By Rebecca Dudley, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology and Graduate Fellow with American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis
For the publication of this short essay, permission from the farmer central to this story has been ascertained, though all persons and place names remain pseudonyms.
I pull into Mr. Dan Leonard’s driveway. As I turn the car off, the rural quiet settles, the December sun piercing through the half-bare Louisiana canopy. Mr. Leonard has agreed to this interview after a few visits already. Several summers before, he drove around the fields showing and explaining to me the technical, biological, and ecological aspects that shape his farm. Along the way, the family and community histories embedded in the landscape became palpable. I’m here today to ask him about his family history in farming, to learn from him about his farming experience, and to understand his perspective on farming today and how it got to be that way.
Today, two sunbathing dogs lift their heads in acknowledgment of my arrival. I check the mirror, acutely aware of my white skin, and how my femininity and intellectual academic-ness are awkwardly out of place here. The car door shutting is rudely loud, and as I turn to the crackling of tires on gravel following behind, Mr. Leonard and his nephew James emerge from the pickup. We smile, greet, and settle inside his home to have a visit. There’s no rush. I take notes and ask questions. There are long, serious pauses, and moments of levity, too. This is our third or fourth visit, and our mutual understanding is unfurling slowly.
***
Of the rural population in this Louisiana Parish, about 20,000, or roughly 35%, identify as African American today. Of those 20,000, there are just a handful of Black farmers and only one who practices row crop farming. Black farmers were not always so rare in the United States or, especially, in the South. After the Civil War, the proportion of farmers who were Black steadily increased to a high point in the early 1900s of nearly 15% of all farmers. This Parish exemplifies the dramatic decrease in farm ownership by African Americans in the past hundred years, from that high point to about 1.5% of farmers today, from farming roughly 20% of all American farmland to about half of a percent today (Francis et al. 2022; United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service 2017). Simultaneously, the overall proportion of people farming has declined radically with the rise of farm modernization and consolidation. However, while there are fewer farmers in the U.S. overall, there are disproportionately fewer Black farmers, and those Black farmers who persist have control over a much smaller proportion of farmland.
This precipitous drop in Black farming and farmland ownership was caused by on the one hand, federal- and state-level discrimination against Black farmers in the form of administrative foot-dragging, discriminatory denials of access to credit, and excessive red tape, which prevented these farmers from accessing the capital necessary for farm operations. On the other hand, outright acts of white supremacist violence including the destruction of farm equipment and buildings, killing of farm animals, and attacks and murders of Black farmers—especially during the post-Radical Reconstruction era and throughout Jim Crow, but continuing through the Civil Rights movement—drove Black farmers from farmland throughout the early 20th century (Daniel 2013).
Mr. Leonard, in his mid-60s, is the only Black soybean farmer—practicing what many call industrial or conventional agriculture—in this rural community in Louisiana.1 The political economics of industrial farming already puts pressure on him. Think tractors, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified seeds. Think also of lobbyists representing large industrial agricultural firms, such as Bayer (formerly Monsanto), shaping intellectual property and environmental protection law to their advantage (Elmore 2021; Lewontin 1982). Think John Deere (among many other equipment and digital farming firms) developing digital hubs for surveilling farmland and farm work (Bronson and Knezevic 2016), and global markets shaped by international geopolitics (like the war in Ukraine) which push and pull the prices of grains like soybeans and corn—and the fertilizers and pesticides needed to produce them—up and down (USDA Foreign Agricultural Service 2022).
Mr. Leonard’s experience as a Black farmer comes with additional pressures. Think of the history stretching back to the plantation and the subsequent Jim Crow era, which shapes the current farm and food system through a history of racially exclusionary politics of farm loans, preferential subsidization for just a few commodities, and the national trend in the past hundred years of farms to consolidate in size, resulting in fewer and fewer farmers overall, and concentration of land ownership with a few powerful corporations and stakeholders (Daniel 2013; Wright et al. 2020; Dudley 2000; Gibson and Alexander 2019; MacDonald, Hoppe, and Newton 2018). Think also of tightening farm labor markets and the racialized politics of farm labor and immigration, and a seemingly deep-seated American aversion to farm laboring (Holmes 2013), contrasted to the picturesque admiration of “the American farm” (e.g. Ragsdale 2021).
