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.
Modern Farmer
JUNE 30, 2023
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. After the Civil War, the sharecropping period often involved predatory practices, including low wages and unsafe conditions. But the process hasn’t always come easily.
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Modern Farmer
JULY 16, 2024
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.
Civil Eats
DECEMBER 10, 2024
When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. It really is modern-day sharecropping. Today, the approximately 40,000 Black farmers remaining in America own less than 1 percent of the countrys farmland. The elders refer to the USDA as the last plantation, she says.
The Equation
MARCH 4, 2024
We must not forget that at that time the economic options for Black Americans were scarcely more than sharecropping on former plantations or brutal industrial labor in northern cities; political and social freedoms were systematically denied. Colonel Allensworth envisioned having a Black community where people would be free and independent.
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.; The farms had to be large, though, to pay off the machines. today it is less than 2 percent.
Civil Eats
OCTOBER 24, 2023
Together, BIPOC growers own less than 2 percent of all farmland in the country. “You need at least $1 million to purchase farmland in California, and that doesn’t even include the tools, infrastructure, resources, and the labor.” million grant in 2022 to Ujamaa for the purchase of a medium-sized plot of land in Yolo County.
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