On the day we met in early June, Philip “P.J.” Haynie III’s gears had ground him awake just before 4:30 a.m. By the time I got into his truck, he had already spent the morning farming in his head. Rain was coming at 10 a.m.—half a day earlier than previously forecast, but still three hours out—and Haynie was rearranging the day’s chores, toggling between calls to his crews at two farms. In eastern Arkansas, where I’d watched his tractor kick up big clouds of Delta dust as it prepared seedbeds, drainage ditches that could wait yesterday needed to be quickly put in today, before the sky opened. “These big old flat fields don’t drain very well,” he explained to me, and a downpour threatened to drown the young plants. There was a newly planted field of rice—still germinating underground, shoots not yet poking through the soil—that needed spraying, so that the rain could seep the herbicide into the ground.
But at the southern farm, an hour and a half away, the rain threatened the herbicide’s effectiveness. “I need a good hour of drying time so the herbicide dries on the plant before the rain washes it off,” Haynie told me. Between the two farms there were nine men, six machines running, and a Delta sky so wide you can see weather coming miles ahead of time. “I’ve got to watch this weather and stop their spraying before the rain starts down there.”
Haynie—broad-shouldered, quick to smile, with the restless energy of someone perpetually calculating what comes next—is a fifth-generation Black row crop farmer who farms land split between Virginia and Arkansas. The United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, has an admitted history of denying and intentionally delaying loans to Black farmers—driving tens of thousands of them into foreclosure and transferring nearly 16 million acres of their land into white hands. This history renders Haynie a rarity in U.S. agriculture. That he is also one of the few Black farmers who grows rice—a crop requiring expensive irrigation, precision-leveled fields, and specialized equipment—is yet another legacy of USDA racial discrimination and exclusion.
Haynie is careful not to reduce Black farmers to what he calls “woe is me” narratives. Not because he minimizes history—few people speak more bluntly about it—but because there’s more to the story. He spends equal time trying to engage Black kids in farming as he does explaining why so few Black farmers remain. “There are more bald eagles in the lower 48 states than there are Black farmers,” he tells me. He had just finished talking about the federal programs created, enacted, and expanded to save one endangered species from extinction. Haynie is doing all he can to ensure another doesn’t disappear.
“Mother Nature drives our bus,” Haynie is fond of saying. The weather may determine a day’s work, but federal policy has too often seemed determined to separate Black farmers from their land. As Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade wars exacerbate one of the worst agriculture crises in decades, his administration has scrapped USDA programs designed to help remedy that history. Haynie is fighting to ensure Black farmers have a future—by not just surviving, but trying to forge one.
From the Beginning, False Promises
That so few Black farmers remain is neither accidental nor inevitable. Haynie is one of roughly 46,000 Black farmers in the United States today—just 1.4 percent of all American farmers, down from 14 percent in 1920 (Black farmers themselves contend that even the 1.4 percent figure is inflated). There are today just barely 30,000 Black-owned farms, mostly in the Deep South—with more than 11,000 Black farmers in Texas alone—covering roughly three million acres.
The first great post-emancipation betrayal of Black Americans was, of course, over land. At the end of the Civil War, the federal government had its earliest chance—of what would later be many—to make a good-faith attempt at recompense for nearly 250 years of brutal chattel slavery by creating a Black landowning class. Instead, it restored the very white planter class that had waged war against the United States to preserve slavery. Thus, the famous promise of “40 acres and mule” to the formerly enslaved went unfulfilled. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman gave the order, and 400,000 confiscated coastal acres were given to freed families. But within a few months, President Andrew Johnson rescinded Sherman’s order, pardoned former Confederates, and forced Black families off the land.