Amid this, Mr. Leonard farms soybeans, like so many across the country. Growing soybeans, while common nationally, is unique in this area. Here, most farmers grow sugarcane. When I ask why he grows soybeans, he explains that his farm has too little acreage to meet the economies of scale that sugarcane demands. He is a soybean dot in a sea of cane. It’s no coincidence that the dramatic disparity between his farm size and the sugarcane farms surrounding his farm also falls along racial lines; it’s no coincidence that Mr. Leonard farms soybeans and not cane.
Today, to be Black and a farmer is rare. In this historically racially discriminatory agricultural economy, Mr. Leonard’s and his family’s story of survival recognizes both the global and national pressures that all farmers face, the resilience and commitment that survival requires, and the reliance that farmers have on each other—and how racial dynamics cut through these threads. For Mr. Leonard, much of the community he has relied on for his farm’s survival, and whom he relies on today, are his white neighbors.
Mr. Leonard grew up the son of sharecroppers, and the farm he owns and operates today is just across the street from where his father sharecropped cotton. His father, Gerry Leonard, bought the nearly 100 acres of the Leonard Family farm, piece by piece, over the course of decades. Like many family farms, the land is divided up among descendants. While to the untrained eye, it may look like a few large fields, all soybeans, all together, walking through this farm is a tour of family history, like so many family farms today. This parcel bought from a great uncle decades ago, that parcel rented from his son, this parcel bought by a white farmer who went out of business, this dozen acres by the tree line really a quilt of a dozen or so siblings and cousins who now mostly live in faraway places. Many family farms feel like this, each collection of stories showing how family relationships and intercommunity relationships punctuate the farmscape. After his father died in 1993, Mr. Leonard’s mother, Elizabeth, inherited ownership of the farm until her death in 2003. After she died, the farm succession plan went into effect, leading to a cascade of descendants—her many children—inheriting pieces of land. In 2005, Mr. Leonard, the youngest boy of nine children, inherited ownership of the farm business from his parents, the house, and the 7 acres it sits on. He rents the remaining 92 acres (with secure, 20-year lease agreements) from a total of 17 relatives, most of whom stay in Texas, to farm a total of 99 acres.
When his father died, the loans that the senior Mr. Leonard had taken out to buy the farm had not yet been fully paid off. The farm loan was administered through Farmer’s Home Association, and it was set with an 80-year term. Now a reorganized branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency2, the Farmer’s Home Association settled in a class action lawsuit known as Pigford v. Glickman, which alleged the USDA systemically discriminated against hundreds of thousands of African American farmers through its lending practices—at once helping white farmers build wealth in land but excluding and further dispossessing black farmers (Daniel 2013). The fallout of the Pigford v. Glickman case has been mixed, with claimants receiving paltry payments compared to the lost wealth in land that resulted from the decades of exclusion.3 However, the case is still considered a turning point within the USDA, since it led to systemic restructuring, including new oversight measures of how loans are administered today4 and requirements for a committee-appointed “socially disadvantaged” farmer to the local FSA County Committee (“County Committee (CC) Frequently Asked Questions for Stakeholders” 2022).5
Mr. Leonard, who now serves as the committee-appointed “socially disadvantaged” farmer in his area, says it was a common experience for the structure of the loan to be so long. But, he makes sure to emphasize, things aren’t like that now. He tells me that his father purchased equipment in the ’40s and ’50s, using operating loans from the now-Farm Service Agency. Nearly 50 years later, in 1993, these pieces of equipment still weren’t paid off fully. For a 10-year loan for a piece of equipment that was $1000, the interest would nearly equal the principle. “You never pay it off…They’d set it up so you couldn’t pay it off,” Mr. Leonard says.
“That’s messed up,” James adds.
“[And] the place needs to be paid off before you can make any money,” Mr. Leonard ends.
As he explains this history, he emphasizes that he has the succession papers that prove this inheritance—it’s important to keep these documents on hand. To participate in any federal programs like crop subsidies, crop insurance, or farm operating loans, his inheritance and ownership of the farmland must be proved. Proving this inheritance to bureaucrats, or denying it, is one site where discrimination can appear.
