2. Non-White Farmers

The modern farm system also excludes almost anyone who is not a landowning white farmer. European settlers took land from the Native Americans and eventually forced them onto reservations.

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80 million acres in this way between 1871 and 1928.⁶⁶ By 1910, freed Black people and their descendants had acquired at least 16 million acres of land, almost all of it in the South.⁶⁷ Through a variety of means, white families, often with federal assistance, deprived them of almost all of their acreage,⁶⁸ so that by 2012 there were only about 300 Black commercial farmers, or about 0.2% of the total.⁶⁹ Black farmers’ lost wealth and income since 1910 would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars today according to recent estimates.⁷⁰ Federal and state governments passed a series of laws in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that barred Asians from owning land. Many Japanese American farmers who had been interned in camps during World War II returned to their farms to find white farmers had stolen them.⁷¹

Because of this and other widespread discrimination in landownership and agriculture, almost all farmers are white. USDA also still discriminates against Black and other non-white farmers on a systemic basis. For example, more than 99% of the 2019 tariff bail out, the single largest farm subsidy that year, went to white farmers.⁷² These payments further entrench the positions of those who received them.

Many non-white farmers have responded to this system by working toward reform. Black farmer groups have led numerous campaigns against discrimination at USDA, often connecting their problems with the problems of department employees who have protested harassment, abuse, and mismanagement within USDA itself. Black farmers have also led campaigns in regions throughout the South to prevent the construction of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and to support safer modes of production. Numerous leaders in the sustainable agriculture movement are non-white, and a wide variety of non-white farmer groups use sustainable and

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traditional practices to produce food and connect with their culture.⁷³ These leaders are already creating a vision of a more sustainable agriculture, and policymakers should ensure also that farm policy reflects their interests.