In this recording of Farm Aid’s monthly Breaking Bread series, we’re sharing our conversation with shirlette ammons about her podcast series, Tending. Released in 2025, the audio series exalts the stories of Black farmers involved in a fight against the USDA that became one of the largest class action civil rights lawsuits in American history (Pigford v. Glickman). shirlette is a Black queer southern truth teller, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning TV producer, poet, and musician who hails from a tiny, wonderfully-named pocket of eastern North Carolina earth called Beautancus.
Dig In
- Visit the Tending website to listen to the podcast and see photos
- Check out the Black Farmer Fund, which is shifting power towards historically divested communities
About the Breaking Bread Series
The Highlander Center defines “popular education” as an opportunity to learn from each other’s shared lived experiences to build collective knowledge. Breaking Bread: Lunch and Listen will feature stories that uplifts the shared history of food and farming; organizing and resistance that’s got us to where we are now. We pair that history with work that folks are doing presently, that will inform the future we want for each other as it relates to farming and agriculture, food, culture and rural communities. This storytelling and making our narratives public is a key and critical part of community organizing. Please join us!
