'We're trying to re-create the lives we had': the Somali migrants who became Maine farmers
Muhidin Libah stretched his arm overhead, tapping the head of a corn stalk and sending its leaves quivering in the August sun. “About seven feet,” he guessed, comparing the plant to his 5ft 6in frame. Corn was one of the first vegetables he and about 40 other Somali Bantu families planted when they began farming in Lewiston, Maine, in 2014. That was a decade after Libah had landed in the United States as a refugee, and 23 years after he’d been forced to flee Somalia’s Jubba valley.
“I love corn,” he said. Ground down, it can be used to make injera, a spongy flatbread that came to Somalia from Ethiopia; muufo, a drier fermented flatbread; soor, a corn grits porridge known as ugali in Kenya; or dozens of other dishes from Africa. “We’re always trying to recreate the lives that we had back home.”
Libah’s community began arriving in Lewiston, an ageing mill city of 36,000 in America’s whitest state, in 2001. Today, their population measures 3,000, but their quest to make a true home was ongoing until September, partly because farming is a key feature of the Somali Bantu way of life, and their long-term access to farming land had been uncertain. When they first arrived, “We could see all this green land, all these farms,” Libah told me. But it was beyond their reach. “We did not know where to start,” he said. “We did not know who to contact. We did not have any money.” Since 2014, the community has had to re-establish itself on rented plots six times.
The Somali Bantu farmers shared this struggle for land security with small farmers across the US. Speculation on farmland, coupled with rising demand from developers, has translated to swelling purchase prices and rents for tenants. Farmland is also being concentrated in fewer hands as many farmers retire without heirs to carry on their profession. An estimated 371m acres (150m hectares) of farmland – equivalent to nearly all the cropland of the lower 48 states – is expected to change hands by 2035. But with limited access to capital, credit and other aid, small farmers such as Libah and his community have little hope of getting their hands on those acres.
A new effort, which seeks to develop “commons”, hopes to change that. The term describes resources that are not owned by anyone – much like air, water and the internet – but are jointly managed and stewarded by those who have a stake in it. In May, the New Hampshire-based Agrarian Trust, a non-profit organization seeking land access for the next generation of farmers, launched a national network of Agrarian Commons. Each of the 10 regional commons, established across eight states, will hold land parcels in trust, and be controlled by the farmers and local organizations. The sole tenant of the Little Jubba Central Maine Agrarian Commons is Libah’s Somali Bantu community. Two decades after arriving in Maine, they are putting down permanent roots.
Elusive land ownership
Until now, Libah and other Somali Bantu families tended plots on lands they leased, at market rates, from private landowners. Their main 35-acre plot, just outside Lewiston, was composed of 40 community gardens – about a tenth of an acre for each family – surrounding 11 larger commercial plots. There, iskashito groups grew tomatoes, eggplant, kale, collard greens and other vegetables to sell at farmers markets or at wholesale to local kitchens and pantries. The Somali word means “cooperative”, a traditional practice in which a few farmers work a single plot together, sharing labor and profits equitably. An additional 150 Somali Bantu farmers had community plots at two nearby sites, in Auburn and Greene.
Farming is central to Somali Bantu culture. Libah’s community hails from
Somalia’s lush Jubba valley, where the weather was temperate, the soil so rich it was practically self-fertilizing, and the Jubba river provided an endless gift of water. “All you needed to do was clear the land,” said Libah. Mammoth fish, like catfish, crowded the river. Hyenas and lions lounged along the road from home to the family farm, interspersed with grazing antelopes, and land was abundant. At age six or seven, Libah began working on one of his father’s 12 farm plots, chasing away small white monkeys. The community farmed to feed themselves, and unloaded any excess at the market. “We’ll sell it to you if you have the money. If you don’t have money, we give it to you,” he recalled.
This came to an end in 1991, when opposition groups overthrew Somalia’s military junta and civil war broke out. Vulnerable to clan militias, about 12,000 Bantu people – an ethnic minority descended in part from slaves brought to Somalia from south-east Africa in the 19th century – fled to a refugee camp in Kenya. Nearly a decade later, some returned to Somalia, but many were resettled by refugee organizations in American cities, including Atlanta and Chicago. Repelled by the drug use, crime and flagrant consumerism they observed, the family-oriented Muslim immigrants soon sent scouts across America in search of a cheaper and safer place to live. They found Lewiston in 2001.
Somali Bantu families began flocking to Maine. At first, people in the community had to rely on food stamps and church pantries, and some locals complained the immigrants were freeloading and draining the public coffers. In 2002, Lewiston’s mayor asked Somali leaders to stop encouraging others to emigrate, drawing national attention and inciting the fury of America’s white nationalists – a group of them even travelled from Wyoming to protest against the Somalis’ presence.
Libah arrived in Lewiston in 2005, after 13 years in the Kenyan refugee camp and one year in Syracuse, New York. Soon after settling in Maine, he founded the Somali Bantu Community Association, where he still serves as director, and the association still helps people with everything from reading their mail to navigating IRS audits. With time, the community began to feel accepted. They found jobs, shopped at local stores, attended schools and colleges.
Yet farmland remained elusive. Libah found the leasing process confounding, filled with sudden reversals that, even with hindsight, he does not understand. Once, a landowner told Libah that he admired the work of the association and was willing to lease part of his property, only to rescind his offer. “You go and walk the property and get excited, and the next day you call the person, who will tell you, never call me again,” he recalled. The group toured another property only to be informed the following day that the offer was off the table and had been rescinded. “I didn’t know what was happening behind the scenes,” he told me, “but something was wrong.” Absent other explanations, he believes that it was racism.
Then, in 2014, a couple in nearby North Yarmouth finally leased them enough land for 20 Bantu farmers. Before long, a misunderstanding ended that arrangement. They transplanted the farm to a parcel in New Gloucester, but in 2015 were asked, once again, to move. They settled next in Turner and Auburn, then Greene and Lewiston, where Libah raises his beloved corn.
“Cultural differences, misunderstandings and miscommunications” had sometimes prompted landlords to terminate the lease, observed Ashley Balkhow, the daughter of the North Yarmouth couple. She met Libah while working for another refugee farmer program, facilitated the association’s first lease with her parents, and now works for the association. The landlords were well-meaning and supportive of the Bantu farmers, she said, and she thinks they simply wished to expand their own operations, use the land for different purposes, or sell it off for more money than farming could garner. “We live in a system where farmers – their only real asset is their land. When they sell it, that’s what they have for their retirement,” she said. The real problem is “the power dynamic of the land owner, always being the person to decide, ultimately, what happens” to the land.
Tenants have little say. And each move cost the Somali Bantu farmers time and money as they built and rebuilt irrigation systems, prepared soil, and reconfigured subdivided plots, all while riding out the usual vicissitudes of climate and weather. For the iskashito groups, thin profit margins added to the stress: small farmers don’t usually enjoy the heftier profits that larger operations can realize. But the deficits were not limited to the balance sheets. Most of the Bantu farmers – the families tending the community plots – do not grow for income or profit. They feed themselves, and give crates of beans, corn, tomatoes and squash to friends and relatives in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and upstate New York anytime the community gathers for weddings or funerals.
“If you have land, it’s not only for farming,” said Libah. Land is also a place “where we can exercise our culture” – raucous drumming, dancing, feasting and healing ceremonies – through all the seasons. “It’s also other pieces in the community that we’re missing.”
Little Jubba farms
Libah’s vision of secure land tenure remained a dream until 2019, when a local farmer friend connected him to the farm justice activists of the Agrarian Trust, which exists to tackle one of the most significant barriers for new farmers: a system that commodifies land and concentrates power in