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Matt Katz: This is The Takeaway. I'm Matt Katz in this week for Tanzina Vega.

Nancy Pelosi: On this vote, the 'yeas' are 220, the 'nays' are 211. The motion is adopted.

Congress Member 1: This is a good plan to provide direct assistance to the people of this country.

Congress Member 2: We are going to be saddled with a burden, a spending burden, and a tax burden that is really indefensible from the perspective of what it actually accomplishes.

Congress Member 3: Legislation represents the boldest action taken on behalf of the American people since the Great Depression.

Congress Member 4: Outside of stimulus payments, nearly half won't even be spent this year. It's simply unfathomable that Democrats want to spend money years down the road.

Congress Member 5: The American rescue plan is transformative. It will comprehensively and compassionately meet the moment.

Matt Katz: On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the hard one $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. All but one Democrat voted for the bill, Jared Golden of Maine was the lone No, and every Republican voted against it. The bill known as the American Rescue Plan includes $1,400 checks for families, extends unemployment insurance, and provides funding for vaccine distribution.

One aspect of the bill that has gotten less attention so far is $10.4 billion that will go towards agriculture. Approximately $5 billion of that will go towards disadvantaged farmers, many of whom are Black.

Here to explain the significance of this legislation and some of the history behind the struggles that Black farmers have been facing for decades is Lloyd Wright, a farmer from Westmoreland County, Virginia, and former director of the USDA Civil Rights Office. Lloyd, welcome to The Takeaway.

Lloyd Wright: How are you doing? Great.

Matt Katz: Also with us today is Laura Reiley, business of food reporter for The Washington Post. Laura, welcome back to the show.

Laura Reiley: Thanks for having me.

Matt Katz: Laura, how and why did this aid to disadvantaged farmers, in particular, become part of the overall COVID stimulus package?

Laura Reiley: This is correcting historic problems. In November, Cory Booker introduced the Justice for Black Farmers Act, and that got revived a little bit and then taken up by Senator Warnock as the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act. It was that piece of legislation that was the model for what ended up in this relief bill.

Matt Katz: Lloyd, this Bill is huge for Black farmers specifically, can you explain why and how this, in particular, helps them?

Lloyd Wright: Black farmers, in general, consider this to be probably the most significant act since this 1964 Civil Rights Act, in that, we as Black farmers have always been discriminated against by the Department of Ag. Efforts to correct it in the past really didn't work. Pigford, for example, promised debt relief, but farmers didn't get it, and many of them are still going out of business.

We're convinced that if this act is implemented the way we think it should be, and that is that the Black farmers will get debt relief, we will save the few remaining Black farmers in this country.

Matt Katz: Debt relief, is that the big provision here that's going to be so helpful for Black farmers?

Lloyd Wright: Yes, it's the debt relief. Just for a little background, in the Pigford lawsuit, Black farmers thought they were going to get compensation, debt relief, and priority for future programs. They really received $50,000, those who prevail. Only 371 got debt relief, and some of them stopped making payments because they were told that the debt would be forgiven.

When Pigford was over four or five years down the road, they learned they were not going to get debt relief. Some of them were in debt with interest and penalties that they still haven't climbed out of. In fact, Pigford probably put more farmers out of business than in help. We think this is really the first relief that's going to try to save the remaining Black farmers.

Matt Katz: Laura, the American Rescue Plan allocates something like $4 billion for disadvantaged farmers, about a quarter of whom are Black. Can you talk a little bit more about what this relief looks like? We talked about debt relief, what are some of the other elements of this?

Laura Reiley: Well, so it's $5 billion, and $4 billion of that is in direct debt relief as Mr. Wright just said. $1 billion is for grants, outreach, and other programs that are really aimed at recouping lost lands. Black farmers have lost something like 15 million acres over the past 100 years, largely since the 1950s. Through a number of legal and quasi-legal mechanisms, a lot of times they lost land due to foreclosure, they've lost land because they don't have clear title.

