Shade Lewis had just returned from feeding his cows on a bright spring afternoon when he received a letter from the government offering to pay off his $200,000 farm loan as part of a new debt relief programme established by Democrats to assist farmers who have faced generations of racial discrimination.
It was a windfall for a 29-year-old who had been scraping by as the only Black farmer in his corner of northeastern Missouri for the past decade, where signposts quoting Genesis line the soybean fields and traffic signals alert drivers to slow down because it is planting season.
Conservative white farmers, on the other hand, are enraged by the $4 billion fund, claiming that they are being unfairly excluded because of their ethnicity. It’s also thrown Lewis and other black farmers into a new culture war in American agriculture over race, wealth, and power.
Lewis said, “You can feel the stress.” “The conservative Caucasian farmers have been very critical of us.” The debt relief is restitution for what the government refers to as “socially oppressed farmers” — Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and other nonwhite employees who have faced discrimination for generations, from Jim Crow-era abuse and land theft to banks and federal farm offices refusing them loans or government benefits that went to white farmers.
The initiative is part of a larger push by the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress to address how racial inequality has dominated the predominantly white farming industry in the United States. Black farm advocacy groups claim that the largest, most dominant farm operations receive nearly all of the land, benefit, and subsidies, leaving Black farmers with little. However, in much of rural America, the payments tend to enrage white conservative farmers even more.
The proposals have sparked thousands of angry comments on farm forums, and banks fearing a loss of interest income are fighting them. And some rural residents have banded together under the slogan “All Farmers Matter,” which was inspired by the conservative reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Lewis is part of a new wave of Black farmers who are returning to urban plots and small rural farms, motivated by a desire to provide nutritious food to their communities and build wealth rooted in the soil. Lewis used to scoot a toy John Deere tractor through his mother’s apartment in
LaGrange, a 950-person city on the Mississippi River, and pretend he was farming the carpet. In high school, he became involved in 4-H, forestry, and business organizations. At the age of 19, he began farming with a few cows and the goal of finishing each day with his own dirt on the soles of his boots.
A quarter of all farms in the United States were owned by African Americans in 1920. However, after a century of ethnic strife, foreclosures, migration into towns, and farm consolidation, less than 49,000 farmers remain, accounting for just 1.4 percent of all farmers in the United States. The majority of them are found in the Southeast and Texas.