***
As our conversation continues, we’re interrupted by Keith Fletcher of Fletcher Farms, a white man, who in a gentle and playful way asks Mr. Leonard to move a truck that’s in the way of their sugarcane harvest. Once he leaves, both Mr. Leonard and James emphatically explain how kind Mr. Fletcher is: “we have the best neighbors…so supportive.” Mr. Fletcher helps Mr. Leonard with various aspects of his farm operation, like maintaining their shared access road so that Mr. Leonard doesn’t have to. Another neighboring farmer, whom Mr. Leonard pays to spray his crop with pesticides, helps Mr. Leonard by giving him time to pay until he harvests his crop. “Time means a lot.” Indeed, timing is everything in industrial farming. A delayed operating loan payment could result in being unable to pay for seeds in time for harvest. A delayed harvest could mean being unable to make a payment on a note. Trust, in the form of wiggle room when the rhythm of natural cycles misaligns with the rhythm of loans made and payments due, greases the farm economy and maintains community. These moments of trust happen at the interpersonal and neighborly level, unfolding and perhaps even widening narrow paths of farm justice over time.
Before Mr. Leonard’s father bought the land, he sharecropped land owned by the Genet family, raising cotton and keeping one-fourth of his crop. The Genets, a white family that’s been farming in the community since the French settlement in the mid-18th century, still own that once-sharecropped land. According to Mr. Leonard, at one point the Genets owned the whole town—an exaggeration that points to a truth. As we drive together along the old fields (we could have easily walked, since it was only across the street and down the next road about fifty feet), Mr. Leonard explains that his father bought his farm from a Genet who was Black. I’m taken aback, and he reads my face. The Black Genets and the White were first cousins, he explains. “They were kin…by what happened a while back…Their daddy had white blood in him. His name was [Genet].”
The family from whom his father bought land and the family for whom his father sharecropped represent two sides of one bloodline—the white landowning and the mixed-race descendants of their enslaved, and, possibly, of a line of free people of color. The French legacy of the institution of slavery is alive in this small town, where free people of color had political power and land until the American purchase of Louisiana, which introduced to the territory a strict binary method of categorizing race. In this Louisiana Parish, racial boundaries were more porous until Americanization, which free people of color comingling socially and politically with whites. There is much more to be unpacked about this history—violence, rape, autonomy, resistance—but for Mr. Leonard’s story today, the possibility of trusting relationships across racial lines is not precluded by this history of racial discrimination. A hopeful possibility intermingles with this history.
Back in the house, we keep chatting about how the Leonards came to own this land. “Why did the [Genets] let it go?” James asks. Mr. Leonard explains that they cut it into tracts to sell to poor folks, including the 72 acres here, as an act of goodwill.
“Daddy then bought some from Uncle Eddie [Mr. Leonard’s mother’s brother]…Bradley Freret [a wealthy white man] helped a lot of Black folks get land. He helped Daddy to get this place.” Mr. Leonard explains that this white man “had compassion for Black people, and he wanted them to have their own place.” When his father purchased the land, it was about $500/acre. He was able to do it through the 80-year FHA loan which Mr. Leonard paid off once he inherited the land (and the debt). When Mr. Leonard inherited the farm, its finances were precarious, because of the debt his father had not been able to finish paying. A white Genet descendant who today is a high-ranking member of the agricultural community here helped Mr. Leonard stay on the land when he inherited his father’s sweltering debt, using his significant political clout in the agricultural community to negotiate with the Farm Service Agency loan agents on behalf of Mr. Leonard. In a separate conversation with Mr. Genet, he explained to me that, “it wasn’t right,” referring to the way that Mr. Leonard’s father’s loan had been set up, and how Mr. Leonard was being treated as he tried to settle his father’s debts. The two, Misters Genet and Leonard, have lived in this rural community their whole lives, farming just a few miles from each other. “He gave me time, and the time he gave me helped.”
“We grew up together,” Mr. Genet explains to me when I discussed this essay with him.
Some whites, Mr. Leonard explains, went through the same thing. “Years back, they [Farmer’s Home] wanted you to lose, but it’s different today.” Mr. Leonard himself sits on the Farm Service Agency local County Committee and sees its operations from the inside. We start talking about the aforementioned Pigford case. He explains that farmers in Mississippi got most of the Pigford money—$50,000 a person, sometimes $200,000 a person (though reports summarizing the Pigford payouts show that $50,000 was the upper limit).
