For John Boyd, Jr., a farmer and civil rights activist, the first months of the Trump administration have felt like déjà vu of the worst kind.
“It’s just like going back in time,” Boyd, founder of the National Black Farmers Association, told The Independent.
Boyd is a fourth-generation farmer who raises corn, soybeans, wheat, and livestock in Virginia. He has spent years lobbying Congress and fighting in the courts to correct the federal government’s well-documented, longstanding exclusion of Black farmers from loans, subsidies, and other forms of support.
“He's totally dismantled the work I've been doing for the last 40 years,” Boyd said of Trump. “I don’t think people understand the magnitude.”
Through changes large and small, the Trump administration looks set to drastically alter the direction of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), a federal agency that has in recent years dispersed billions trying to make up for a long legacy of racial discrimination in farming.
And it couldn’t come at a worse time: Black farm ownership has been declining for decades. Advocates warn a community whose agricultural labor helped build the United States economy may now no longer have a future in it.
“We will neither commemorate nor celebrate our immutable characteristics, neither among ourselves nor among Americans at large,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said last month in her opening speech to staffers. “We will instead celebrate the things that make us American: merit, faith, and liberty first among them. All Americans deserve equal dignity, and at this Department they will receive it.”
So far, her tenure has been one of slash-and-burn changes.
After taking office, the Trump administration ordered a freeze on trillions of dollars in federal funding, including on numerous Biden-era climate and environmental justice programs, and has sought to cancel all government spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Many of those moves are now locked in court battles.
At the USDA, where roughly 2,000 people have been fired as part of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency Program, these orders have reportedly sent officials searching one-by-one through grants for keywords like “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “environmental justice.”
Rollins has also put large portions of approved Biden-era spending under the Inflation Reduction Act on hold. Though some funding has been released, the secretary is combing through USDA spending to “ensure that programs are focused on supporting farmers and ranchers” and not, as she put it, “far-left climate programs.”
These reviews have created a climate of uncertainty for Black farmers.
The agency suspended then reinstated a scholarship program aiming to connect Black students from underserved, rural areas, to agricultural education at historically Black colleges and universities, institutions Trump pushed to fund during his previous administration. The USDA has also cut funding meant to increase diversity in various agricultural sectors, part of at least $132 million in DOGE-era rollbacks at the agency.
Ray Williams, of the Seattle-area non-profit Black Farmers Collective, has already felt the impact of these orders. His organization operates two community and teaching farms, which grow food for local organizations serving the hungry in Seattle and the surrounding King County. He was counting on continued access to a five-year, $150,000 set of funding to train and support small-scale farmers, who typically can’t or struggle to qualify for federal support.
“That program is sort of on hold until we figure out what’s going on,” he told The Independent, adding that other farmers he knows have been impacted “severely.”
Another effort, an attempt to build a food hub connecting growers to hunger-relief organizations in South Seattle, is also on pause, pending the fate of food-related funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Boyd, the Virginia activist, is among the thousands of Black farmers waiting for a portion of the roughly $10 billion in economic relief payments approved under the 2024 American Relief Act, in his case about $50,000. He says that farmers from all groups, many of whom voted for Trump, are feeling the pain. As the chaos in Washington continues, the spring planting season is arriving fast.
“He came right into office and really cast a web of doubt amongst the very people that voted him in,” Boyd said. “If you ride through rural America, they have all these Trump signs.”
Todd Western, who grows corn and soybeans on 160 acres in Iowa and helps organize the Iowa Farmers of Color conference, said the federal funding pause came at a particularly bad time. Last year saw poor yields across the industry, and the new administration came into power this January during the crucial months when farmers count on accessing tens of thousands of federal dollars each to help buy seed and other key inputs. His family’s operation, Western Family Farms, saw their payments delayed.
“When he shut down those payments, that was like a two-week delay into doing things,” Western told The Independent. “That sends a scare through any farmer.”
Western points to other changes impacting white and Black farmers alike, including Trump’s tariffs on Canada, which supplies key agricultural inputs like potash for fertilizer.
These broad-based impacts, according to Western, might stop the White House from going too far. He hopes some of the administration’s funding pauses are a “scare tactic” and that bedrock support for farmers won’t be hit.
“In some ways because we’re part of a broader group, he can’t afford to piss off and offend the entire community of farmers,” Western added. “That avails us of some protection. I don’t like saying that. I don’t like to be separated out of the herd like that. We’re all part of a big community.”