Often they've lost land because of something called heirs property, which is when a Black farmer dies without a will, all of his property essentially gets chopped up between all legal heirs. That is a way that unscrupulous real estate folks have chiseled away at that farmland over generations.

Matt Katz: Laura, why have Black farmers been falling victim to some of these systemic issues more so maybe than white farmers?

Laura Reiley: Well, there's been systemic racism at the USDA, largely at the local level. A farmer will go into his local USDA office and get in line for the various programs that they offer, including loans, and often they get their loans late, so their loans that they need for seed or fertilizer or to repair equipment, or they get a lesser loan, or they don't get a loan at all.

Really, I think what people who are not in farming don't understand is that almost all farmers get annual loans in order to buy the stuff they need to plant, and then they repay those loans at the end of the growing season once they harvest.

The whole system is really predicated on these short-term loans in addition to real estate loans for your land itself. If systematically, those Black farmers are last in line to get these loans, it means they plant late, which means their yield is worse. It's this cycle that they can't get out of.

Matt Katz: Lloyd, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called the allocation of stimulus funds for disadvantaged farmers reparations. He intended that to be a disparaging comment, but then advocates for Black farmers have approvingly called this reparations. Do you see this in any way as a form of reparations?

Lloyd Wright: No, I do not. In that, if they were trying to give farmers back the land that they've lost over the years, if they were trying to compensate farmers and their families for all of the pain that the USDA has inflicted, catch up with the education system, et cetera, maybe that would be reparations.

This is really providing farmers with something they should have had 25 years ago. They've been promised a lot of things in the past they never received. Certainly, I wouldn't call it reparations. You'd have to do a lot more than this. Although this is action, I don't want to downplay that, but you need to go beyond what's in this bill. The Justice for Black Farmer Act might get closer. There are some additional provisions in that.

Matt Katz: What is that bill? What does that bill do?

Lloyd Wright: Well, actually, that bill would provide up to 160 acres of land to some farmers, Black farmers. It would do a catch-up program. I think as stated, Blacks didn't get services. One of the problems in the past has been, USDA is probably the only agency that allow local control. In other words, the county committees are selected by farmers who are getting the benefits. They're the only ones who can vote. Then they weigh in on who can get what.

Back when I was director of civil rights, 95% of the county committeeman were white males, they took care of themselves, their family, and their friends, and people of color didn't get very much. It's been a long, long time of local control and denying farmers what they should have had.

Hopefully, that will get addressed down the road, and the Justice for Black Farmer Act hopefully will address that as well. We need to really weigh in on that system of allowing the local control. So there's a number of good things. It'll also straighten out the Office of Civil Rights that's dysfunctional.

Matt Katz: Laura, you reported that Black farmers have lost 12 million acres of land since the '50s due to systemic racism and biased government policy. Does this latest round of funds ultimately help Black farmers acquire more land and maybe acquire some of that land back so to speak, or does it just stop the bleeding in terms of the loss of acreage?

Laura Reiley: I'm pretty hopeful that it will restore some land. The average Black farmer has 100 acres, the national average is 440 acres. 98% of farmland is owned by white farmers. We've had this kind of ethos in the United States for decades. Kind of, get bigger get out.

The only way to really make money farming, whether you're farming real crops or you're ranching or growing specialty crops, fruit and veg, the only way to be successful at it is to do it at scale. That's been problematic for a very long time.

We also have an aging farmer situation right now, and the average farmer age is 50. So we're really at a moment, an inflection point where there's going to be a lot of turnover. I'm hopeful that some of this money, and especially the outreach programs that will assist land grant universities and historically Black colleges to focus on the needs and goals of Black farmers. I'm hopeful that that will change.

Matt Katz: Laura, can you explain one thing to me. Much of the money is earmarked for socially disadvantaged farmers, are those specifically Black farmers, or are other farmers included in that category?

Laura Reiley: Yes, so Indigenous, Native American farmers who have also been discriminated against and also had lost a lot of land. They are in this all farmers of color, but the Black farmers have had a specific and long-standing issue with how they are treated by local banks, by the USDA, et cetera. I think that their situation demands more direct compensation.

