Interview with TC Collins

Omer Jean Winborn: My name is Omer Jean Winborn. Today is July the 20th, 2026, and we are at the Ypsilanti District Library on Michigan Avenue. This oral history is being recorded as part of the Ypsi Farmers and Gardeners Oral History Project. Would you mind stating your name for the recording and introducing yourself in whatever ways you feel meaningful and comfortable?

Takunia Collins: Good morning and thank you for the invitation. My legal government name is Takunia Collins. But in different communities I go by different names by different people. Some call me Farmer TC. A lot of the younger kids from the past used to call me Ghetto Gardener. Then some call me Takunia Kanawha. Different names for different communities because that's how I was pronounced... Name was pronounced and people got to know who I was.

Omer Jean Winborn: Would you mind telling us what year and where you were born?

Takunia Collins: Well, I was born in 1966. I was born at the old St. Joe's Hospital out in Ann Arbor.

Omer Jean Winborn: Where does your family come from?

Takunia Collins: Well, our family came from originally, my dad came from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My mom came from Wheeling, I mean not Wheeling, but Charleston, West Virginia. But their family line from my mom's side came from Mississippi and also from Virginia. But then my father's side primarily came from Louisiana and also from Alabama.

Omer Jean Winborn: Where have you lived most of your life?

Takunia Collins: Born and raised on the northeast side of Ypsilanti, the historic Willow Run, where it used to be the community called Clay Hill.

Omer Jean Winborn: Could you tell us about how you came to live in Ypsilanti?

Takunia Collins: Well, when my dad moved up here from the south, he met a young lady, which was my mom, and they started living out in Willow Run and years later I was here.

Omer Jean Winborn: Could you tell us a little bit about your involvement in growing food?

Takunia Collins: Well, I learned about growing food in a more difficult way. I was born in a generation where children were supposed to be seen and not heard. I was one of many children in our family line where we would caravan and go on different U-pick farms and that was always a must. From picking shell peas, snap peas, sugar peas early in the spring, strawberries, asparagus, those were spring crops. Learning how to can, from there in the mid-spring to early summer would be, we would have starting to plant tomatoes, an assortment of hot crops. Let me say it that way because it was so many. There was a young gentleman older than me, Oliver Olson. 00:04:00He taught me about growing different types of potatoes, growing different types of crab apples. And his wife, she was an herbalist and she taught me different types of things of herbs. There was a woman named Mrs. Prior that was on the south side of Ypsilanti. She was an evangelist at the time, a religious person, and she would go around teaching the community about different aspects of the Bible and learned from her about different herbs that Mrs. Olson didn't teach. So those pretty much were the foundations of learning very early, I would say, not say very early, but late in the '60s, early '70s.

Omer Jean Winborn: Well, thank you, 'cause you've answered our next question. I wanted to know if you wanted to add any more to it is, how did you first learn how to grow food? And I think you answered that. Do you wanna add anything else to that?

Takunia Collins: Well, one of the things that, learning from that, is that having two great-great-grandparents, they were enslaved residents, and having two grandparents that were sharecroppers, learning from both of those sets of families early on, like I said, we were children that were supposed to be seen and not heard, and learning about growing tobacco, learning growing cotton, learning about different varieties of, I would say, mugwort, you would have motherwort, you would have witch hazel, you would have different types of mints for different properties. Just picking and just learning about the different types of dandelions, that was the most difficult part. And distinct flavors of the different types of dandelions, even though you only see one yellow flower and one cotton plume, there were different types of dandelions and that was the most difficult. And again, you couldn't ask because you just had to learn how to pick, plant, and harvest.

Omer Jean Winborn: So how long have you been growing food? How long have you been doing this?

Takunia Collins: Well, from what I understand, I was raised into it, but I didn't realize it until I was probably about three and four years old when I was able to talk more and ask more questions. Not prior to that, being a younger child, I can't go back and think of that long, but I do know at three and four, at that time, I knew when I was growing and how I was asking questions and knowing to be quiet and knowing what questions could I ask.