He pauses, blank-faced. It’s a lot of money. But, though the sums seem high, to buy a single acre of farmland today is about $2,000. It really isn’t that much, when you start thinking about the scales that industrial farming requires today. To farm industrially at the economies of scale you need to make a living, you need 100 or more acres.
To get by, Mr. Leonard relies on his neighbors—small things like equipment sharing and figuring out the latest farm policies from D.C., and big things like applying the pesticides needed to ensure his crop thrives. “They good people, and we all need good neighbors to survive here,” he tells me. His relationship with his neighbors is trusting but also situated in the wake of a lifelong struggle to keep his farm, against racial discrimination in many forms. There is a tension here of trust, the hope that this trust nurtures, and the legacies of the past.
After we’ve been talking about this history for a little while, Mr. Leonard pauses. He says “you can’t hate for what happened.”
“’Cause you can’t change it,” James, in his early twenties, adds.
“If a white person wanted this place, they could have it—’cause they have ways,” Mr. Leonard says. Implying, in other words, that their farm exists because it has been allowed to.
If trust is built through recognizing past racial injustices and if it opens paths of farming justice, these paths are narrow here. But James, as he hopes to take over his uncle’s farm, has a foothold in that path because of the trusting relationships with neighbors.
In a landscape where small farmers rely on good neighbors to maintain their land leases over decades, to support the farm operation, and to help gain access to markets and financing, trust is forged through interpersonal acts. It knits community across generational and racial lines, James and Mr. Genet. The recognition of past racial injustice is implicitly, subtly recognized in these acts, which in turn builds trust. But this is a trust-building of a subtle kind, not of political outspokenness, and without anything but social accountability. Possibilities of justice rooted in this kind of interpersonal trust-building, in this small community, are circumscribed by the very systems that produced distrust and injustice in the first place.
1 All names and locations are intentionally obscured for the protection of these individuals.
2 Farmer’s Home Association and the subsequent Farm Service Agency were/are both branches of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmer’s Home was established as a way to regulate agricultural markets during the Great Depression, as part of a longer history stretching back to the Civil War, of federal intervention into farming. For a history of the development of these entities, see Conkin 2008.
3 After the settlement, $50,000 was awarded to 15,401 Black farmers or about two-thirds of farmers who filed for a claim under the class action lawsuit (Cowan and Feder 2013). A recent study found that through systemic discrimination, an estimated $326 billion of wealth in land was lost in the Black farming community (Francis et al. 2022).
4 That is, the power to approve or deny loans was reassigned to state and national levels, and new oversight measures were put in place for local Farm Service Agency offices. However, following the Pigford versus Glickman settlement, no loan officers were fired.
5 The County Committee is an elected, local group of farmers and landowners who shape county-level farm policy implementation. Much cited through this essay, Peter Daniel’s Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (2013) discusses the role of the County Committee as a primary site of discrimination against Black farmers.
Works Cited
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Conkin, Paul K. 2008. A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture Since 1929. Lexington, Kentucky, USA: University Press of Kentucky.
“County Committee (CC) Frequently Asked Questions for Stakeholders.” 2022. USDA Farm Service Agency.
Cowan, Tadlock, and Jody Feder. 2013. “Report for Congress: The Pigford Cases: USDA Settlement of Discrimination Suits by Black Farmers.” Washington, DC. https://nationalaglawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/crs/RS20430.pdf.
Daniel, Pete. 2013. Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
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Ragsdale, Bruce A. 2021. Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
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Wright, Willie J., Tyler McCreary, Brian Williams, and Adam Bledsoe. 2020. “Black Farmers and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition.” In Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, edited by Hanna Garth and Ashanté M. Reese, 228–50. University of Minnesota Press.
Rebecca Dudley is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology and Graduate Fellow with American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her historical anthropological research focuses on legacies of the plantation in industrial agriculture, including the racialization of labor, technology, financing, commodity flows, and knowledge. She examines how family networks, institutions of governance, and agricultural practices and technologies intersect, and how these intersections produce or restrict possibilities of farm sovereignty and self-determination today. Before beginning her dissertation research, Rebecca worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency.
