The post A New Path for Small Farmers in the Southeast? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In 2016, Willis Nelson and his three brothers—third-generation Black farmers—started a farming venture with 40 acres in rural Sondheimer, Louisiana. Located on the western bank of the Mississippi River, the family farm now spans roughly 4,000 acres and produces corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat, and milo.
Getting to this current size wasn’t easy, however. In their first attempt to scale up and acquire 640 acres, the brothers turned to the Farm Service Agency (FSA), a loan-making entity of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“When we got to the FSA, it was just bad,” says Nelson. “It seemed like they were looking for any reason not to give us a loan.” Nelson and his brothers were repeatedly told that the farm’s paperwork was incorrect and asked to produce what they say was an unnecessary amount of financial documentation.
Despite having a signed contract with the USDA and an agreed-upon work plan, the bank’s launch is now on pause alongside many other USDA programs as they each await review.
“We couldn’t even get a guaranteed loan from other banks, because they kept saying we didn’t have enough cash flow,” says Nelson. This continued for four years until Nelson and his brothers were approached by First Southern Bank after their farm got a writeup in The Christian Science Monitor. The community-oriented bank gave the Nelson brothers their first loan to fully fund their farming venture.
A new effort seeks to jumpstart and sustain small farmers and other agricultural-based businesses in the southeastern United States. The Southern Farmers Financial Association (SFFA) is a cooperative, mission-driven bank designed to lower the barriers to accessing credit for small farmers, especially those in high-poverty and low-resource areas. Historically, limited-resource farmers, often Black farmers and farmers of color, have faced systemic barriers and discriminatory practices when seeking financial support from traditional lending institutions, including governmental agencies.
“This [bank] is about making sure that agriculture works for all and that our rural communities survive,” says Cornelius Blanding, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, a nonprofit organization that supports Black farmers, landowners, and cooperatives with various land retention and advocacy efforts across the South. As the leading partner of the SFFA, the Federation will help the new bank build upon its existing infrastructure across the region and support it with its outreach, education, and technical assistance.
The Biden-Harris Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided the SFFA effort with $20 million in initial funding to be dispersed through the USDA—and the bank has had plans to open its doors towards the end of the first quarter of 2025. However, with the Trump administration’s sweeping executive orders and recent crackdown on alleged “radical and wasteful programs,” as well as programs related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) and climate change, things are now uncertain.
“While we hadn’t used that language around the bank and don’t consider it to be DEIA, we’re in jeopardy for being labeled as such because of their way of looking at this,” Blanding says. Despite having a signed contract with the USDA and an agreed-upon work plan, the bank’s launch is now on pause alongside many other USDA programs as they each await review.
After review, the SFFA will either be modified to fit new guidelines or completely terminated.
“We’re hoping for the best case and that it will be some kind of modification,” says Blanding.
How the Green Bank Took Root
Farmers of color have long encountered discrimination at the hands of the USDA. They have been consistently denied small loans and access to grant programs, subsidy payments, and other assistance the agency would typically guarantee, resulting in substantial economic losses. The Pigford v. Glickman class-action lawsuit, filed by Black farmer Timothy Pigford against the USDA in 1999, was the culmination of years of discrimination.
SFFA leaders gather for the press conference launch of the green bank in late October of 2024. (Photo credit: Federation for Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund Archives)
The concept of a mission-driven—or green—bank started over a decade ago after an informal convening of farmers in Atlanta, Georgia. “Many of the folks who were a part of that convening had been working on the Black farmer lawsuit since 1999, and it was the center of those conversations,” Blanding says.
Those involved in the convening realized that access to credit—which provides the startup capital that most farmers seek to purchase supplies, seeds, and technology—continued to be one of the most significant barriers to low-resource farmers in the region. As a result, they formed committees and dedicated working groups where, eventually, the idea of a cooperative green bank took root.
“When you look at the data, the majority of Black farmers, the majority of low-resource farmers, [and] a majority of farmers of color are located in the Southeast,” Blanding says. This disparity was a significant factor in the decision to base the SFFA in the Southeast region. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, the bank will serve Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas with virtual hubs.
What sets this bank—intended for farmers, landowners, and agriculture-based businesses—apart from a standard bank is its strict focus on agriculture and strengthening rural communities. In the eyes of many traditional lending institutions, a low-resource farm may not be bankable. The SFFA will have a different approach to collateral.
“It’s not about tying up the assets of a farmer or landowner to the point where they can’t survive or don’t have other options,” says Blanding. “It’s about getting to ‘yes’ and working with folks from where they are.”
