Indian Springs Farmers Association

Ben Burkett awakes at5:30 in the morning to tend the land his family has farmed since the 1880s. In partnership with his daughter, he grows spinach, kale, mustards, peas, watermelon, squash, eggplant, sweet corn, okra and mixed organic culinary herbs on 150 acres, and pine timber on 80 of his 255-acre southern Mississippi farm. Ben also helps his niece manage her 53 acres of timber held in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, through which farmers are paid for environmental stewardship.

A list taped on his kitchen wall bears the names of 26 extended family members. “My labor force,” Ben explains.

By noon, when the sun is too hot to work beneath, Ben generally walks a half mile to the Indian Springs Farmers Association packing facility to help load watermelons into two 18-wheelers that leave seven days a week during watermelon season for wholesalers in Boston, Chicago, Mobile, New Orleans and Jackson. About once a month each summer, the coop sends a truckload of mixed vegetables north to a Chicago farmers’ market, where the membership of several churches buys the produce.

The 42-member vegetable marketing cooperative grades, packs and ships the produce of African American farmers in six Mississippi counties, helping them secure higher prices through collective bargaining and access greater marketing opportunities than any individual could on his own.

Members own shares in the coop and are entitled to one vote per person. They pay a slim $1 monthly fee for the services provided by the coop, thanks to an enduring board of directors belief that farmers should recoup as much profit as possible.

Ben estimates he sells 80 percent of what he grows through the coop and the rest he brings to farmers’ markets in Hattiesburg and New Orleans . Outside the official purview of the coop, Ben and a handful of coop members, all friends since childhood, alternate days at market. He takes his own and other farmers’ produce to market on Tuesdays and gets to stay home on Saturdays while friends sell his produce for him.

It was a group of farmers in Ben’s father’s generation, men whose children Ben had grown up with, that founded the coop in 1979. They were fed up with selling to white brokers who had the insidious tendency of paying a “white price” of about six cents per pound for watermelon and a “black price” of half that amount. A young farmer at the time, Ben joined the coop the year it started.

In 1981, the coop joined forces with Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an umbrella organization now composed of 35 coops representing 12,000 African American farm families from Texas to North Carolina . The federation assists farmers in land retention and the development of economically self-sufficient communities. Member coops purchase supplies and receive marketing, financial and technical assistance through the federation.

Former Indian Springs manager of 16 years and current director of the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives, the local arm of the federation, Ben is at once farmer and community activist. He is involved in several coops, believing that is “the only way you can make it,” in the rural south.

But while fostering democratic control of wealth is central to his vision for healthy communities, he holds that economic development also depends on goodwill between the races. From the watermelon price disparities of the late 1970s to the ongoing unwillingness of industry to locate in majority black counties, according to Ben, racial inequity continues to be a liability.

“That’s the biggest problem to economic and social development in the south. We’ve come a long way since the 1880s, but there’s still a long way to go,” he said.

Pulling his own weight on this journey, Ben is part of a program called Mission Mississippi , through which 3,000 white and black families from participating churches adopt one another for social outings. Ben gets together for ball games and dinner with his adopted white family. He is also on a commission charged with making a recommendation about how to build trust between races. The commission sent groups to Brazil , India and South Africa to learn how those countries have attempted to mend race relations.

Besides South Africa , the Mississippi farmer has traveled from Kenya to Nicaragua and Lebanon to Zimbabwe with FSC, exchanging knowledge and information with small-scale farmers. He in turn hosted West African honey, rice and vegetable producers who visited the United States to learn irrigation, marketing and packaging techniques from African American farmers.

The fellowship among small-scale family farmers within his coop, across the south and internationally is one step toward preserving a threatened way of life, and one that’s has been in Ben’s family for generations.

He sees the farming population in his neck of the woods aging, and young people who want to farm not staying in it because of sinking commodity prices. “They don’t see that money coming in as fast as they thought and they quit,” he observes. But Ben’s daughter, with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and pursuing a master’s too in that field, is committed to the long haul. Ben expects to turn over the family farm to her when he retires. That’s a while off, though, as Ben pledges he’ll be farming as long as he is physically able.

“I can’t sing, I ain’t no preacher and I can’t dance,” he jokes, “but I can farm. There’s mighty few in this country that can farm, that know how to farm. It’s something to be proud of. And I can make a living.”

Ben turns in around 8:30 most nights satisfied, above all else, with having performed the basic agricultural feat of reaping from the earth at least tenfold what he sowed.