Civil Eats

DECEMBER 27, 2023

The food system bears a disproportionate impact on communities of color, ranging from the farmworkers struggling to feed themselves even as they harvest the nation’s produce to the BIPOC farmers who are often shut out from crucial financing and other resources. Here is our best food justice reporting this year.

Food 89

Food Sharecropping Finance Farming 89

Civil Eats

DECEMBER 10, 2024

Isaiah White harvests kale at his familys fifth-generation farm in Warren County, where the U.S. When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. Patrick Browns nephew Justice White pauses while harvesting organic purple kale. Across the road, peacocks shriek. They must be pets?

Plantation 113

Plantation Farming Farming Acre 113

Modern Farmer

JULY 16, 2024

Some are even ready to harvest. Even after slavery was abolished in New Jersey in 1866, white farmers created their own form of sharecropping called “ cottaging ,” where former enslaved Black people would provide labor in exchange for shelter and crops. Porter’s farm faces another common challenge: he doesn’t own his farmland.

Food 98

Food Farming Farming Agriculture 98

Food Environment and Reporting Network

DECEMBER 20, 2024

In 1944, International Harvester tested the first mechanical cotton picker on a plantation just south of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Over the next two decades, tractors, mechanical harvesters, and chemical herbicides made sharecropping obsoleteyou no longer needed much labor to farm cotton or grains.

Acre 52

Acre Farming Farming Crop 52

Civil Eats

JUNE 4, 2024

Adeeb: There was a loss of farmland, farm traditions, knowledge, and skills being passed from one generation to the other due to migration. We would harvest things in the morning, prepare them, and they’d be on the table for 3 o’clock. How will the oral history project support that? It was comforting to me.

Food 107

Food Seeding Farming Farming 107