From the Soil Up

Keisha Cameron, founder of High Hog Farm, and Brandy Hall, founder of Shades of Green Permaculture, are two Georgia women working to heal themselves, the land, and their communities, from the soil up.

by Beth Ward

Keisha Cameron and her husband, Warren, were en route from their family farm in Grayson, Georgia, to Augusta with a baby ram in the back of the car.

“He’s tiny, so we have him in a crate,” she says to me over the phone. “My husband just pulled over to strap the crate back down, and somehow he’s knocked up against the doors. We don’t want sheep in the road.”

Driving down a busy interstate with a lamb in the car isn’t as unusual as it sounds. The Camerons are farmers, and alongside their three children, they serve as owners, operators, and stewards of High Hog Farm. They cultivate Indigenous heirloom crops and raise sheep, goats, rabbits, and chickens for seasonal food, natural fibers, and other sundries.

But in a much deeper way, what Keisha Cameron is cultivating on her farm is a healing relationship to her land built around food and community, the proud Black agrarian culture of her ancestors, and restorative agriculture practices based on the seasonal cycles of nature that allow that land to thrive. 

Cameron didn’t necessarily grow up wanting to be a farmer — never imagined it in her wildest dreams. But around 2009, she found herself with a horse of her own, some acreage on a foreclosed property in Gwinnett County, and a kind of nagging feeling of spiritual misalignment.  

“I [was] watching entirely too much HGTV, and so naïvely enchanted with this pastoral idea of fixing up a place and moving my horse to my own spot.”

So she followed that sense of enchantment down what she calls a “winding road,” one that took Cameron from her academic, marketing, and sociocultural professional background to spending her days with her hands deep in the dirt — a road that began in part with an ill-fated attempt to have her land cleared by a logging company in 2010.

“They took the best and left the rest,” she says, “and we were left with all sorts of erosion problems. I was trying to mitigate all that, and that’s when I found Brandy Hall at Shades of Green.” 

Cameron took a Shades of Green permaculture design course in 2013 to learn how to repair her land. 

“Permaculture,” coined by Bill Mollison in the late 1970s, describes practices that integrate land, its resources, and people in a way that is mutually beneficial to humans, animals, plants, and the environment. It champions the diversity of nature and utilizes land management practices such as water harvesting, natural building techniques, waste management, food production, and animal systems to help create a kind of closed-loop environmental system where all parts of that system can live in harmony. It’s a philosophy based on ancient Indigenous practices and ways of living and speaking that go back thousands of years.

That permaculture was a repackaged form of that deeper, ancient knowledge was something Cameron understood intuitively early on. But she found she was able to use its framework to explore how she might steward her land in a way that healed not only the soil but her spirit, too. 

“If we could become a friend of this land,” she thought, “and a friend to nature, all of this could be healed, and we could start the remediation process. And that was really a metaphor for what was going on with me internally. That kind of deep healing from the soul up.”

Tending to her land at High Hog became transcendent work, a kind of sacred restoration that gave Cameron a true sense of belonging.

“My faith and my spiritual walk took on a different level of understanding and meaning when I began to see it show up in agriculture, in the nature around us,” she says. “The soil was my healer, my teacher. It still is. It was able to help me really detoxify a lot of my thought processes. … It allowed me to slow down. It allowed me to take things in seasons, to respect change and the whole cycle of life, which includes death and decomposition.”

Working on the land with her family also allowed Cameron to connect to the ancestral communities and people groups to whom those land stewardship practices first belonged.

“Going further back and understanding the history of Black people and our relationship with land … it took me back into the history of sharecropping, back to chattel slavery,” she says, “and understanding that the people that were brought over in the trans-Atlantic slave trade were brought over because they had a deep knowledge of agriculture and a relationship to land and the soil.”

Farming also helped Cameron shed a lot of culturally instilled shame about what it means to be a land-based worker, and it’s her hope now to continue sharing what she’s learned with her community. 

“I’m trying to invite people into this,” she says. “It’s a coming back. It’s not just a reconciliation. It’s really a restoration.”

