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Meet the Arkansas Farmers Turning Sweet Potatoes into Spirits

Modern Farmer

Prime farmland, it attracted countless farmers, including the Black farmers seeking to fulfill the promise of “40 acres and a mule” that followed the American Civil War. It’s still run by the family today, now growing 100 acres of mostly sweet potatoes, the warm-climate vegetable that is an important staple in African American foodways.

Acre 97
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Black Earth: A Family’s Journey from Enslavement to Reclamation

Civil Eats

Patrick Brown, who was named North Carolinas Small Farmer of the Year by North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University this year, grows almost 200 acres of industrial hemp for both oil and fiber, and 11 acres and several greenhouses of vegetablesbeets, kale, radishes, peppers, okra, and bok choy.

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Transforming the Delta

Food Environment and Reporting Network

If we took 5 percent of the acres and diverted them into almost anything that wasnt a commodity, its literally an additional $2.5 Over the next two decades, tractors, mechanical harvesters, and chemical herbicides made sharecropping obsoleteyou no longer needed much labor to farm cotton or grains. today it is less than 2 percent.

Acre 52
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California Will Help BIPOC Collective Cultivate Land Access for Underserved Farmers

Civil Eats

Just a few miles from California’s state capital, owner Nelson Hawkins has turned an abandoned half-acre lot into a hub of food production for the community. growers and owned more than 16 million acres of land. percent of all farmers and own fewer than 5 million acres. Today, they make up just 1.3

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The Food and Farm Bill Must Right the Wrongs of Longstanding Racial Injustice

The Equation

The birth of an unjust agricultural system From plantations to sharecropping, since its inception the U.S. They aimed to maximize profits by exploiting humans and the environment through cheap labor, human commodification, and maximizing yields of a few commodity crops that degraded the soil.

Food 81