, a resource we’re using to support community land access projects in low-income and BIPOC communities in ways that enhance the impact of our lending and technical assistance. These funds are being used to acquire property interests that are community-controlled and designed to ensure that access to land and the benefits provided by the property are not privatized and will continue to serve future generations. That is, they will be “left in the land” forever!