(From left) Warren, Zachary, Keisha, Abraham, and Johnathan Cameron have been farming at High Hog Farm in Grayson, Georgia, since 2014. They cultivate heirloom crops and raise sheep, goats, rabbits, and chickens for seasonal food, fiber, and other sundries. Photo provided by High Hog Farm.

Not only has High Hog Farm become a productive farm supplying food and fiber, but before COVID-19, it was also the stage for the Black Sheep Fiber Circle, where makers learned about the legacy of African, African American, and Indigenous textile art; the Cultured Kitchen, where folks explored the human stories behind the foods they ate; and the Ubuntu Program, a program that used farming practices as a way to teach students about the impact of systemic racism and “othering” on their communities. 

Through this work, Cameron has been able to feed her family, her community, and her spirit.

“For me,” she says, “I have come to an awareness about being on the land, being in connection with the animals, with the soil, with these plants, learning just how much of our life — literally our life support — comes from nature and our environment. That is deeply healing.”

“ … [T]he more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our [human] race.”

- Rachel Carson, acceptance speech for the John Burroughs Medal, April 1952

Hall, too, took a circuitous route to her work as a land steward. She founded Shades of Green Permaculture in 2008, but she’s felt at home in nature since childhood. 

Hall grew up in two places. She would spend summers with her dad in the clean, pristine wilderness of western North Carolina, where she would camp under the stars. Her other home was south Florida, where her mother and stepfather ran a 15-acre ornamental plant nursery surrounded by what she describes as “sludge-filled drainage ditches,” where she’d spend her time outside climbing on potting soil and looking for pincher bugs. 

In south Florida, she bore witness to the damage caused by cultivated agriculture. Her family would have to leave home for a day or two every time flyover chemical spraying was done to the fields. Eventually, the family would flee south Florida altogether as a result of her mother’s and stepfather’s severely diminished health “because of pervasive herbicide and pesticide use in the environment as well as being near [agricultural] zones,” she says.

“[That] juxtaposition of life force versus destruction imprinted on me at an early age, and began my inquiry into finding a better, healthier way for humans to cohabitate the planet,” says Hall. “It became an obsession of mine in my early 20s, as I began to study natural building, farming, and plants. I wanted, from the beginning, to help people live a life in integrity with nature.”

That desire, alongside the principles and practices of permaculture, would be the foundation of Shades of Green, a woman-owned, eco-conscious landscaping design firm in Atlanta that centers conservation, sustainability, and the interconnectedness of plants and people.

In December, in the wake of a pandemic that forced so many to come to terms with the truth of white supremacy and systemic inequity, Hall took to her blog, The Pawpaw Patch, and wrote “What Permaculture Got Wrong." She confronted permaculture’s whitewashing of Indigenous people’s ancient relationship with the land. 

“So many times, I’ve wanted to separate from this word permaculture,” she wrote. “I feel deep grief in using a word that is inherently antithetical to centering Indigenous voices.”

Hall noted in the blog that “permaculture is a word created by white men to over-simplify and make palatable what Indigenous people have always known, so it can be received by modernized, post-industrial, capitalist ears. There’s so much more that’s needed than permaculture if we are to truly find our way back to the Big Story and the deep knowing that it’s all alive, interconnected, and intelligent.”

Hall continues to use the word “permaculture” in her business because it can, she wrote, act as a bridge from where we are to where we could go, in terms of rehabilitating our relationship with the natural world. 

And Hall’s small, close-knit team accomplishes this on a day-to-day level by helping people, myself included, better nourish the soil of their lawns, create thriving pollinator habitats and mini food forests in their backyards, and cultivate biodiversity on their own land.

Last year, Hall’s business was booming. 

As the pandemic raged, and people found themselves isolated, locked down, and afraid, they turned to their yards and outdoor spaces for solace. And they turned to companies like Shades of Green to build out berry patches and butterfly gardens to help them find it. 

“I started [2020] thinking that there was going to be a big economic collapse,” said Hall when we spoke over the phone late last year. “I was bracing myself for big layoffs and scaling down, but I have been pleasantly surprised that the opposite is true.”

