Earlier this summer, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released data that suggested that, after years of decline, the number of Black farmers has grown to more than 45,000.
This is in stark contrast to the dire situation of Black producers in the 1990s, when a New York Times article predicted their coming extinction; Black farm numbers had fallen below 20,000 in that decade.
Yet we now seem to see a renaissance, something the agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, took credit for at the end of his first term as secretary of agriculture. In a 2016 essay, Vilsack wrote that the department was “forming new partnerships in diverse communities and regaining trust where it was once lost. This is most evident in the rising number of Hispanic and African American farmers.”
It’s a narrative that undeniably flatters the USDA, which stands to gain from public perception that there are far more Black farmers than there really are. After all, the department is the main culprit behind the huge land loss suffered by Black farmers in the 20th century, when African Americans lost almost 90% of their acreage, worth more than $326bn today.
And the department’s atrocious record of discrimination is by no means in the past. An award-winning 2021 Mother Jones investigation found that USDA agents still generated hundreds of discrimination complaints each year. The agency’s civil rights office, meanwhile, functioned as a “closing machine”, finding ways to dismiss or resolve complaints without real investigation or a favorable disposition for the complainant. As one employee told us: “Doing right is a lonely, lonely, lonely business” in the civil rights office.
Despite the department’s continued dysfunction, the latest agricultural census, which counts farmers around the nation every five years, would have you believe that there has been a surge in the number of Black growers since the 1990s. A closer look at the data and interviews with Black farmers and other experts, however, show that the reality is quite different.
As Jillian Hishaw, a well-respected Charlotte-based agricultural lawyer, tells us, the census counts are “overly inflated”. Hishaw’s more than two decades of fighting land loss have given her extensive first-hand knowledge of the current state of Black farming. She is not alone in her assessment; older Black farmers widely believe that the census overcounts.
In 20 years of combined experience speaking with African American farmers and analyzing census data, we have come to the same conclusion. In a lengthy 2019 investigation for the Counter, we demonstrated that changes to the census methodology explained recent increases in census counts.
To understand the problems with USDA’s counts, it’s important to understand the nuances of the agriculture census. It is the most comprehensive single source of farm data in the country. Unlike the decennial national census, which publishes a straightforward population count, the farm census uses statistical methods to estimate numbers of farmers. In fact, about 60% of the count of farms with Black producers came from adjustments in 2022, the most recent agricultural census year.
Since USDA took over the farm census from the US Census Bureau (which administers the national count), the agency has made many changes to the survey. Many of these alterations were long overdue and made the census more accurate, such as adjustments to account for farmers who should have been included in the original survey but weren’t or better outreach to Black farmers and their organizations.
However, while making the census more accurate, these changes also made newer counts impossible to compare with older counts, at least without certain caveats. One consequence was that the more accurate counts created a “false trend” in Black farmers, as a 2002 paper put it; the number of Black farmers appeared to increase, when in reality, they were just being counted more accurately.
But the problems with the USDA’s census go deeper than the “false trend”. The census lumps together non-farm rural properties, non-commercial hobby or retirement operations, very low-income farms, and those that bring in significant incomes into a single, incoherent count.
The clearest indicator of this problem is the significant rise in “farms” with no sales. The department has stretched its definition of a farm from any operation that produced or normally would produce $1,000 of agricultural goods to include operations with the potential to produce $1,000 in goods, whether the operation produces anything or the owner intends to use it that way. Properties with a few rows of berry bushes, five acres of pasture for horses or an acre of land for cattle all count as farms.
Farms with zero sales went from 100,000 in 1992, before the USDA assumed control of the census, to 400,000 in 2017 – making up a fifth of the total. Almost 30% of African American farmers had zero sales that year, meaning they were almost certainly non-farmer rural property owners.
Lloyd Wright, a former director of civil rights at the USDA and a Virginia farmer, points out that in addition to zero-sales farms in the 2022 agricultural census, 57% of farms with African American producers bring in only marginally more than the minimum: less than $5,000 in sales.
That’s simply not a sustainable business. In fact, most of these operations are probably taking a loss. Virtually all farm sales – about 95% – come from operations with more than $100,000 in sales; only 2,500 Black farmers reach that threshold. This is probably close to the minimum of sales needed to make a living from the farm: after expenses, farms with $100,000 to $250,000 in sales averaged $39,000 in net income in 2022. In any case, that means many Black farms are barely surviving and are vulnerable to closure.
Wright has long been troubled by census overcounts. In a 2019 interview, Wright said that in his work with Black farmer groups and 1890 land grant institutions (historically Black schools founded as agricultural training centers) across the country, he found that “none of them agree with what is being displayed in the census. That doesn’t meet their experience in the field.” He underscored this point with his own counts of Black farmers in Virginia’s Northern Neck region, where he farms. In response to a request for this article, Wright reported 16 African American farmers as against the USDA’s 64 – a whopping 75% difference.
Michael Stovall, a fourth-generation farmer who is from and lives in north-western Alabama, also says the census count is far too high in his area. “A lot of the people that used to have small farms, they’re not here any longer. I’m riding everywhere – every county in this area, I’m normally riding around – and you don’t see anybody any more.” He continued, “In the whole area, north Alabama – it’d surprise me if it was 150.” For the eight counties Stovall referenced, the census reports 332 farmers.
Referring to the latest count of Black farmers, Bernice Atchison said: “No way. No way. There’s nothing like 45,000 farmers at this particular time … Because of circumstances that have occurred down through the years of many being foreclosed on, many have died. The pandemic took out quite a few.”
Atchison, of Chilton county, Alabama, has been part of the struggle for justice for Black farmers for more than 40 years and assisted many other farmers with their discrimination cases. She also works with numerous organizations that advocate for Black farmers, such as Friends of the African Union, a civil society organization. Based on this experience, Atchison estimates “we’d be doing good if we were to have 18,000 [Black farmers] at this point,” she said.
Thomas Burrell, leader of the Memphis-based Black Farmers & Agriculturalists Association, told us several years ago: “We believe, based on our research and representation, there are less than 5,000 farmers.”
These advocates are united in their belief that the agricultural census, in its current iteration, grossly overstates the number of Black farmers in the country. But just how much it overstates them or – more precisely, how few Black farmers there actually are – is unclear, with their anecdotal estimates varying from the low thousands to Atchinson’s higher figures. More research, by organizations independent of the USDA, is needed to understand the true state of Black farming today.
When asked for comment, a USDA spokesperson sent a statement that referred to the 2022 census’s “rigorous methodology” and “extensive quality controls” as well as agency efforts to improve counts of minority producers and to conduct outreach to all producers, including those from “underserved communities”. The response did not explicitly address our questions about the discrepancies between census counts and what Black farmers report, the effect of zero-sales farms on census counts or related issues.
As the prime culprit in the dispossession of Black farmers, the USDA benefits from the perception that the number of African American farmers is increasing or is higher than it really is. If the public were aware that, instead of 45,000, there are only 5,000 African American farmers with real access to the farm economy and viable businesses, then the threatened extinction of the Black farmer would seem less like an averted danger and more like a nearly accomplished fact.
It was bad enough for the USDA to engage in widespread discrimination against Black farmers and drive almost all of them from the industry. Now the agency claims there’s a renaissance, using numbers Black farmers do not trust to do so. That’s the sign of an entity that is simply not capable of facing the reality it created and therefore not capable of rectifying it.