In partnership with community-based organizations, the SFFA is designed to figure out alternative ways to get those who own land, farm, or run other ag-based enterprises to the point where they are financially viable. The bank is intended to serve as a revolving loan fund that offers reasonable interest rates—and will ideally grow to have assets, enabling it to continue providing financial resources to a farm long after its initial disbursement.
While it is not a grant-making institution, Blanding sees the cooperative green bank as having multiple arms that can have grant-type resources and provide gap financing—a short-term loan or credit line that covers the difference needed for an immediate financial obligation.
To help ensure it remains aligned with the needs and priorities of the farming communities it serves, the SFFA also plans to have various classes of membership for its borrowers. As in a traditional cooperative, members will get a share of earnings and will receive dividends.
Class A membership will give member-owners the highest voting power and the ability to invest more significant sums of money in the cooperative, explains Ben Burkett, longtime farm advocate and the Federation’s Mississippi state coordinator, who, alongside Blanding, was a part of the initial conversations that conceptualized the SFFA. Class B and C cooperative members can invest some capital but have limited to no voting rights.
For low-resource farmers and others in the Southeast, the SFFA would be a safety net that has never existed before. “There are many community-based organizations doing a lot of work with Black farmers and socially disadvantaged farmers,” Blanding says. “This [green bank] is not intended to replicate any of that, but to step in the middle and provide things there weren’t available until now.”
A History of Injustice
Though its future is uncertain, Blanding believes that the SFFA would be another step in the right direction for justice.
The Pigford lawsuit eventually led to the most robust civil rights settlement in U.S. history, totaling just over $1 billion. However, payouts did not begin for another 15 years, and were only partial. In 2023, the USDA launched the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program and a year later issued payouts to farmers, ranchers, and landowners who had experienced discrimination. “It doesn’t repair what happened historically, but it acknowledges it,” Blanding says.
“When you look at the data, the majority of Black farmers, the majority of low-resource farmers, [and] a majority of farmers of color are located in the Southeast.”
Despite this progress, discrimination remains. Even as recently as 2022, Black farmers had the highest USDA loan rejection rate of any demographic group: 36 percent of Black farmers who applied were approved for direct loans, compared to 72 percent of white farmers, according to an analysis by National Public Radio.
And while Burkett has been a successful farmer for decades, he still experiences the bias that lending institutions hold toward Black farmers. Last year, for example, Burkett financed a tractor with a cooperative credit institution that Burkett has been a member of for over 30 years.
“They took that tractor for collateral, and then they took another one of my tractors and a piece of my equipment,” Burkett says.
The SFFA aims to address the patterns of injustice by, most importantly, acknowledging the historic hurdles low-resource farmers and farmers of color have faced. “No farmer would be discriminated against at this bank, no matter the situation he or she is coming from,” says Blanding. Secondly, farmers have faced injustices simply based on their lack of access to credit. That is the specific problem that the bank is trying to solve.
“We think we can reverse those patterns by addressing those two issues,” says Blanding.
Supporting Small and Mid-Size Farms Through Big Challenges
Nelson, whose farm is in the northeast corner of Louisiana, sees a desperate need for the SFFA’s reinvestment in smaller operations. Small farmers near him have faced many problems in recent years, such as climate-change impacts, land loss, and being denied financial assistance.
Willis Nelson and son Wil’laddyn Nelson standing in a soybean field on the Nelson & Sons Farm. (Photo credit: Willis Nelson)
“I’ve been seeing with all the farmers that there is difficulty in making their cash flow,” says Nelson, who is also a current member of the Federation and a board member of the National Black Growers Council. “It’s been a rough four years for the Southeast.”
Considering the high cost of starting and scaling farming operations, many farmers never see investment returns, says Blanding. And farms that are smaller in acreage are more vulnerable to a number of issues that can quickly become financially burdensome.
Climate change—specifically extreme drought and floods—causes many issues for small farmers in particular. With the more intense heat, drought, and storms brought on by the changing climate, “It’s not the original growing seasons that we’re used to,” Nelson says. His farm has been working to keep its yields up and keep up with inflation.
Lenders often want to see the farm’s profitability alongside other factors such as income, credit score, and business plan. Because of the extreme weather, farmers with smaller operations suffer more substantial losses than larger farmers—making it more challenging to get the capital they need to stay afloat.