The administration may be turning away from race-conscious policymaking, but activists have pursued court challenges to get what they say is due to Black farmers nonetheless.
Boyd is part of a lawsuit, currently at the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing the Biden administration wrongly overrode a $5 billion commitment in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act for debt relief to Black farmers to make up for past USDA discrimination. White farmers challenged the Rescue Plan provision, leading to the original offer being replaced with billions in relief for a more open-ended group of “economically distressed” growers.
Another suit seeks similar relief. At the Sixth Circuit, a group of farmers argue they were wrongly left out of billions in assistance in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, meant for Black farmers who were victims of pre-2021 historic discrimination, arguing past discrimination locked heirs to farms out of reaping the benefits of their families’ labor.
The suits, according to Thomas Burrell, president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, are an attempt to correct decades of discrimination that have pushed the Black farmer towards non-existence in America.
“In 1910 African-Americans had acquired over 20 million acres of land,” he said. “Today, we own less than 5 million acres. Federal courts and Congress have acknowledged, the source of this deprivation of property is directly the result of discriminatory behavior at the USDA.”
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A $1 billion, 1999 settlement in a case between Black farmers and the USDA identified over 22,000 people who had faced discrimination, one of the largest civil rights class-action settlements in U.S. history. It marked one of the most direct financial acknowledgements of the sordid history of the treatment of Black farmers in America, which began with slavery, and in the years since has included decades of predatory land agreements and racist violence, culminating in the 20th century Great Migration of African-Americans out of agricultural communities in the South to the industrial cities of the rest of the country.
Now, less than two percent of farmers in America are Black, an under-representation of about seven times given African-Americans’ share of the U.S. population.
Western, the Iowa farmer, is one of 59 Black farmers among the 86,000 total agriculturalists in his state. He said it’s important to remember this minority-within-a-minority status, and the history that created it, as the new administration seeks to eliminate programs that explicitly assist Black farmers.
“We work the land like any other farmer with our blood, sweat and tears,” he said, adding, “The only reason there are 59 now is because of the racial prejudice practices the USDA did and admitted to.”
Even with an administration that’s more open to talking about race, being a Black farmer was never easy. Producers battle state and federal bureaucracy and a financially risky industry.
Syrita Jenkins, a North Carolina poultry farmer, took out nearly $800,000 in USDA-backed loans to get a chicken farm up and running. After an agreement to work with a major producer was put on hold over equipment issues, she’s watched as Biden-era money meant for economically distressed farmers like her go straight to paying off her loan, while her farm sits idle.
She said that when dealing with the farm bureaucracy, there’s “no budging,” a situation made worse by what she sees as a long-time indifference to Black farmers at USDA. Jenkins said she’s watched as her father, and now her own operation, has been met with apathy and “cookie cutter” responses. She sold her house to help pay down the principle.
“We don’t get the equal opportunities that are out there,” she said.
Andrea Haritos, of Delaware’s Huck and Buck Farm, told The Independent that being proactive about applying for funding has kept her from facing the same difficulties as some other Black farmers, but she wants to see others like her succeed.
“I want those same things to happen for other individuals,” she said.
Haritos, who also works in real estate, said owning land is a key part of empowerment for all communities.
“There’s nothing without you having land,” she said. “I don’t care if you have a cloud-based business. You still have a house, and your business is based in a building, on land.”
Burrell, of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, is hoping to meet with the administration and convince them to drop their defense in the appeals suit. He hopes he can make the case to Trump, who began earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from his father’s estate as a toddler, that Black farmers ought to have access to the same kind of generational wealth, given both their rights as Americans and their historical contributions, both voluntary and coerced, to American’s agricultural wealth.
“Not only do we want to make America great again,” Burrell said, citing the president’s campaign slogan, “We ought to recognize the people who helped make America great in the first instance.”
Williams, of Black Farmers Collective, argues that continuing to embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion is what will lead to the fairer, merit-based system the USDA wants to create. Without explicit efforts to reach out to communities that have been kept out of farming in the past, the money will continue to flow towards those who already had generational wealth and access to capital in more unequal times, he said.
“If you realize some folks have been excluded, you might actually think about how to include them,” he Williams said. “If you say that we’re doing nothing, then we fall back to the way it was. I just can’t see how somebody that has a seat at the table because their father had a seat at the table, that’s merit. That’s just nepotism.”
