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Black-Owned Farms Are Holding on by a Thread
Racial discrimination has long contributed to the steady decline of Black-owned farms in America, but a movement to grow those numbers may soon be bolstered by real support
by Nadra Nittle Feb 23, 2021, 10:30am EST
"It’s a longstanding pattern. During the 1930s, structural racism began to erode the gains of African Americans who had toiled and sacrificed to acquire their own farmland as newly liberated people after the Civil War. “Farmers of color … were left out of a lot of these policies that supported farmers following the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, when it was a really challenging time to be a farmer, as it always has been,” says Holly Rippon-Butler, NYFC’s land access program director. “The fact that these programs left out farmers of color, and Black farmers in particular, led to a … really sharp decline in the number of Black farmers that’s disproportionate to white farmers at the same time period.”
The New Deal, the set of public works programs, financial reforms, and other policies President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented to help the country bounce back from the Great Depression, established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) to offset the effects of the economic downturn on the agriculture sector. The AAA organized committees that controlled agriculture in counties across the country, according to historian Pete Daniel, author of Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. White power brokers who were primarily interested in amassing more farmland for themselves (or for others who shared their racial and class backgrounds) made up the bulk of these committees. They ignored or antagonized African-American farmers, who were excluded from serving on the committees and lacked the resources to challenge the decisions of the all-white members bent on limiting the amount of crops they could grow.
“In those days, there were allotments for crops, for example, cotton,” Daniel says. “Each farm owner was given so many acres to grow. If you were an African-American farmer, white people could just cut you right down to nothing.” In short, the powerful individuals who served on the county AAA committees could allot African Americans significantly less land to cultivate than they allotted to whites, allowing white farmers to thrive while curtailing Black progress in agriculture.
Officials at the USDA’s now-defunct Farmers Home Administration (FHA), founded in 1946, also engaged in discrimination, namely by denying loans to Black farmers. By withholding the financial resources these farmers needed and limiting the crops they could grow, officials at various levels of government made it difficult for African Americans in agriculture to flourish.
State laws directly served to separate Black farmers from their land as well. For example, many Southern states had (and still have) heirs’ property laws that took effect when landowners died without wills, rendering the decedents’ heirs owners of a fractional interest in their property. The number of heirs multiplied with each new generation, and any of them could sell their fractional interest or ask a court to force a sale of the property, even if the other heirs objected. But historic barriers to legal services mean that as many as 50 to 75 percent of African Americans die without wills, causing them to lose farmland. Although heirs’ property is worth an estimated $28 billion in the South, court-ordered sales of this property, often to white buyers, have resulted in it being purchased for “pennies on the dollar.”
Heirs’ property laws and loan denials continued to plague African-American farmers well into the 20th century. In 1997, Boyd participated in Pigford v. Glickman, a class action lawsuit against the USDA for discriminating against Black farmers seeking loans and support from the agency between 1981 and 1996. The government settled the case for $1 billion two years later. Boyd took part in the lawsuit after FHA officials repeatedly turned him down for small loans while granting sizable loans to white farmers in his region. On more than one occasion, FHA officers reportedly engaged in overt racism, including spitting on Boyd and tossing his loan application in the trash without reviewing it. He launched the NBFA after connecting with other Black farmers who’d endured similar ordeals.
Winning the Pigford case proved bittersweet. A number of the Black farmers who’d experienced racial discrimination while applying for USDA support were already dangerously in debt or unaware of the class action suit when the federal government disbursed $62,500 apiece to the 400 farmers represented. Some lost their farms or died before receiving the settlement, but the NBFA’s ongoing advocacy prompted then-President Barack Obama to sign a bill in 2010 approving a $1.25 billion payout, known as Pigford II, to the Black farmers excluded from the original class action. Neither settlement, however, could help the African Americans who lost an estimated 36 million acres of farmland from 1920 to 1978 because of systemic racism.
“Pigford did things in that people got money, but you can’t possibly atone for the racial discrimination that happened in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s,” Daniel says. “You can’t bring back those farmers to the land. They’re gone. The people in that case endured even after all that discrimination, but it was tough.”
And it isn’t over. Black farmers today say they experience bias in the public and private sectors alike. As the coronavirus rocked agriculture in 2020, the NBFA continued to call out discrimination, initiating a boycott against agriculture equipment manufacturer John Deere. The group alleges that the company does not respond to Black farmers’ calls for service on its machinery in a timely manner and remotely shuts off tractors when these farmers try to repair equipment on their own. Additionally, NBFA accused John Deere of refusing to exhibit its products at the NBFA’s annual conference. More detrimental, Boyd believes John Deere has made it difficult for African Americans, who must often rely on their own financial resources and not federal loans, to buy equipment.
“The issue with John Deere is that many Blacks are C.O.D. [cash on delivery] borrowers, and we don’t have credit there,” Boyd says. “They’re [one of] the largest agricultural lenders in the world, and when you don’t extend credit to somebody, we can’t get the equipment … unless we have cash money to do that.”
A John Deere spokesman says that it takes Boyd’s allegations seriously and is “committed to eliminating the systemic inequities that have prevented generations of Black Americans and communities of color from having fair access to social and economic opportunities.” The representative notes that the company recently joined a new coalition with the National Black Growers Council, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives to help Black farmers overcome systemic challenges." | |
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