Omer Jean Winborn: Well, since you have such an extensive background, what prompted you to start growing food?

Takunia Collins: Well, it was by accident. And I wouldn't say by accident, but is that when my mom was a domestic worker and my grandmother would go, both of them would go to the Ford Estate, and we would go to the Ford Estate and I would watch them clean the house, do the yard work, do the manicuring of the roses, and knowing the different varieties and colors and the smells of roses, brought curiosity to my mind. And it's like I thought roses were just always red, but when you see a white rose, when you see a peach rose, when you see a pink rose, it's like that drew my attention. Then it was like 00:08:00every day going to the Ford Estate and it was like could never be at home because I was always seeing and being with my mom and being with my grandmother always at the Ford Estate, manicuring their lawn. And it was like... That was a staple. It was like I couldn't just stand there because I had to work. That was part of learning experience. I can't remember the name of the tool, but it was like a pair of scissors, but they was hand scissors. But it was using them on the lawn. And it was like three, four years old, just cutting the grass, manicuring it real low and making everything very even. And it was precise because it's like you're giving a five-year-old a pair of scissors that they were sharp and you're trusting me to cut grass. I guess it brought out the maturity early in life because when you look at how kids now have safety scissors and they have guards on it, compared to having lawn shear scissors, that was dangerous. But our parents at that time knew how to entrust, I would say, maturity. Yeah, we were playing around, yeah, we was foolish and stuff like that, but it wasn't the way that they didn't trust us. And when you had the responsibility of cutting the grass, taking care of the manure, I would say when you have to go and get the turkeys and separate the turkeys, the ducks, and the chickens and it's time to slaughter, you know, you learned all that stuff and how to take the feathers off. And that was everyday life. So in between that, we learned about gardening. And gardening meant not just plants, it meant taking care of the animals, taking care of the livestock, taking care of the laundry, how to make soap out of lye and how to make starch out of potatoes or rice. And it's like those were staples for food, but it wasn't like we could go to the grocery store and buy those products. We literally had to live off the land in most cases and did things like that.

Omer Jean Winborn: So where do you grow food now and can you tell us about your growing sites now?

Takunia Collins: Well, we have several different areas that we're growing. We have the Clay Hill Community Farm and Garden that's out in Northeast Willow Run. I still call it community Willow Run because Willow Run was a vibrant big city way before my time. Learning about it from neighbors and older generations when they would tell me how Clay Hill was and how the village was separate from the Clay Hill, and having a bowling alley, having a movie theater, and having grocery store at that time. I learned a lot about our community from Willow Run. And learning about how historic Ann Arbor, what they call it Bricktown or they would call it Kerrytown, and learning about my grandmother, my dad's sister, and my dad when they used to go to Ann Arbor High, learning that community. And it was very interesting because I did not know anything because again, you had to listen, but you could not ask. So when going to Ann Arbor, it was like a road trip. And looking back, how leaving Ypsi, going to Ann Arbor is different because my parents had to take different roads just to get to Ann Arbor. And asking my parents, well, my mom's not here anymore, 00:12:00but asking my dad and my mom at the time, "Well, why did you take this road? Then why did you have to go this way?"

