Soul Fire Farm, near Grafton, appears like many other farms in upstate New York — a 70-acre patch of land where varieties of vegetables and herbs grow near chickens in a particularly bucolic setting.

But the work done at this farm goes far beyond the seasonal harvest, and programs Soul Fire hosts throughout the year that aim to address social and food-related injustice have garnered national attention in recent years.

"We're a black and brown-led community farm that's committed to food justice and ending racism in the food system," said Leah Penniman, co-founder and co-director of Soul Fire Farm, reciting a sort of Soul Fire tagline that underlies nearly every part of the farm's work.

Agricultural Census data released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in April shows the significant disparity that persists in minority farm-ownership.

Among 3.2 million total U.S. farm producers — defined by the USDA as "someone involved in

making decisions for the farm" — just over 45,500 are black.

In New York state, black people make up 17.6 percent of the population, but among the state's 33,000 farms, just 106 farms have a black producer. And those black producers in New York farm just 11,000 of the state's 6.8 million acres of total farmland.

This is a part of what Penniman is trying to change.

Soul Fire was founded by Penniman,and her partner Jonah Vitale-Wolff in 2006 after the couple moved from Massachusetts to the South End in Albany.

When they saw the lack of access to healthy, nutritious food in the neighborhood — long considered a food desert — they worked to save money and eventually purchased land off of Route 2, between Grafton and Petersburgh.

They soon planted 80 varieties of vegetables, fruits and crops with cultural significance, boxing the harvest up once weekly to take back for members of the South End community to have.

That early farm share system has grown over the last decade, and now 80 to 100 families in food deserts throughout the Capital Region, from Arbor Hill and West Hill to North Troy and the South End, sign up for the program each year to receive boxes of fresh vegetables they would otherwise not have easy access to.

"(The South End) is a food apartheid neighborhood, there was no fresh food," Penniman said, using a term she coined to describe the correlation of food deserts existing largely in minority communities. "We were really committed to that, and the education piece came out of demand."

From that farm share system grew what is now a robust program of educational workshops that provide training for around 1,200 new farmers each year, said Penniman, whose recently-published book "Farming While Black" lays out the main educational curricula the farm uses.

The book focuses on teaching practical organic farming skills, land use and agricultural techniques, but also weaves in stories about race and the role land plays in addressing inequality.

"If you look at the entire food system, there's a lot of injustice, from lands to plate," she said.

Soul Fire hosts day-long workshops for a wide range of organizations, but the farm's major draw is the Black Indigenous People of Color Farming In Relationship With Earth (BIPOC FIRE) workshops, which started in 2013.

The intensive 50-hour programs teach around two dozen participants at a time about farming, and provide a space for storytelling and discussion about how race-related inequality has affected participants' lives.

Penniman said there's a three-year waiting list for the five-day workshops, which Soul Fire hosts throughout the summer.

Penniman references injustices by pointing to historical land dispossession from Native Americans and people of color, as well as the statistical imbalance of minority farmworkers versus minority farm operators, and the resulting health problems associated with lack of access to healthy food.

"If you're a person of color, you're more likely to have diabetes, heart disease, hunger, all these diet-related illnesses basically because of your Zip Code," she said. "So we're really looking at the whole food system."

In Canarsie, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, fresh, organic veggies can be difficult to come by, and neighborhood bodegas typically stock Doritos and soda rather than healthier, fresh food, according to Jahshana Olivierre, a participant in one of Soul Fire's 2016 BIPOC farmer immersion workshops.

"I was interested in learning how to farm. The neighborhood I come from, there aren't any healthy food options," Olivierre said. "We have a few supermarkets, delis, a bunch of fast-food restaurants —McDonald's, Wendy's, all that ... good produce is just very difficult to find."

Olivierre said she was initially nervous about coming upstate for the five day program, but said it was ultimately a life-changing experience, educationally and emotionally.

"It was important that Soul Fire opened that opportunity for us to engage with the land practically, but also spiritually and emotionally because that is very much a part of black history in America," Olivierre said.

"Something that we spoke about a lot was trauma. All these things are connected," Olivierre said. "The land just brought up a lot of pains that I was unable to tend to in my city life. But because the pace and spaciousness of the farm was different, it had more space, the environment was different and gave me a nurturing space for those things to come up. Inaccessibility to food is connected to so many things."

A lack of access to healthy food lends itself to a cycle of other related problems, like poor health, associated medical costs and, according to Olivierre, an inability to focus not just on finding one's next meal, but rather on promoting greater change within a community

"When we learn about how to farm as black and brown people, we are taking back our power. We are healing our agency, we are dependent upon ourselves," she said.

Since participating in the program three years ago, Olivierre went back to Brooklyn and worked with the Canarsie Neighborhood Alliance to open the Canarsie Neighborhood Community Garden. And Olivierre has also worked putting together youth workshops to discuss addressing violence in the neighborhood.

Penniman said 87 percent of graduates from Soul Fire's programs go on to do some type of work providing food for their local communities across the U.S. Last year, the farm had graduates from 32 states around the nation, according to Penniman.

"I literally had a participant say 'the only images I'd ever seen of black and brown people working the land are images of either migrant labor or slave labor," Penniman said.

"So to kind of stand up and look out and see all of us working, but we're working because we want to, because we want to provide this food for the community and learn these skills is this really important cognitive dissonance," she said.

As Penniman and her team at Soul Fire continue working to train a diverse pool of new farmers each year, she hopes the process helps in healing still-tender historical wounds.

"So many of us have inherited pain and trauma from the history of oppression on land," Penniman said. "That needs to be undone for us to rewrite a story and have a noble, dignified relationship with the earth. "