Remove Family Farming Remove Farmland Remove Sharecropping
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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. But Black farm ownership has dropped dramatically over the years, with just 1,500 estimated to remain in Arkansas today. But the process hasn’t always come easily.

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

Civil Eats

In the months before Patrick Brown was born in November 1982, his father, Arthur, lay down on a road near the familys farm to prevent a caravan of yellow dump trucks from depositing toxic soil in his community. Patrick currently operates Brown Family Farms on the land that Byron worked as a sharecropper once he was freed.

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

The Equation

In federal food and agricultural policy, the best vehicle to achieve this change is the food and farm bill. The birth of an unjust agricultural system From plantations to sharecropping, since its inception the U.S. food and farming system was built on systems of oppression that excluded Black farmers and exploited food system workers.

Food 81