Black Farmers Fed Communities for 150 Years — Now 1.7% Own Farmland and the USDA Helped Kill the Rest

Sixteen million acres. That is the number that should be written on the walls of every USDA office in America, etched into the marble of every courthouse in the rural South, and taught in every American history class that claims to tell the truth about how wealth is created and how it is destroyed in this country. Sixteen million acres is the amount of farmland owned by Black Americans at the peak of Black agricultural land ownership in 1910, when nearly one million Black farmers — constituting 14% of all American farmers — worked land they had acquired through extraordinary effort in the decades following Emancipation. They had started with nothing. They had been released from slavery with no land, no capital, no tools, no livestock, and no government program designed to help them acquire any of it. And in forty-five years, through a combination of grinding labor, meticulous saving, and the kind of communal resource-pooling that would later be called cooperative economics, they had accumulated sixteen million acres of American farmland. It was, by any measure, one of the most remarkable wealth-building achievements in the history of any dispossessed people anywhere on earth.

Today, Black Americans own approximately two million acres of farmland. Approximately 49,000 Black farmers remain, constituting 1.7% of all American farmers. The loss of fourteen million acres — nearly 90% of what Black families had accumulated — represents the largest transfer of agricultural land from a racial minority in American history. And the cause of that loss is not mysterious. It is not the result of market forces operating neutrally across all communities. It was engineered, facilitated, and in many cases directly executed by the United States Department of Agriculture, the agency that was created to help American farmers and that spent the better part of a century systematically destroying Black ones.

How the USDA Killed Black Farming

The mechanism was loans. Agriculture is a capital-intensive enterprise that operates on annual cycles: a farmer borrows in the spring to buy seed, fertilizer, and equipment, plants and tends the crop through the summer, harvests in the fall, sells the crop, repays the loan, and begins again. The USDA’s Farm Service Agency — and its predecessors, the Farmers Home Administration and the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service — administered the federal farm loan programs that provided this essential operating credit. And for Black farmers, the loan window was effectively closed.

This was not speculation. It was proven in federal court. Pigford v. Glickman, the landmark class-action lawsuit filed in 1997 and settled in 1999, documented systematic racial discrimination in USDA lending across decades and across the entire southern United States. Black farmers were denied loans that white farmers with identical qualifications received. When they were approved, they received smaller amounts, at higher interest rates, with shorter repayment periods. Applications from Black farmers were processed months or years after those of white farmers, ensuring that by the time credit arrived — if it arrived at all — the planting season had passed. USDA county committee members, who controlled local lending decisions, were overwhelmingly white, and their decisions reflected not neutral risk assessment but the racial attitudes of the communities they represented.

The settlement in Pigford and its successor case, Pigford II, totaled approximately $2.3 billion. The amount sounds large until you calculate what was lost. At conservative estimates of $3,000 per acre for southern farmland — land that is now worth considerably more — fourteen million lost acres represent a minimum of $42 billion in land value alone, not counting the decades of agricultural income, the generational wealth transfer, and the community infrastructure that the loss of that land destroyed. The settlement amounted to pennies on the dollar of what was stolen, and even those pennies were distributed through a claims process so inadequate that a Government Accountability Office report described it as “seriously flawed.”

“They didn’t just deny us loans. They denied us loans while approving the white farmer down the road with less land and worse credit. And then, when we couldn’t make the payment because we couldn’t plant the crop because we didn’t get the loan, they foreclosed on the land. That’s not negligence. That’s a plan.”
— John Boyd Jr., founder, National Black Farmers Association

The Heir Property Trap

USDA discrimination was the primary engine of Black land loss, but it was not the only one. Heir property — land passed down without a will, resulting in fractional ownership shared among all descendants — has been called the leading cause of involuntary Black land loss by the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. The mechanism is devastating in its simplicity. When a Black landowner dies without a will, which has historically been the norm rather than the exception in rural Black communities where access to legal services was limited, the land passes to all heirs as tenants in common. Each heir owns a fractional share. Any single heir can petition the court for a partition sale, forcing the entire property to be sold at auction. And because partition sales attract speculators rather than community buyers, the land typically sells for a fraction of its market value, enriching the speculator and dispossessing every other heir.

The Emergency Land Fund, established in 1972 by Robert S. Browne, estimated that Black Americans were losing 500,000 acres per year to heir property issues, tax sales, and related mechanisms. The Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which has been adopted by approximately 20 states, has partially addressed the partition sale problem by requiring that co-tenants be given the right to buy out the petitioning heir and that the property be appraised at fair market value before any sale. But the act came decades too late for the millions of acres already lost, and it has not been adopted in several states where Black land loss remains most acute.

The New Black Farming Movement

Against this history of systematic destruction, a new Black farming movement is growing, and it is growing with a clarity of purpose that draws directly from the lessons of what was lost. The movement has multiple expressions. In cities, Black urban farms are transforming vacant lots into productive agricultural land that addresses food deserts — neighborhoods where access to fresh, affordable food is limited or nonexistent, which disproportionately overlap with majority-Black communities. Will Allen’s Growing Power, based in Milwaukee, demonstrated that urban farming could produce commercially viable quantities of fresh food on small lots within city limits. Ron Finley, the “gangsta gardener” of South Central Los Angeles, turned the parkway strip in front of his house into a food garden and sparked a national conversation about the connection between food access, health outcomes, and community self-determination.

