Changing Perspectives: Earth Tenders, Land Workers
"I’ve seen folks come to spaces and groups I’ve worked in and learn how to take back a sense of agency in their lives, recognising their self-worth and existence as intertwined with the seasons. It’s powerful."
This week we’re interviewing Ali Yellop, who runs the Earth Tenders community growing project alongside Idman Abdurahaman. Ali is particularly passionate about communal development and growth.
How did you first get into agriculture and food production?
ALI: It started from a love of food in kitchens and grew from there.
In 2015 I was working as a sous-chef on a yoga retreat in Spain, harvesting from the kitchen garden for meal prep and had an epiphany that I wanted to connect deeper to the land. That led me to travel to Mexico exploring farms and food pathways and then to Jamaica to connect with my culture.
By 2017 I had entered formal horticultural training and the Grenfell Tower fire had happened which radically altered my perception of the world. It revealed to me the fragility of life, complete failure and injustice of the systems we live in and I questioned where my place in the betterment of the world lay.
Both sides of my family have agricultural roots. The West Indian side of my family has been tending land forcibly and then for subsistence for generations. My maternal great-grandmother Louisa Martin was a farmer and landowner in St James Parish, Jamaica who organised workers in her local area and sold her produce at the markets in Montego Bay.
My English kin comes from a long-line of flax-farmers and roaming land-workers. My paternal grandfather and grandmother owned a home in Dagenham, East London growing vegetables, tending to bees and chickens.
A lot of my storytime with grandparents, particularly my maternal grandmother (nanna) was about their love of land, food, growing up rural and the daily interactions with land which filled their lives before arriving in England.
So my love for food and then agriculture grew from my familial roots and the restoration that connection with the outdoors brings to my life. So much richness is gained from kinship to nature.
Tell me about Earth Tenders. Why is there a need for training in food growing across communities in London?
ALI: Earth Tenders was born out of the roaming workshops I was providing from 2018 to different communities around London. These were exchanges where I would provide herbal medicine-making workshops, foraging walks, nature facilitation voluntarily or for low cost. I also worked in community garden spaces building up my land skills.
Last year an opportunity emerged to potentially steward a piece of land, this involved the need to incorporate into a formal group, so naturally I had to give Idman a call and then, slowly, by the emergence of spring this year, we acquired access to the space and that’s where we’ve been growing from. We’re learning and building together.
I think there’s an ever-growing need for folk in urban settings to learn practical and empowering skills such as how to grow their own food. Cities will continue to grow and we have populations of folks that need to decompress, stretch, be outside and experiment with the ancient and ancestral practice of cultivating food and medicines.
An ambition of Earth Tenders is to provide food training for people who are typically marginalised and thought of last in urban food spaces: the mammas, the youth, people of colour, queer and trans folk, those struggling with their mental health, affected by low income and elders who respect all the aforementioned groups.
There are so few spaces where people of colour in particular feel welcomed in land and garden spaces. Earth Tenders is one space of a few that is providing access so that safety, growth and fun can unfurl on the land.
How do African and indigenous practices affect your work?
ALI: I believe it’s a matter of kinship. My mum always says all our ancestors ask of us is to speak, recognise and create a relationship with them. I hear ancestors and I know that to not just be the kin of my bloodline but the natural world as my kin.
Indigenous people globally have always seen the Earth as kin, all the elements as within and part of our very being. I believe that the mentality of colonialism that was birthed and spread from Europe has no respect, love or appreciation for the land.
Colonialism today is well and truly alive, most of us can recognise it well in the hyper-consumerism we are told to aspire toward. I think an anti-colonial mindset is to know that the more we extract and consume from the Earth in such unnatural and disrespectful manners, the more pain awaits us.
As a descendant of the peoples of Jamaica, I’m inspired by the deep inner-standing of connection to nature displayed in Rastafarian communities. The movement of livity – including eating whole, natural, unprocessed, fresh foods to enrich us on a cellular and spiritual level – is a powerful message in these times.
I’ve been very influenced and enriched by the level of self-sufficiency I’ve seen in communities and the focus on nourishment and non-violence in our diets and mentality that has become popularised through the word veganism.
What can wider English farming learn from non-Western philosophies?