That remains this country’s most infamous Black land betrayal, but even that was hardly the first. The 1850 Donation Land Act offered parcels of Oregon Territory land to “every white settler,” but excluded Black people. The citizenship requirement for the 1862 Homestead Act—signed days after Congress created the USDA—implicitly excluded both free and enslaved Black folks, whom the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision had declared incapable of citizenship. An estimated 93 million living Americans descend from those original homesteaders. As sociologist Thomas Shapiro has argued, that means roughly one-quarter of the country’s current population “potentially traces its legacy of property ownership, upward mobility, economic stability, class status, and wealth directly to one national policy—a policy that in practice essentially excluded African Americans.”
Between emancipation in 1865 and 1910, against every obstacle the country could construct, Black Americans—nearly all of them formerly enslaved or just one generation removed from enslavement—managed to acquire an estimated 16 to 19 million acres of farmland. But over the twentieth century, roughly 90 percent of it was lost.
Historically, the theft of Black farmers’ land has been both extrajudicial and institutional. Terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and White Caps—racist, masked paramilitary groups who operated in the South—drove Black farmers off their land at gunpoint. So did ordinary white mobs, as in the 1919 Elaine Massacre, when hundreds of Black farmers in Arkansas were killed merely for gathering to organize for fair cotton prices. A decades-old Associated Press investigation found tens of thousands of additional acres stolen through these and other means—land that has since become, in just a few of the many documented cases, “a country club in Virginia, oilfields in Mississippi, a baseball spring-training facility in Florida.”
Institutionally, most Black land was stolen through the ordinary machinations of the government. The USDA’s discrimination against Black farmers is among the best documented examples of racial discrimination in American history. Government reports dating back to 1965, including by the USDA itself, document how the agency’s racist loan denials and intentional delays, discriminatory debt collection, foreclosures, and other practices stripped Black farmers of their land. No policy would facilitate that discrimination more than the New Deal decision to leave the administration of federal farm programs in local hands.
In exchange for supporting Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s programs, Southern Democrats demanded that the agency’s loans, subsidies, and modernization funds remain under local control. The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act gave them what they wanted in the form of county committees—elected panels of white landowners, often literal heirs of the Confederate planter class, who decided how USDA funds were steered across the Jim Crow South. Thomas W. Mitchell, a 2020 MacArthur fellow and property law scholar at Boston College, noted they were charged with making “decisions that determine whether a farmer will be successful or unsuccessful.”
“And perhaps not surprisingly, you have a certain percentage of these farmers who are racist,” he told me, “and they do whatever they can to suppress Black farmers’ ability to succeed.”
“They would delay loans for Black farmers and wouldn’t approve them until June,” Haynie told me. “When June comes around, it’s too late to plant corn. But because you put it on your crop budget, you have to plant corn. When the neighbors who planted in April are yielding 200 bushels, yours is only yielding 100. And at 100 bushels, you can’t repay your loan.”
The technological advances that followed World War II would only exacerbate the divide. Dewayne Goldmon, the USDA’s senior adviser for racial equity under the Biden administration and a third-generation Black Arkansas farmer, identifies this as one of the “big government winks and nods that allowed the system to manifest itself.”
“When farming shifted from manpower to machines that cost more but were more efficient, you had to have the up-front capital to acquire those machines, and if you didn’t, your fallback position was to keep doing it the way Daddy and Granddaddy did it—and not being able to follow the modern trends of agriculture,” Goldmon told me. “Knowing what to do on a farm and having the resources to do it are two totally different things, and that’s where discrimination can really play an unfair role.”
The “prevailing practice” in local USDA offices—including the arm that provides loans, disaster assistance, and other forms of aid to farmers—was to “follow local patterns of racial segregation and discrimination in providing assistance paid for by Federal funds,” according to a 1965 government study. “Equal Opportunity in Farm Programs,” a Great Society–era report, was the first to formally document the racism Black farmers had always known. It changed almost nothing.
Finally, a Little Progress—and Immediate Backlash
More than three decades later, in a 1998 report, the USDA’s own advisory commission report noted the “blatant discrimination” Black farmers were subjected to; another from the same era cited “years of bias, hostility, greed, ruthlessness, rudeness, and indifference not only by USDA employees, but also by the local county committees.” That was the same year that P.J., who was about to graduate from college, and his father had a local USDA employee pull a gun on them.