Takunia Collins: Well, we had to avoid the police because police still didn't like us. And we had to take this road because these police officers were more friendlier with us than with the police officers with us on this side of town. It's like, I did not know that. And that's in the '70s. So learning the history of the lost communities in Washtenaw brought me to understand why is our community left without all this information? Because now we only have 11 Black communities in Washtenaw County. At the time, we had many more. Learning about the history of Black farmers in Saline, learning about the Black farmers in Whittaker, it brought out the very importance of me listening to my teachers and asking the questions about the Underground Railroad. And when I understood that the Underground Railroad traveled throughout Washtenaw County, but only a few select sites are only mentioned, it became more of a problem. And that's what drew me to piece together where are my community members coming from? Because our parents taught us one thing, the school taught us one thing, but now the school system and a lot of the community is disconnected. And they don't talk about the history of Black folk, where they came from, where the food comes from, and they don't talk about the Black cemeteries that's in Washtenaw County. They don't talk about tree apartheid. A lot of people never heard about tree apartheid. A lot of people never heard about gerrymandering until just within the past four or five years because of the way the elections are. So growing food draw more out of me instead of me being a carpenter or a drywall insulator or a painter. The reason why I say that because those are skill trades that I learned besides just gardening and farming. I don't consider myself a jack of all trades, but we had to learn a trade. We were taught Bible literature. We were also taught about having a skill trade and a backup skill trade and a backup skill trade. It's not, I would say, as a hustle, but you had to learn how to build a house. You had to learn how to put shingles on the wall or on the ceiling or on the roof. You had to learn how to... And I go back to what my mom and my grandmother said about learn how to make lye and soap out of lard and out of bones and things of that nature. These were very instrumental tools. We don't have that now. We have the convenience of going to the grocery store and just buy any and everything without using our skill set. And that's the problem, because that becomes addictive. Because if we're allowing that to happen, we're allowing our history to be erased about culturally 00:16:00how to be foragers.

Omer Jean Winborn: You just went wonderfully into the next question. And I wanna ask you again, thank you so much, that was a wonderful introduction to the next question, and it's, can you share something about how you came to grow on those particular plots of land? And you've just explained it. Is there anything else that you would like to say about that?

Takunia Collins: Yes, and thank you so much. Learning from different aspects of the prism of Black, from the very light skin to the very dark skin. We may be Black on the outside or Black in the inside, but culturally, we have a culture that came from different aspects of Africa that brought different cultures of cuisine to the States. Where some people may call it okra, technically it's jambalaya or gumbo. When some people say it's rice, we say it's Gullah rice or Gold rice. Understanding where people of our color and our culture came from, not everybody is from the same mixing pot. And what I mean by that is that not all Black folks know the history of rice. There's only a certain group of people that left the first and second migration that brought that history to the North. There are Black folks that were here before the first migration that was already growing rice, which is Manoomin, wild rice, that's also Blackfoot Indian, or you would say Seminole Indian. It's not taught, but yet our history is not allowing us to talk about how our food gets grown. So when I created the Underground Railroad Garden Program, I listened, I asked, and I watched, and I weaved that fabric of understanding that we got to teach our community about all 50 to 60 varieties of collard greens. We have to teach our community about, there's over 7,000 different varieties of apples. We only hear about Johnny Appleseed, but we don't talk about the woman that left New York, that settled in Kalamazoo, that also brought apple trees here, and Sojourner. And we don't talk about the history of the Black farmers on western side of Michigan that helped bring the upland soil to what it is today. When we talk about the Dust Bowl and how the Dust Bowl dust left the plains and came from Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, upper Indiana, and Wisconsin and Michigan, that soil brought in nutrients, but it also brought in that nutrients for the Black farmers to continuously grow crops that they brought from the South to the North. Today, we lost quite a few Black farmers on the west coast of Michigan, or what you would say the fruit bowl that's on the Great Lakes. That upland soil is very important. But when you say the types of plants and things that I grow, I'm trying to grow heritage and heirloom variety of plants that's connected to our history. Just because... 00:20:00And hypothetically, if Susan and her family are born in Arkansas, that could be upper Arkansas, you have Joshua that was born southern Arkansas. But when they both got to Arkansas, originally where they come from, is a key indicator of where their culture and their cuisine is really come from. Because a lot of people do not have the ability to look up the historical rolls, the name rolls of their lineage, and find out where they came from in Arkansas, northern Arkansas or southern Arkansas, even though it's the same state, but they're thousand miles apart.

Omer Jean Winborn: You have just beautifully gone through the question. My next question was, when thinking about the history behind land farming and gardening, what comes to mind? And you've just told that so beautifully. Would you like to add anything to what you just said? Because you just went through that just wonderfully. Would you like to add anything else?

Takunia Collins: Well, thank you again. I didn't see the questions that you was asking, but I was just...

Omer Jean Winborn: I know you didn't. You just really... It's wonderful.

