The Biden administration recently invested more than $3 billion in “climate-smart” agriculture. But the program has an interesting stipulation: Black farmers and other historically underserved groups must be key participants in funded projects.
So why the focus on Black farmers? It’s been estimated that, in 1910, Black Americans owned roughly 16 million acres of U.S. farmland, mostly in the South. That land was hard-earned, and represented the triumph of Black farmers despite limited opportunities to accumulate wealth in the Reconstruction era. But as of 2017, the year of the most recent Census of Agriculture, that had dropped to only 2.9 million acres — a more than 80% decrease during that 107 year period.
