Dear extended family,

I had been homeless or living out of my van for 3 years leading up to my joining Sylvanaqua farms. After I was offered a job. I spent the months of April through September living in my van parked in Chris and Annie Newman's driveway. The temperatures reached up to 100 in July and August.

 Upon my arrival I immediately dove headfirst into the work with absolutely no experience. I performed eviscerations of animals I had just seen living and breathing. We did these slaughters in old horse stables next to a fabricated chicken barn of 500 live hens already laying eggs. As someone who is servsafe certified I questioned every step of the process. But neglected to direct my questions to Chris Newman himself because I was afraid to rock the boat. As I looked a little harder at the rest of the operation,  I had even more questions about operational efficiency and land management. But because I was a newly hired farm hand I kept my mouth shut. As a woman in a man's world I fucking knew better than to speak up at first, but I was still labelled as the angry black woman.I was accused of being too firey and having bad communication.I still tried to be 3 times better. I worked twice as hard for half of the recognition and that only fueled my fire more. I was going to be taken seriously even  if it killed me. And it almost did. My usefulness in the organization  was directly linked to how hard I could work. How fast I could scoop buckets of grain. How quickly I could finish a shift and how often I could do solo shifts.

 After a couple months of sleeping in a van ridden with fleas, no sleep and night terrors. I snapped. I had reached my limit, but so had everyone else. I felt justified in my anger after I lost my partner. I lashed out. The handling of this emotional turmoil by Chris and Annie Newman left me feeling completely alone. I was sent on a paid vacation to straighten up and get over the loss of my relationship and try to see past the betrayal I felt. I stopped talking to everyone. I buried my pain in my work when I wasn't in heated conversations with any one I could get my hands on. I could no longer bear the thought of my partner being happy with someone else. I had an opportunity to breach Chris' privacy when he gave me the password to his computer and regrettably, I did. I read his personal messages to people I worked with, I saw jokes about muzzling me go unchecked by my coworkers. In the fall of 2020 any relationships I had left fell apart. It was after months of hard communication distrust and outright hostility I managed to burn all of my bridges with fiery hostility.

The workload (for me personally involved Saturday farmers markets an hour and 45 minutes away,  door to door deliveries 3 days a week  slaughters twice a month and field chores almost everyday), living conditions in and out of hotels and air bnb's during a global pandemic, and interpersonal relationships weighed heavily on me. I was working 60 hours a week most weeks.  I accrued 6 tickets driving an uninspected and  unregistered farm truck provided by Chris Newman. I began to question if Chris gave a shit about my safety as a Black woman.  I had come too close to getting the vehicle searched by police. I ended up paying hundreds of dollars worth of fines but I made Chris pay for some too. I wasn't going to face that alone.

My mother committed an atrocity by calling the cops on my brother and having him committed. I immediately brought him to the farm with the blessing of Chris and Annie with no one else's consent and started taking care of him. I worked my ass off during this period and my life was clearly falling apart all around me and I couldn't handle the weight. We began to maintain the hog program by trapping all of the pigs in the fall of 2020. There was never an established breeding program. There was always unchecked breeding in every pig paddock. piglets being born year round. Because they weren't running wild in the forest we started seeing mass births of piglets more than the 6 or 10 that seemed to occur once a week during the summer and early fall months. We had dozens and dozens of piglets being born into a 30 degree mud pit. The losses were heartbreaking.  The pigs ate most of the piglets but as frequently as I could, I gathered the dead bodies in a bucket to cut down on cannibalization.  

The pigs were out of control and with the help of Jaime, a relatively new hire- We were able to all learn and witness our first pig castrations. We did 40 or 70. It's all a blur now. But we started the clock 3 months 3 weeks 3 days till we could release the pigs back into the woods so there were no more births going unaccounted for. We never released them. Boars too old to be castrated  escaped the pens we built and impregnated their mothers. I had never seen such a dysfunctional system and I had no idea how to fix it. We started shooting pigs. The idea of letting local hunters go out into the woods and take care of the feral hogs was laughable. Instead we learned to shoot pigs, we shot boar and piglets. I had absolutely no experience coming into this. But we knew that the pigs deserved more than a life locked in cages. We deferred to someone we thought knew how to run a regenerative hog program. There had to be a better way but any questions regarding the process was met with ridicule, competition and slander. It became a battle of who's faster. who's stronger. who's smarter. Who's been farming longer. who is actually from the hood. We didn't care what anyone thought because we all knew better. I became lost in the toxic masculinity that had taken grip of the farm. it became an outright pissing match between every man who knew better and the women fighting to be taken seriously. Every single one of us became toxic.

