Black farmers and intellectuals have always been on the forefront of the sustainable farming movement. Despite this wealth of knowledge, however, throughout American history Black farmers have lost more and more land with each passing decade through methods of displacement of varying shades of legality. Some were justified through a court system which newly freed slaves and their descendants were not equipped to solve. Others were carried out through federal policies carried out through the United States Department of Agriculture that were weaponized against the very people who most needed their help, while still more were justified through overt forms of white violence that the aforementioned system chose to ignore. All had the effect of crippling the growth of Black wealth and agency over the food systems which most neglected their communities in the aftermath of the civil war, a legacy which is beginning to be reversed by a new generation of BIPOC farmers who are reclaiming a relationship to the land which is often tainted with intergenerational trauma in order to fight back against food apartheid and environmental degradation resulting from industrial farming. 

The recent decline in Black farm ownership has its beginnings  in the aftermath of the Great Depression, when the USDA began promoting farm modernization programs. According to Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, Pete Daniel writes that as a result of this industrial revolution in farming, farmers had to invest more in expensive fertilizers and machines, but the subsequent boom in crop yield also led to a deflation in prices, thinning margins further. The USDA began providing loans to rural areas to encourage further adoption of the new technologies, but these were often dominated by local white landowners who began weaponizing USDA aid programs against farmers who participated in civil rights activity. Cut off from necessary aid, Black farmers had no choice but to turn to defaulting on their loans and forced sales of their land, one of the driving factors of the Great Migration. Daniel also outlines how even after a 1957 report (Equal Opportunity in Farm Programs: An Appraisal of Services Rendered by Agencies of the United States Department of Agriculture) revealed that Black farmers had no input in farm policy or representation on county agricultural committees, and USDA leaders claimed full compliance with equal opportunity laws by 1970, the agency turned to "passive nullification" to continue their legacy of discrimination against Black farmers-- essentially, the agency pledged full compliance, while continuing to pursue discriminatory policies behind the scenes. This is a pattern which the Supreme Court's Pigford v. Glickman decision outlined when it described the pattern of racism in the USDA. As a result of these factors, between 1910 and 2000, Black farm ownership declined by 90%, leading to significant macroeconomic consequences. For example, in the aftermath of the World War, the rise of industrial agriculture caused many poor white farmers to default on their land as well; however, the land usually went in the hands of another white farmer due to industrial consolidation, meaning overall white farmland ownership held steady. Black farmland which was defaulted on also went in the hands of white farmers in line with this trend, which, according to Mother Jones, resulted in a huge transfer of wealth from Black families to white ones in the aftermath of the world wars whose effect is still felt today. 

Collage of images from Pexels and Soul Fire Farms.

During the Obama administration, then-secretary of the USDA Tom Vilsack claimed to have finally addressed the racist history of the department through tangible policy change, reversing the decades of systemic discrimination that tainted its reputation during an 8 year presidential term. The narrative that Vilsack constructed around the correction of systemic inequities in farming in a lengthy Medium post and in interviews with the media came to be taken as gospel in liberal policy circles. Major news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today jumped on and amplified Vilsack's claim of a new era of civil rights for the department, which mostly centered on a finding in the 2012 Census of Agriculture that there had been an increase in the number of Black farmers in the US. However, an investigative report by The Counter, a media outlet focusing on deep, independent journalism on our food system, found that most of the claims that Vilsack made in his report-- including that he had resolved a backlog of complaints from the Bush years, that there had been an increase in Black farmers, and that the USDA had fairly dealt with land claims from Black farmers-- were false. In fact, according to a former USDA civil rights employee, the agency was more than six times as likely to foreclose on a Black farmer than a white one. Documents obtained through a FOIA request found that between 2006 and 2016, Black-owned farms were foreclosed upon at a higher rate than any other racial group. Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights Joe Leanord's explanation for this gaping disparity? A "lack of financial literacy" among Black farmers. 

In the face of the lack of agency that BIPOC people today still have over their food system, and the tenuous hold that Black farmers have over their land because of the persistence of these discriminatory policies, collectives of BIPOC-led farmers and growers have begun to recognize the intimate relationship between farming and civil rights to create a more equitable system. Penniman outlines a three step approach to movement building through farm work based on the Ghanian concept of "lata ete no no daa", or that there needs to be three stones in place for a cooking pot to stand firm. These three principles include protest and direct action to resist oppression; working within the existing legal system to evolve practices which advance justice; and building alternative solutions. She draws from a long tradition of Black farmers who took the lead in registering to vote and hosting organizing meetings during the civil rights movement in the place of their peers who were tenant farmers and faced possible retaliation from white landlords for participating. As well as BIPOC-led farming communities such as Soul Fire Farms, which serves as a training school in upstate New York for farmers of color, Oko Farms, and Farm School NYC, advocacy groups such as the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and Land Loss Prevention Project are working on defending Black farmland by providing legal help to Black farmers at risk do to heirs laws and passing legislation such as the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act which would, for the first time, provide federal legal protections from the types of abuses the USDA has carried out for decades. They are planting the seeds for a more equitable food system that operates for the good of those who it serves, which holds the key to turning agriculture into a tool that reduces climate change instead of exacerbating it.

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