Biden Administration Tries to Address Generations of USDA Racism Against Black Farmers and Others

I was at a meeting early last week organized by a private company for farmers to learn how to receive tax credits and other funding from the Biden administration’s “climate-smart” programs that encourage more environmentally friendly farming practices.

Being a news guy, I asked someone from the company how many people were at the conference. “We just figured it out,” he replied with a grin, “Three hundred twenty-nine people are here.”

I walked back to the main conference room and sat with a white friend, whose husband is Black.

“Three hundred twenty-nine people are here and there’s not one Black person in the room,” I said.

“I noticed,” she replied.

I attended the Iowa History Conference last Thursday. It was wonderful. I learned so much.

Ricki King, a panelist in the “Writing and Preserving Iowa’s Agricultural History” discussion mentioned last December’s first-ever Iowa Farmers of Color Conference, and all panelists joined her in relating the importance of sharing Black farmer stories as part of telling our story — Iowa’s story.

With these two conferences converging last week, I wondered about the societal processes at work that kept Black farmers out of the room at the farming conference. I purposefully am not naming that conference or its organizer because I don’t want anyone to conclude without evidence that racism played a role in the absence of Black farmers. The conference was organized in part because the organizer offered unique services that farmers in the room could purchase in order to obtain a maximum return from the government for embracing climate-smart agriculture.