FARAI CHIDEYA, host:
This is News & Notes. I am Farai Chideya. All this month, we've been talking about how housing issues affect African-American communities. But before people dreamed about buying pre-made houses on pre-approved lots, they wanted land. Forty acres, more or less. When the United States was founded, only white land-owning males could vote. And slaves and sharecroppers felt a sense of freedom, pride and power when they were finally able to purchase and farm their own land.
In 1920, the United States had almost a million black farmers. Collectively, they owned more than 15 million acres. Now, almost 90 years later, that number has dropped to fewer than 30,000 black farmers who now own less than 2 million acres. Many family farms are in trouble, no matter who owns them, but black farmers are going under at a five-to-six times rate of white farmers. In a few moments, we'll check in with two advocates for black farmers but right now we have Ben Burkett. He owns more than 250 acres of farmland in Petal, Mississippi. He's also a member of the Indian Springs Farming Co-Op. Welcome to the show, Ben.
Mr. BEN BURKETT (Mississippi Farmer, Member, Indian Springs Farming Co-Op): Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
CHIDEYA: Yeah, pleasure to have you on. So how long have you been farming and how did you get into the business?
Mr. BURKETT: I've been farming for 34 years, and I kind of took over from my father. I'm a fourth generation farmer on the same land for a little over 100 years.
CHIDEYA: What does it mean to you to have land in your family for this long and to be a farmer in your family over these generations?
Mr. BURKETT: Well, it means I've always got somewhere to go home. Paid for, the taxes paid up. There's some social pride in knowing my family has been farming for a little over 100 years and I'm a fourth generation. We always been somehow or another able to make a living out of it. (unintelligible) We hope to leave it to the next generation. I'm 56 years old, I have a daughter. My great nephew farming is with me now. So it brings great enjoyment just to know you've always got somewhere to go.
CHIDEYA: So when you talk about, you know, this land and your family, what challenges are you facing right now in terms of maintaining a market for you products and keeping up the land?
Mr. BURKETT: The high cost of input, is what people saying now. Diesel is four dollars, labor doubled since the Hurricane Katrina, I was in the Hurricane Katrina affected area. But also the marketing issue. You know, a small farm, we receive very little sustenance from the federal government (unintelligible). And we don't think that's fair. We think (unintelligible) those small, medium family farmers that are still out there. Black farmers are still holding on, struggling, (unintelligible) those types of farming operations too.
CHIDEYA: Well, Ben, I'm going to bring in our other two guests. We've got Gary Grant, who is the national president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association. He's also a landowner in North Carolina and son of a life-long farmer. And Ralph Paige, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta. Ralph and Gary, welcome.
Mr. GARY GRANT (President, Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association): Hello, good to be here.
CHIDEYA: Thanks to have you on. So, Gary, you know Ben personally. You know other farmers with, you know, similar stories and struggles in terms of having to deal with the logistics of keeping a hold of land. So in your mind, what's been the biggest challenge for black farmers over the years?
Mr. GRANT: Access to capital has been the primary issue. And even when there have been disaster years like Ben was talking about earlier, you know, how things go up, that they still don't have the access to the capital and even federal programs that should function and work for them and enable them to be able to ascertain what they need in order to recapture and regain control. But overall, access to capital and the fact that the United States Department of Agriculture has pretty much ruined all of the black farmers' credit rating in the United States.
CHIDEYA: What do you mean when you say the department has ruined people's credit rating. That's a broad sweeping allegation. What do you mean specifically?
Mr. GRANT: Well, the fact that when farmers were going through what was known as the Farmers Home Administration, that farmers were not given adequate financing from, or treated the same way that the local white growers were treated. They were faced with discrimination and actually racial acts of discrimination, and never received the full amount of money that they needed to operate their farms. They received the money late in the planting year and all of those pieces play into whether you can have a good crop year and whether you are able to make your payments back to the government on time. So as the Farmers Home Administration, which is now known as the Farm Service Agency, was the lender of last resort, if it was going to help to destroy you, it also helped to destroy your credit rating.