Finally, some hope: Pigford v. Glickman was a landmark 1999 class-action lawsuit in which Black farmers were found, as a class, to have endured decades of USDA discrimination so systematic that a federal court estimated it to be worth at least $2.25 billion in restitution. Even the judge approving the settlement acknowledged that the story began over 100 years before the lawsuit. Instead of civil rights law or legal citations, his ruling opened with the words, “Forty acres and a mule.” The settlement could not possibly “undo all that has been done,” he wrote, but was merely “a good first step” toward ending the discrimination “visited on African American farmers since Reconstruction.”
The optimism was short-lived. To enumerate everything that went wrong with Pigford is an article in itself (and is one I’ve written before). Of roughly 22,700 claimants, fewer than 400 ever received any debt relief. Despite Black farmers’ class win, “the Justice Department opposed blanket mediation, arguing that each case had to be investigated separately,” according to the Congressional Research Service. In effect, Black farmers had to individually relitigate and again prove their victimization to collect. The George W. Bush–era Justice Department spent $12 million and 56,000 attorneys’ billable hours fighting farmers’ claims. In 2010, President Barack Obama and Congress authorized another $1.25 billion in debt cancellation, dubbed Pigford II, to make up for those errors, but few Black farmers were made whole. A federal appeals court wrote that class counsel’s incompetence in the 1999 Pigford case had caused Black farmers to suffer a “double betrayal: first by the Department and then by their own lawyers.” Counsel would ultimately collect more than $100 million across two settlements, despite nearly all of their clients getting nothing.
But organizing never stopped. Lawrence Lucas, president emeritus of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, and Lloyd Wright, who had led the USDA’s Civil Rights Office under both Bill Clinton and Obama, were among a coalition of Black farmer advocates who spent years building the legal and political groundwork for more. In 2019, that coalition sent an open letter to presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren that helped push the issue onto the national agenda. “We want something very simple, something that white farmers in this country have enjoyed for more than a century,” the letter stated. “We want a department that works for us, not against us.” The following year, New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker introduced the 2020 Justice for Black Farmers Act. It was the murder of George Floyd, and the brief window for anti-racist policymaking that followed, that pushed the federal government to at last take action. In 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation to provide roughly $4 billion in debt cancellation for Black and other “socially disadvantaged” farmers.
The amount was, in reality, modest. The bitter irony of the legislation was that it applied only to farmers with USDA loans, which few Black farmers—Wright estimated less than 8 percent—had received, precisely because of the USDA’s racist lending history. It did not mandate removal of staff in the USDA’s local agency offices, where officials “regularly engage in many types of discriminatory conduct,” according to the Committee on Government Operations report. Nor did it promise to return any of the millions of acres of land stolen. Mitchell, the property law expert, co-wrote a 2022 study published in the American Economic Association’s AEA Papers and Proceedings journal, with economists Dania V. Francis and Darrick Hamilton, along with two other experts, that conservatively valued the land lost by Black farmers between 1920 and 1997 at $326 billion.
“Our estimate is conservative for a couple of reasons. It only accounts for land lost between 1920 and 1997. There was land lost before 1920, and land lost after 1997. And our research team made decisions to use conservative assumptions about compounding interest,” Mitchell told me. “But what we don’t do in that study is talk about the additional consequences of losing that land—how it could’ve been leveraged to generate further economic mobility, to finance children’s higher education. All we did was look at how the land would’ve appreciated over time. We didn’t do a deeper dive on how that landownership could’ve generated all this other wealth.”