Alongside climate change, the changing demographics of the farming community creates another challenge. “Some of us [farmers of color] are still losing land,” Nelson says. Additionally, most land in the area is passed down through succession, from one generation to the next, but the youth no longer have as much interest in farming or they lack the resources to start. In many places, people have sold their land or private entities have taken it over. “It’s not family farming anymore,” Nelson says.
“Agriculture is a huge and important part of what this country is. The more people who are part of it and succeeding in it, the better off we are as a nation.”
Burkett also sees medium-size farming operations, or those with gross sales between $100,000 and $400,000 annually, facing outsize problems. “Mid-size farmers—what I call true family farms—are totally being squeezed out” as many farms in the area have had to cease operations or downsize, he says. Farms can either get really big or stay small, says Burkett.
“It just costs so much to do business now with the cost of equipment, labor, industry requirements, safety, rules and regulations,” Burkett says. “You’ve got to have a full-time man or woman just to keep up with those targets.”
Nelson believes a cooperative green bank could help family farmers navigate challenges like these. On his farm, a bank loan would help him carry out certain upgrades, such as installing underground irrigation to prepare for drought.
In the absence of a bank like the SFFA, Nelson had to go through the USDA’s cost share program, known as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), to get the equipment he needed to drain the water from his land after a recent flood. The program covered 70 percent of the cost, but Nelson still had to put up 30 percent, impacting other farm needs. And while programs like EQIP are helpful, the funding is limited, not guaranteed, and can require a lengthy wait.
Additionally, some EQIP funding has been paused since the start of the new administration while the USDA conducts a review of grant contracts to determine if they align with President Trump’s executive orders rolling back climate projects and work that prioritizes equity or diversity. While a court ordered the funds to be unfrozen, the agency has only released small batches of that money.
EQIP was one of several programs that got a bump in funding from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act for farm projects that prioritized climate goals, so some farmers’ contracts may also be at risk of cancellation. As funding through EQIP and the vast suite of farm programs the USDA runs becomes more uncertain, SFFA could become an even more vital resource—assuming it continues.
Nelson sees the SFFA as a key to rebuilding the farming community from the ground up. With backing from the green bank, reinvestment can look like community-led gardens and agricultural programs that lower the entry point for new farmers. This could mean enabling new or existing small farms to acquire small amounts of acreage, helping them become financially viable and putting them in a position to scale up.
“We [farmers in the area] don’t have to have 1,000 acres to start [farming]—we can get back to the 40- or 100- acre farms, and the rest will follow,” Nelson says.
Growing Excitement
Nelson believes a localized lending institution like the SFFA would be an enormous first step in rebuilding the assets of farming communities like his across the Southeast. Alongside the lending, Nelson wants to see the cooperative green bank offer financial workshops to teach farmers how to fill out balance sheets, create basic budgets, and manage profit and loss—all skills critical to their survival.
“I’m willing to give my time because we have to make something out of this,” Nelson says.
Late last year, the first portion of the IRA funds were released—just over a million dollars. These funds have already been used to hire a permanent CEO and set up the bank’s infrastructure. Now, the bank founders are waiting to hear from the USDA to learn if and when they will receive the rest of the funding needed to move forward and whether the program will be modified—or, worst case, terminated.
In the meantime, they have been in conversation with aligned organizations like the Native American Financial Services and entities that work with low-resource farmers, such as the Farm Credit System, to spread the word across the Southeast to make sure that farm-adjacent people fully understand what the cooperative green bank offers, and that they can trust it.
The response to the forthcoming cooperative green bank has been overwhelmingly positive. The main question that Blanding and SFFA leadership have heard over the past few months is, “When will it open?”
Since the SFFA’s initial conceptualization, the Federation for Southern Cooperatives has kept its membership abreast and in touch with people inside and outside their farming community.
“Agriculture is a huge and important part of what this country is,” Blanding says. “The more people who are part of it and succeeding in it, the better off we are as a nation.”
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]]>The post Brea Baker on the Legacy of Stolen Farmland in America appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Brea Baker remembers spending a lot of time in her grandparents’ New Jersey home with piles of paper everywhere. Her grandfather, Alfred Baker, worked to ensure the family was never tricked out of anything rightfully theirs, considering the precarity of Black land ownership in the American South. Her grandfather stressed the importance of keeping a paper trail, such as receipts for property taxes and deed records to prove ownership.
Baker was an undergrad at Yale in 2015 when the Black Lives Matter movement—just two years into its existence—started to grow. She began to ask herself, and her grandfather, more questions about her family’s story and their relationship to land, and saw how that history connected to her student activism.
