by Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

Minister Farrakhan told me to tell you that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said, "The farm is
the engine of our national life."

The engine of our nation is what pushes the nation forward. Without the farm we are lost. Without
agriculture we have nothing. Because of the bad treatment under slavery and under the sharecropping
system, our elders left the land seeking a better life in the cities. They left with a bad taste in
their mouth, so that when schemes were fashioned to take the land from them, they did not put up a
real fight. They took the little money and let the land go.

The national life includes food, clothing and shelter. You can get all of these, if you have the
land. However, most of the countries in Africa import their food from their former colonial or slave
master. No nation can truly be free with its mouth in the kitchen of their former colonial masters.

We need the land not only for economic development and wealth, but our very health depends on it.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad gave us the "Economic Blueprint" in Message to the Black
Man, and he gave us a pattern to sustain our lives in "How to Eat to Live". America has
forced many of us off the land. America is now forcing many countries to destroy their seed and buy
seed from American companies. Why?

As the value of money goes down platinum, gold and silver go up. But these minerals are just a
means of exchange. You can not eat, wear, live in or ride platinum, gold or silver. You must
exchange these items for the land and the means of extracting and processing the raw materials from
the land to make the items of necessity.

Real value rests in land, seeds, clay and trees.

Since our elders never got the real value for their work on the land, we have now lost respect
for the land. Where will you work and live tomorrow? What are you doing to insure your future or do
you still think that America will find a way for you?

We at Muhammad Farms under the Three Year Economic Savings Program, Inc are striving to prepare a
future for our people. Allah (God) blessed Minister Farrakahn through the charitable contributions
to both the Three Year fund and the 2004 Saviours’ Day gift to retire the mortgage on the farm in
April of last year. On his visit to the farm after paying off the mortgage, he told us that it is
now time for economic development.

Part of our development will include facilities, activities, training and other programs to
introduce our "city cousins" to a sustainable way of life. Owning farm land is truly a
step towards independence. We are in the process of installing the latest state-of-the-art
irrigation system to make our farm both more productive and an example to other Black farmers what
can be done without government assistance, but with the support of the masses of our people.

Our next steps include the development of value added processing and storage facilities to
transform our raw products into items that we can ship direct to our customers in the cities.

Our motto is "from the land to the man" and no middle man. A farmer receives a mere
$2.50 per bushel of wheat, barely covering the costs for growing the wheat. However, the consumer
pays at least $80 per bushel. How does this happen, you may ask?

A bushel of wheat is 56 lbs from which a baker can make at least 40 loaves of bread. If he sells
a loaf for $2.00, he stands to make about $80 (40 times $2). Where does the other $77.50 go that the
farmer did not receive for that bushel of wheat?

The companies in the middle between the farmer and the consumer, including trucking firms, flour
mills, storage facilities, bakers, wholesalers and retailers pocket that money. This is why the farm
is the engine for the rest of the economy. Not only does the farmer feed the people, he supplies the
raw ingredients that allow others to get rich. When you support the Three Year Economic Savings
Program you are helping to develop an alternative production and distribution system that will get
around the middle man and provide Muhammad Farms and other Black farmers, direct access to customers
in the cities.

The Ministry of Agriculture for the Nation of Islam is promoting the development of
community-owned and controlled cooperatives in the cities. Each mosque and study group was recently
asked to send a representative to the Agricultural conference sponsored by the Ministry of
Agriculture at the farm in Georgia.

We were most inspired by Believers in Cincinnati and Atlanta who were both in their second year
of running their community-based cooperatives. Both of these groups started off with a very limited
budget and no facilities to speak of. However, they are swiftly moving to a point to where their
collective efforts, perseverance and patience will reward them in having permanent facilities. When
they open their doors to the public, they will already have a number of families serving as a
guaranteed customer-base to keep their doors open and allow them to hire young people in their
communities and provide a future for their children.

We video taped the conference and recommend that any city that wants to develop a cooperative get
one of these tapes in order to study how to be successful.

A 1,600 acre farm, like our farm in Georgia, at best can provide 5,000 people with enough food
for one meal a day each year. However, there are over 40 million Black people in America. To feed
them, if they don’t eat meat requires 6.3 million acres of land. To farm this land successfully we
need $2 billion in equipment and 18,000 farmers.

The Ministry of Agriculture continues to interact with the larger Black farm and college
communities to help us save our remaining 3 million acres of land and put our farmers back to
farming instead of renting their land. We continue to help them fight the U.S. Department of
Agriculture through our participation in the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association.

We are also on the board of the recently organized Black Family Land Trust, which is developing
financial tools and resources to help Black people keep and develop their land. We are also active
on the campuses where we show our young people the relationship between land ownership and economic
development.

We give the equation Knowledge + Land + Capital=Power. During the first 45 years after slavery,
Black people used the land and its products to develop a nation within a nation in the South. Blacks
were buying land, creating inventions, manufacturing products, building schools, hospitals and
homes; setting up banks and insurance companies. When America had the first national census in 1900
and followed it up in 1910, America got frightened over our development. So frightened were they
that they lynched us, bombed us and legislated us out of business.

Now we must take the lessons from our past and use the courage from the faith in God and buy
land, develop our skills, save and invest our money to build a glorious future for ourselves and our
children.