Civil Eats

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Photo credit: Oisakhose Aghomo Forging Pathways to Land Access for BIPOC Farmers in Georgia Emerging tools are helping young and beginning BIPOC farmers find farmland and navigate the confusing legal process needed to acquire and manage it. Here is our best food justice reporting this year.

Food 139

Food Sharecropping Finance Farming 139

Food Environment and Reporting Network

DECEMBER 20, 2024

Over the next two decades, tractors, mechanical harvesters, and chemical herbicides made sharecropping obsoleteyou no longer needed much labor to farm cotton or grains. In 1920, Blacks owned or operated 14 percent of all farmland in the U.S.; But this farm is different: It produces rice seeds. today it is less than 2 percent.

Acre 107

Acre Farming Farming Crop 107

Civil Eats

JUNE 4, 2024

Traveling through Appalachia, Tessa Desmond and her team kept hearing the seed stories. He had overheard Desmond discussing seeds with his neighbor. People have hung on to seeds even when they aren’t actively planting and tending them,” says Desmond. We’ve included audio samples of oral histories from the project.

Food 111

Food Seeding Farming Farming 111

Civil Eats

DECEMBER 10, 2024

Photo credit: Cornell Watson) Ideally, wed get this sweet corn in the ground today, he says, indicating a bag of organic seed and a nearby half-acre plot of loose brown soil. When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. It really is modern-day sharecropping.

Plantation 144

Plantation Farming Farming Acre 144

Food Environment and Reporting Network

DECEMBER 31, 2024

Seed funds came from wealthy friends and friends of friends, some of whom told me they hadn’t fully appreciated what they were supporting. Land-trafficking mafias , which operate in every region of Peru, have allowed developers to launder unclaimed swaths of rainforest into legal farmland. “There is a before and an after.”

Plantation 126

Plantation Acre Cultivation Crop 126