Takunia Collins: Well, one of the things that is important, we have now the millennials. They do not know the moon phases. The moon phases play a key role in agriculture. It plays a key role in our heritage. Learning the moon cycles decides on when to plant and when not to plant. Some believe that it's folklore, but the Farmers' Almanac is a real thing. Looking on the back of the trees and seeing where the moss is growing and different varieties of moss is very important. Learning the way the wind blows through the trees, these are tools that help put that seed in the ground and to cultivate. Without knowing the high tide, you're living on the coastline and growing something, you could be flooded. Living in the Great Plains, well, if you didn't know the way the wind blows and a storm was approaching, you just had a blizzard. These are key indicators that we don't have anymore. We are in a generation now that we look at our tablets, our phones, the computer, or we listen to the weather and they give us a forecast that is sometimes 60% inaccurate. True indeed, the Farmers' Almanac or just folklore of learning how to read the stars, the patterns of the stars, the position of the moon or the position of the sun, is not inaccurate because these are God's tools. This is what God given us. So learning from the older generation that we are losing, these are our guides that we should cherish so that way we can give that to the next younger generation. Because these younger kids will be lost with knowledge that they don't have. You cannot find history about cuisine and culture in the African community or Blackfoot Indian in any of these books that teach them about gardening and farming. So we are losing our heritage daily.

Omer Jean Winborn: And you continue to answer the questions. [laughter] My... The next question was, how are you inspired, connected to any of the history in any way? And you have answered that so beautifully. Is there anything you wanna add to that? 00:24:00Takunia Collins: Yes. I would say the younger generation, please stay tuned. Don't tune us out. Don't rely on shortcuts of where your food is coming from. We are in an epidemic now. We just had COVID just around the corner. That was six years of isolation. Those four to six years, and what I mean by six years is because it was only a four year gap that we had. It was a year prior and a year afterwards. Those two years are very key indicators on how life has shifted. People in those four years of COVID isolated themselves that they had to social distance, so they could not connect to the soil. They could not connect to one another about how to space a plant apart. They could not harvest the plant with social engagement. Watering a plant was very important. If a person cannot be six feet from you, but you're trying to explain how to water a plant, there was no connect. We have to rely on safe practices, that's number one. But we also have to bring in more true herbalists, naturalists, and wisdom seekers, because if we leave those three elements out, we are relying on man-made synthetic chemical compounds that's eradicating our food supply. And I go back to the dandelion. Dandelion is going for $2 a pound at a local grocery store. But if you go to the high-end grocery store, that dandelion leaf is going for $15 a pound. Same plant, but it's all about educating the community about a dandelion. You can go to Kroger's or Meijer's, you won't see a dandelion plant being sold in the grocery produce aisle. But when you go to Whole Foods, you'll see it selling there for, like I said, close to $15 a pound. The difference is that food is racially enlightening, but social distancing. And if the high-end stores see a way of marketing something that was provided by us as Black folks as a commodity that came from the slave era and the spice era, they're profiting off of what built America.

Omer Jean Winborn: Powerful. What you just said. Now I'm gonna ask you how...

Takunia Collins: Can I add to that before...

Omer Jean Winborn: Absolutely, absolutely.

Takunia Collins: So what I mean by the dandelion, the dandelion is the number one thing. People pay hundreds of dollars, even thousands of dollars to spray on their lawns to take the dandelions out, and they want a green grass. People spend more money for green grass than having a dandelion to grow and put that dandelion on their plate to eat. Dandelion is very beneficial, from tinctures to teas to wines to jellies to jams to even medicine. But yet that same plant, 00:28:00again, people spend thousands of dollars just to take it out of their lawn. So if they can eradicate a dandelion that is very beneficial, they're spending that same amount of money to eradicate the true plants that's beneficial to all communities. And we are allowing ourselves for genetic modified food to be brought to our tables. And corn is the number one that's genetically modified. Soybean is the number two. Then you have wheat. So I just wanted to share that with you.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh, thank you for sharing that. The next thing I wanna ask you, which you answered, but I wanna hear you go a little further. How has this connected... Growing food connected you to your ancestors?

