In 1920, there were 925,708 Black farm operators in the United States. They made up about 14 percent of all American farmers, and they worked something on the order of 16 to 19 million acres of land. It was the high-water mark of Black agriculture, built in a single generation out of emancipation by people who understood that owning the ground you stood on was the most durable form of freedom the country offered.
A century later, Black farmers make up less than 2 percent of the nation's farmers. By the 2022 Census of Agriculture, the figure was roughly 1.5 percent. Between 1920 and 2007, Black farmers lost about 80 percent of their land. One widely cited academic estimate puts the value of that lost acreage and the income it would have generated at roughly $326 billion in today's dollars. This was not a market outcome. It was engineered.
The mechanisms were layered and patient. New Deal farm programs in the 1930s paid landowners to take acreage out of production, and the local committees that distributed those payments routinely cut Black tenants and sharecroppers out entirely. Federal lending followed the same pattern. In 1965, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documented that the U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated against Black farmers in the loans, credit, and disaster aid that keep a farm alive from one season to the next. A denied operating loan in a drought year is all it takes to lose land a family held for three generations.
“The land was never just land. It was the most durable form of power available, which is exactly why it was taken.”
Then there was heirs' property, the tangle that follows when land passes down without a will. Ownership splits among dozens of descendants, and a single heir, or a speculator who buys one heir's share, can force the whole parcel to a courthouse-steps 'partition sale' at a fraction of its worth. Add discriminatory tax assessments, outright intimidation, and violence, and the land moved steadily out of Black hands and into others'.
The government eventually admitted a piece of it. In 1999, a federal court approved the settlement in Pigford v. Glickman, a class action in which Black farmers proved the USDA had discriminated against them and then ignored their complaints. It became one of the largest civil rights settlements in American history, ultimately paying out more than a billion dollars across the original case and its follow-on, Pigford II. For many farmers the checks came decades too late, after the land was already gone.
The reckoning is still unfolding. In 2021, Congress passed debt relief for 'socially disadvantaged' farmers as part of the American Rescue Plan, and lawsuits immediately froze it. Congress replaced it in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act with a race-neutral $2.2 billion Discrimination Financial Assistance Program. When those payments went out in the summer of 2024, more than 43,000 people received awards of up to $500,000, and by the USDA's own accounting the large majority of recipients were Black farmers. A payout is not the same as the land back, but it is an admission on the federal ledger of what was done.
Which brings us to the part the timeline tends to skip: the rebuilding. It is already happening, and it does not look like nostalgia.
In Petersburg, New York, Leah Penniman's Soul Fire Farm works 80 acres as a training ground, sending a steady stream of new Black and Brown farmers back onto land of their own while feeding communities the grocery industry abandoned. Two hours south in Chester, Karen Washington, a James Beard Leadership Award winner who has organized for food justice for decades, co-runs Rise & Root Farm as a cooperative. In Cedar Grove, North Carolina, Kamal Bell left a teaching job to build Sankofa Farms and an academy that puts young Black boys in the soil alongside the science. In North Charleston, Germaine Jenkins turned a competition prize into Fresh Future Farm, an urban plot with a full grocery store attached, keeping the money inside the neighborhood.
The pattern runs coast to coast and generation to generation. Jamila Norman farms 80-plus crops on an organic acre in Atlanta and hosts a national television show about it. Nineteen families pooled their money in 2020 to buy nearly 97 acres in Toomsboro, Georgia, and start the Freedom Georgia Initiative from scratch. Outside Milledgeville, former Army Ranger Jon Jackson runs Comfort Farms as a working farm and a crisis center for veterans. And some never left: Browntown Farms has been Black-owned in Brunswick County, Virginia since 1908, and the Taylor-Stevenson Ranch has raised cattle outside Houston since 1875, the only Black-owned ranch to carry Texas Century Ranch status.
That is the throughline connecting a bank, a beauty brand, and a 38-acre vegetable farm: ownership is the asset that compounds. The land was taken because it was the most durable form of power available. Taking it back, acre by acre, is the same move in the other direction. You can find these farms, and the businesses growing alongside them, in the BLK Society directory.
Sources
- U.S. Department of Agriculture, Census of Agriculture (1920 and 2022)
- Francis, Hamilton, Mitchell, Rosenberg & Stucki, “Black Land Loss: 1920–1997,” AEA Papers and Proceedings, vol. 112 (2022)
- U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Equal Opportunity in Farm Programs” (1965)
- Congressional Research Service, “The Pigford Cases: USDA Settlement of Discrimination Suits by Black Farmers”
- U.S. Department of Agriculture, financial assistance to 43,000+ farmers under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Discrimination Financial Assistance Program (2024)
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