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Our Best Food Justice Stories of 2023

Civil Eats

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 89
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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. 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.

Acre 95
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Urban Farms are a Lifeline for Food-Insecure Residents. Will New Jersey Finally Make Them Permanent?

Modern Farmer

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 97
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The Future of Resilient Agricultural Communities in California Is Alive in Allensworth

The Equation

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.

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California Will Help BIPOC Collective Cultivate Land Access for Underserved Farmers

Civil Eats

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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Oral History Project Preserves Black and Indigenous Food Traditions

Civil Eats

Adeeb: There was a loss of farmland, farm traditions, knowledge, and skills being passed from one generation to the other due to migration. Emmanuel Fields, Frankfort, Kentucky His grandmother’s sharecropping experience made him turn away from a connection to agriculture and community. How will the oral history project support that?

Food 139
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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. After the antebellum plantation system ended, exploitative and oppressive systems continued through the sharecropping system.

Food 78