Tag Archives: farming

The unfortunate case of the disappearing Black farmer

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John Boyd was interviewed by Grist writer Madeleine Thomas on the state of Black farmers in America. Mr. Boyd has been a driving force in the movement to procure support for Black farmers – and even funding to help cover the personal and community cost of Black farmers being denied USDA support that was made readily available to Caucasians.

Boyd’s work helped spark a landmark legal case in 1997. In the class-action lawsuit Pigford v. Glickman, 400 black farmers alleged that the United States Department of Agriculture had denied them loans based on racial discrimination. The decision eventually awarded thousands of black farmers payments up to $50,000 for discrimination claims. In 2010, President Obama announced an additional $1.25 billion settlement, known as Pigford II, to fund any additional unfiled claims. Native American, female, and Latino farmers were also eventually awarded similar settlements, too.

…What has happened is that a lot of family farms have been left to the next generation, and they’re really not set up to continue farming. That has created a huge challenge for black people in this country as far as being agriculturalists and maintaining and contributing to America’s fabric, which is why black people were brought into this country in the first place. We were brought to this country to work the land and we’ve done it for hundreds of years for scot-free. Here we are hundreds of years later, barely holding on here.

Mr. Boyd advises taking back control over our connection to land and food by investing in back gardening, small scale farming and even larger scale farming. On the particular subject of land, he shares this wisdom:

We need people to become concerned that God doesn’t make any more land. They make a new Cadillac and a new Mercedes-Benz every day, but the actual land, once it gets away from you and your family loses that land, it’s very difficult to go back and buy it from a white farmer because they’re not going to sell it back to you. We can’t continue to give our land away for pennies on the dollar and move to suburbs and condominiums. That’s a real problem.

…As my grandfather said, “I can’t leave my PhD to my children, but I can leave my raggedy farm to them.”