Biden’s historic stimulus plan includes debt relief for Black farmers and increased support for land acquisition*
By Jeffrey Anderson
Amid the recent landmark $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, a notable stimulus for disadvantaged farmers has arrived just in time for planting season. No legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has targeted Black farmers—who constitute roughly a quarter of all farmers of color—as will the $5 billion in debt relief and grants to support training, education and land acquisition through the American Rescue Plan, The Washington Post reported this week.
That’s good news for farmers like D.C.’s Ronald L. Williams, the subject of a recent feature I wrote for Red Canary Magazine, an independent publication devoted to public awareness of environmental, social justice and equity issues—and change. Sponsored by Red Canary Collective, a 501(c)(3), in collaboration with Joe Donnelly, an award-winning journalist, writer and friend of District Dig, the magazine is home to writers, photographers and artists looking to do “difference-making work.”
I had been wanting to write about Williams for some time. He’s one of the most knowledgable—and opinionated— Washingtonians I have met in my 12 years of reporting on D.C. government, politics and local culture. Throughout the five-plus years I’ve known him, as we engaged in frequent talks about housing, development, racial inequity and the misdoings of local officials, he has been building a family business as a farmer, crabber and oysterman.
As I reported in Red Canary, Williams is a sixth-generation Washingtonian who is reclaiming his ancestors’ agrarian roots by acquiring property on land and water and developing a farm-to-table operation that integrates local seafood-and produce-harvesting and -distribution by aggregating his own produce and seafood with product he buys on the regional wholesale market.
With a skeletal crew and his wife as a business partner, Williams’s enterprise eventually will extend from downtown Anacostia through Prince George’s County, and down to Crisfield and Historic Smith Island, in Somerset County, Maryland.
The plan is for Williams to run a two-way delivery route between Crisfield and Smith Island, where he is renovating a 19th century farmhouse that will house a production facility, restaurant and bed and breakfast, and other amenities. From Crisfield, where he will have a separate production facility, cafe and tourist center, he will run a similar route up through Maryland’s Eastern Shore to farmers markets and individual households in the D.C. area.
Inspired by the injustices of the past, and motivated by his love of fishing and farming—and a fierce independent streak—Williams has found that an older generation of white family farmers on the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia Peninsula are dying off without a legacy plan in place. He also has found that the small farm-to-table movement is not as inclusive as its white sustainability “congregants” would like to think.
Williams hopes that the stimulus package is a sign that the government is interested in leveling the playing field. “I was just on the phone talking to someone about CDFI,” he texted me this week, referring to the U.S. Department of Treasury’s program for Community Development Financial Institutions.
For Black and other minority farmers, President Joe Biden’s recent appointment of Tom Vilsack as secretary of agriculture has provided an opportunity to reduce racial inequities in the agricultural sector, and redress the discrimination of the Jim Crow era—and the eras of slavery and reconstruction before that.
Vilsack has taken flack for his first stint as agriculture secretary under the Barack Obama administration, and the provisions of Biden’s relief package that are directed to socially disadvantaged farmers also present an opportunity for him to make good on unmet promises of the past.
At the turn of the 20th century, Blacks in the South owned or partly owned more than 12 million acres of usable farm land, mostly to grow cotton, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (“USDA”) Natural Resources Conservation Service. Even then, federal laws afforded white farmers subsidies and allowed white business owners to inflate interest rates on farm loans for Blacks.
Black farmers turned to crop diversification to obtain cheaper debt, but they continued to suffer from discrimination, inferior education and predatory lending practices, which in turn denied them equal access to research and technology.
Ownership peaked in 1920, when the Census of Agriculture counted more than 925,000 Black farmers, comprising 17% of registered farmers in the United States. Despite landmark civil rights settlements in 1999 and 2011, that number, by 2017, had shrunk to 35,000 farms—less than 2% of all registered farms. (USDA puts that number at 45,000 today.)
The first of those settlements, in the class-action lawsuit Pigford v. Gluckman, resulted in more than $1 billion in settlements with 13,000 Black farmers; in the latter, known Pigford II, a federal judge approved another $1.15 billion for Black farmers.
However, payments under the first settlement were delayed and insufficient to retire the farmers’ debts, and they were denied under the second settlement, causing many to lose their farms.
Biden’s relief bill draws from legislation introduced by U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock, of Georgia, which stems from the Justice for Black Farmers Act, sponsored by five U.S. senators who joined New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker to propose extending land grants to Black-owned farms over the next decade.
With these reforms in mind, Williams is buying up cheap land and developing a model that operates on property and business ownership and diversity of product and lines of service to create “generational wealth.”
If he can obtain CDFI status, he will be eligible for funding through the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI), which will enable him to build the capacity to expand on his vision of growing, aggregating, processing and delivering healthy food in low to moderate-income under-served communities from the Chesapeake Bay watershed to the D.C. region.
His philosophy is that Black farmers need to be assertive and not rely on leased or shared land, or money lenders that have traditionally discriminated against Black-owned businesses.
“People love talking about equity, but when it comes to doing something, they don’t want to touch that shit,” Williams says of the sustainable food co-ops and alliances that hold out education, advocacy and research as incentives to get into farming.
“They don’t want to help me get to the roots of what enslaved my ancestors,” says Williams, who sees the status quo in the sustainable farming community as a form of patronage, and access to capital and land as a better way to be truly “sustainable.” (See Dean Kuiper‘s story “A Grievous Harvest,” also in Red Canary Magazine, for an in depth look at historian Pete Daniel’s book, Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, on how nearly a million black farmers were pushed off the land and dispossessed of their own agricultural history.)
“If you’re Black, if you’re leasing land from other people, if you’re working for other people…you might as well be a sharecropper,” he says.
Biden’s Covid-19 relief package may be a drop in the bucket compared to the catastrophic losses endured by Black farmers due to discrimination at the hands of government, lending institutions and white-owned businesses in the agriculture industry–but Williams will take it.
“If we talk about how black lives matter, we gotta talk about history,” he says. “What does that look like for minorities? How does this diaspora work for all of us? Why not pull ourselves up by America’s original sin, which is agriculture?”
