Lance Cheung/USDA
A farmer in Singer, California, November 2018.
Amidst his “flood the zone” strategy that disorients and distracts the public and his opponents, President Donald Trump’s new administration is cutting public policies that champion racial equity, dismantling federal agencies, and terrorizing immigrant communities.
Key Trump Administration officials have previously sought to end public policies that assist farmers of color. If that happens, as it has in the past, our farmer coalitions will stand and fight without distinction for the hardworking people who grow our food, and who deserve policies that address our country’s long history of discrimination.
Trump’s confirmed pick for Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, has promptly terminated $132 million in contracts with farmers that were inked during the Biden era. Many more such cuts are expected.
Meanwhile, the nation’s farmers anxiously await what will happen to the 2501 Program within the Farm Bill, the omnibus piece of legislation that governs most facets of our farm system and is slated for renewal this year.
The 2501 Program offers grants to underserved farmers, ranchers, and foresters who have historically experienced limited access to USDA programs and services. That certain groups have experienced such oppression on racial grounds was verified in the landmark Pigford v. Glickman case, which resulted in the largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history.
In his book Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, Pete Daniel notes that Black farmers in the twentieth century lost their farms disproportionately when compared to their white counterparts. That’s in large part because officials at U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) offices around the country regularly denied loans to producers for no other reason than the color of their skin.
The 2501 Program emerged to address this long, dark past of discrimination in the nation’s agricultural history, which has roots in chattel slavery. How this program emerged is just as important as who it benefits.
2501 found its way into the 1990 Farm Bill—and has stayed there every cycle since—due to the work of interracial farmer coalitions. Leaders from groups such as the National Family Farm Coalition and the Rural Coalition, with their extensive bases of small-scale farmer groups around the country, organized protests and testified in Congress, advocating with farmers of color-led groups such as the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.
Meanwhile, it is nearly guaranteed that the Trump Administration will take aim at 2501 as Farm Bill discussions unfold. Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser, started one of the nonprofits that filed lawsuits to block Biden’s efforts to extend farmers of color debt relief as part of his 2021 American Rescue plan.
A host of other conservative legal nonprofits, including the Bradley Foundation and Charles G. Koch Foundation, joined Miller in alleging that “reverse racism” was at work in policies that sought to correct the effects of racism in U.S. agriculture. It is just a matter of time before the current push against diversity, equity, and inclusion will find its way into Farm Bill discussions.
But farmers and farm advocates are ready. We know the playbook. More importantly, we have our networks and the relationships we have built over the years. Our efforts to fight discrimination and forward racial justice are decades long. The 2501 Program is one product of that fight. So, just as Trump will come for this program and everything else that seeks to uplift people of color, we will fight back.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.