What are some of the conditions of black farmland access in the southeastern US?
Black farmland ownership in the US peaked in 1910 at 15 million acres, and today has declined to less than 3 million acres owned (Rainge, 5). Despite land ownership decline, black producers are still farming: of the 2,042,220 farms in the US today, 35,470 have Black producers (1,973,006 have white producers) (USDA, 2017). Many farmers nationwide rent the land they farm, including many Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers, a designation which includes farmers of color, beginning farmers, female farmers, and veterans. Renting agricultural land can be expensive and lead to instability as land is not secure.
“Tenants have a less secure position, in that they have to negotiate a lease on a regular basis, comply with the owners’ demands, typically have little say about the future of the land, and do not build wealth long-term from the land.” (Horst and Marion, 2018)
This research set out to investigate land access for Black Farmers in the southeast, “Southern Belt” or “Black Belt,” of the United States. The name Black Belt is the official agricultural region designation for the rich, black soil in the middle of Alabama. This research compares Black and White farmers’ farmland conditions in the southeast US.
Where are black farmers in the southeast?
Data Exploration & Visualization
All static maps are in the USA Lambert Conformal Conic Projection, and data come from United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), from the 2017 Census of Agriculture. Map data, such as the county and state borders, are from ESRI.
What are cropland rents in these areas?
“The discriminatory implementation of farm policy over previous decades has meant lasting negative economic implications for black farmers, particularly those living in the rural South. The effects are still seen today, as evidenced by the fact that the average farm income for all full-time and part-time farms in 2017 was $10,276 for white-operated farms, while the average income for all black-operated farms was just $795.” (Castro and Willingham, 2019)
Analysis
I used statistical tools in ArcMap to examine the situation and look for significant high-occurrence and low-occurrence clusters of each variable using Local Moran’s I. This tool compares a county to it’s neighbors, to see if it is significantly different. I could then explore other summary statistics in those clustered areas.