With the grip Chris had held on the ranch operations, we desperately wanted to break away. Chris deflated because he knew it would never work if he was involved.  we had already all lost our respect for them back in June at a Black lives matters protest. December and January of 2020 the conflict came to a head and the businesses were split. the anger and resentment we all felt for each other left us divided and uninformed. Kami took 50k worth of loans from Chris Newman's fundraisers to purchase the animals and the infrastructure from Chris Newman. Chris gave Kami his business plan and swore not to interfere. But the shadow management never stopped. No real changes could be made until Chris let go of his unilateral control of sylvanaqua, as the demands of sylvanaqua dictated the workloads and expectations of everyone else in the system. That never happened. With feigned excitement and hope we split up. Chris took over processing. Kami took the ranch and Annie took the garden. I continued working for all of them. I split my time and resources and energy still trying to make ends meet financially. With a flat pay of 1000 a month coming from the ranch and 1100 flat rate coming from the garden and being paid hourly in the butchery I managed to buy a shitty broke ass truck and pay off all of my tickets. We were stupid to think that with space communication would get better.

 Rumors spread like wildfire from business to business farm to farm. I resented almost everyone around me. I tried again at a new perspective. I left the ranch. Annie accepted me reluctantly into the Apprenticeship program, we had so much conflict over the past year that had soured me towards her. Maybe more than anyone else. The accusations ran rampant on both sides. After Annie refused to take white supremacy training I still joined. After they had taken unsolicited pictures of protesters in D.C in june i still joined. After the trauma of what I believe to be outright racial discrimination at my first disciplinary hearing with Annie Newman for missing 3 daily zoom calls I still stayed. It was the blatant lack of professionalism that pushed me to eventually leave in april. I left the garden willingly to try again at the ranch. I never stopped working in the field. 6 months passed and I hadn't forgiven them. But I went back. I met with Chris and Annie to discuss leaving the garden and was met with enthusiastic glee from Annie. We talked about my transition plan and Annie told me I didn't need to feel  responsible for my still scheduled garden shifts because they considered my last day at work to already have passed. I was given  8 days to vacate the house in the garden where I had lived from October 2020 to March 2021. It felt like there were incredibly hard feelings on both sides but I thought I could move out at that time and there wouldn't be a problem. But there was. Annie's ultimatum turned into a pay withholding. If i didn't vacate I wouldn't receive pay. Days passed. Annie's deadline passed. And shit got ugly. Without proper access to a vehicle and no money for a uhaul and a broken down van that had been my home for 3 years. I couldn't move fast enough. Annie threatened to impound my van. I was working everyday at the ranch.  Because I didn't have the resources to move. I unwillingly continued Annie's narrative that I was combative, unwilling to compromise and I was disrespectful and unprofessional. Through internal and external manipulation everyone held a figurative knife to each other's throat. I was completely and utterly unhappy. Everything Chris did I saw as a personal attack.

After weeks of unchecked illegal pork processing in an unregistered facility we underwent a chicken slaughter. 8 people were tasked with killing and processing 300 birds in a span of 4 hours. Needless to say it went sour. New processes were sent out the night before and put into practice with little to no input from anyone but Chris. With the new processes and new facility we only ended up finishing about 100 birds. We packed them into coolers with a mix of ice and warm water and walked away defeated. The 40 acre crew including myself came back the next day without Chris and finished dispatching the birds. 300 birds were put into warm water and ice and forgotten. Days passed. We slaughtered 100 more birds 2 days later that were packed into a cooler with ice and warm water. Days passed. Chris cut down more illegal pork and forgot about the birds. I think it was maybe 4 or 5 days before we opened the bird coolers again. After sitting in warm water for 5 days the smell was indescribable. Noone wanted anything to do with it so the 400 birds were tossed onto the back of the trailer and taken back out to the field where I and the 40 acre crew had raised them from 4 days old. I threw every single bird away and  piled them on the bones and remains of the piglets from the winter time. I had become desensitised to death; it was part of my daily routine.

