The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued over $2.2 billion in payments to over 43,000 farmers across the country this week, including 1,265 farmers from Louisiana.
The money aims to address a history of discriminatory lending practices by the USDA against Black and other minority farmers. A study shows that over the 20th century, Black farmers lost over $320 billion in land, partly due to that discrimination.
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said the Biden Administration hopes the money will help thousands stay on the farm.
“This financial assistance is not compensation for anyone's loss or the pain endured, but it is an acknowledgement by the department,” he said at a White House press briefing on Wednesday.
Farmers have been waiting on this money for years. The payments were stalled after white farmers and banks sued over the first version of the program in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act. The plan had a provision that set aside $4 billion for socially disadvantaged farmers, including Black, Native American, Hispanic and Asian farmers.
A provision in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 repealed that debt relief and replaced it with $3.1 billion for economically distressed farmers. Most of that money has already been doled out, Vilsack said Wednesday.
The other component was the $2.2 billion for farmers who faced any type of discrimination by the USDA before 2021, not just racial. Black and Brown farmers who were already expecting the money had to fill out a new application and explain how they were discriminated against. That led some of them to sue the USDA.
Angie Provost and her husband June, sugar cane farmers in Iberia Parish, helped push for the original legislation as they struggled to get loans in the past due to discrimination from their local USDA offices.
“As [June] took over the farm, there have been numerous hurdles for him to cross that sort of harken back to the days of Jim Crow contract leasing and indentured servitude,” she said.
Provost and her husband are also suing the USDA separately. She said USDA could have made the application process easier and less stressful for them.
Many farmers in Louisiana had trouble with the long application and with gathering proof they had been discriminated against, according to Ebony Woodruff, director of the Agricultural Law Institute for Underrepresented and Underserved communities at Southern University Law Center.
“Remember, a lot of this stuff happened decades ago, and in a place like Louisiana, we have hurricanes coming through, houses are destroyed, people didn't have the paperwork to supplement their applications,” she said.
The USDA said it did make it easier for farmers to get records from the agency to help them get proof.
“However, I don't know one farmer that received their records from every farmer I talked to. They all received, you know, the same email saying, ‘Hey, we couldn't find anything,’” said Woodruff.
Monica Rainge, USDA Deputy Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights said the question of discrimination on the application was left open-ended on purpose.
“I want to be really clear that there was a broad covered basis for this program in terms of the discrimination,” she said. “And so, because this is a non-legal process, this was not an adversarial thing. It was really up to the producer to tell his or her own story about how they experienced discrimination.”
Now that the funding is out, Woodruff said the USDA should keep trying to fix equity issues affecting Black farmers. She wants to see more transparency from the agency and for those who discriminated against loan applicants to be removed from those positions.
“The discrimination that's happening in these local county committee offices is still occurring in 2024,” she said.
She added that they have lobbied the USDA to make its loans process easier for producers. The USDA shortened the application from 29 pages to 13. Rainge said the agency has also invested in more assistance for producers interacting with their local USDA offices.
“This program is a one time payment, and we recognize that further investment will be needed to continue to level the playing field for farmers,” she said.