She thinks the uptick in business came as a result of a values realignment triggered by COVID-19. And during a year that brought about so many profound social reckonings, Hall found herself reassessing how she expressed and lived out her own values, too, and those of her business. 

“It was about asking, ‘Where [am I] in these conversations around race and injustice and food security and all the things that are happening?’ … As a white woman in a capitalist, commercial, urban world, what does this look like for me?”

For Cameron and her family, the questions and challenges were a bit different.

Cameron’s family farm found itself still navigating the closed markets and supply chain issues of the spring, while also contending with an almost daunting surge in support in response to the new wave of white wokeness prompted by the summer’s protests against police brutality. 

“It was good and encouraging, but overwhelming, because it became, ‘Let’s uplift and support Black farmers and Black chefs and cooks and restaurants and Black artists,’” she says. “But the ‘I want to help you’ became almost onerous at a point because it negated the history of why these people and communities have been marginalized all along.”

How is all of this connected then? How does systemic inequality inform the ecological systems of our environments and our communities? What do pandemics and permaculture have to do with each other? 

“If you are really good at hurting Black people, you will indeed hurt the environment, I promise you. … If you are really good at hurting women, you’re probably interested in war, I promise you.”

— Jericho Brown, interview with Krista Tippett for “On Being,” June 2019

Through a journey like Cameron’s, it becomes clear the ways in which nature, coming back to the land, can help bring Black and Indigenous people a true and profound sense of healing and wholeness, a returning to the ancestral knowledge that originally and still belongs to them.

But the inverse is also true. 

Denying people of color access to healing green spaces, to nature, creates deep spiritual wounds and real-life health consequences that are often the result of simultaneous harms inflicted on the environment — a truth refracted back to us during the pandemic.

We know that in neighborhoods predominantly occupied by low-income individuals and people of color, there is less green space. Data has long shown that these communities also bear the brunt of the impact of environmental degradation in the form of urban sprawl, road construction, pipeline drilling, logging, and mining. They also have less access to parks, coastlines, and other outdoor recreational areas, according to the report “The Nature Gap” by the Center for American Progress. 

Members of low-income communities and communities of color are also more likely to be concentrated in neglected areas with less clean air and clean water, and more toxic pollution — areas where natural sites are often abandoned and uncared for.

And this comes down largely to how we divide and label space, says Cameron. 

“It’s problematic, just in general, because we sequester off areas and we label them ‘wilderness,’ which is kind of odd. …  We move people into these little compartmentalized boxes or groups or areas, and then anything that extends outside of that is defined as wilderness. But even within that, you’ve got spaces where you designate who belongs and who doesn’t belong, who has access and who doesn’t have access, and then you chase out the things that you consider to be less desirable.”

Those spaces that are considered wild are often then tamed. We mow them down, pave them over, fence them off, coat them in chemicals to control unsightly weeds. 

“We treat [wild spaces] as something that is other,” she says, “as something that is dangerous that needs to be conquered. … We strip them for whatever resources we can get from them, and then we set up our houses, put our fences in, and designate how we pay taxes on it, who has ownership of it. And then we move other people who are not considered [desirable] into these other areas which are neglected.”

Evidence, perhaps, that when we justify othering in nature, it becomes much easier to justify doing it to people. 

For Hall and her team at Shades of Green, part of the solution to some of these issues could lie in urban agriculture — what she refers to as the intersection of green space and food production. It’s a kind of mindful cultivation of urban public spaces where communities and nature support each other, one where the people in those communities have the power to determine what they need, and where people, plants, and animals are all nourished and cared for as part of a holistic system.

“Public spaces are such an important aspect of building any sort of cultural resilience or food resilience or access,” Hall says. 

“To own any amount of land is such a huge privilege, and there are so many barriers to access from the get-go. But green spaces are part of the public domain, and it really makes sense to invest in those from a perspective of building resilience and food security.”

