For Naima Dhore, millets bring up memories. She fondly remembers eating them for breakfast as a child in Somalia – the home she and her family had to flee as a child because of a civil war. Now, living thousands of miles away in the United States of America, she’s growing foxtail and proso millets to rekindle that sense of home and heritage.
“I missed millets,” she recalls. “I felt that nostalgic feeling. And one day I just decided to try growing them.”
Today, Naima has a family of her own and owns a 20-acre farm just outside the city of Minneapolis, in the northern state of Minnesota, where she’s surrounded by a large East African community.
But when she started growing food, she did not have a farming background at all. She and her husband became interested in agriculture while living in a small apartment in a suburb of the city.
Initially, they just wanted to provide access to fresh foods and the outdoors to their two young children. Gradually, though, they began seeking ways to use farming to connect with their community and culture, starting with the crops themselves.
“Over the years, I gravitated toward growing crops native to my country,” she says, including cowpeas, jute and okra.
The Minneapolis area is home to an estimated 50 000 to 100 000 Somalis, plus other East African diasporas, and Naima works closely with younger and older generations on farming and gardening projects.
“My goal is to recruit young people and engage them in farming, and to work with our elders to preserve our culture,” she says. “A lot of the Africans here are interested in growing foods they’re familiar with.”
Millets are a part of this bigger picture. For three years, she grew them on a small scale to figure out which varieties would produce well in Minnesota, whose growing season is different from East Africa’s. This year, after good results, she’s preparing for her first marketable crop while she continues to work out challenges related to harvesting and processing.
“It’s just amazing I can grow millets, something I had as a child in Somalia, here in a place like Minnesota,” she says, adding that many in her community are excited about her millets. “That connection is so important to many of us who are so far away from our home country.”