CHIDEYA: Ralph, this is a time when you have a few different trends. You have the rise of agribusiness and big companies really taking over major levels of farming and seed production and seed distribution, but you also have people trying to plug back in. Even, you know, even urban people trying to do, you know gardening, community gardening, farmers' markets. What are the good and bad aspects to where a black family farm might find itself today?
Mr. RALPH PAIGE (Executive Director, Federation of Southern Cooperatives): I think there's tremendous interest in ownership of land by black communities and by black farmers. In fact, the largest wealth that was ever created in this country was 15 million acres of land by African American farmers has been lost. So we have lost a great asset in the black community and the greatest piece of wealth. We are down now to about two million acres of land, and that's for a country that talks about freedom and promotes freedom.
And you just look at opportunity, and what has happened to the land ownership in this country, and that is almost an atrocity that a country as rich as America, that a large segment of the population have lost all the land. Saying that, there's tremendous pride in the black community about ownership and about land. He had a lot of young folks who would like to come back if there were opportunities to farming and to own land and starting value-added processing and doing things to make a living and create economic opportunities in their own community.
CHIDEYA: Now, let me ask you this. When you - you know, you're the executive director of something called the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. What are these cooperatives that you are helping to coordinate?
Mr. PAIGE: Well, we are working with over 75 credit unions and cooperatives marketing and production cooperatives throughout the southeast region. Small groups getting together collectively creating markets, collectively growing the crops and doing things that will add value to it, and doing things where they can, in fact, stay on the land. And one case in fact I'm working on today, a group of farms in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas come together and develop markets and provide technical assistance to these local cooperatives where they can get certified, they can become certified growers. They can have their facilities certified and help them create a brand and markets and this is the only way that small farmers can compete, through cooperatives...
CHIDEYA: Let me get Ben...
Mr. GRANT: If I can interrupt there, because Ralph probably needs to say something about this as well. And we're still talking about the fact of how do they have access to capital even in this process? And I believe earlier you said that we were talking about 25,000 black farmers left in this country, and I would challenge that statistic given out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, because they are talking about people who gross 1,000 dollars a year. But even those growers cannot borrow from the USDA to, you know, and be able to move forward and increase their growing possibilities. So the question really, is what is a family farmer and at what stage do you declare that it's a family farmer and not throw out statistics that deceive the rest of the country?
CHIDEYA: Well, let me get Ben back into this. We were just talking a little bit about the co-ops and your part in something called the Indian Springs Farming Co-Op.
Mr. BURKETT: Yes, ma'am.
CHIDEYA: What is it that you do? I mean, when you grow a crop and tell me and give me an example of what crop you grow, how does the co-op assist you in getting that to market?
Mr. BURKETT: Yeah, this co-op is a little bit over 30 years old. At the present time, we have 34 members. We had over 40 members before the hurricane. So after Katrina, I (unintelligible). But this facility's a place where we bring out produce and we re-pack it and we ship it out. And we have about - right now we have five (unintelligible) of strawberries going to be shipped out of here tonight. Running this facility with the Federation's helped us with the construction of it and the state of Mississippi and a little federal money. The building is 10 years old. But the cooperative is the only reason why many of us has been able to survive. We've got a place that meets USDA standards with all the certificate for processing vegetables. We can re-pack it, cut it, put in a bag, or whatever and ship it out. It's been a God-send in this community. It kept many farmers in business.
CHIDEYA: Ralph, what's the future? I mean, you gave some hints about how black farmers can find a niche, particularly black family farms. But to my knowledge, there are no African-American-owned agri-businesses, like major companies. Is that your understanding?
Mr. PAIGE: There may be one or two that, you know, are of scale to the multi-million dollar operations, they're miniscule. Now, saying that, you know, our goal is to start to - we are starting and working with small cooperatives owned by small farmers like Indian Springs. There are groups in Georgia which is value-added, we call it. Value-added where a small group of farmers get together. In this case, they grow and harvest and process collared greens and put them on the market and create a brand. There's another co-op that does southern alternatives, pecans, where small farmers collectively grow harvest, produce crack shell and ship pecans. They're doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, and there are examples like that all over the place.
