Bountiful: Somali Bantu Farm in Wales Reaping a Harvest

WALES — Harvest time at most farms is fast-paced and largely mechanized.

Not at the Somali Bantu Community Association’s Liberation Farms, where virtually everything is done by hand, from planting to picking, washing to packing up. It’s not the din of a roaring combine in the fields off Gardiner Road, but the occasional small talk in Somali, or chickens and roosters clucking and crowing as they escape from a pen they share with the goats.

Make no mistake, this is a business, albeit a nonprofit business, with product to be grown and orders fulfilled constantly from May through November. As the growing season winds down, the group’s executive director says it’s been a huge success in this very first year of owning and operating the farm, although Somali farmers have had a presence there since 2014.

“We are learning as we go,” explained Muhidin Libah, executive director of the Somali Bantu Community Association. “We were never business people in Somalia especially (the) farm businesses. We never thought somebody could make a good business out of farming — because we were farmers but we didn’t have resources, we didn’t have money.”