Says Hall, “Many of the tools we have to build food security and ecological health, they’re not these major, heavy-handed construction projects. It’s working with organic matter that’s falling from trees in the form of leaves. It’s using techniques like hugel beds, which are just contoured, raised beds made with rotting wood — and we live in a big ‘ol urban forest where there happens to be an abundance of wood. Those are things that don’t take a lot of money or capital investment from cities. Those are things that are the tools of the people.”

Shades of Green worked with the city of Clarkston, Georgia, to create an edible streetscape. Hall and her team also created pollinator habitats and worked to restore and heal the depleted soils of post-constructed roadways around the site. They are bringing back biological diversity to a city known as the “most diverse square mile in America.” Photo provided by Shades of Green.

As an example, Hall and her team recently worked with the city of Clarkston, Georgia, to build out a natural, productive streetscape around Refuge Coffee Co., a coffee shop and nonprofit that offers on-the-job training and a living wage to members of its international refugee community.  

“At the Refuge Coffee site, we did a streetscape of pecan and Vitex and olive and pineapple guava and tons of edible species, with an understory of some annuals that people know and love, and can harvest at will.”

They also created pollinator habitats and worked to restore and heal the depleted soils of post-constructed roadways around the site. Hall and her team are bringing back biological diversity to a city known as the “most diverse square mile in America.” 

Hall hopes more cities will embrace edible landscaping. Too often, she says, city and local officials are more concerned with the hassle of fruit dropping on sidewalks, or summer berries staining concrete.

“It’s thinking of wild spaces as, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a maintenance nightmare.’ That’s something I’ve heard over and over again in working with larger entities and cities. But that is thinking of a landscape in a completely static way, not in a way where people are interacting with it and are part of the ongoing stewardship and health and caretaking of that space.”

It’s a way of thinking that fails to take into account the people in urban communities coming to freely pick the fruit from these trees to eat and share, birds coming to eat berries and seeds, leaves falling and turning into nutrients for the soil, butterflies, and bees pollinating and propagating the flowers. 

It’s also failing to see the intrinsic link between nature and people, failing to recognize that caring for one can better enable us to care for the other. It’s failing to understand what Indigenous people, what land stewards like Cameron and Hall have been trying to demonstrate — that nature is us, and its beauty and medicine should be equally accessible to everyone. 

“[It all] really comes back to the principles of permaculture, the sharing of abundance,” Hall says. “That’s one of the ethics of permaculture. It’s based on the idea that that’s what nature does. It shares the abundance. It feeds in order to be fed. The chestnut tree doesn’t say, ‘Oh, sorry, you can’t have these. These are mine.’”

Keisha Cameron and her sheep, Smalls. Photo by Zachary Cameron.

Back on the highway, Cameron considers what all of this has meant for her family and her farm over the past year. 

“The last part of this year has been exploring, specifically, what are we going to put our hands to, and how are we going to do that in a way that is truly sustainable,” she says. “So that when and if we get to a place of a new, relative normal, some level of stability, we’re able to be continually responsive and supportive of the people around us. And that includes our own family’s needs.”

And that all starts with asking the land what it can support, says Cameron. 

“Really asking our land and our space, ‘What do you need? What are you willing to offer?’ Being able to tune in. On some level, [it’s been] a spiritual kind of thing, an awakening … we’re sitting here reflecting like, ‘Well, nothing’s promised tomorrow.’ This is going to sound so corny, but it’s a ‘seize the day’ kinda thing. We are here, we have to show up. It’s a major shift in priorities and expectations. Our definitions of what is enough have shifted. Our perspectives have shifted. It’s been a blessing. It was a challenge. The challenges still exist.”

She seems optimistic as we talk. 

“I’m writing. I have my laptop on my lap and a sheep in the back. It’s a good living.” 

She laughs. 

Header Photo: Before COVID-19, High Hog Farm hosted farm days for individuals and groups such as Gangstas to Growers, an Atlanta-based program that empowers at-risk youth and those who were formerly incarcerated through agriculture, employment, and entrepreneurship. Photo by Warren Cameron.

Getting a National Park Going in Central Georgia

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