Every shift since I was taught by a coworker that nursing the chickens until they died painfully of disease infection or dislocated bones that I didn't know how to reset wasn't kind, it was cruel. I shut down the chicken hospice. I learned to end their suffering. I kindly euthanized more birds than I care to remember. I established a test if they couldn't walk on  their own anymore, if they weren't interested in food or if it looked like a whole limb might be subject to oozing infection or protruding breaks. I would offer them a last meal and I would take them into my arms. Breaking the neck swiftly. More often the entire head being ripped off in one motion. I did this for them. I thought about this as I threw those unlucky birds that had made it the full term at sylvanaqua into the compost. I looked at hundreds of hours of work and care. I tossed failure after failure into a rancid pile. And I broke. My soul broke into pieces that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to find again. Then we looked into the walk in. 6 pigs that were halved had begun to grow mold during our week and a half of failed chicken slaughters. By the time we noticed what had happened the mold had spored. We threw away hundreds of  pounds of pork. Faced with the epic failure of the sanitation standards and management of our processing facility. Chris walked away. Putting two relatively new employees in charge. At that point we had accrued 15 employees, 6 year long leases, 1500 broilers, 2000 laying hens, 200 pigs and 13 cows. We had tried everything to make this shit show functional except talk to each other. To this day I still have no idea how much money was thrown at the problems without any real resolution. I'll never know. So the remains of Sylvanaqua finally decided to sit down and talk. We became aware of our financial situation. We had enough money collectively in our bank accounts to survive the next 2 months. After a week or so of exhausting team meetings in between chores during chores and after chores. We voted on our first collective decision.  We decided to pool resources from the processing business and buy feed for the animals for the month of April. There had never been a process like that before.  

Chris jumped back into our pot of boiling water. He had a plan. He would save us all. He would present it to the entire group of us on Monday. He didn't though. He sent out different plans to different people before Monday.  Telling some of us that he had plans to dissolve 40ACR crew. Telling me he had plans to raise enough money that we would be able to continue. At that point we (the employees) had started building trust with each other. So we laid out all of our messages and plans and secret emails from Chris. We called a meeting. The 7 person scheme involved keeping 7 out of the 15 employees and downsizing. The money bags scheme was to squeeze 500,000 from one of our biggest investors. Unbenounced to Chris we all shared his schemes with each other and walked into the Monday meeting with very low expectations. I was fired. Kami was fired. Jacqueline was fired. Sonny was fired. We were given another ultimatum. We had until 3pm that day to vacate the ranch we had until may 31st to vacate our housing situation and if we complied we would get to keep the rest of what was in the 40ACR bank account 7000 and we would be paid  4000 dollars to leave. We accepted his terms and left. The rest of the crew followed us. 5 people declined the offer to stay at sylvanaqua in the days following. Almost every employee had deemed Chris and Annie unfit for management positions and both had completely walked away. 4 people are all that remains of the Sylvanaqua dream. We moved out 3 days later after we were offered even more money to leave.

We found shelter at the Choptico garden. All planning to be vacated before may 31st per our agreement to receive the severance Chris dangled in front of our noses. Then the cops came. Annie found 2 employees seeking shelter during a pandemic. At the garden which Annie had led us all to believe didn't exist anymore. Faced with the very real danger of police brutality they filmed the incident hoping it would save their lives. We are still waiting for the cops to pull up again as we search for new jobs pulling all of us into different directions. I feel the dreams of what Sylvanaqua could have been decaying in my heart. I look at the people around me like it's the last time I'll see them again. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going and if I'll be okay. But I've faced adversity before. As a Black woman in America I was built for this. I've been burned. I've been fired. I've been manipulated. I've been exploited before but never by someone I thought was kin. I will now take on the weight of my decisions to not look past my own feelings of hate, anguish and distrust or what I thought I deserved. I come forward under the white gaze and tell you now I've let down my community. I took part in abusing the land. I abused my coworkers. I let myself down. I let down the movement that is Black agriculture. But most of all I llet down the animals I participated in the most extractive, colonized, and capitalistic relationship between human and nature that I've ever seen.  I stayed for the paycheck. I benefited from their suffering. My only hope now is to withdraw my support of these systems and start healing from the intergenerational colonialism and trauma.

Free the land

Feed the people

Xander thorn-beary