The Invisible Farmer
A hundred years ago, the people responsible for feeding Americans weren’t all white and male. A dark history of discrimination has since squeezed many African Americans out of farming. But a small number survive, and they’re fighting to ensure that, after centuries deeply connected to the land, they don’t disappear completely from America’s landscape.
The first time Dee Dotson went out to the field to plow, he worked until darkness fell. His father called him back to the house, but he protested. He said he was almost finished.
This would’ve been about 80 years ago now. Today’s mechanized agriculture would be almost unrecognizable to Dotson’s teenage self. He’s now 93, but he still works long hours on his farm in northern Mississippi, tending to his four cows and his two small plots of vegetables.
“Mostly I see anything that needs to be done, I mostly do it on the farm,” Dotson says in between calls to his cows. His customers come to his property to pick their own vegetables.
Dotson’s farm is a relic. It’s only about 62 acres, just 14 percent of today’s average farm size, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics. A sturdy, hand-made trellis lines the front side of his garden plot, ready to hold the summer’s runner beans. Onions are interspersed with turnips, an organic form of gardening that was invented long before the word was trendy. And an old, hand-drawn well provides a reminder of a time not so long ago when the property had no running water. The well’s over a hundred years old, and he still uses it in the summer for his animals.
Back in 1922 when Dotson’s father-in-law purchased the first 40 acres, the farm would’ve seemed normal for someone starting out, only about half the size of the average farm of that time. Since then, U.S. acreage in farmland hasn’t changed much, but at least 4 million farms and their owners have disappeared, government data show. Farms have grown bigger, while the number of farmers has shrunk. And although the decline of the small farm has been felt across the country, one group of Americans has been harder hit by the changes than perhaps any other: African Americans. Today, they make up only around 1 percent of farmers, down from 14 percent in 1920. About 90 percent of black farmers live in the South. They have become all but invisible.
Dotson is one of the few surviving African-American farmers. At 93, he has difficulty hearing, so his nephew Frank Taylor shares his story for him. “There is some hope here in rural America,” says Taylor, as he looks proudly at his uncle. “However, I look on the other side of it. If my uncle was allowed to sign up for conservation practices through the various governmental agencies, we would have had a broader and larger farm.”
Taylor says the color of his uncle’s skin prevented him from accessing services from the USDA and other agencies. That story of discrimination isn’t unique to Dotson. It’s one of the reasons so few African Americans remain in agriculture today, despite a strong historical legacy that began with slavery and moved through the post-Civil War days of “40-acres-and-a-mule” and sharecropping. In 1990, after a series of hearings and several past reports from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Congress released a report citing the USDA as a catalyst for the decline of minority farmers. And in a settlement of a 1999 class-action lawsuit known as Pigford v. Glickman, USDA officials acknowledged the agency’s racially discriminatory practices and granted around $1 billion to African-American farmers in damages caused by the discrimination. They also established new bureaucratic procedures aimed at reducing future discrimination.
Taylor now runs the Winston County Self Help Cooperative, which his uncle helped found in 1985 during the farm crisis and which continues to provide resources to small farmers and particularly African-American farmers. He also owns a tree farm down the road that’s been in his family since the 1880s. He’s no stranger to the struggles facing African-American land ownership.
He says when he returned to Northern Mississippi after college and got involved in agriculture in the late ‘80s, he witnessed the discrimination, making an already tough time for farmers even tougher. “It was humiliating because you had people (who would) arbitrarily make decisions for African-American land owners,” he says. “They’d say, ‘No, we’re not going to loan you anything’ without even having them fill out the application.”
Those who did receive loans, he says, had to report to a credit manager who got to decide whether they could get money to buy equipment like tractors. Sometimes farmers were awarded the necessary funds but after the planting season was already over, too late to make a difference.
It’s a story that Shirley Sherrod, co-founder of New Communities in Georgia, knows well. New Communities lost 6,000 acres of land after an extended drought in the late ‘70s. They applied for an emergency loan through the Farmers Home Administration, at that time the USDA’s lender of last resort, but it came three years too late.
“(The program) was there for other farmers, for white farmers,” Sherrod says from a former plantation home that New Communities now owns outside of Albany, Georgia. “We were told we get a loan, the county supervisor said, over his dead body.”
So the next time New Communities went to the local office, they brought officials from Washington with them to get the application. “After that, (the local officials) slowed that process and did everything they could to block it, but finally after three years we got an emergency loan,” Sherrod says. “When you're farming 2,000 acres that's much too long to go without the proper input when you’re having continued drought.” The loan had required a lien on all available assets. In 1985, they lost everything.
Sherrod grew up on a farm in Georgia, about 25 miles from the 3,000-acre plantation that New Communities now owns. When she was 17, her father was shot by a white farmer over a few cows, and his murderer was never convicted. Before his death, she’d thought she would leave farming after high school and head North to college, like so many of her peers. “I made the decision on the night of his death that I would not leave the South,” she says. “I would stay…and devote my life working for change.”