Then, in 2019, her grandfather passed away. She was left with half-opened conversations, but they created enough of a blueprint for her to begin piecing together the Baker family’s multigenerational farming legacy through historical research. Her findings led her to write her debut book, Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, in which she lays out the violent expulsion of Black farmers and landowners across the American South.
“We need to get to a place where most Americans finally believe that we need to address the legacy of slavery and start talking about what that would look like.”
Baker’s book is a memoir, a history, and an argument for Black Americans to return to rural life. It reveals the deliberate ways in which agricultural policies and Jim Crow violence harmed the Black land economy, including that of her family. Baker also describes the many land-return and reparations advocacy movements reshaping the conversation around Black and Indigenous land stewardship.
The book opens with a brief history of U.S. governmental policies, starting in the late 1700s, that stripped Indigenous communities of land and wealth. Baker then covers the sharecropping economy and the Great Migration, spanning the mid-1800s through the early 20th century, when Black people transitioned from enslavement to a level of autonomy. Rooted takes us into the present day by laying out the case for reparations as a foundational policy for racial, economic, and environmental justice in the United States.
Today, Baker is a writer, speaker, and anti-racism consultant. When she’s not writing and traveling, she raises chickens and fruits and vegetables like spinach, rhubarb, and tomatoes on an acre of land she shares with her wife and son in Atlanta. We spoke to her recently about the deeply personal and important historical events she’s covered in her book, and her thoughts on where the land justice movement goes from here.
Tell me about your family’s farming legacy and story of land ownership.
I am a sixth-generation Black landowner. The first [Black] person in my family to own land was my great-great-great grandfather, Louis W. Baker, on the paternal side of my family—so we have this longstanding legacy of farming and land ownership.
Louis W Baker had two sons who helped him maintain the farmland in Warren County, North Carolina in the mid-1860s. Generations later, starting around the 1950s, my great-grandfather, Frank L. Baker, lost a lot of land, mostly due to a significant dispossession period during the 20th century for Black farmers and landowners. This was due to predatory property tax increases and debt. As a result, much of that land ended up in the hands of corporations and the state.
My grandfather, Alfred Baker, and many of his siblings ended up traveling north by way of the Great Migration, and that ultimately whittled away at the ability to maintain the farm as a family-owned business.
We do still have something, and that is a beautiful thing. My grandfather spent his entire pension buying more land that he would eventually retire on with my grandmother, Jenail Dunlap, and we [the Baker family] started to bring back the farming. My aunt now lives on that land, growing peppers and leafy greens, and she makes these incredible juices and hot sauce—all from what she grows.
What was the spark that ignited you to turn your activism and family research into a book?
I was learning about my family and feeling so much around Tulsa and [the Wilmington Massacre] and so many other stories. So much of your ability to remain connected to agriculture, and know where your food comes from, depends on growing your own food and on having access to land. [Black people have] been robbed, and no one was talking about it.
“We have so many elders around us; before they become ancestors, talk to them. Ask them about their first experiences on land.”
We continue to dance around it, and there’s been no real commitment to anything connected to reparations, even though many of us have a full record of being defrauded.
I felt like my grandfather died trying to make something happen for our family, and he did. We have this beautiful home and acreage, but there’s this story he wanted to tell, which ended up being the basis for Rooted.
In your first chapter, you explore the importance of marronage—the act of freeing oneself from slavery and building an independent community. How does marronage manifest in communities today?
Maroon communities created what they wanted to see for themselves. Today, marronage shows up in how we make ourselves independent of the federal government while still holding the government accountable.
There are no real ways to be a non-taxpayer, devoid of federal government. Many of us are still practicing marronage while being citizens of this country and demanding what our citizenship is supposed to include.
The Black Panther Party was an example of a very maroon-like entity providing the things the community lacked. They filled in critical voids, and that was a very powerful thing to do.
We can find marronage in something as simple as community gardens: We’re going to feed and depend on one another, right?
For example, my wife and I get way more eggs than we can use from our chickens. First, we give them to the family and to our neighbors, and then what’s left, we sell at a heavily discounted price to friends and co-workers.
Our neighbors know they can come to us if needed, and they’re looking out for us in return. This is how we grow interdependence, which is what maroon communities have been about.
In this book, you write that during the Reconstruction Era, land-owning Black people had to learn how to not just own the land but also how to commodify it quickly. How did that shift their relationship to land?
There was this immediate need to learn. Commodification is a form of capitalizing off of something, so we start to see the emergence of Black capitalism, of becoming part of this economy to survive.
