Land Access for Black Farmers

NCF Office – August 6, 2024 3 Comments

This week we have a guest contribution from Mari Hunt Wassink of Black Earth Gardens. This writing first appeared as a letter to the editor in blackiowanews.com on May 13, 2024. Mari has given us permission to share her story. –Melissa Logsdon, NCF Associate Pastor

My family has been farming in what is now known as the United States since the 1700s. What does 300 years of generational wealth from farming look like? Zero dollars. Zero cents. We’re not alone — $326 billion of farmland has been stolen from Black families since 1900, largely due to the USDA’s racist practices. This figure doesn’t include the many Black families like my own who were pushed off leased or sharecropped farmland through racist discrimination and violence.

Today, the National Young Farmers Coalition finds that over 65% of young BIPOC farmers identify “finding affordable land” as a top challenge. In Iowa, Black farmers manage 0.02% of the state’s total farmland, even though Black Iowans make up 4.1% of the total state population.

My great-grandmother, Gladys Moore, was the last person in my family to grow up farming. She was born in 1925 in the Mississippi River Valley of northern Mississippi. Her parents likely kept chickens and a vegetable garden. Her father worked as a farm laborer and sharecropper at the King and Anderson Plantation, which was a 17,000-acre cotton plantation founded via slave labor in the 1830s. Six generations of my family before Gladys were enslaved on farms and plantations across Mississippi, Georgia and the Carolinas.

Instead of tasting the fruits of their labors and building a stable livelihood, my great-grandmother and her family were forced to flee the exploitative labor practices and racial terrorism in their community — there were at least 13 lynchings in their county prior to their exodus. For my ancestors, fleeing racism meant leaving farming behind for the slaughterhouses and urban centers of the Midwest. Since colonizers kidnapped my ancestors and brought them to the Americas in the 1700s, agriculture became the means by which their lives were stolen and their labor exploited.

Today, I am reclaiming the wisdom and practices of my indigenous African ancestors to heal the land and my community through farming. 

I fell in love with regenerative farming (a framework committed to improving soil health, water and air quality, wildlife diversity, and human health) because of its potential to rehabilitate degraded land and ecosystems, heal our bodies and minds, challenge colonial-capitalist systems, and further justice in our communities. 

After completing two beginning farmer training programs and drawing on such inspirations as Leah Penniman and Karen Washington, I launched my farm, Black Earth Gardens, last year. Black Earth Gardens is a small-scale, regenerative farm that specializes in growing vegetables, fruits, and herbs that are culturally important to African Diaspora communities in Eastern Iowa, with an emphasis on dismantling food apartheid and expanding food sovereignty locally.

Despite my family’s deep roots in agriculture, today I face almost insurmountable barriers to succeed as a beginning farmer. After a few years of beginning farmer training, I had developed the skills and knowledge to run my own farm but had no land on which to do so. Because of the racism that my family has faced through the generations, there is no farmland or farm assets in my family. This means I will inherit no farmland, nor do I currently have access to family farm plots. As a result, my single biggest barrier to success is land access.

At the founding of our country, white settler-colonists exploited the labor and agricultural expertise of kidnapped Africans to build their own wealth and the wealth of the U.S. No one has worked harder or amassed more wealth for our nation than our Black ancestors did. Yet we, their descendants, have not inherited this wealth.

In a society where land means wealth, we have been exploited for our farm labor and then denied the harvests.

The bottom line is that centuries of racial violence and exploitative policies have prevented me and other Black farming families from building the same generational wealth and farmland as other longtime farming families. And while I personally am not interested in participating in or perpetuating the colonial-capitalist system of land ownership and individual property that has so poisoned our relationships to each other and the Earth, I do desire the stability to grow nourishing food for my community and the freedom to return to a sacred relationship of mutual benefit with the land. And this necessitates land access.

While a single legislative session cannot rectify 400 years of racist policy, there are two bills before Congress that could begin to address inequities in land access for young Black farmers. Currently, Congress is working on the next Farm Bill. For the first time, a bipartisan coalition — including Rep. Zach Nunn of southwest Iowa — wants to include funding for community-based land access and beginning farmer support programs via the Increasing Land Access, Securities, and Opportunities Act (LASO) marker bill. Several programs in our state could directly benefit from this funding. These include Feed Iowa First (where I currently farm) in Cedar Rapids, the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm in Iowa City and Global Greens in Des Moines.

Another promising bill is the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which seeks to “correct historic discrimination… that robbed Black farmers and their families of the hundreds of billions of dollars of inter-generational wealth that land represented.” If passed, the LASO Act and the Justice for Black Farmers Act would be a meaningful legislative start to creating a brighter, more equitable future for farming in the U.S. A future that acknowledges and honors the historic contributions of Black farming families like my own while investing in the next generation.–Mari Hunt Wassink, Black Earth Gardens