The year is 1910 and 14 percent of the nation’s farmers are Black Americans. Living before the times of widespread mechanization, their labor is physically intense and intimate with the earth. Purchased only two generations after emancipation, these plots of land represent the resilience and dignity of the communities they serve.
Since then, America’s agricultural landscape has changed, and not only where big machines have replaced hands and feet. Today, fewer than two percent of the nation’s farmers are African American, according to the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture. What happened in the past 110 years are vital parts of our nation’s story in which seeds of innovation, regeneration, and communal stewardship are planted throughout.
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