Help Me Finish "The Last Honest Work: Farming, Food, & Freedom"

A Black Agrarian’s Memoir About Work, Family, Citizenship, Land & the Long Search for Freedom

My name is Kwabena “Cubby” Osei Nkromo.

For more than 30 years, I have worked at the intersection of food, farming, community building, civic leadership, entrepreneurship, ministry, organizing, and the stubborn effort to build institutions that make ordinary people's lives better.

Now, at 55, I am writing the book that attempts to make sense of that journey—and to leave an honest record of it for my children, my community, and anyone trying to build a purpose-driven life in difficult times.

The book is called: "The Last Honest Work: Farming, Food, & Freedom"

The Book Has Evolved

Some of you supported this project when its working title was:

"For the Love of Food & Farm: A Grower’s Life, Battles & Lessons Learned".

I still love that title—especially “For the Love of Food & Farm,” a phrase that has followed my work for many years. And that book is still inside this one. But as I began examining the full arc of my life, I realized that the story I needed to tell was larger. Farming is part of it. Food is certainly at its center. But so are family, fatherhood, race, class, work, faith, politics, love, failure, entrepreneurship, community, institutions, homelessness, resilience, and the continuing struggle to become truly free.

This is why I came to feel that the more mature title for that story is "The Last Honest Work". This campaign is therefore not abandoning the book that earlier supporters helped me begin. It is documenting what that book has grown into. About The Last Honest Work I describe the book as a reflective autobiographical memoir—part personal history, part social analysis, part agrarian reflection, and part accounting of a life spent trying to build things.

It traces a journey that begins long before I ever called myself a farmer: growing up in Roxbury, Boston; coming of age in a large Black working-class family; encountering agriculture as a young student in the South; studying plant and soil science and agricultural economics; discovering the possibilities of urban agriculture; becoming a grower, organizer, entrepreneur, minister, public servant, civic leader, father, husband, and institution-builder; working across cities and communities from Boston to Houston, Atlanta, Flint, Alabama and beyond; developing my Farmer-Citizen identity and philosophy; and building the vision that eventually became North America Food & Farm (NAF2).

But The Last Honest Work is not simply the story of a career. It is an attempt to answer questions that have followed me throughout my adult life: What constitutes honest work? What does it mean to be free? What do we owe our children, our ancestors, our neighbors and the generations coming behind us? Why do food and land remain so deeply connected to power? What happens when the institutions people depend upon stop serving human beings well? And what can ordinary people build together instead?

Food and farming provide one of the great through-lines of my life. But ultimately this is a book about human dignity and the struggle to construct a life worth living.

Why I Am Asking for Help Now

This campaign has also become more immediate because my life has changed dramatically since I first created it. I am presently rebuilding after an extraordinarily difficult period of personal and economic disruption. At the same time, the experiences of this period have made completing the memoir feel more necessary—not less.

I have accumulated decades of stories, documents, photographs, ideas, projects, victories, mistakes, relationships, conflicts and lessons. The problem is no longer whether I have enough to write about. The challenge is creating the stability, time and space to turn a lifetime of material into a finished book. My immediate objective is therefore straightforward:

Move from instability into a 55+ affordable housing community named The Village at Stone Mountain in metro Atlanta GA, establish a dependable base for my family and work, and protect enough sustained writing time to finish "The Last Honest Work". For me, these things are connected:

BLACK HOBO LIFE → HOUSED → PRESENT FATHER → STABLE AUTHOR

A stable home is not the end of the campaign. It is the foundation from which I can finish what I started.

What Your Support Will Make Possible

My current funding strategy has three stages.

1. GET HOUSED — $2,000

My first priority is securing my move-in at The Village at Stone Mountain 55+ affordable housing in Georgia. Funds at this stage will help cover move-in costs and deposit, utility activation, basic household setup, transportation and other immediate necessities associated with establishing a home. I will have the income to maintain the housing through a combination of consulting revenue, W-2 employment, and paid speaking engagements.

2. GET STABLE — $2,500

Once housed, the next objective is protecting the first one to two months of rent and essential living expenses while employment, consulting and other earned income come fully online. That breathing room matters. Instability consumes enormous amounts of time and attention. Stability allows those same human resources to be redirected toward family, livelihood and creative work.

3. FINISH THE BOOK — $1,500+

The final stage protects time and resources for writing, manuscript development, research, archival work, editing, design, publication preparation and the other work necessary to bring The Last Honest Work into the world. As the manuscript progresses, I will use this campaign to share updates, photographs, archival material, reflections from the writing process and pieces of the history behind the book.

Why This Story Matters

I was born into a generation that inherited both extraordinary possibilities and unfinished struggles. Over the course of my life, I have watched communities change, institutions rise and fail, families struggle, neighborhoods transform, food systems consolidate, land become increasingly inaccessible, political faith erode, and working people search for ways to retain dignity and agency.

I have also watched people build. I have seen gardens reclaim abandoned land. I have seen food bring strangers to the same table. I have seen ordinary citizens organize themselves. I have seen people teach one another, feed one another, employ one another, challenge institutions and imagine new ones. And I have spent much of my adult life trying—sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully—to participate in that work.

That is why I call this book "The Last Honest Work". Not because farming is the only honest occupation. But because growing food taught me something fundamental about honest work: eventually reality answers back. A seed either germinates or it does not. Soil remembers how it has been treated. A community knows whether you showed up. Children eventually inherit what their elders built—or failed to build. And a human life, if examined truthfully, leaves a record.

This book is my effort to examine that record while I am still here to write it.

This Is Also About Legacy

I want my children and eventual grandchildren to know more than the résumé version of my life. I want them to understand where I came from, what shaped me, what I believed, what I got right, what I got terribly wrong, what I tried to build, whom I loved, what I fought for, and what I learned. I also want to leave something useful for growers, organizers, entrepreneurs, public servants, community builders, young people searching for purpose, and ordinary citizens who still believe human beings can build better systems together.

If the book succeeds, readers will not simply finish it knowing more about Kwabena Osei Nkromo. I hope they finish it asking deeper questions about their own work, their own freedom, their own communities, and what they intend to leave behind.

How You Can Help

There are three meaningful ways to participate:

1) Donate whatever amount makes sense for you.

2) nShare this campaign with people who may connect with the story.

3) Stay with the journey. I intend to keep this campaign updated as the housing transition occurs and the manuscript moves toward completion.

To everyone who supported the earlier "For the Love of Food & Farm" campaign: thank you. You helped sustain an idea before I completely understood what it was becoming. I understand it better now. The work is bigger than a farming memoir. It is the story of a Black man who has spent much of his life trying to understand how we feed ourselves, govern ourselves, care for one another, build institutions, raise families, make meaning—and become free.

Now I intend to finish it. Thank you for helping me do so.

With gratitude,

Kwabena “Cubby” Osei Nkromo

Farmer-Citizen

Founder, North America Food & Farm (NAF2)