But here again, going back to the whole idea there's not capital, it's not easily accessible from the banks, it's not easily accessible at all, if any, from USDA and the various programs. There's not - there's a farm bill that would speak to this if enough resources would get into programs like that. There are several USDA programs which are co-op send-up grants, money to provide technical support for farmers that want to do this. There's a training program which they call Technical Assistance Program 2501. There's never had enough funds to really address this. So this has been - there are two or three things going on here.
CHIDEYA: Let me go back a little bit in time to the Pigford Vs. Glickman case. It was one of these landmark cases for black farmers. And Gary, tell us a little bit about that.
Mr. GRANT: Well the Pigford case was brought about because of the very things that Ralph and Ben and I have been talking about, the fact that people were discriminated - black farmers were discriminated against in governmental programs. Not only the lending programs, but the delivery of other programs that were supposed to be able to assist them. And the case was filed in 1998, and a settlement, so-called settlement, was reached in 1999, where people could - farmers could take a track A or track B. And if they took track A, they would settle for 50,000 dollars and hopefully, if they had debt, that it would be written off, and hopefully that they could save their farm land. Track B required that you have - you could go after larger sums, but you also had to have a larger amount of proof in order to prove your case.
This was something that we still today say that the attorney who represented us entered into that agreement with the - and somewhat forced the seven lead plaintiffs to settle for this, which denied many black farmers real settlement to their cases. I mean, you lose 300 acres of land, you lose your way of living and you end up with 50,000 dollars. And lo and behold, you receive a tax statement from your state for something that you didn't even know that you were going to get. And in many cases, people didn't have ample money left when the state tax piece came through to pay it. So it actually got more people into trouble - farmers-wise. And there are farmers 10 years now, who entered in 1998, that are still trying to get settlement out of the government.
CHIDEYA: Ben, you were one of the farmers in the class action - civil action law suit. What was your approach to it? What did you get out of it, good or bad?
Mr. BURKETT: It was - I don't think it was structured right. I agree with Gary, it's a so-called law suit. I filed it under A and then in 1999, and I had to go to appeals before I was approved, and I'm waiting to receive my 50,000. But it appeared the way it then, any black farmers that were continuing to farm (unintelligible), it was always difficult for them type farmers to qualify. And now all my neighbors that are black, they're still farming, eight years later and they still haven't received the 50,000 although this has been in process for 10 years. It was out there, but it didn't do no good as we thought it should have did.
Mr. GRANT: You know, and all the farmers who went through this, they have not been made whole. Their credit has not been restored where it should have been.
Mr. PAIGE: Right. They have not been able to go back to farming. Then of course, they lose their land anyway. Fifty thousand dollars is not enough to really redress the problems that they have experienced and the discrimination. Now, the other thing that I hope for personally, that this will once and for all stop any discrimination as we know it at USDA, other agencies, and really bring this to the - this issue to the forefront in this country. And yet, we're still losing the land, there's no action taken against it. And these practices still goes on at the department. And so I don't know if this thing, when you really uncover it, all of the benefits, how good was it? You know. Then now, in this - even hung up in this farm bill, is legislation that gives people who were left out, there are many farmers who were left out of it.
CHIDEYA: Now, gentlemen, I'm going to break in here. I want each of you to give me as, I mean, literally, a word to a sentence, why it's important or what you love about having black-owned farms. I mean, I think sometimes people think farming is a tough life, who would want it anyway? Ben, you know, what's good about it?
Mr. BURKETT: What's good about it? Any country that's not able to (unintelligible) is in a world of trouble. We're beginning to see that effect now.
CHIDEYA: All right.
Mr. BURKETT: You need that diversity of production.
CHIDEYA: Ralph.
Mr. PAIGE: You know, pluralistic ownership in a country like America is the most important thing, an example that a country can set where blacks, whites, people of color can own a part of this place that we call ours.
CHIDEYA: Gary.
Mr. GRANT: There are people who enjoy working in the soil and the solace that it brings to them as well as the quality of life that it brings to them.
CHIDEYA: All right. Gentlemen, we're going to have to wrap it up there. Thank you so much. We've been speaking with Ben Burkett from Petal, Mississippi, Ralph Paige, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta, Gary Grant, national president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association. And coming up is our sports Bloggers' Roundtable.
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