It’s the first harvest day at Liberation Farms in rural Wales, where Habiba Salat and Maryan Mohamed are tending their crops in greenhouses lush with leafy green vegetables. “A good harvest, yes,” Mohamed says of her spinach yield this sunny May morning.
Far from their east African homeland in war-torn Somalia, each woman leads a five-person Iskashito, or cooperative, on land jointly operated by the Lewiston-based Somali Bantu Community Association and the Agrarian Trust, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit that supports land access for next-generation farmers.
“It is a way of feeding others and something I can give back to the community,” Salat says. “If I take a paycheck, that’s limited to me. But when I produce, that’s affecting other people’s lives and my family, too.”
Outside the greenhouse, Salat enjoys interacting with customers at farmers' markets in Yarmouth and Norway, as does Christine Pompeo twice a week in Portland. The South Sudan native grows African, and American vegetables in Falmouth on the Hurricane Valley incubator farm run by another Maine nonprofit called Cultivating Community. When selling her wares, Pompeo frequently shares tips with buyers for cooking amaranth and other vegetables native to Africa.
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