And still, America First Legal—the right-wing legal foundation co-founded by extremist Trump aide Stephen Miller, who is not a lawyer—quickly sued to stop it. AFL, which had announced its launch less than a month before, boasted it was “led by senior members of the Trump Administration,” a list that included ex-Trump officials Mark Meadows, Matthew Whitaker, and Gene Hamilton (Russell Vought, current director of the Office of Management and Budget, was also on the list). The suit’s arguments were as cynical as its origins—for example, that the “socially disadvantaged” category should comprise various groups that were once discriminated against, “including Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews, and eastern Europeans,” and that the lead plaintiff had “approximately 2 percent African-American ancestry.”
After the AFL lawsuit, other conservative legal groups helped flood the zone, filing at least nine lawsuits, in nine different federal court districts, over less than 90 days; five of these were by Pacific Legal Foundation alone. Banks joined in, too, openly arguing debt cancellation would cost them interest they planned to collect on loans made possible by a century of racist lending. In a letter to Biden USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, three banking groups suggested they might be less “incentivized” to lend to “socially disadvantaged” farmers in the future, a fairly brazen admission, considering they had mostly refused to lend to them at all.
Black farmers, whose history with both the USDA and the U.S. government had given them countless reasons to be skeptical, blamed not only the litigants and their conservative backers but also USDA head Vilsack—who had served in the same role during Obama’s term—for not moving faster. Many felt that Pigford II had failed due to his indifference. An investigation by The Counter, a former news site that focused on the politics of food, found the USDA was over six times more likely to foreclose on a Black farm than on a white farm from 2006 to 2016, a period when the agency was mostly under Vilsack’s watch (from 2009 onward). Biden had signed off on debt relief in March, and advocates such as Wright, a consultant to Vilsack during the Obama years, had pushed for checks to go out immediately. “They could have done it within weeks,” he told The Guardian in August 2021. “They were aware some angry people were trying to stop it. I think we’ll get the debt relief around the same time we get the 40 acres and a mule.”
As lawsuits from white farmers mounted, Democrats, led by Booker, rewrote the program, folding it into the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and purging any references to race. The new legislation split relief into two funds: $2.2 billion to farmers who had experienced discrimination by the USDA, and $3.1 billion in relief for “financially distressed” farmers of any race. The discrimination fund reached Black farmers, who made up roughly 90 percent of recipients. But of the nearly 48,000 who received assistance from the race-neutral distressed fund pool, fewer than 500 were Black. White farmers received 64 percent of payments.
Not to mention the Black farmers who were rejected. Igalious “Ike” Mills, a third-generation Black farmer who farms with his three brothers in East Texas, showed me the USDA rejection letter he received for his family’s discrimination claims. Just as with Pigford, farmers who were denied had no right to appeal.
“We went through that process and laid out that information in that application, and we got not one penny,” Mills told me. “And we’ve never heard anything back in regards to trying to find out more about it, because I understand it was one and done.”
Today, under the Trump administration’s anti-anti-racist agenda, the tentative efforts the USDA was making have been dismantled altogether (though a recent court order pushed back, ruling that the administration must restore $127 million in grants to Black and other underrepresented farmers). In July 2025, the Trump USDA announced it would eliminate all programs aimed at farmers defined as “socially disadvantaged”—a category established in the 1990 Farm Bill for groups that had faced discrimination, including Black Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, Asian Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, and Pacific Islanders—and even declared it would scrap the term itself. Earlier that summer, a USDA press release described USDA programs aimed at remedying racial injustice as “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
But the justification the administration offered was legally threadbare. The rule change cites Strickland v. USDA, a 2024 lawsuit in which white farmers, represented by both the Southeastern Legal Foundation and Mountain States Legal Foundation, sued over disaster relief programs aimed at socially disadvantaged groups. Both organizations also partnered in Miller’s scheme to end debt relief.
A Texas federal court issued a preliminary injunction, which the Biden administration didn’t appeal. The Trump USDA claims that the failure to appeal is “clearly an uncontroverted admission that it had acted illegally,” using that reasoning to justify torching programs the Strickland case had zero to do with. In January 2026, Booker—who actually is an attorney—and other signatories noted in a letter that there had been no public input, and that the rule was not “necessitated by Strickland v. USDA,” since the case’s outcome remains undecided, and the new USDA rule cuts programs the lawsuit never touched. “A race-neutral approach,” they wrote, “is not race-blind in outcome.”