Takunia Collins: Well, it connected me very well because we got the opportunity to know what food was. But when I teach this generation now, and annually it's probably about 15 to 2,000 kids annually by myself that I teach these kids, you'd be amazed that kids only still know that potatoes come from Meijer's, but they don't know it comes from the ground. They don't know that it comes from Peru, and from Peru they don't know that it came from Africa. They don't know that there's over 700 different varieties of potatoes. They don't know that there's over 200 different varieties of potatoes that are poisonous. Kids know that there's one type of potato, French fries. They know potatoes as potato chips. But when you tell them that there's different spectrums of potatoes, from the red, the blues, the purples, the blush, and the burgundy potatoes has more sugar content in it, then you teach them about the brown, the gold potatoes, and the white potatoes have more starch in it, then they get curious and they wonder, "Well, why is that?" Well, it's the molecular structure of the potato that once it splits into one atom, it turns to sugar. If it has less of an atom of a protein, it turns to starch.

Takunia Collins: Then we explain to them that, no, I am not a licensed nurse or a doctor, but potatoes play a key role with diabetes. So I always tell people that always check with your doctor when eating potatoes, because if you have high blood pressure or high sugar, potatoes play a different role in your diet. If you have different ailments, always check first before just growing something, because sometimes you can grow goldenrod, you can have an allergic reaction. You can have... There's different varieties of goldenrod, has different properties. But potatoes itself is very key because we started a potato program because we wanna teach the kids, teach the community there's more besides a Russet potato. Because you only go to the grocery store, you see Russet, you see Yukon Gold, and sometimes throughout the season you'll see a red potato. They don't tell you the name of that red potato, but that red potato has a name. So we explain to you, red potato could be a Red Pontiac, could be a Red Norland, could be a Small Red Norland, it could be a Red La Soda. But each of those red potatoes has a key characteristic in it, and I go in detail.

Takunia Collins: We have farmers and gardeners in many communities, but specifically in our community, that they rely on taking most of our programs, listening and recording it, 00:32:00taking our intellectual property. Then they go back and they teach our class, and they don't teach the whole thing, and they profit from off of our education. We are a nonprofit organization that we wanna go in detail and tell people the full spectrum of where food comes from, the proper way to benefit the community. It's okay to take the class. It's okay that if you record it, but record it in its entirety. Quote where the source comes from so that way we get acknowledged for that, and let people know that if there's any other questions, refer it back to us. Because it's very hurting when you teach a person about a potato, and this is just an example, but you don't give them whole facts. But then when they get sick or they don't get the potato that they wanna consume because it didn't cook out right, "Well, I got this information from over here." Well, let's go back and find where the source comes from. This is the way you properly cook a potato. This is the potato for your diet. This is the potato that you should ask your doctor about. And this is the potato that you may want to consume. Because information and knowledge is very important. Because again, there's too many impostors profiting off of Black farmers.

Omer Jean Winborn: We know that you're passionate about food security, including saving seeds. Could you talk a little more about why food security and saving seeds are important?

Takunia Collins: Food security is very important because we need to save our seeds. Food security, food justice plays a very important role. Seeds are just like our heart and seeds is just like our brain. They have a genetic code that remembers how it was grown. And just because we have heat stress today, or we may have a cold snap today, or we may have too much water tomorrow, that same genetic information that's in that seed is just like the ring that's in a tree. When you have rings in a tree, you can read on how much water intake that that tree has, and you can learn from the generations, from the gaps from those rings. Same thing with a seed. Just because a seed look like a seed, no. You can plant 10 seeds from 10 different bags of black-eyed peas. Some gonna be short, some gonna be dark green, some of them gonna be tall, and some of them gonna be yellow. That tells you the spectrum of the genetic code of how those black-eyed peas were grown prior to you putting them in the ground. And it's very key because trial and error, farmers do it all the time. When they wanna grow crops, they have a test field and they grow a whole bunch of plants, and they will get the best crops and they will isolate those crops and they would take those seeds and they would harvest those seeds because those are the strongest genes. And then they will sit there and reintroduce those and keep reintroducing those continuously until they get a perfect match. Same thing with black-eyed peas. And I use black-eyed peas as an example because peas is just like mice.

