Jan 05 2021
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/05/black-farmers-biden-vilsack
" ...In 1920, Black farmers owned 14% of farmland in the U.S., compared to 1.6% today. Boyd knows firsthand that racism drove this shift. Producers in his county faced discrimination for years at the hands of a USDA employee in charge of giving Black farmers loans in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, he says.
That's the type of discrimination that Black farmers have been experiencing at the hands of the government, he says. The very people supposed to give us a hand up was the very same agency that almost put us out of business and drove us into almost an extinction based on the numbers.
Oct 12 2009
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113730694
Soon after President Reagan took office in the early 1980s, the USDA's civil rights division was quietly dismantled. Nevertheless, the agency continued to tell farmers that if they felt they weren't getting loans because of their color or gender, they should file a complaint.
Noe Obregon, 47, looks exactly like the South Texas farmer he's been all his life: cowboy hat, blue denim shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. Obregon says that in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, it didn't matter what you looked like or how good of a farmer you were. If you were Hispanic in Texas, getting a farm loan from the USDA was like the quest for the Holy Grail.
"I would go and apply, and it would take about two to three weeks," says Obregon. "Then they would turn me down, say it was a high risk crop or different reasons. But it was always, 'No.' Then I would appeal, and it would take 90 to 120 days, and by then my planting season was over."
Instead of getting his loan in the spring, Obregon says his money would come in November. He would use the late arriving loan to get his family through the winter, and then he'd apply earlier the next year.
But Obregon learned it didn't matter how early he applied. While his white neighbors got their loans in February and planted and raised crops, Obregon seethed and his debt mounted. By 1990, he owed the government $150,000, and the USDA moved to foreclose on his farm. He says it was the same with nearly every Hispanic farmer in the county.
"They were either foreclosed, or they'd take their lands, put them up for auction, and Anglos bought them because they had the finances and they had the way to buy them," he says.
Down the road from Obregon's farm, 65-year-old Modesta Salazar tells the same story.
Salazar says the farmers who sat on the local USDA loan board were made up of the most prosperous farmers in the county. She says these men gave the government loans to other white farmers the people they'd gone to school with and known all their lives while Hispanic farmers slowly went broke.
"All the farmers, from Cotulla, from Bigfoot, Devine, from everywhere all the farmers were in the same situation; no help for them," she says.
A Long History Of Discrimination
Both Obregon and Salazar's families filed discrimination complaints with the USDA, but say they never heard anything back. The agency refuses to comment about specific cases. But if you're expecting the Agriculture Department to issue an indignant rebuttal to the overall accusation that it discriminated for decades, you're going to be disappointed.
In 1997, then-Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman testified before Congress and conceded a long history of discrimination in the loan program. He talked about "good people who lost their family land, not because of a bad crop, not because of a flood, but because of the color of their skin."
nov 1 2021 __ Kali Holloway
https://www.thenation.com/article/societry/black-farmers-pigford-debt/
"... The Atchinsons made multiple follow-up trips to the FSA office--but each time--Byrd informed them they would have to wait until local white farmers received their USDA loans before the couple could even apply. From the early 1980s to the 1990s--the Atchinson were denied USDA subsidies