The “socially disadvantaged” designation remains a provision in federal law, but the Federal Register final rule takes pains to note—in language that feels particularly Miller-esque—that “past discrimination has been sufficiently addressed,” and that any other policies aimed at equality “are no longer necessary or legally justified.”
“Trump has relentlessly attacked Black farmers since the day he took office,” Senator Booker wrote me in a statement when I asked his thoughts on that declaration. “USDA has a long, well-documented history of intentionally discriminating against Black farmers, and the Trump administration’s assertion that past USDA discrimination has been sufficiently addressed is a lie. Trump has canceled programs and policies that support Black farmers at a moment when many of them are struggling to stay on their land, and the consequences of these harmful actions will be felt for generations to come.”
Ohio Democratic Representative Shontel Brown, who is the vice ranking member on the House Committee on Agriculture, issued a letter at the time indicting the move as part of “Trump’s resegregation agenda.”
Agriculture “Secretary [Brooke] Rollins and Trump are claiming that they’re restoring these ‘merit-based programs,’ but agriculture has never really operated on a level playing field,” she told me. “Ignoring barriers does not eliminate them.”
Even under Biden, an NPR investigation found that in 2022, just 36 percent of Black farmers were approved for USDA direct loans, compared with 72 percent of white farmers. In 2021, less than 10 percent of white farmers were rejected for USDA loans, while 42 percent of Black farmer applicants—the highest of any racial-ethnic group—were. The Trump administration’s anti-DEI hysteria is extreme, but this administration is just the latest contributor to an American story in which Black farmers are always denied resources to build because of racism.
The bipartisan nature of that failure has been heartbreaking for Black farmers and their advocates. “I don’t think they have abandoned the cause, but they just don’t have any faith in the leadership,” Lucas told me. “They were let down by Democratic leadership, and they certainly don’t have faith in the Republican administration that we have today. So, I would say Black rural America is disappointed—not only with the past administration and what it didn’t do when it had an opportunity to correct the problem, but now with a new administration that cares even less.”
Violence, Rip-Offs, and a Failed Marriage
In spite of all the obstacles placed in his way, Robert Haynie, P.J.’s great-great-grandfather, nourished a land-longing. Today, 60 of the acres P.J. farms are from Robert’s original tract on the Virginia peninsula known as the Northern Neck, where Robert Haynie was born enslaved in 1823, emancipated, and became the first freedman to buy land in the county, in 1867, according to the family. He was not alone. W.E.B. Du Bois estimated that Black farmers managed to acquire three million acres by 1875, eight million acres by 1890, and 12 million acres by 1900.
P.J.’s father—christened Philip, like his own father, but nicknamed “Rickey” to avoid confusion—graduated from what is today Virginia State University in 1976. That was the same year that Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz joked that Black people want only three things: “First, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.” The elder Haynie got a USDA loan because the state director happened to be Black. “We called him, and he called and made sure they followed the rules and regulations,” Haynie told me.
Once the director left the agency a couple of years later, he would never receive another loan. He’d used the ones he had to ambitiously expand the family’s farm throughout the early 1980s—adding hundreds of acres at a time—and faced violent racist attacks from neighboring white farmers. “We had some buildings that were set on fire, some livestock that was burnt up, some equipment that was shot up,” Haynie told me. “I wasn’t supposed to have more land and bigger equipment. So, as a result, this was the action they took to try to hurt me and derail me.”
There was also attempted financial sabotage by the USDA—loan denials, liens on his property, a bankruptcy declaration. In old footage from a 1997 Congressional Black Caucus forum on USDA loan discrimination, Haynie testifies that his loan has been incurring interest at a rate of $352 a day for 10 years. “All of the farmers around me have had debt write-downs and,” he states. “All of the white farmers have been allowed to do debt restructuring and to go on with their lives. I feel like the system has economically castrated me.” The debt eventually ballooned to more than $3.6 million.