Takunia Collins: If you test mice, you would get a good genetic code from it. So you use peas as a key indicator to how it absorbs the nitrogen that's in the air and put that back into the soil. So if you want... Because it's a legume. So if you want to add nitrogen to your soil, you use 00:36:00black-eyed peas, you use peas, or you use lentils. And that brings soil health to your soil. It brings nitrogen to your soil, phosphorus to your soil, niacin. So when you see a good crop growing, you isolate those seeds, you regrow those the following year, and you keep your genes structured in a high percentage. The ones that are low, it's okay to have low-yielding seeds, don't get me wrong, but you would use those as cover crops. And use those as cover crops because that way you turn the soil over and you use that for green manure. Why I bring it up like this is because you just can't just grow a seed. Seed saving is important because if we allow these two big corporations that's worldwide to control the seed vault, we won't have our true seeds that we carried from those ships that we were taken from Africa, that hid in our hair, hid in our gums, hid in our armpits, hid in our private areas, brought to this country, enslaved ourselves because they used us as people of free enterprise for free labor, and cultivated the soil. And when we cultivated the soil and these crops and these companies that we have, the Fortune 500s today are benefiting from what we had from Africa. If we don't save our seeds, we are losing our history. And it's very important that we hold on to our history, hold on to our seeds. Seeds should be royalty-free, heritage seeds should be royalty-free, license-free, and that we should be able to regrow and register and trademark our seeds. It should not be the two corporations holding us hostage from what we already brought here.

Omer Jean Winborn: Thank you for that. As many of us have experienced, growing food can sometimes be difficult. What would you say is your recipe for success?

Takunia Collins: I don't have a recipe for success. I'm still learning and I wanna continuously learn. If I was to have a recipe of success, it's to have the next generation to continuously grow. I'm gonna always fail as a farmer. I will have some success, but I will never have a recipe of success. As long as I rely on Jehovah God, rely on the community, and rely on myself getting up every day, that is gonna be satisfactory for me. We have to make sure that we just keep growing because if you get one day, I just don't wanna get up and grow anymore, or I don't wanna go to the farm today because I'm tired, then it starts to be a routine. We cannot allow ourselves to have a routine of laziness or too much relaxation. It's okay to relax, but we're already losing Black farmers. Six years ago, we had 45 to 46,000 Black farmers. Now let's take that back 100 years ago. We had over a million farmers. We had many, many acres of land. To this day, we have less than 34,000 Black farmers. And it's devastating that we have a current administration that's bringing in... He has brought in 6,000 white South African farmers, 00:40:00gave them free rein to be over here, to be farmers. A lot of those white farmers from South Africa gave up their land, gave up their wealth, gave up their cars. There was one particular farmer, and I watched it on TV, and he sit there and said that he gave up his Land Rover, he gave up his Porsche, he gave up his land, and everything was valued at over $360,000 just to come over here that Donald Trump brought over here to be a white farmer.

Takunia Collins: But yet we, as many Black farmers, we still can't get the land that is promised to us, the 40 acres and a mule. And there was a gentleman this weekend, Brian Foley, he sit there and said that the Gault Village property that's for sale, and he said that's 19 acres of land. He made a good point that if that's 19 acres, double that is close to 40 acres. If we can... One person can get 40 acres, that's a lot of land to cultivate. And he's right. He's right when he brought that up because we're fighting daily to cultivate the land. There's over 30 different agencies, departments in the USDA. I'm struggling to get irrigation, I'm struggling to get solar, I'm struggling to get compost, struggling to get lumber, struggling to get a grant. But that same USDA, they have no problem opening up their door to say, "Would you like a loan?" And I tell any Black farmer or any farmer in general, think twice before you get a loan because you have to do a 10 year plan for yourself. Some people say you got to do a five year plan. When I say a 10 year plan, because I learned this from my grandparents and my great-grandparents, you got to think 10 years out and work your way backwards. If you're gonna borrow some money today, you got to make sure that those plants 10 years from now is already producing today and giving you 100%. Year two should be year 11. Those plants should still be producing and you should be able to divide that into two. And I never understood that. But when I was older to understand and ask questions before my great-grandparents passed away, they explained to me that year two should be year 12, year three should be year 13. You don't limit yourself as a five-year plan because you cannot rejuvenate a land, soil, condition the soil to be prime in five years.

