4. The Legacy of Discriminatory Agricultural Policy

Almost all farmers are old (66% 55 or older; 83% 45 or older), white (95%) men (76%) who live in rural areas.⁴² But while the popular press and general political conversation tends to conflate these farmers with the entire rural community, in fact there are many other farm constituencies.

This stark contrast in attitudes among different rural groups is in part the result of a long and consistent history of farm policy that has favored white landowning farmers over others. The first Civil War Congress in 1861 created USDA, passed the Morrill Act—which provided funding for a nationwide system of colleges for “the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts”—and enacted the Homestead Act. The federal government eventually granted 246 million acres to 1.5 million families through the Homestead Act and its successors.⁴³ Effectively closed off to most Blacks and other minorities, homesteading gave European immigrants and other white families an opportunity to acquire considerable property and assets.⁴⁴

In the first decades of the 1900s, Congress expanded the land-grant university system and federal funding for agricultural research, extension, and education. The New Deal increased assistance for large-scale, capital-intensive farms through an array of ambitious new subsidies and federal credit, crop insurance, and technical assistance programs.

The New Deal coalition that passed these new farm laws was heavily reliant on Jim Crow legislators. These legislators killed programs for and research on small farmers and sharecroppers, and ensured federal funds remained under “local control,” by which they meant white landowners. These same

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legislators also excluded domestic workers and farmworkers, the two most common occupations for Black people, from key statutory benefits and labor protections.⁴⁵ (Congress extended minimum wage requirements to farmworkers—with some important exceptions—in 1966, but federal law still denies farmworkers the right to unionize or earn overtime pay.) This political alliance of big money agriculture and white supremacy enacted policies that pushed hundreds of thousands of Black tenants and sharecroppers off the farm and into cities, in what one historian called one of the “largest government-impelled population movements in all our history.”⁴⁶