California Ag Day ~ Creating Inclusive Agriculture Education

The State of California, Food and Agriculture Code, designates the first day of spring, as California Agriculture Day to encourage public schools throughout the state to use the first day of spring, or another date close to it, to provide education that instructs students on the history and importance of agriculture in California.

California Agriculture instruction could include education on agricultural history, nutrition, economics, or simply the planting of a school garden. A broader goal for California Ag Day will become the use of an inclusive education opportunity that commemorates agriculture's importance to all of California.

Black Agriculture in California has not been a welcomed equal part of the broader California Agriculture industry, yet a new horizon for a growing cultural transformation throughout the U.S. Agriculture industry is slowly beginning to make systemic change, yet a low, low priority.

We have created Black Agriculture Awareness Week, July 10 – 16, to set aside time to focus specifically upon the unique obstacles people of African descent have “farming while black” in a global marketplace, while celebrating and sharing sacred science of Dr. George Washington Carver.

From the beginning, equity and equal opportunity has been nearly impossible since the California Constitution clearly states’ citizenship rights are for “white males only.”

Indeed we have come a long way since our first California governor; Peter Burnett strongly advocated for and proposed legislative action to export all people of African descent out of the State of California.

Targeted “legal terrorism” supported by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case escalated the economic destruction and wide spread land loss of Black Agriculture in California was fully supported by the California State Legislature and local custom.

In the Sacramento region alone, several entire towns, Gold Rush mining communities and Rancho Rio De Los Americanos, a 35,000-acre individual private property, were based upon Black agriculture production and all destroyed by a "legal" methodology of systemic institutional racism.

Official National, State and local government records document and quantify the creation and destruction of Negro Village, Negro Bar, Leidesdorff Ranch, Negro Hill, Negro Bluff and a plethora of Pre-Civil War actions that established a foundation to the last plantation in America, the United States Department of Agriculture, established in 1862.

Today, beginning the second decade in the 21st century of western civilization, official U.S. Agriculture policy is predicated by the same 1862 values and beliefs that created America’s “peculiar institution” while officially celebrated as the "People's Department."

Generations of people of African descent continue to suffer from post-traumatic slave syndrome to the point that even a suggestion of growing a garden creates an immediate quantifiable adverse reaction.

Pigford II vs. USDA remains a challenge, simply because one standard of humanity is beyond the cognition of former slave owners and/or those who benefit from a belief system that mandates 3/5ths of humanity for a class of U.S. citizens clearly targeted for destruction.

The Spring Equinox, by statute brings an annual unique promise to California Agriculture Day to the California Education system through Food and Agriculture Code.

Cognition of an inclusive curriculum design that targets culturally appropriate methodology for today’s student is certainly available, yet not desired in an 1862 vision of the future.

Just as California history unfolded in the 19th century, cycles and waves of ethnic cleansing, land loss, water wars and cyclical commodity fluctuations, natural and man-made, guide California Agriculture toward a #1 position in America, “the greatest garden in the modern world.”

Historic Negro Hill, California is the best example to document the past and provide a clear path to present opportunity toward equity and equal opportunity.

Negro Hill, CA once was the hub of a regional Gold Rush Mining District, was created by industrious people of African descent in 1848. As the word of highly successful trade and commerce spread the community expanded to embrace a multi-ethnic and expansive growth and development.

Systemic institutional racism destroyed the early promise documented at the Negro Hill Civil Usage House, where early regional community development embraced everyone.

Today, those early California pioneers are remembered in Mormon Island Relocation Cemetery, as Unknown, moved from Nigger Hill Cemetery by the U.S. Government in 1954.

Biblical scripture quantifies the current reality and the promise of the Age of Aquarius, written as an annual contextual Passover, of the first Sunday, after the full moon, after the Spring Equinox.

California Agriculture Day is in harmony with universal order, the distant darkness of the night sky and bright angle of sunlight are equal throughout the land named after Queen Califia, the Great State of California.

Inclusive education about the bountiful harvest of California Agriculture production that expands job creation and career development in the broader global agriculture industry is possible for a new generation of California students to take full opportunity of the promise of today.

Together, we can continue the journey towards freedom, equity and equal opportunity for all, especially during this special United Nations International Year for People of African Descent.