What It Means to Be a Story Farmer: BBG is tending the AgriCULTURE stories West Virginia forgot when they put a “Farmer on the Flag” in 1863.

By Crystal Good | Black By God: The West Virginian

Nobody hands you a story. You have to work for it the way you work land — with patience, with presence, and with the understanding that what comes up from the ground is not always what you put in. Sometimes it’s better. Sometimes it’s harder. 

At BBG, as we grow our AgriCULTURE content, our team sees its role as that of story farmers. It’s the most honest way I know to describe what we do at Black By God: The West Virginian with Traci Phillips, Leeshia Lee, and Chamera Davis, who bring that commitment to every story we tell about the land, the people tending it, and what grows when you pay attention.

We are not extractors. We don’t fly in, pull something from the soil, and disappear before the season changes. Story farming is the opposite of extraction. It is cultivation. It is returning to the same ground, year after year, knowing that the relationship with the land is the work itself.

We also practice “permaculture” — working with what we have, adapting to the conditions on the ground, building something sustainable from what’s actually there. We set out to build Farmer on the Flag as a full podcast series. What we ended up with was something more honest: real clips from real conversations, and a clear vision for a platform that could create original content, share curated resources, and do it consistently. That’s not a compromise. In permaculture, that’s called reading the land right.

That work matters more right now than it ever has. Agricultural journalism is disappearing across the country. Local newsrooms have shed their ag reporters. Rural communities — the ones feeding this nation — are watching their stories go untold at exactly the moment when food sovereignty, land ownership, and the agricultural economy are under the most pressure.

Our Folk Reporters — citizen journalists are already filling that gap, doing the best they can with what they’ve got and covering the stories nobody else is telling.

When the West Virginia Senate passed a bill to put the state in charge of beekeeping regulations, it was Folk Reporter Aliyah Smith who showed up at the West Virginia Legislature Agriculture Committee to document what that meant for local control and the farmers who depend on their hives. When lawmakers advanced a bill to create on-campus food and health aid pantries — grant dollars that could mean the difference between a student eating or not — our Folk Reporter Tiara Brown was there, connecting a policy debate to the lived reality of food insecurity in West Virginia communities. 

The kind of coverage that falls away when ag reporting isn’t anyone’s beat.

Agriculture is an economy. It is a health system and cultural inheritance. And in West Virginia, where Black farmers have been systematically stripped from that narrative telling these stories is an act of restoration.

That’s the spirit behind BBG’s Farmer on the Flag content — named for the figure on the West Virginia state flag who has been there since 1863. This Instagram and TikTok platform is built for amplification, education, and memory. It is where we share original reporting and curated resources — Black agricultural history, food-sovereignty tools, and profiles of the farmers doing the work today. It is a space built for connection: between the people in these stories and the people who need them, between the rich history of Black farming in Appalachia and the next generation that deserves to inherit it.

You have to believe the land is worth farming. You have to believe the stories are there, even when they’re not obvious, even when the conditions are hard.

The soil is rich here. The stories are deep.

And we can’t tend it alone.

If you have a story to tell, we want to hear it. If you know a farmer, a food keeper, a seed saver, a land steward — send them our way. If you want to write with us, interview with us, or just be in the field alongside us, reach out. Tag us in the stories you see that nobody’s covering. Show us what’s growing in your community.

BBG is not just a publication. It’s a story farm.