Our Story · New Haven, CT
We grow fresh food, living knowledge, and community power.
An Afro-Indigenous agricultural enterprise — a farm, a school, a weekly harvest, and a wealth-building engine, run by people you can name.
We say it in three words: Eat the Sun.
Photosynthesis is the only process on earth that turns light into food, and every plant our ancestors carried across an ocean was sunlight they had learned to store. We shorten the distance between that light and a plate in New Haven.
Fresh food you can trust, rooted in a history worth knowing, grown by people you can name.
We never market Black pain more powerfully than Black possibility — a future worth joining, built one weekly harvest at a time.
Farmer D · Founder, Root Life
Know the grower. Know the harvest.
For more than a decade Farmer D has worked where soil, culture, health, education and economic self-determination meet. Through Root Life, fresh food becomes an entry point into agricultural knowledge, youth employment, entrepreneurship, cultural memory and stronger neighbourhood economies.
Thousands of young people and community members have come through this work. The farm is more than a production site — it is a classroom, a laboratory, a gathering place, a healing landscape and an incubator for future farmers.
Grow food. Grow knowledge.
Grow people. Grow power.
Where the share comes from
The share is older than the acronym.
Community-supported agriculture in the US is usually dated to 1986, to two farms in New England, with roots in European biodynamic farming and Japanese teikei. That account is true. It is also incomplete.
A generation earlier, Black farmers and organizers in the South were already building the same arrangement — paid in advance, harvest straight to the people who paid — for a harder reason. Banks would not lend to them. Buyers would not pay them fairly. A membership was a way to farm without either.
Documented record
The Clientele Membership Club
Dr. Booker T. Whatley · Tuskegee Institute, Alabama · promoted from the 1960s, published 1987
A Tuskegee horticulturist built a whole small-farm plan around membership. Households paid a fee up front, then came and picked their own food. He called the club “the lifeblood of the whole setup” — it guaranteed the market before a seed went in, and let the farmer plan against real demand.
- At least ten crops, so something sells in every month of the year.
- Pick-your-own — no harvest labor, packing, cold storage or transport.
- Fees in advance, standing in for credit banks would not extend.
- Within about forty miles of a city of fifty thousand, on a hard-surfaced road, with real water.
- High-value crops on small acreage, not commodity crops against thousand-acre farms.
Documented record
Freedom Farm Cooperative
Fannie Lou Hamer · Sunflower County, Mississippi · founded 1969
A former sharecropper bought forty acres of Delta land with a ten-thousand-dollar donation, and six hundred and forty more the next year. People fired and evicted for registering to vote needed food no landlord controlled.
- A pig bank: thirty-five gilts and five boars, lent to families to breed and return — thousands of animals within a few years.
- Land held in common, worked in plots, cash crops covering the bills.
- Head Start, a commercial kitchen, a garment factory, a tool bank and housing, run as one thing.
- Membership, not charity. People joined something they had a stake in.
It did not survive. Undercapitalized from the start and carried largely by Mrs. Hamer’s own fundraising, the farm folded in the late 1970s. We say so because the reason — no institutional backing for a Black cooperative — has not changed, and it is the risk we build against.
What we carried over
Paid before it is picked. Your share funds the cycle it belongs to, the way the club dues did — how membership works.
Many crops, every week. The ten-crop rule solved for a season with no gaps; our growing room harvests year-round — this week’s harvest.
You come to the food. Pick-your-own was about labor, and about knowing the ground — where we grow.
Members, not beneficiaries. Freedom Farm was a cooperative, not a feeding program — the pathways in.
Fact, and our reading of it. The two records above — the Clientele Membership Club and Freedom Farm Cooperative — are documented: names, places, dates, acreage, plans published in print. What we carried over is ours, not theirs. Neither Dr. Whatley nor Mrs. Hamer called this work a CSA, and we do not claim them as founders of Root Life. We name what we learned from them, which is a smaller claim.
Sources: Booker T. Whatley, How to Make $100,000 Farming 25 Acres (Rodale Press, 1987) and his 1982 Mother Earth News interview · Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers (UNC Press, 2018) · SNCC Digital Gateway. Reported membership-fee and discount figures differ between sources, so none is quoted. How we handle attribution
How We Got Here
A decade of growing, told honestly — tap a chapter.
What We Practice
Daily work, not slogans.
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Every cultural reference we publish names its people, place, time, source, and certainty. Read the Cultural Attribution Policy
Our ecosystem
Root Life grows through relationship.
Our work sits inside a living network of farmers, land stewards, cultural workers, educators, funders, cooperatives, community institutions, movement organizations, international partners, and public agencies working toward food sovereignty, ecological restoration, economic self-determination, cultural continuity, and healthier communities.
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Explore the ecosystem →In the press
Written about, since 2020
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New Haven Independent June 2026After Gather, 2 Gardners Keep Their Hands In The Dirt
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Yale Daily News February 2023“We grow community”: How urban agriculture has sprouted in New Haven
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Edible Nutmeg December 2020Urban Agriculture and Food Justice Take Root in New Haven
Two more pieces, full citations and notes for anyone quoting us are in the press kit.
Contact Root Life
Root Life LLC · New Haven & Greater New Haven, CT
admin@rootlife.ag — a person answers within one business day
Product concern? The lot code is on your container label — replacement or refund, your choice.