The Black Farmer Fund, established in 2019, provides non-extractive capital — loans and investments structured to build wealth rather than extract it — to Black farmers and food enterprises in the Northeast. The National Black Food and Justice Alliance coordinates policy advocacy and community organizing across the Black food sovereignty movement. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which has been supporting Black farmers and landowners since 1967, continues to provide technical assistance, legal support, and cooperative development services to Black farming communities across the South.

The Health Connection

The connection between Black farming and Black health is not incidental. It is causal. Black Americans suffer from diet-related diseases — Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, certain cancers — at rates dramatically higher than the general population. The CDC reports that Black adults are 60% more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes and 30% more likely to die from heart disease than white adults. These disparities are not genetic. They are dietary, and they are driven by the food environment. When the nearest source of fresh produce is a thirty-minute bus ride away but there are three fast-food restaurants within walking distance, dietary outcomes are determined by geography, not choice.

Black farmers growing food in Black communities directly address this crisis. Urban farms, community gardens, farm-to-table programs, and Black-owned food cooperatives create the food access infrastructure that the commercial food system has refused to build. The food is fresher, it is more affordable than the processed alternatives that dominate food deserts, and it is produced by and for the community that consumes it. This is not agriculture as a nostalgic exercise. It is agriculture as public health intervention, economic development, and community self-determination, all operating simultaneously.

Cooperative Farming: The Model That Scales

The cooperative farming model — multiple farmers sharing land, equipment, distribution networks, and market access — is particularly well-suited to the economic realities of Black beginning farmers, who face the same capital barriers that have constrained Black farming since Emancipation. Cooperative structures reduce the startup costs for individual farmers, provide the economies of scale necessary to compete in commercial markets, and create the institutional framework for collective land ownership that protects against the heir property issues that have destroyed so much Black-owned farmland.

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives has supported the development of more than 100 agricultural cooperatives across the South. New cooperative models are emerging: community-supported agriculture (CSA) cooperatives that guarantee farmers a market before planting season, processing cooperatives that allow small farmers to add value to raw commodities, and marketing cooperatives that give Black farmers access to retail and wholesale channels that would be inaccessible to individual producers. These models are not new. They are the same cooperative principles that Black farmers employed in the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance in the 1880s, adapted to contemporary market conditions.

Land Link: Connecting the Willing

There is a quiet crisis happening simultaneously in American agriculture that creates an extraordinary opportunity for Black farming: the aging out of the existing farm population. The average American farmer is 57.5 years old. Approximately 370 million acres of farmland are expected to change hands in the next two decades as the current generation of farmers retires. Many of these farmers have no successor — their children have moved to cities, and there is no one to take over the operation. Land link programs, which connect retiring farmers with beginning farmers seeking land, represent one of the most promising pathways for rebuilding Black agricultural land ownership.

Programs like the National Young Farmers Coalition’s land access initiatives, state-level farm link programs, and organizations like the Black Family Land Trust are working to ensure that Black beginning farmers are connected with available land before it is consolidated by corporate agricultural operations or converted to non-agricultural use. The economics can work: retiring farmers often prefer to sell or lease to beginning farmers who will continue farming the land rather than to developers or speculators, and USDA programs for beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers — programs that, ironically, are administered by the same agency that spent decades discriminating against Black farmers — provide favorable financing terms for these transitions.

The Land Remembers

There is a saying among Black farmers in the South that the land remembers who worked it. It is a statement that operates on multiple levels: as an ecological observation about the way farming practices shape soil composition across generations, as a cultural assertion about the connection between a people and the earth they have tended, and as a moral claim about what is owed. Black hands cleared this land. Black hands planted it, irrigated it, harvested it, and made it productive. Black hands did this first under the compulsion of slavery and then, after Emancipation, under the aspiration of ownership, building from nothing the sixteen million acres that represented not merely economic value but the physical foundation of Black freedom in America.

What was taken can be rebuilt. Not to sixteen million acres — not immediately, and perhaps not ever, because the land that was lost has appreciated to values that make recovery at that scale functionally impossible without massive public investment. But the movement to rebuild Black farming does not need to recover every lost acre to succeed. It needs to create a viable, growing, institutionally supported Black agricultural sector that provides food access, economic opportunity, land ownership, and generational wealth-building capacity to Black communities. The tools exist. The land is available. The knowledge — both the traditional agricultural knowledge passed down through generations of Black farming families and the modern technical knowledge available through extension services, agricultural universities, and farming organizations — is accessible.

What is required is the decision. The decision that the land matters, that food sovereignty matters, that the connection between a people and the earth they work is not a sentimental relic but an economic and cultural necessity. Forty-nine thousand Black farmers have already made that decision. They are farming right now, today, on land they own or lease, growing food that feeds their communities, building wealth that they will pass to their children, and proving, with every harvest, that the USDA’s decades-long campaign to eliminate Black farming did not succeed. It diminished it. It devastated it. But it did not kill it. And from the two million acres that remain, with the right investment, the right policy, and the right organizational infrastructure, the next sixteen million acres can begin.