Takunia Collins: It takes 10 years to get that soil to soil health. So if you're going to get land, it takes 10 years or more for that soil to be enriched. If you was to clear the land, it takes two years to three years just to clear the land. Then you have the microbes, the nematodes. When it was brought to me in that way, it was like a roadmap. If you wanna get from here to Detroit, 00:44:00you just can't drive straight there. You got to know where your gas station's at, you got to know where the restroom is at, you got to know where I got to go to a rest area to pull over just in case of emergency. You just can't go straight from A to D without going through C and B. That is the same thing about a 10-year plan. So we as farmers need to help educate each other and we need to create co-ops. And what I mean by that, look what Amazon doing, look what USPS is doing. They work with logistics. The trucking industry works with logistics. If we got two Black farmers in the South that grows watermelon and they know that people in the North need watermelon, if we got people that's in the North that grows collard greens and we got different seasons because in the South they are zoned, the hardiness zone is zone seven and eight and nine. We are five, six. We should collaborate, create our logistic business. And if we need watermelons at a certain time of the year, truck our watermelons to the North. We need to truck our collard greens, our cabbages, our radishes, and our celeries, and our onions, and potatoes to the South, to the South. We should all come to the table and say, you know what it's time to stop cutting out ourselves and bring this food to the table in a rightful manner. We should be able to work in the 48 states, including Alaska, including Hawaii, but those are more costlier, and I'm not excluding those two. But we got 48 states that we can capitalize with other Black farmers, that we can sell our product. And then we can work on the cottage law, teaching our mothers, our daughters, and our sisters, and our brothers how to make products at home. And then work with the school systems because the school systems have vacant land that they're just cutting grass. Creating garden spaces and food-to-table and table-to-plate programs. Then working with these churches, they have land. We can get back the 40 acres and a mule, but we got to do it in a new 2.0 way because this is 2026. This next current administration, we don't know who's gonna be in office, but we should have ourselves at a table having this discussion about how to bring this food here because before the next epidemic gets here, it's gonna be worse than COVID. And that was our lesson. That was a lesson because we can look back at history, how the plague was, and that killed off millions of people. COVID killed millions of people too. But we are in a modern era right now that we are addicted to not listening.

Omer Jean Winborn: You have just answered the next question so beautifully. I'm telling you, going through these questions, it was, why is it important to grow food as a tradition, to passing it down? And you just answered that beautifully. So I'm gonna go to the next question.

Takunia Collins: Can I say something on that one though?

Omer Jean Winborn: Absolutely. Say something.

Takunia Collins: We need to embrace the education system all over again. We don't know... I won't say we. We have a generation that don't know how to can. No matter if it's pressure cooking canning, no matter if it's dehydration or I would say solar heating. We have sun outside. We pay almost $30 for a bag of sun-dried tomatoes. 00:48:00We just had a heat wave two weeks ago. Think about all the tomatoes that you can cut up, put on a wire screen, sprinkle some sea salt on it, and let them sunbake in the sun for two weeks. That's just tomatoes. Solar hydration, we should be able to teach our community how to solar dehydrate our food, and that's free sunlight. It goes back to seed saving. It go back to how to save herbs and how to preserve herbs, how to can, how to dehydrate our produce so that way we can teach our community and all communities beyond that how to preserve food. Because right here in Belleville, Michigan, we have survivalists. That are marketing freeze-dried food, selling it on Amazon, and it's locally here in Belleville. And if the nationalists are already selling their product, and I mean nationalists, survivalists, they're worried about the apocalypse, but they're worrying about and selling this product of a freeze-dried product, and you look at it on Amazon, you can look it up. It goes from buttermilk, it goes from sour cream, it goes from butter. They're dehydrating these products, repackaging them, and selling them and saying it's survival food for the next 30 years. We should be able to do that too. We have to learn to go back to our basics. Learn how to can again. Learn how to freeze-dry. Learn how to solar dehydrate. Learn how to cold water bath our products, because it's not that hard to make jelly or jams or preserves.