And she’s kept her promise. Sherrod has been working with small farmers, particularly African-Americans, in southwest Georgia since, to help them keep their land and remain profitable in the face of drastic changes in America’s agricultural economy over the past 50 years. She’s done work through the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the Southwest Georgia Project.
Following her father’s death, she also became active in the Civil Rights Movement and met her husband, Charles Sherrod, a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Together, they formed their own solution to African-American land loss: New Communities, the first community land trust, where they hoped to build villages, a health system and an educational system, and to farm the place as a community. But they faced fierce opposition from the white community, from bullets through their windows to purposefully diluted fertilizer. And then they eventually lost the 6,000 acres to discrimination and drought.
Given that history, where Sherrod finds herself now is a bizarre turn of events. Cypress Pond, the plantation New Communities bought with settlement money from the 1999 Pigford v. Glickman case, was once owned by the largest slaveholder in Georgia.
“They tell me, ‘Daddy, I don't see how you do that, I don't see how you do all that work,’” he says. “I say you just got to make up your mind to do it.”
“I’m sure slaves had to build this house, but never envisioned the day when it could be in the hands of black people,” Sherrod says as she glances around the fully-restored plantation home. She says she made the lawyer fax her the paperwork when she learned they’d won the case after so many years of struggle. “It was unbelievable,” she says.
Cypress Pond is beautiful. Endless rows of pecan trees stand perfectly spaced. An osprey roosts in a cypress tree above a placid pond, and massive longleaf pines provide a reminder of a time when these skinny giants ruled the South. It’s in the middle of one section of those pines where Sherrod says she feels the presence of slaves every time she visits.
Although she says she still faces pushback from the community, that people think the money given to African Americans after the Pigford case was an unnecessary waste, she’s working hard to make New Communities at Cypress Pond a place for people to come to heal and to grow. “From all of the pains of life,” she says. “The racism that's just hurt all of us, kept all of us from being what we could be and should be in life.”
Much like Dotson and Taylor, she wants to continue the legacy of African-American land ownership and provide the resources that can help reverse the trend that discrimination started. The USDA isn’t the only responsible party when it comes to African-American land loss. The causes include the Great Migration, the movement of 6 million blacks from the rural South from the early to mid-1900s; problems with heirs’ property that’s been handed down informally through generations; and a stigma that equates working the land to the days of slavery and sharecropping. She works to address those issues at the Southwest Georgia Project and by providing support and training at the demonstration gardens on the New Communities property.
But there’s one particularly troubling question that people working to reverse African-American land loss are trying to answer: how to get young, African Americans interested in agriculture. Across demographics the average age of the farmer rose to 58 in the 2012 Census of Agriculture, a number that’s been on the rise since the mid-‘80s. But for African Americans, the age is even higher, at almost 62.
Dotson says his grandchildren come visit, but they’re not interested in farming. “They tell me, ‘Daddy, I don't see how you do that, I don't see how you do all that work,’” he says. “I say you just got to make up your mind to do it.” Who will take over when he’s gone?
Taylor says the cooperative that Dotson helped found has a few members in their 30s, but most are older. As for his own tree farm, he’s made sure to work with his eldest daughter on a plan for inheritance and to instill in her the importance of land ownership. She and her husband recently bought their own farm. “When I come back 200 years later, it better be in our family,” Taylor says. “Because this is the legacy that my family worked for, (that) they worked to sustain.”
And Sherrod says New Communities is facing the same issues. “We want to train young farmers, but especially African-American farmers, ‘cause that’s a dying breed right now,” she says. “Once you come up with a place like this, you have a little more interest for young people, but prior to this, getting young people to be involved in some of that work wasn’t the easiest thing.”
She has managed to bring in two young faces. Cedrick Rowe and Amber Bell are both in their 20s and from the neighboring urban center of Albany. Bell works as the program director for the Southwest Georgia Project, and Rowe pretty much runs the entire farming operation at New Communities. He managed to get a section of the farm organic-certified in just under a year.
“Someone like Cedrick here is very, very important. He’s young, he can relate to them. And Amber, she’s young and can relate to them because getting young, African-American women is difficult,” Sherrod says.
Rowe was in his last semester at Fort Valley State University studying agriculture when he met Sherrod and accepted a job offer. He shows off his young orange trees and grape vines with pride and shares his visions for agroforestry and organic GMO seeds. He says he grew up around agriculture. His grandmother and aunts had worked for a former slave owner, and he gave them a small plot of land that they farmed in Cedrick’s youth.
“I needed something where I can be more outdoors and run free,” Rowe says. “It was kind of in my blood I say, as far as farming, because it come natural to me. The stuff I learn now is new stuff. I try to stay ahead on the technology in new ways.”
And Bell, much like Sherrod decades before her, wanted to leave the area for a bigger city like Washington or New York, but Sherrod convinced her that the need was greatest at home. So, she stayed.
“I don't believe this work is for everyone, but I believe we should give everyone the opportunity to at least see,” Bell says. “And then someone will be like Ced or me and say, ‘This is where I want to be.’”
