The Changing Face of
Farm Country
But something may be
shifting in America’s farm country. Protests over the killing of George Floyd,
Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black Americans have erupted in a number of
small agricultural communities including: Madera, California, population 64,000
and 79 percent Hispanic; Havre, Montana, population 9,800 and 80 percent
white/15 percent Native American; Hermiston, Oregon, population 18,400 and 60
percent white/37 percent Hispanic. McCook, Nebraska, population 7,700 and 97
percent white; Huntington, Indiana, population 17,000 and 96 percent white;
Sandpoint, Idaho, population 8,700 and 92 percent white; and Mankato,
Minnesota, population 42,000 and 88 percent white.]...
Reckoning with Racial
Justice in Farm Country
Rural communities and
agriculture groups are divided over George Floyd's death and the resulting
protests. As some stay silent, others express solidarity or hold rallies in
support.
BY GOSIA WOZNIACKA
FARMING, Food Justice,
Rural America
Posted on: June 10, 2020
| 9 Comments
Since a Minneapolis
police officer killed George Floyd on Memorial Day and massive protests have
swept across the country, Davon Goodwin has struggled with the muted reaction
to the historic civil unrest in his rural farming community.
Davon Goodwin. (Photo by
L.L. Gingerich, courtesy of the National Young Farmers Coalition)
As the only commercial
Black farmer in Scotland County, North Carolina and the manager of a local food
hub whose clients are all white farmers, Goodwin has had very few conversations
with co-workers, customers, and other local residents about the outrage and
sorrow streaming daily on newscasts and social media feeds.
“There’s mostly silence
about it. Like it never happened,” he said. “Part of me feels like, damn, I
know you’re not Black, but you’ve just seen a murder on TV.”
But Goodwin says he’d
like to have conversations with his fellow farmers, since discrimination by
police and hate crimes are just as present in rural areas, though less visible
than they are in cities. “Not talking about it is not going to help,” he added.
Goodwin has also been buoyed
by the thousands of people who have been denouncing police brutality and
standing up for Black lives in small towns across the U.S.—many of them in
Republican strongholds with predominantly white populations, former “sundown
towns,” where African Americans were not welcome, and some towns with Ku Klux
Klan histories.
“For us to have
long-lasting change, white people must understand that they have to do the work
and we as Black people cannot do it for them.”
“It shows me that people
in rural areas are not going to stay silent anymore when it comes to racial
issues in America,” Goodwin said. “For us to have long-lasting change, white
people must understand that they have to do the work and we as Black people
cannot do it for them.”
Rural America, Farm
Country Slow to Respond
As heated Black Lives
Matter protests have taken place in hundreds of cities in the U.S. and abroad
over the last two weeks, countless individuals, organizations, and corporate
brands have come out publicly in support of racial justice and the Black Lives
Matter movement.
The agriculture industry
has been much slower to respond. A few farming organizations—mostly those
supporting small and mid-size family farmers—initially spoke out against
anti-Black racism and police brutality. It took the American Farm Bureau
Federation—the country’s preeminent farming group, which represents large
commodity farmers—10 days to issue a statement. As of last week, more farming
and rural groups had spoken out, but the voices of individual farmers have
remained conspicuously quiet.
Ninety-six percent of
farmland owners are white and 95 percent of U.S. producers—about 3.2
million—are white, while there are only 45,500 Black farmers. It’s a far cry
from the 950,000 who worked the land in 1920 and owned an estimated 16-18
million acres of land. Today, Black farmers own just 1 million acres and the
vast majority farm in the rural South.
Given this legacy, the
silence of agricultural groups seemed deafening.
The National Farmers
Union, the first farm group to call for racial justice in the wake of Floyd’s
death, said it had a “moral obligation” to address America’s legacy of racism.
“If we stand idly by while our friends and neighbors suffer—as too many of us
have done for too long—we are complicit in their suffering,” President Rob
Larew said in a statement. The group, which was founded in 1902, underlined its
legacy of championing social causes, including the women’s suffrage and Civil
Rights movements.
Beyond police brutality
and discrimination in the justice system, Larew sees systemic racism in
agriculture play out in a way that includes lack of access to health care,
land, credit, and other services. The rural South, which most Black farmers
call home, has the highest and most persistent poverty rates.
The silence of
agricultural groups seemed deafening.
From slavery to Jim Crow
laws and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan—rampant in rural areas—to
sharecropping and tenant farming, Larew points to the long history of racism in
agriculture. The most recent example is the 1997 class-action lawsuit against
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which found the agency had
discriminated against Black farmers in its allocation of loans and other
assistance. And while the agency has since made some efforts to minimize
discrimination, Larew said Black farmers continue to be harmed and much remains
to be done.
