Supporting Black Farmers Supports America

April 14, 2025

Authored by:

Ruth Steinhardt

P.J. Haynie traces his love of farming back to the age of 10, when his father, instead of buying him a toy tractor, presented him with the real thing. From that moment on, young Haynie planted and plowed right alongside his father's experienced farmhands. Decades later, he's the fifth generation to run Haynie Family Farms-one of just a few large-scale row cropoperations in the United States owned by a Black farmer.

But despite his years of experience and the farming tradition in his blood, Haynie has faced obstacles his white friends and peers haven't, he told an audience at the George Washington University last week. There was the time he, his father and their crew drove to a new farm they'd just acquired from one of the biggest landlords in their county, parking their tractors in a line on the property. Then they went to sleep.

"Next morning, six o'clock, we went back down and all that equipment is shot up," Haynie remembered. "Windows are busted out, tires are flat. That event put a fire in my belly, folks, that is still burning to this day."

Haynie shared his story as part of "Tracing the Legacy: Black Farmers and the Fight for Equity," a panel discussion co-hosted by GW's Global Food Institute(GFI), the Institute for Racial, Ethnic, and Socioeconomic Equity(Equity Institute) and the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences Department of Historyand moderated by Mya O. Price, assistant professor of GFI, that outlinedthe past, present and future of Black farmers in the United States.

Agriculture in the U.S. was shaped indelibly by Black labor "intertwined with the strange and cruel practice of slavery," said Wendy Ellis, assistant professor of global health in the Milken Institute School of Public Health, director of the Equity Institute and founding director of the Center for Community Resilience. Enslaved people also brought with them the farming techniques that transformed an early American economy driven by large-scale production of rice, tobacco, cotton and other crops.

"African farmers provided the infrastructure to sustain and build a new society," Ellis said.

In the years after emancipation, however, Black farmers continued to face systematic discrimination and disempowerment, Ellis said. Besides facing physical threats of the type experienced by the Haynies, these families were refused access to lines of credit that would have kept their businesses afloat. Subsidies were targeted toward crop farmers, while Black farms were more likely to raise livestock. During the Great Depression, Black farmers were excluded from federal farm loan programs. White farmers, who could receive this government aid, were then able to exploit their Black neighbors as sharecroppers.This unequal treatment continued through the 20th century and into the 21st: A groundbreaking 1999 lawsuitestablished that some 16,000 Black farmers were either denied farm loans, loan servicing and benefits or were given loans with unfair terms by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A follow-up suit was settled in 2010.

As a result of these and similar policies, Black farmers now own less than 1 percent of U.S. farmland, said panelist Seanicaa Edwards Herron, an Aspen Food Fellow and founder and executive director of the Freedmen Heirs Foundation. Herron's father was a farmer, but he encouraged his daughter to get out of the family business and go to college: "Being the only girl in a family of all boys, he was very adamant that I didn't go into agriculture," she said. "But because I have a bit of a rebellious streak, I was not going to let the boys outdo me."

Herron did go to college, acquiring degrees in agricultural economy and agricultural business and eventually becoming a market analyst. But she retained the goal of benefiting her family's farm and the larger Black agricultural community. Her foundation now works to help Black farmers, ranchers and landowners develop and succeed. That means educating the next generation of farmers, restoring legal land rights where they have been lost and bringing investment dollars into Black-led agricultural communities and organizations.

What it doesn't mean is performative solidarity, photo-op partnerships or showy new policies that don't center the actual needs of farmers, Herron said. "There has to be an intentionality to build with Black farmers, to work with them…to actually build upon creating that relationship with the intention of long-term partnerships or contracts." And while that work is difficult, it's always worth doing. For Herron, "It's about legacy."

While this year may feel like a setback for those involved in equity work, panelist Jewel Bronaugh said, it is far from unprecedented-and she urged the many students in the audience not to feel paralyzed by the challenge. Bronaugh was the USDA's first-ever Black deputy secretary, leading the commission that in 2024 produced a comprehensive reportproviding recommendations on how to address racial equity and underserved communities (a commission on which Haynie also served). She is now president and CEO of the 1890 Universities Foundation, which supports historically Black colleges and universities.

"Don't be afraid of all the things that you hear…First of all, we've been here before," Bronaugh said. "We have made it, we have survived, and we're better off. But we need your voices to carry us forward."

Whatever the challenges, speakers agreed, this is a crucial moment at which supporting Black farms means an opportunity for a healthier, more sustainable American food system. In the face of rising food insecurity and the many consequences of climate change, "American farming will necessarily have to change," Ellis said. "The adaptability and wisdom that is rooted in Indigenous and Black farming will become increasingly valuable for farming writ large in America."

"Black farming isn't just a historical relic," Bronaugh said. "Black farming should be woven throughout every aspect of our society."

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