Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
New research from American University and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund says the currently stalled farm bill is an avenue for reversing historic discrimination against farmers of color by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I spoke with Sara Clarke Kaplan, executive director of American’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, to learn more about their new toolkit – “Pointing the Farm Bill Toward Racial Justice.”
Enjoy our conversation about the current state of the farm bill, and Kaplan’s hopes for its future, below.
What’s the current state of the farm bill? Or, in other words, what’s the occasion for this toolkit?
The farm bill is reauthorized every five years; reauthorization is always a big deal because there’s a tremendous amount of money involved for issues ranging from sustainable agriculture to farm extension programs to nutritional assistance programs. This reauthorization was especially high stakes because of the infusion of money from the Inflation Reduction Act into conservation programs. In 2023, ARPC, The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, UC Berkeley’s Food Institute, and AU’s Center for Environment, Community, and Equity convened a national summit on racial justice and the farm bill when Congress was in the process of deliberating a new Bill. Unfortunately, Congress kicked the farm bill reauthorization into 2024 and we still don’t have a new farm bill. That means that the goal of building in policy changes that would increase racial justice is still a critical issue right now.
That said, this work – and this toolkit – isn’t just about a single reauthorization: it’s part of a longstanding and ongoing collaboration of grassroots agricultural organizations and food justice scholars that has produced a strong, lasting coalition of farmers, advocates, researchers, and workers who are seeking to infuse questions of racial equity into food, climate, and agricultural justice. The toolkit reflects that coalitional thinking, with the goal of carrying it forward into ongoing efforts for this eventual farm bill reauthorization and beyond.
Why is the farm bill a good target for justice-oriented demands?
It’s important to remember that the farm bill is a huge omnibus bill, and the primary Congressional vehicle for setting U.S. agricultural and food policy. As such, it’s an instrument for distributing huge amounts of money and for setting multi-year political priorities. It’s not just farm subsidies, it’s the provision of rural broadband, the mediation of food insecurity, the decision of who has access to the treasury of germplasm. These funds are already slated to be spent on agriculture, so the question becomes where these resources will go? How can we ensure that the farm bill’s policies and allocation of resources address the needs, interests, and long term sustainability and wellbeing of all of the diverse people who are impacted by its 12 titles? And if you look carefully, some of the most important racial justice issues of our time are present in the farm bill. Researchers of mass incarceration have traced how when small farmers lose their farms, it opens that land up to prison development; reproductive justice organizers have pointed out that the ability to have and raise children requires secure access to healthy, affordable food; there are so many ways in which the farm bill is a critical site for interventions by people and organizations committed to intersectional racial justice.
This research is based on years of listening sessions and symposia with Black farmers. What were the most surprising findings from those community-based conversations?
Our colleagues at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, conducted two years of extensive listening sessions with their many Black farmer and landowner members in the South. These were led by their former Director of Land Retention and Advocacy, Dãnia Davy, who is now continuing this important work at Oxfam. The results of these unprecedented listening sessions were distilled and presented at the summit, where we continued to discuss them with farmers, researchers, and other allied grassroots organizations. While I can speak to those summit presentations and conversations, our Federation colleagues are really the experts on this.
One point that Federation speakers emphasized was that despite provisions in the previous farm bill for “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers” many programs and sources of funding are still not reaching Black farmers. At the summit, we discussed various ideas for making the language in policy more specific about the needs of Black farmers, Indigenous farmers, and other farmers of color.
Our colleagues at the Federation – and Dãnia in particular – also called attention to the intersecting challenges that Black farmers and landowners face that make it even more difficult for them to work the land: lack of broadband internet, the dearth of child and elder care in the communities, etc. It goes without saying that these are issues of racial, social, and economic justice.
The toolkit’s central tenet is “Climate Justice = Racial Justice = Food Justice = Farm Justice.” Can you elaborate on that idea?
I can imagine that at first glance, this equation might seem cryptic, but it’s crafted to clarify matters by making implicit connections explicit. All too often, discussions of agricultural policy marginalize questions of racial equity and justice, and far too little is known in the broader racial justice movement about the long history and ongoing role that farming and farmers have played in racial liberation struggles in the U.S. and globally. I consider myself as having been part of that problem. I’m relatively new to Farm Justice, with a long history in racial and gender justice movements, but largely in urban settings. Yet the more I learn about central issues in Farm Justice work, the more I see how inextricably these issues and movements are entwined.
Of course, rural participants in grassroots racial justice movements have always known this. Take, for example, projects like Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative, which enabled Black farmers and sharecroppers who had been excluded, exploited, and terrorized by white landowners to exercise self-determination while providing a source of much-needed food to the hundreds of poor Black families who worked that land. Or take the BIPOC farmers who are innovating new approaches to regenerative agriculture and the building of sustainable, resilient rural communities, who are at the frontlines experiencing the effects of climate change. As long as the vast majority of recent investments in conservation and climate-smart agriculture are directed to white farmers, existing racial disparities will increase, and we will all lose out on opportunities to benefit from the climate-forward work of these small BIPOC farmers.
What’s the connection between American University and this Farm Justice work?
It’s so important to remember the historical relationship between institutions of higher education in the United States and agriculture. There are over 100 land grant universities in the U.S., from large, well-known universities like Cornell or the University of California, Berkeley to small HBCUs like the University of the District of Columbia. Not only did those land-grant institutions’ original emphasis on agriculture, science, and engineering, create an idea of postsecondary education and research as a resource for everyone, not just elites, but it was through the land grant system that the HBCU system and Tribal College system as we know them now first came into being. In fact, several of our collaborators on the summit and the toolkit came from land-grant universities: April Love from Alcorn State’s Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Policy Research Center, Sakeenah Shabazz from The Berkeley Food Institute at UC Berkeley, Mchezaji Axum from the College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia. Of course, that’s not a history that American University shares. But AU faculty like Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, for example, have been working in collaboration with community partners like the Federation, Rural Coalition, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, for years – in some cases, over a decade – to build a coalition that connects grassroots movements, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers and scholars. And that’s where the Antiracist Research and Policy Center comes in. From summit to toolkit to our forthcoming online research hub, the “Pointing the farm bill Toward Racial Justice” project is an example of what we believe is the best way toward future social justice: the creation of transformative, scholarship through reciprocal, equitable, and sustainable collaborations among scholars, organizers, and policymakers, presented in ways that are accessible to everyone, including the people most impacted by the issues we address. Not only does it touch on all of our core focus areas – that is, not just climate, land, and environmental justice, but race and reproduction, educational access and equity, and even carceral politics – but it’s an important opportunity for us to remind people that race issues aren’t just urban issues – race is a huge part of the fabric of rural and agricultural American life, and needs to be addressed as such.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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