Black Farmers and the Fight for Food Sovereignty in Canada
Tim Adekola
President & Founder
Despite representing a growing portion of Alberta's farming community, Black farmers face systemic barriers to land and capital. We look at the landscape and what Adesco is doing to change it.
A Growing Presence, A Persistent Gap
Black farming communities in Canada are growing — yet they remain severely underrepresented in land ownership, agricultural financing, and policy decision-making. Studies consistently show that Black farmers are less likely to receive agricultural loans, more likely to farm rented land, and less likely to have access to the cooperative structures that give larger farming operations their competitive advantage.
The History Behind the Gap
The barriers facing Black farmers in Canada are not accidental — they are the legacy of deliberate exclusion. From discriminatory homesteading policies that limited Black settlement in the Prairie provinces to the systematic exclusion of Black farmers from agricultural cooperatives throughout the 20th century, the playing field was tilted long before today's farmers arrived. Understanding this history is essential to designing solutions that actually work.
Food Sovereignty as a Framework
Food sovereignty — the right of peoples to define their own food systems — offers a powerful framework for addressing these inequities. Rather than simply increasing access to the existing industrial food system, food sovereignty calls for the creation of alternative structures in which communities have genuine control: over the land they farm, the seeds they plant, the markets they access, and the policies that govern their work.
What Adesco Is Doing
Adesco's programs are designed with food sovereignty principles at their core. The livestock banking model builds community wealth rather than dependence on external institutions. The seed library preserves cultural agricultural knowledge. The advocacy work connects individual farmers to broader movements for policy change. None of these interventions alone is sufficient — but together, they are building the infrastructure for genuine agricultural self-determination in Black Alberta communities.
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