“When a farmer, particularly a Black farmer, stays in their prescribed lane—smaller acres, older equipment, struggling—they don’t have too many problems,” Goldmon told me. “But when you elect to modernize your equipment, expand acres, and that’s when you start facing more headwinds. And there’s a strong historical basis for that statement.”
Rickey opted out of Pigford, because the limited damages for individual farmers was $50,000, far less than the USDA claimed he owed. The law firm of Steptoe & Johnson took up his case pro bono and won. He noted that his legal fees totaled $1,000,000—an impossible amount for most farmers. Incredibly, he said, the USDA stipulated in its settlement that he could never borrow money from the agency again.
“I got some relief, but it’s what you can’t get back,” Rickey told me. “And the stress and the strain that it puts on relationships. That financial stress is what basically led to my divorce from the mother of my children. It was just too much, she couldn’t bear it.”
P.J. Haynie frequently notes that his grandfather sold corn for $4 a bushel, his father sold corn for $4 a bushel, and he, too, sells corn for $4 a bushel—but his combine cost $700,000 instead of $60,000. The math only changes when you stop selling the raw commodity and start selling the end product it becomes. “There’s more money in a two-pound bag of wheat flour than in a 60-pound bushel of wheat I’d sell as a farmer,” Haynie said.
In 2021, Haynie co-purchased a commercial Arkansas rice processing facility, becoming one of the few Black owners of a rice mill in the United States. It is the kind of achievement that should be unremarkable but is extraordinary precisely because the USDA has prevented so many Black farmers from accessing it.
The next year, P.J. joined the USDA’s Equity Commission, one of the agency’s efforts that had only just begun to address 160 years of documented discrimination. Under Trump, the commission has since been rendered moot. Also cut was the $80 million climate-smart agriculture grant won by the National Black Growers Council, which P.J. Haynie co-founded and previously chaired. It would have helped rice farmers switch to more sustainable irrigation practices.
Haynie and other Black farmers were also side casualties of another Trumpian assault on government: the dismantling of USAID by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. USAID had long been a reliable buyer of surplus U.S. rice, but the fact that it could no longer do so contributed to a glut that sent rice prices into free fall. As well, USDA staff was gutted by DOGE, which pushed out about 20 percent of its workforce, forcing office closures and program cancellations. Riceland, the country’s largest rice miller, announced in June that it is temporarily shuttering grain-drying facilities and weighing layoffs. Arkansas, where rice is the signature crop, is projected to plant its smallest crop in five decades this year—down as much as 40 percent from historical averages. Growers, including Haynie, are projected to lose some $200 per acre this year.
“When they dismantled USAID, and then you couple that with a large crop of rice that farmers produced over the last couple of years, it’s a snowball effect that’s gotten bigger,” P.J. told me. “Now you’ve got a bunch of rice that USAID would normally take out of the supply pipeline just sitting in farmers’ bins. In other countries, rice farmers are being subsidized to produce rice that we import while U.S. rice farmers are hurting.”
A Crisis Affecting All
The farming crisis didn’t begin on Trump’s watch. Commodity prices were already dropping, even as fertilizer, seed, and fuel costs remained high. But Trump’s tariffs and trade disputes have turned an agricultural downturn into an economic catastrophe. The USDA itself projects net farm income nationally will drop to $153.4 billion this calendar year, down $4.1 billion from 2025 after inflation; farm debt, conversely, will hit a record high of $624.7 billion. Perhaps nowhere is the pain felt more acutely than Arkansas, where agriculture is the state’s biggest industry, contributing $24 billion annually to its economy, and rice its most important crop. Farm bankruptcies in Arkansas more than doubled in 2025 over the year prior, giving the state the highest number of Chapter 12 filings in the country (that is, the Chapter 11 equivalent for farmers and fishermen), and the most it has registered in the current century.