“This isn’t a
Minneapolis story alone . . . we know these problems persist throughout rural
America as well,” Larew said.
The group, which lobbies
for family farmers and ranchers and works to promote strong rural communities,
has received a mix of comments on social media in response to its statement.
Most were positive, Larew said, but a few members asked the union to “stay in
its lane, to stick with agriculture” or to focus on “all farmers,” not just Black
ones.
Larew said his group
won’t be deterred and will continue to speak out for social justice. It’s now
sharing toolkits to help educate white farmers about the historical context of
racism in agriculture. The group also held a panel about the legacy of Black
land laws at its most recent national convention.
The National Young
Farmers Coalition also underlined agriculture’s troubled past and present in
its official statement. “Our food system is rooted in stolen land and stolen
labor,” the group said. “A just and healthy food system for all people will not
be possible if we don’t reckon with legacies of harm to people of color in the
U.S. and confront the systemic racism and oppression that continue.” The
organization is also offering a Racial Equity Toolkit for white farmers who
want to deepen their understanding of the issues.
Others groups who have
spoken in support of the protests include the National Family Farm Coalition,
the National Rural Health Association, the National Sustainable Agriculture
Coalition, the Land Stewardship Project, and the Women Food & Ag Network.
Black Farmers ‘Have to
Work Harder, Run Faster’
One of the most common
and most offensive comments Devon Goodwin has heard from white farmers is, “We
work hard, you need to work hard, too.” That sentiment, he said, ignores the
fact that many white farmers have worked their land for generations (and in
some cases, on the backs of Black slaves) while African American farmers,
already impoverished through the legacy of slavery, have too often been
dispossessed of theirs.
That legacy continues to
shape their current reality: The latest census of agriculture found that most
Black farmers owned between 10 and 49 acres of land—much less than U.S.
average, which is 441 acres. It also showed that Black land ownership has
dropped by 3 percent in the last five years, while white farmers only lost 0.3
percent of their land.
“You can’t tell a
bootless man to pull himself up by the bootstraps,” Goodwin said.
An Army veteran who grew
up in Pittsburgh and served a tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Goodwin did
not inherit his farm. He had to live apart from his wife and son for several
years and go into debt to buy the 42 acres in Laurinburg. On Off The land (OTL)
Farms, he grows muscadine grapes, blackberries, and vegetables for a large CSA
program. He also works a full-time off-farm job as the manager of the Sandhills
AGInnovation Center.
“My grandfather told me,
‘You’re Black, so working hard isn’t going to be enough. If they have one
degree, you have to have two. If you’re running a race, you need to run
faster.”
Goodwin said he also
worries for his own safety, especially given the fact that violent crime and
the number of people killed by police are on the rise in rural areas. The
31-year-old said he frequently gets pulled over by police. And he’s careful
about what he says around white people so as “not to rattle the cage too much,”
he said.
“Out here . . . we’re so
isolated, if something happens on one of these back roads nobody lives on,
nobody will videotape it and nobody will know,” Goodwin said.
He continues to farm, he
said, because “it’s liberating and gives me the ability to be the person in
control now,” he said. “Owning land is very powerful for me. Sometimes I have
to pinch myself because it’s almost not real.”
He’s unsure whether the
current protests will lead to permanent change. “America has a hell of a bill
to repay,” he said. “But changing the system means some people are going to
lose their privilege. [When it comes to agriculture] that means land reform,
land reparations. In rural America, people are definitely not ready for that.”
The Changing Face of
Farm Country
But something may be
shifting in America’s farm country. Protests over the killing of George Floyd,
Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black Americans have erupted in a number of
small agricultural communities including: Madera, California, population 64,000
and 79 percent Hispanic; Havre, Montana, population 9,800 and 80 percent
white/15 percent Native American; Hermiston, Oregon, population 18,400 and 60
percent white/37 percent Hispanic. McCook, Nebraska, population 7,700 and 97
percent white; Huntington, Indiana, population 17,000 and 96 percent white;
Sandpoint, Idaho, population 8,700 and 92 percent white; and Mankato,
Minnesota, population 42,000 and 88 percent white.
These protests have
taken place despite false rumors in many small towns that outside agitators and
Antifa, or anti-fascists, would be coming by busloads to cause mayhem. The
rumors, spread on social media and in some cases stoked by local sheriffs, caused
panic in some towns and may have intimidated people interested in joining the
protests. At least one Twitter account posing as Antifa was later found to be
run by white nationalist groups. Whether in response to the rumors or for other
reasons, at many of the small town protests groups of white, visibly armed men
showed up to counter-protest and “protect” the protesters and the town’s
property. In many cases, they harassed and even attacked those marching.
