Over the years there has been a decline in the number of Black farmers in the United States. But, as Delmarva Public Media's Kevin Diaz reports, there has been a small resurgence on the Eastern Shore.
RUSH: By some estimates, the peak of black farming in the United States was 1910 when 14% of American farms were African-American owned. Today it's about 2%, but as Delmarva Public Media's Kevin Diaz reports, black farming may be undergoing a small resurgence.
DIAZ: Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, Thelonious Cook had no plans to become a farmer. He had a background in IT. He was inspired only after he discovered his family owned a small, overgrown piece of land in Virginia's Northampton County, on the lower Eastern Shore.
COOK: We always had a garden in Hampton. It was just a small half acre plot behind our house. So growing up, I did grow beans, squash, cucumbers in the summertime, tomatoes and that sort of thing, but it was more of a chore.
DIAZ: Now he has a 7.5 acre spread near Birdsnest, above Cape Charles. In 2022, he was recognized as a Farmer of the Year in Virginia for his sustainable, regenerative practices. He identifies as a returning generation farmer, starting out in 2015 after earning a master's degree in sustainable development.
COOK: In the beginning, there wasn't a lot of black farmers that were younger than 70 that I knew. But then I started to meet [more]. As I were going to regional conferences, I would meet four or five from different areas. But certainly in the last four or five years, it's been a huge resurgence.
DIAZ: Although American agriculture today is largely the province of white rural farmers, Cook is part of a growing generation of black farmers promoting what they see as a natural African-American affinity for small scale, eco-friendly farming, stretching back to the roots in Africa.
COOK: It's really the only way you can do it in a way that makes sense environmentally, socially, even economically, as I'm sure people have learned over thousands of generations by doing it that way.
DIAZ: Cook is also the founding president of the Mid-Atlantic Black Farmers Caucus, now up to 98 members and growing. One of his connections is Blain Snipstal, a former Cambridge resident who farmed in Caroline County for a decade before helping start the Black Dirt Farm Collective in Prince George's County. Calling himself a child of the crack epidemic, Snipstal was raised by relatives, studied agriculture in Kansas, and gravitated toward other black activists drawn to a new back to the land movement. We caught up with him during a talk at Salisbury University.
SNIPSTAL: I mean, I think spiritually the land is speaking to people and people are listening and trying to find an alternative that's of meaning to the current trajectory of society.
DIAZ: Among those who've made the transition from urban life to the farm is Lisa Joseph. After her husband died in a work-related incident, she moved out of the Washington, D.C. area and bought an old farmhouse near Pocomoke City surrounded by 15 acres of farmland. She's trying to teach herself how to grow vegetables for local farmer's markets, but concedes that she has a long ways to go.
JOSEPH: You can watch something from a seed. You can make your own seeds. I tried to grow from a seed, and then sometimes I buy stuff from Home Depot. But really the beautifying thing is to just pick off okra that you grew a tomato. So I'm not in this for the money. I haven't made one dime. I take care of two individuals with disabilities. I can't wait on a tomato and a potato to pay my mortgage.
DIAZ: Like Cook and Snipstal, Joseph found inspiration in the 2018 book, Farming While Black, written by Leah Penniman, an American farmer, educato, and food activist, in Grafton, New York. Her Soul Fire Farm was highlighted in a Mark Decena documentary shown recently at Salisbury University and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, which supports black and minority farmers through its small farms program. None of these black farmers have any illusions about the historical headwinds they face, including periods of racism and discrimination over the past century that saw huge decline in black farmers in the South, along with a great migration to cities in the north. But with the rise of small scale agriculture, feeding a growing farm to table movement on the Eastern Shore and across America, they see falling barriers, and perhaps new hope. For Delmarva Public Media, this is Kevin Diaz.