It was against this backdrop that hundreds of Arkansas farmers gathered in September last year with state representatives to pray, literally—heads bowed, hands folded—for economic relief. Video of the meeting, which went viral across social media, featured an anchor voice-over solemnly noting that “until the federal government steps in to save them, farmers have no one to turn to but God.” A white farmer named Chris King spoke directly to the president. “Mr. Trump, you looked at me sir, and you said, ‘I love you,’” King declared into a passed-around microphone. “Mr. Trump, I need to see the fruit of your love.”
They had voted for this man and his policies three times. Arkansas, one the country’s most rural states, has only gotten redder since Trump first ran in 2016. (Its Blackest counties remain blue.) That’s actually true in nearly 444 U.S. counties the USDA labels “farming-dependent.” Trump won 433 of them in 2024, with more than 100 giving him at least 80 percent of their votes. Now they were pleading for federal intervention to save them from the consequences of the government they voted in.
The irony was not merely that white farmers—who had largely opposed debt relief for Black farmers despite decades of well-documented, court-acknowledged discrimination—were openly demanding a check in their own time of need. It was also that the fecklessness of Trump’s tariff strategy had been made apparent in his first term, when the resulting trade wars caused more than a $27 billion drop off in agricultural exports in 2018 through 2019. “The Trump administration responded not by changing its trade policies,” the National Foundation for American Policy would dryly note in a report, “but by shoring up the president’s political support from farmers.”
The Market Facilitation Program, the euphemism the administration used for its trade policy bailout, allotted $12 billion in aid the first year. Out of the first $8 billion that was distributed where the race of the farmer was identifiable, more than 99 percent went to white farmers; similarly, a second $16 billion payment that followed overwhelmingly benefited white farmers. As well, the Trump administration’s 2020 Coronavirus Food Assistance Program provided just 0.1 percent of its payments to Black farmers. In total, along with a third year of trade bailout payments, ad hoc subsidies to farmers hit close to $46.5 billion in 2020. That’s nearly four times the $12 billion 2009 auto bailout, and even more than the $37.4 billion federal government spent in 2020 maintaining the nuclear arsenal.
Perhaps more notably, it is almost $46 billion more than the mere $210 million collective total that Black farmers were estimated to owe the USDA during Biden’s administration.
These billions moved through the Commodity Credit Corporation, or CCC, a USDA discretionary account that lets the agriculture secretary use funds without needing a cosign by Congress. It is, ironically, the same account that Black farmer advocates—specifically Lawrence Lucas and Lloyd Wright—had begged Vilsack to use when lawsuits by Stephen Miller and white farmers stalled Black farmer debt relief. Vilsack had refused, but here was Trump using it without hesitation or scrutiny. Even as the payments hit record levels in the third year without ever having been appropriated by Congress, Politico noted the lawmakers took “a largely hands-off approach, letting the department decide who gets the money and how much.”
There was reason for public concern around the size, speed, and lack of oversight of the payments, Neil Hamilton, emeritus professor at Drake University’s Agricultural Law Center, told Politico. “It’s just, ‘Here’s your check.’”
Interestingly, there was not a peep over these payouts from Representative Sam Graves, the Missouri Republican who called Black farmer debt relief “wrong and un-American” on social media days before it was even signed back in 2021—though, as Mother Jones has noted, Graves’s family farm has taken in nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in USDA subsidies. Nor from Pennsylvania GOP Representative Glenn Thompson, who wrote that he was “deeply concerned with the lack of transparency” on who would qualify for Biden’s 2022 funding through a congressional appropriation but expressed no qualms when Trump moved $46 billion in the other direction, most of it through an unappropriated account.
The largest payments flow to growers of commodity crops—corn, cotton, rice, soybeans—on land with established “base acres,” a designation that relies on decades of USDA-financed production history. Black farmers were systematically excluded from the lending programs that would have allowed them to build that history.