ALI: It’s difficult to speak on what I don’t know and I haven’t travelled or met enough English farmers to know what non-Western philosophies could enhance their farming practices.
For me, as a half-English land-working woman I think a big part of our healing process on an island that has inflicted so much pain on the world, is to learn how to reconnect or rediscover our roots and heritage.
I ask myself often, what have we lost in these lands in the pursuit of modernisation? What is the farming history of my kin? What is it to be English? What can I reclaim or reimagine from my ancestry?
Do you consider yourself a farmer? Why or why not?
ALI: Not yet. We took a recent research trip to Turtle Island aka the USA with the simple intention to connect with and learn from Black and Indigenous-led farms and that really humbled me.
Folks were honest in exposing the struggles they’ve faced being farmers. There’s such a romanticisation about the farming life when you come from city living and I lost that on that trip.
A lot of farmers are heavily in debt, reliant on grants and donations, stuck in unstable housing situations, stagnating wages, operating in extreme burnout and battling depression. Farming is hard work and it’s not a term I would co-opt, I respect farmers too much.
I’m a community food grower, meaning I serve the community first and foremost by facilitating spaces for folk to learn about how to grow, work and connect with your ancestral food pathways. Spaces that offer connection, healing, personal and communal development. I do not grow for yield specifically, though I welcome and humbly receive that blessing.
I’d like to develop my skills in the future to be more equipped to be a part of a team tending a rural community hub, but to be honest I’m scared of being reliant on revenue that comes from the production of food or sustaining on reliance from grants or donations. I still need to dream more to imagine another way.
What is your favourite thing about the work you do?
ALI: With Earth Tenders, it’s the autonomy we have, that we’ve prayed into a reality. I really value that this piece of land, we can take our time with, work at our own pace and explore what we want to develop.
We try to grow what we can, we facilitate the work we want to and we trial and dream up experiences for our communities. We want to make it restful. There’s freedom in that! We still work with the constrictions of being on council-owned land and within a park but it feels good to determine the work rate and flow we wish to pursue things in.
On a personal level my favourite thing about the work I do is getting folks to invest in their health, healing and self-loving which in turn benefits those around them.
Time spent tending plants, cooking a hearty meal, harvesting and processing herbs creates small moments which in turn can help propel more fulfilling lives. Meditating with a cup of tea, loving on your body as you moisturise it, praying over the water you drink and calling on a herb to calm the headache of a loved one are powerful, small, daily acts that can shift mindsets.
I’ve seen folks come to spaces and groups I’ve worked in and learn how to take back a sense of agency in their lives, recognising their self-worth and existence as intertwined with the seasons. It’s powerful.
How would you describe the future of food?
ALI: Access to real, fresh, seasonal and naturally-produced food is already a luxury and limited for many and the rise of bioengineered food has been normalised by many.
The incentives to become a farmer are low and global farmer uprisings are commonplace. It’s either fertile ground for change for our futures or a continued deterioration which will always affect the most vulnerable. I pray for the former.
When people say food or farming or even gardening isn’t political, I have to laugh.
Tell us about the object you have chosen from our collections.
ALI: I have chosen Caciques and Cemí idols: the web spun by Taíno rulers between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico by José R. Oliver.
I have chosen this text because I’m interested in the pre-colonial Caribbean and uplifting the stories of the original peoples of the Caribbean.
In the world of the agrarian Antilleans, the cemi or zemi – Yúcahu: The Fruitful – ushers the crops to fruition.
The staple crop of the islands was manioc, also known as cassava, yucca and many other names. Yúcahu was the life-giver of cassava and all crops, he sustained the lives and the very culture of the Antilles as a fertility God, an all-seeing protector and a prophetic deity.
Yúcahu foretold that the Taínos will be conquered by a heavily clothed people, a prophecy turned true with the invasion, genocide of the original peoples and settlement of the Spaniards and thereafter many European groups.
I’m fascinated by cemí or zemis crafted attentively from stone and those made of shell that were then buried in agricultural fields to be fertilised by urine, rainwater and the waters of the river in supplication to Yúcahu. I think cultivating the land in reverence of deities, our ancestors, in honour is beautiful and it should be more commonplace in the West today.