Omer Jean Winborn: Wow. You said a mouthful. And it's, again, answering the next question is, what would you like people who come after you, either your direct descendants or even people who are just listening to this in the future, what would you like them to learn from your experience?

Takunia Collins: Learn from the mistakes that I've learned. Learn from the hatred, the racism that exists. Don't be shy from it. Yes, gardening or farming does bring back memories, but those memories were only in books for most of us. So we can only see what was there. We can only hear for what was told. I'm from a generation that was not in the fields during the slave time, so I cannot sit and say I was part of the slave trade or the slave time itself. I only heard about it and I saw about it, so it does not affect me. So we should not let hearsay affect us. But yet we got to educate ourselves to be smarter and educate ourselves to say, you know what? Let's change that narrative. Because if we keep hearing that type of propaganda from within our own community, we are allowing ourselves to let white supremacy be superior over us. We should not let fear take us for something that we own this land. We should be able to take the land back and cultivate the land like we had did in the beginning, not by slave trade, but just by cultivating it and eating off the land. So if the next generation or any generation after me, just know the facts first and don't be afraid to 00:52:00ask questions.

Omer Jean Winborn: Thank you. That ties into the next question. Is there anything that you would like to say to people who might be listening to this? Anything you'd like to say to people who are listening to this and listening to you? Can you think of anything else you'd like to say?

Takunia Collins: Take time to listen to the old generation. We don't have that much time left for them. We should cherish all their memories so that way we can pass that down to the next generation. If we're gonna listen to back chatter and this gossip and all this stuff and have that fear because it's gossip, stop listening to gossip. Listen to the old folk generation. They're wise. They want to tell their story. They want us to hear it. But it takes us and our generation and the younger generation to just be humble, be quiet, and listen.

Omer Jean Winborn: Wow. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you'd like to talk about?

Takunia Collins: Yes. Two things. We as the Black community should talk about health. We have women that have a health crisis. Speak up and ask. Get yourself checked out. No matter what the health issue may be, don't be afraid to go to the doctor. Us as Black men, we have to get out of our shell. And I mean that. I'm included. We got to go to the doctor. We cannot rely on, oh, I'm gonna get better. I'm gonna be okay. No, we're not. There has been bad doctors, there's been tests, there's been things that's done to us in the Black community that, yes, that is true. But we have to go to the doctor. We have to go and get mental health. We have to go and get housing. We have to go and get financial literacy taken care of. We have to teach ourselves more. And I'm not saying the word better, I'm saying more. We got to teach ourselves more because we have to help each other. We got too many Black folks that has gotten out the crab barrel and are purposely leaving us behind so that way they can sit there and rub elbows with bougie other white folks and Black folks. Enough is enough. Because at the end of the day, you're just the same color as I am and you're gonna end up back in that barrel just like I'm already in that barrel. Let's help one another to achieve so we all can get ahead in life. Because right now, it is turbulent out here. And it's very turbulent. The waves are coming on both sides. And if we allow white supremacy theory and thinking take over on our thinking, we have lost our freedom to be here. Fight for your civil rights. Fight for your human right. I have three pillars that I fight on. Fight for equal pay for women because women are equal. They need to be paid. Fight for people that are disabled 00:56:00because they wanna farm, they wanna garden, they wanna have a say so too with food justice and food security. And fight for people of color. Because when I created the Washtenaw County Black Farmers Fund, that's what it was intended to be, to help Black farmers. It was not to sit there and just be a conversation piece. It was not supposed to be a pick here and a pick there type of operation. It's to help lift up. It's not a handout.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for your powerful interview.

Takunia Collins: Okay. You're welcome. Thank you.