“Farm subsidies are really concentrated to the largest and wealthiest farms that really don’t need the help,” Anne Schechinger, a senior director at the Environmental Working Group who has tracked federal farm payments for over a decade, told me. “People who are smaller and growing different crops and who might actually need the support are not the ones getting the majority of this money.”
All these years later, the inequality still lives in Census data. Just 1,736 Black farmers grew corn and soybeans per the 2022 Census of Agriculture, and only 150 grew cotton. Roughly 70 percent raised livestock while another 10 percent grew fruits and vegetables, which get none of the subsidy price guarantees. Just 1,590 Black farmers operate farms larger than 500 acres. The average Black farm today is just 150 acres, less than one-third the national average of 463 acres, and more than half of Black-owned farms are under 50 acres. Since subsidy payments are also tied to acreage, even the relatively few Black farmers who grow covered commodities receive smaller payments than their white neighbors.
“Historically, because Black farmers haven’t grown rice and haven’t had those base-acre allocations, they miss out on those payments,” P.J. Haynie told me. “The recent Farmer Bridge Assistance Program paid $132 an acre for rice farmers versus $30 for soybean farmers. Because Black farmers didn’t get their loans on time—and had to make it with half the amount of loans the county committee system gave them—we didn’t have the money to risk growing those more expensive crops. That’s why we haven’t historically grown them.”
Wright has watched this dynamic play out for four decades. “The base acres system that was set up in the ’80s—the yields associated with it are higher for white farmers on the same soils,” he told me. “So they’re going to get a bigger check. The bailouts might hurt Black farmers more than the tariffs have. Because if at the end of the day one group has more money than the other, they can survive—and buy out the folks who didn’t get any money. If neither of them received money, we’d all be equal and we could compete. But we can’t compete if one gets money and the other doesn’t.”
Trump’s $12 billion farmer bailout in February 2026, this time dubbed the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, again went through the CCC. The fund had to be replenished through an act of Congress. Again, there was little to no outcry.
White farmers insisted they don’t want handouts, ever. An Iowa farmer’s Wall Street Journal op-ed from late last year was headlined, “AMERICAN FARMERS WANT FAIR TRADE, NOT HANDOUTS.” “They won’t like it,” John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, told Wisconsin Public Radio last fall, “but it’s better than losing the farm.”
“Once you send farmers billions of dollars from a program, it’s hard to get rid of that,” Schechinger told me. “Every time there’s a program added, it’s never like one is really taken away.”
In 2019, a study from the University of Missouri suggested that soybean farmers were reimbursed more than double for their losses by Trump subsidies. In a political culture obsessed with the idea that even the most minimal government aid will have corrosive effects when the recipients are Black, it seems no one worried whether these payments might foster dependency among white farmers. And yet, a 2019 survey by Purdue University found that 58 percent of farmers said “they expect another MFP [Market Facilitation Program] payment to be made to U.S. farmers for the 2020 crop year.” The word “handout” seems to apply based only on who’s doing the receiving.
Some farmers, Schechinger said, may have voted for Trump specifically because of those payments, calculating that other rounds would follow. “That would make sense for these corn and soybean mega farms,” she said. “They were voting for this administration in order to get more of these subsidies.” And I suppose credit where it’s due. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans deliver for their people.
A staggering 70 percent of farmers said they cannot afford the full cost of fertilizer to meet their needs this year, according to an April study by the American Farm Bureau Federation. Wright, a soybean farmer, told me he is getting out of farming, renting his land. ”Farmers are all going to be damaged by this,” he told me. “But right now, Trump is trying to convince his supporters that he’s already given too much to Black people.”
“We as farmers, we’re all hurting,” P.J. Haynie said. “But because of the resources some of our neighbors have, and because their land is paid for and has more equity, they have more options in financing and banking.” Black farmers, who have never had those options, have never had a cushion to fall back on.
