For Groundswell Farm Owner Bruce-Michael Wilson, Farming Isn’t Just About Crops

In partnership with: Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural Development

As a boy growing up on a 160-acre farm in Hopkins, Bruce-Michael Wilson loved spending long days and nights harvesting corn while riding the tractors and combines. He also enjoyed hearing his father tell stories about how Wilson’s grandmother, a member of the Chickasaw Nation, crafted a medicine sack for her son each spring and stuffed it with garlic and other remedies to ward off the old and usher in the new.

“African Indian roots to me meant that I was unique and of a special class of people. I had a bold spirit,” Wilson says. Still, he notes, “It was obvious to me at an early age our family was the only Black family in the area since I observed all the kids in school to be white only.”

Despite his bond with farm, family and heritage, Wilson went into real estate and investing, regularly returning to the family farm to help cut and bale hay and work the large garden with his mother.

“I never saw farming as a moneymaking career,” he says. “Quite honestly, this is the problem today as it relates to the demise of Black farmers. You don’t often do or become what you do not see.”

But the tug of the land wouldn’t go away, so in 2019 he bought a 7-acre USDA-certified organic farm in Zeeland to help his aging parents in their retirement and rekindle interest in what was once a thriving industry for the Black community. The farm was already named Groundswell, signifying “a coming together.”

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Sustainable Growth

Wilson now grows about 200 different varieties of 60 to 80 vegetables, from staples like potatoes, sweet corn, squash, beets and carrots to more exotic varieties of bok choy, kohlrabi, fennel, sorrel, eggplant and leeks. He sells them through CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscriptions, to local restaurants, and at farmers markets and grocery stores in underserved neighborhoods.

His crops thrive in black muck rich with carbon and nitrogen. “What separates my soil from the rest,” Wilson says, “is that it is left behind from fluvioglacial deposits which melted and formed a riverbed which later dried up and created these pockets of super-fertile soil that continues to replenish its nutrients and produce outstanding growth.”

The farm incorporates several sustainable practices, including a stringent food safety program, crop rotation, soil sampling, composting and cover-crop planting to restore nutrients and protect against erosion. Organic farming comes naturally to Wilson, who notes that Groundswell is one of a handful of Black-owned and -operated Michigan farms to achieve certified organic status.

“It is something my family and ancestors have practiced even before it became popular,” Wilson says. “As a matter of fact, most Black and Indigenous farmers have chosen to grow naturally or organically from the beginning until now.”

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Inspiring the Next Generation

In 2020, Wilson launched Dunyun, a nonprofit organization named for his late brother, with the goal of inspiring children with his unique perspective on farming.

Hosting kids at Groundswell reminds him of the sheer joy on his cousins’ faces when they visited his childhood home and were enthralled by the animals and wide-open landscape.

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“This season, I had a chance to see the same thing with the kids that visited my farm through an eight-week day camp program that Dunyun operated on the farm grounds,” Wilson says. “Having the kids on the farm added a breath of fresh air to the landscape. If it only touched one child, then Dunyun was successful in its overall mission.”

For Wilson, agriculture isn’t just an occupation. “It is more of a vehicle to continue to hone my own skill set in the field of farming and also to become a role model to teach others to acquire land and learn to grow much like our ancestors, both red and Black, did many moons ago,” he says.