Compost, Cotton & Cornrows
Compost, Cotton & Cornrows
Podcast Description
Compost, Cotton & Cornrows is disrupting sustainability storytelling and amplifying Black and Afro-Indigenous voices shaping a new narrative for liberation, cultural preservation, and planetary healing. From doulas and scientists to farmers and fashion designers, our guests are visionaries redefining what it means to build a sustainable future. This is an unapologetically intersectional, intergenerational, and global space celebrating the power of Black regenerative practices. Each episode is a dynamic fireside chat with changemakers across the Black diaspora, whose expertise and experiences span industries and identities. Compost, Cotton & Cornrows is more than a conversation—it’s an archive, a call to action, and a blueprint for the futures we’re creating for us, by us.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The show primarily focuses on sustainability, cultural preservation, and planetary healing through the voices of Black and Afro-Indigenous changemakers. Episodes highlight diverse topics like conscious fashion with industry leaders like Nia Thomas, who discusses ethical luxury, and marine science represented by guests such as Dr. Tiara Moore, who brings attention to challenges faced by Black scientists. The podcast aims to redefine what sustainability looks like in various industries and identities.
Compost, Cotton & Cornrows is a podcast centering Black sustainability leaders across fashion, agriculture, wellbeing and beyond. Through storytelling, culture, and climate conversations, the show explores how ancestral wisdom and modern practices can cultivate regenerative futures. Hosted by Dominique Drakeford, each episode unearths powerful insights that shift the narrative of environmental justice.
In this episode of Compost, Cotton & Cornrows, Dominique Drakeford sits in rich conversation with Fredeline “Freddie” Amedee-Benjamin, co-owner of Papa Rozier Farms, a vertically integrated farm-to-store ecosystem rooted in Haiti What began as a mission to sustain Bati School evolved into a 50-acre regenerative farm producing cold-pressed castor and moringa oils that are grown, harvested, pressed, bottled and sold without a middleman in Brooklyn. “We are essentially the farmer and the producer,” Freddie shares. “I can tell you where it came from and how it came to be in your bottle.” Together, they unpack sustainability as the ability to self-sustain and to build something that protects and provides for itself no matter what the world is doing while also challenging the global narrative that reduces Haiti to crisis instead of creativity, ingenuity and legacy.
This conversation is about memory, power and refusing to follow trends that simply circle us back to what our ancestors already knew. From Haiti’s revolutionary roots in 1804 to uplifting women through education and employment (Bati School is 85% women-led), Freddie reminds us that sustainability is cultural. Castor and moringa are not new, but instead are ancestral technologies, anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial and anti-trend. This is a story about building institutions that outlive headlines, raising daughters who show up unapologetically and proving that when you put enough energy into something, it becomes unavoidable.
CAN’T STOP! WON’T STOP!
Compost, Cotton & Cornrows: the space where Black & Afro-Indigenous Vanguards are redefining sustainability through storytelling!
@Compost_Cotton_Cornrows
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