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Black Farmers Finally Got Something. Then They Took It Back

Painting by Odes Roberts, Farmers.
Digital Print Art By Odes Roberts , Farmers

"This is an administration that wants a white-only America."

That's not a hot take. That's John Boyd Jr. president of the National Black Farmers Association, 43 years in this fight after watching the USDA cancel a $300 million land-buying program specifically designed to help Black farmers build ownership. When the man who has spent four decades on the front lines says that's the worst Black hate he's ever seen in his face, no disguise we should probably listen.


Here's What They Don't Want You to Know About the Black Farmers


This didn't start in 2025. The USDA has been shutting Black farmers out since the 1930s. Denied loans. Denied technical assistance. Denied the same access white farmers received by default. Over the last century, Black farmers lost an estimated 16 million acres. The National Black Farmers Association has put the value of that land loss at $326 billion.


Let that sit.


For nearly 100 years, the government said: not for you. And then, finally actually finally something changed.


The Inflation Reduction Act included a $2.2 billion Discrimination Financial Assistance Program. Real money. Payments to 43,000 farmers who experienced documented racial discrimination in USDA lending before 2021. Average award: $82,000. Some as high as $500,000. The first reparative action the USDA had ever taken in its entire history.


That was 2022.


What Trump Did Program by Program


Here are the receipts. This is not opinion. This is the list.


July 2025 — Section 2501 Program eliminated. In place since the 1990 Farm Bill. Provided outreach and technical assistance to Black farmers and farmers of color. USDA wiped the "socially disadvantaged" designation entirely. Gone.


Mid-2025 — $400 million minority-owned food business program. Shut down.


July 2025 — USDA filed a rule making every grant and loan program race-neutral.

Sounds fair. Except the entire reason race-conscious programs existed was to correct 100 years of race-based harm. You don't fix targeted discrimination with colorblindness.


March 2026 — The $300 million Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program canceled. Specifically designed to help underserved farmers buy land. Gone.


Also canceled: 145 specific grant awards totaling nearly $150 million in community projects and food hubs.


Also canceled: The $2.2 billion discrimination relief program itself — the one that already paid out. Clawed back.


That's not a budget cut. That's a reversal of everything.


Old weathered black man hand holding carrots, turnips, and beets with dirt
Rooted Hands

The People Behind the Numbers


Right now, 190 Black farmers are facing foreclosure. Not a metaphor. Not a projection. One hundred and ninety people who could lose their land while this administration dismantles every program that existed to help them keep it.


John Boyd Jr. went to Washington to fight for them. His association asked to attend a White House event for farmers. They were turned away.


Boyd's response: "Why can't we be at the table?"


Twenty states and DC have sued the USDA. Black and Indigenous farmers are fighting in court to defend what's left of the $4 billion in debt relief that was promised and then canceled. The 5th Circuit let Black farmers intervene meaning they had to go fight for a seat at a legal table just to protect something they were already owed.


Boyd has been doing this for 43 years. Earlier this year, he said: "This is the worst I've seen 43 years of Black hate in your face."


He's not being dramatic. He's telling the truth.


Painting by Odes Roberts. Our Backbone.
Digital Print Art By Odes Roberts , Our Backbone

This Is Personal


As a granddaughter of a sharecropper, this hits hard for me.


My grandparents, my grandfather, my ancestors they worked the ground. Hands in the soil. And I come from descendants of slaves who understood something that got passed down deliberately: you need to know how to take care of the land. So you'll always know how to eat. How to be. How to just live.


That knowledge wasn't casual. It was survival. It was the thing they made sure their children carried.


So when I see Black farmers being pushed off their land like they don't mean anything like their work, their legacy, their ownership doesn't count it doesn't just make me upset. It makes me want to dig in and understand what is really going on. What is the actual agenda behind not allowing Black farmers to do what white farmers do?


Because we have watched this for years. The struggle to hang on. The constant fight just to stay in place. And now we're watching programs designed to close a 100-year gap get stripped away, one by one, while the people who built this country's agricultural foundation are being locked out of a White House farmers event.


Here's what I know for certain: Black people need to support Black farmers. Not as a feel-good slogan. As a real commitment.


Once the land is gone, it's gone forever. We cannot allow other people to come in and take what our ancestors worked with their bare hands to make fruitful. This land carries memory. It carries blood. It carries the proof that we were here and we built something.


The least we can do is fight to keep it.


Sources

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