When we went off of Indigenous wisdom, societies were much more communalist. Agriculture was very valued, but that was simply one’s job in the community, similar to being an educator, a healer, or a doula. [Our] ancestors had to go from that communalism to being the lowest rung of society as a slave, to then finding a way to make a living off [agriculture]. We had to learn how to put a price on one crop versus another, a price that would make sense to white people.
Trying to figure out a space to be a citizen, a business owner, and part of this agri-economy as a Black person was a delicate dance. But our expertise was often overlooked. I know this soil, I know these trees, I know the stars, I know what that wind means. I know when there’s too much water in the air and when there’s too little water in the air. There was so much innate wisdom, but now they [our ancestors] had to learn the psychology [and business] of making a profit while working with unsavory actors.
It required double consciousness, a concept that W.E.B. DuBois spoke to often.
Reparations for Black land theft is a subject you explore in the book, along with Indigenous land rematriation. How do those conversations make space for one another?
First, it starts with Black and Indigenous people being in community with one another more. We also need to look honestly at Black history and Indigenous history in this country and acknowledge that both cultures have always had an abundance mindset regarding land, that there was enough to go around, that it could be held communally and benefit all of us.
“This country was built on Indigenous genocide, on stolen land, on land that our ancestors worked. All of that deserves repair.”
It is a white supremacist idea that only some of us can have land, and the other people should work it. It is a capitalist idea that the people who own the land would not be those who work it.
The pathways to landback and Black reparations can look very different. For example, in Indigenous communities, landback looks like reclaiming larger swaths of land that are still more rural—and that’s much of what is currently happening in the Pacific Northwest. For Black people, reparations can look like government accountability. States like California are leading the way with initiatives such as forming a reparations task force to address the state’s former participation in the slave economy.
We need to get into the nitty-gritty and be open to the tension. Reparations and landback should be multi-pronged approaches, where people can access resources and assets in the form that works for them. Even more importantly, there is a need for both groups to be in solidarity. I do believe we owe each other something—honesty.
How do we work together and make the case for justice simultaneously so that we are not pitted against each other? We could say, Yes, it’s all stolen land that our ancestors worked on. This country was built on Indigenous genocide, on stolen land, on land that our ancestors worked. All of that deserves repair.
The Pigford vs. Glickman case, which resulted in $1.15 billion in settlements for Black farmers in 1999 and 2010, is considered a hallmark case in addressing alleged discrimination by the USDA. What have been the lasting ripple effects of the settlement—good and bad?
I’ll start with the bad to end on a high note. The negative outcome of the case is that many white people believe that those settlements were reparations. Any new addressing of the issue feels like reverse racism.
We ran into that issue in 2021 when the Biden administration attempted to pass debt-relief legislation for marginalized farmers, which includes white women, women of color, and non-Black people of color. It was portrayed in the media to be only for Black farmers. White farmers saw it as a threat that Black farmers were going to be compensated again and reacted by suing for reverse racism, which kept that money tied up in the courts.
For the Pigford settlements, the message that traveled farthest was that Black farmers were getting money. But many Black farmers did not qualify anymore because they no longer owned their land. To qualify, you had to have existing acreage. If you were already bankrupted and had no money, you could not qualify either. And if you didn’t keep specific records of the debt from the decades that case specified, you did not qualify.
One of the good things about the settlements that did go through is that they kept many farms alive. It was the first time that the government acknowledged that they did not do right by Black farmers and attempted to address it. It was also the first time that the government held the USDA accountable.
I believe that about 20,000 Black farmers and families benefited from the settlements. While that is a large number, we still have less than 1 percent of rural land currently owned by Black people. The problem of the widening racial wealth gap and the lack of Black farming families in the South is still not solved.
What do you hope people take away from your book?
I hope that Black people feel seen and excited to talk to their elders, whether those people are biologically related to them or not. We have so many elders around us; before they become ancestors, talk to them. Ask them about their first experiences on land.
We need to hear those stories, understand the fear, and understand why people do what they do so that we know what we’re fighting against and for. We need to get to a place where most Americans finally believe that we need to address the legacy of slavery and start talking about what that would look like.
I would want everyone to leave the book filled with urgency to act. That starts with learning about your family history through projects like Where’s My Land, which helps Black families reclaim stolen land.
It also looks like working to preserve cultural traditions through food, worker-owned land projects, and resource sharing. It also starts with understanding the fact that we’re never going to get to a post-racial America without some form of reparations.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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