Naima Dhore:
Organic Farmer Cultivating Food Sovereignty

“There's something magical about the land. when I'm up on the field, touching the soil, I feel so free.”

In May 2017, like so many soon-to-be college graduates, Naima Dhore was getting ready to celebrate the milestone in the company of her beloved family. A ceremony significant in almost any student’s eyes, graduation meant even more for Naima, a young Somali immigrant. It wasn’t just her personal achievement—it was her family’s dream.

Everything changed three days before graduation. Naima’s husband, a business owner and resident of Minnesota for 22 years, was detained. Naima received her diploma without him by her side, unclear on her husband’s fate and unsure of her family’s future. A few months later, they learned that he would be deported to Somalia.

“My husband was my biggest supporter, and I woke up every morning knowing that he was cheering me on,” remembers Naima. “So I kept on.”

Like so many Muslim women, Naima had become the backbone of her family and her community.

In the year and a half before Naima’s husband was able to return to the United States, she not only worked full time, supported their two young children, and started graduate school.

She also took the first steps toward creating a community farmers association.

“My children were watching my actions. They needed to know the importance of hard work and never giving up, no matter how challenging life is,” Naima says.

And that is exactly what Naima taught her children and what her story imparts to us.

Naima’s interest in farming was set in motion when her first baby was born. As she was getting ready to start feeding him solid food, she was surprised by the options at her local grocery store.

“Growing up in Somalia, everything was fresh and ready to prepare,” says Naima. That was not the case at her grocery store in south Minneapolis, where even baby food was processed and packaged.

Naima started wondering if there was any produce that she could grow in her small apartment. She did a Google search and stumbled upon microgreens, edible seedlings of vegetable greens also known as “vegetable toddlers” or “vegetable confetti.” Traditionally used as garnish on restaurant dishes, microgreens have become popularized as a healthy, sustainable way for those without access to land or garden space to grow their own produce.

Naima’s curiosity grew as quickly as the baby kale and arugula in her microgreen garden. She experimented with herbs and explored what she could grow in her community garden. In 2016, she enrolled herself, her husband, and her two sons in a training program for first-time farmers at Big River Farms. The goal was for her family to learn about producing their own food, but Naima quickly found herself asking more questions.

“When I went to the farmers market, I didn't see anyone who looked like me. And when I went back to my own community, I didn’t see any green space,” Naima says. She realized that she probably wasn’t the only parent who couldn’t find fresh produce to feed her children. 

Worse was the fact that when fruits and vegetables were available at local grocery stores, they failed to meet cultural needs and dietary specifications. Western produce just couldn’t be used in preparing traditional East African dishes.

“It's not the food that is meant for us as a community,” explains Naima. “We need a lot of healing—mental and spiritual healing through food that we are familiar with.”

Holding this vision of healing in her heart, Naima set out to provide food not just for her own children but for her entire community. She became a certified organic farmer, began growing produce that she knew they loved—collard greens, spinach, tomatoes—and selling it at farmers markets. The reaction was: “Where can I get more?”

In order to feed a growing hunger that she knows is both physical and psychological, Naima has begun exploring the possibility of purchasing land. Though she understands that ownership is far more sustainable than continuing to rent, it’s just about the last thing that she imagined when she started growing microgreens in her Minneapolis apartment. 

“I've been very vocal about the challenges for BIPOC farmers like myself and the issue around land access,” Naima says. Unlike many of their white counterparts, farmers of color usually can’t expect a family member to transfer land ownership or provide other capital. Even applying for a loan through the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA), which sets aside a portion of funding for minority and women farmers, has been an excruciating process for Naima.

“This system is not designed for us. Not only is it outdated, but it was never meant for Black farmers or immigrant farmers,” she says.

True to her nature, Naima started asking questions and imagining possibilities. What would an infrastructure designed by and for Black immigrant farmers look like? If she could cultivate her tiny microgreen garden into an eight-acre plot featuring native East African produce, why couldn’t she create a farmers association?

In summer 2020, Naima officially launched Somali American Farmers Association (SAFA), a nonprofit organization that supports East African immigrant families in Minnesota by providing regenerative, indigenous farming training and education in the importance of locally grown, organic produce. “There are only 39 Black farmers listed in the state of Minnesota, but we have a lot of folks who are interested in farming and actually hold a great deal of knowledge,” she says. “Often all they need is help in getting their paperwork together or advice about navigating the system.”

In addition to making space for farmers who look like her, Naima is also tackling white-, Western-centered agriculture from the inside-out, becoming one of the inaugural members of the Emerging Farmers’ Working Group at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. She’s brought to the table not only her experiences of barriers but also her insights about practices such as regenerative farming.

“These practices have been deeply rooted in our culture for such a long time,” Naima explains. What may strike an American farmer as new and innovative is actually a method that’s been used by centuries of African farmers who “think about the ecosystem as a whole and don’t just take what we want.” 

Of particular interest to Naima is seed saving, the practice of preserving reproductive material from plants so that they can be grown from year to year without the loss of biodiversity or native variety.

Learning from her Native sisters and brothers, she plans to “go home [to Somalia] so I can bring back, preserve the seeds in their natural state, and spread knowledge about how we used to eat, how we used to heal through plant medicine.”

By returning to these indigenous farming practices, Naima believes, we can heal not only the earth but also the communities who need it most.

And what seemed like a distant dream a few years ago—land ownership—has become in her eyes a necessary next step.

“There’s this hidden power in land,” she says. Some of Naima’s most beloved moments have taken place on her farm, seeding the soil, teaching her children and her community how their food grows.

More than anything, Naima says, it has humbled her. She recalls one day early in her farming enterprise that she spent painstaking planting onions by hand, only to return the next to find every plant damaged or uprooted by hail. “Alhamdulillah,” she remembers thinking, “This is just nature teaching me that things are given to us and things are taken from us.”

For Naima, spending time with earth under her feet and between her fingers is a reminder of the simple truth that so many of us lose sight of: the world is bigger than you or me or anything that we can see.

As easily as Naima learns lessons from her work and our beautiful world, she teaches us what it looks like to be the change that you wish to see. Grounded in who she is and what she wants the future to be, Naima is uncovering a forgotten road for healing and carving out a new path for sovereignty.

Naima, thank you for being our Shero.