Protests in farming
communities are possible because rural America is changing, said Jane Kleeb,
the chair of Nebraska’s Democratic Party. Kleeb, author of Harvest the Vote,
How Democrats Can Win Again In Rural America, said that despite the stereotype,
not all rural communities are racist or backward. In fact, racial and ethnic
diversity is increasing in rural America.
In many rural
communities, Latinos and other immigrants and refugees now make up more than 20
percent of the population and white people are a shrinking percentage of the
population. Rural farming areas also have more adults over 65 than urban or
suburban counties and have experienced population loss over the past decade.
The increase in
diversity, coupled with the fact that rural communities are faced with
population loss and may be more willing to welcome young people of color, is
slowly changing hearts and minds, Kleeb said.
“There’s a lot of
reckoning and soul searching the agricultural community needs to do if we’re
serious about addressing this.”
These communities, Kleeb
said, are working hard to figure out—some more successfully than others—how to
bring together people from different cultural and racial backgrounds. And
although white farmers continue to dominate, “some bridges are being built,”
said Kleeb. In Nebraska, for example, some farmers and ranchers have helped
their Latinx employees who can’t secure bank loans buy homes.
White farmers are also
realizing that they share in many of the same problems that are shouldered by
people of color in rural areas. Most recently, the pork plant in Worthington,
Minnesota had to shut down after experiencing a major COVID-19 outbreak. The
plant’s immigrant workers said conditions were unsafe and the company refused
to slow down. As a result, local farmers didn’t have a place to sell their
hogs, said Brian DeVore with the Minnesota-based Land Stewardship Project.
“If the packing plant
didn’t weaken its safety rules for the immigrant workers, maybe the farmers
would not be in a bind,” DeVore said. “There is a connection. Enlightened
self-interest, this will impact the farmers.”
DeVore said his
organization, which runs a soil health program as well as a farmer training
program, promotes racial justice and immigration reform as part of its mission.
“We’re inoculating them
with these ideas,” he said. “Sometimes I see farmers rolling their eyes. A few
don’t renew their membership. But you do it enough, they keep coming to the
meetings . . . and there may be a little more acceptance.”
But, said Kleeb of
Nebraska, a lot of work remains to confront rural racism: “There’s a lot of
reckoning and soul searching the agricultural community needs to do if we’re
serious about addressing this.”
And while rural voters
helped elect Donald Trump in 2016, Kleeb said the George Floyd protests don’t
have to turn into another element of the urban-rural divide to define the
November election. Democrats can win rural areas if they address issues such as
land justice, fading infrastructure, and social justice, she said.
“We need major
investments to put land back into the hands of young Latino, African American,
and Indigenous farmers and ranchers,” she said. “And we have to make sure
financial resources are going into these small communities and not just the big
cities.”
Some Farmers Want to
Support Communities Impacted by Protests
While dozens of farming
groups representing big and small farmers have now come out in support of
racial justice, farming advocates say real action is needed to move agriculture
toward a more just future.
“The people who want to
do something when this is over, to build new systems—whether in criminal
justice or the food system—are critical,” said Cornelius Blanding, executive
director of The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a group that represents
Black farmers, land owners, and their cooperatives.
Blanding, who won the
2019 James Beard Foundation Leadership Award for his work strengthening
cooperatives, said, for now, his group is mobilizing its member farmers to
support urban communities impacted by the protests by feeding folks on the
front lines “who put themselves in uncomfortable positions.”
The hope, Blanding said,
is to do something similar to the USDA’s Food Box program, which has suppliers
package food products into family-sized boxes and transport them to food banks
and organizations serving hungry Americans impacted by the pandemic since May.
The effort goes back to
the Federation’s roots in the Civil Rights movement, when farming cooperatives
in the South helped support protesters who were marching and boycotting. “If
there is a way to support the Black Lives Matter movement in a similar way, we
will be there,” he said. “People pick rural versus urban, but when we realize
we’re all in this together, we can make a quicker impact and a bigger impact.”
Over the long term,
Blanding hopes the agricultural community can compensate those who have lost
land, as that dispossession has often lead to generational poverty and other
problems.
“When you can’t feed
yourself as a community, it creates problems. So, Black people and communities
are not really the true owners of the country and this allows for inequities to
perpetuate themselves,” Blanding said.
The outpouring of
response and attention has left Blanding hopeful. “This sort of attention could
lead to real change,” he said. “The Civil Rights movement took a turn when
protesters were attacked by dogs, it was shown on television and the world saw
it. The world has to see these injustices, and this is what’s happening now.
Our hope is to break the cycle of oppression, not just repeat it.”
National Latino
Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association
1029 Vermont
Avenue, NW, Suite 601
Washington, DC
20005
Office: (202)
628-8833
Fax No.: (202)
393-1816
Twitter: @NLFRTA