Matt Katz: Recently, during the Trump administration, there were bailouts for farmers who were affected by the trade war with China. Laura, what do we know about how much of that money, I think was $28 billion, went to Black farmers?

Laura Reiley: Very little. I had pushback on the story I wrote earlier this week from farmers in the Midwest saying, "Hey, the bailout went largely to people who had their trade partner in China temporarily disrupted because of these trade wars, or pork producers, because pork, we had a unique opportunity last year because China had lost half of its porker because of the African swine fever." Pork producers in the US were like, "Huhu, this is our opportunity, our golden opportunity to sell massive amounts of pork into China," and the trade war disrupted that.

A lot of the producers of the things I just mentioned are white, and so they in fact were the ones who received this $28 billion in relief. However, if you look at the money that has gone to pandemic, the CFAP, TEFAP, all those programs, they too have largely benefited white farmers.

Matt Katz: Lloyd, I'm going to let you get back to the farm in a moment, but you and your father, who was also a farmer, have experienced some of the racism that we've been talking about firsthand. Can you just describe a bit for our listeners what it's like to be a Black farmer in America?

Lloyd Wright: Well, it's almost like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

Farming is difficult, and a number of farmers will go out of business for various reasons, weather disaster, you name it, but if you really are handicapped from the beginning by the Department of Agriculture, it's really difficult. I'll give you an example with my father, who at the end would not work with USDA. In his farm, he had two tracks, which mean two deeded pieces of property on different tracks.

He had an allocation for wheat, and the office told him he could put it all on either track, the whole allotment. He did, then before you harvest it, another person came up doing spot check and said, "No, you can only put the amount allocated to each track." He had put most of the wheat on the small track, and he had to destroy three-fourths of the wheat.

In this regard and the fact that they told him to do it, they made him destroy it. It was those kinds of things where they tell you to do something, then come back and punish you for having carried out their order, and that's what happened one thing with my father.

Another, when we had a disaster in '72 from a hurricane with oysters, because my father also was an oyster farmer and we still operate the oyster beds. He was supposed to get some money to try to reestablish that the oyster was killed from the freshwater. They use language and would not write on a piece of paper, the one item they wanted, and I was Upstate New York at the time.

I had to come home to find out really what they needed because the deadline was approaching. All they needed was the deed, showing that he actually had the list to this oyster bed. It took me less than a couple of hours to do it, but for Blacks who didn't have someone to come home and do that for them, they didn't get it at all. It's those kinds of little tricky things they do. Some things worse, like giving loans late, that's too.

Then they also supervise the loans. Even though you have a loan, the county committee or the county office will tell you when and what you can buy. It's those kinds of things that really has hurt Black farmers, and hopefully, the Justice for Black Farmer Act will get in some detail and address those things, but yes, my father was discriminated and he never complained, and that's the other thing. There are probably more farmers discriminated against who didn't complain than did.

The good thing I like about this emergency act is that it doesn't rely on a file complaint because many farmers just to survive in a community, refuse to complain, even though they've been discriminated against.

Matt Katz: Lloyd Wright is a farmer and former director of the USDA Civil Rights Office. Laura Reiley is a business of food reporter for The Washington Post. Thank you both for explaining this issue and these challenges to us.

Laura Reiley: Thank you. It's been an honor to be on with Mr. Lloyd.

Lloyd Wright: Thank you. It's an honor to be with you, and I'm always pleased to read your articles.

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Matt Katz: This latest funding is just a drop in the bucket when taken in the context of decades of discrimination against Black farmers who faced hurdles in securing loans from the USDA. 100 years ago, there were around 1 million Black farmers in the US, today there are less than 50,000. Here to provide us with some historical context is Nadra Nittle, Senior Reporter for Civil Eats and a contributor to Eater. Nadra, thanks so much for joining us.

Nadra Nittle: Thank you for having me.

Matt Katz: It's our pleasure. Can you give us an overview of the difficult history between the US Department of Agriculture and Black farmers?

Nadra Nittle: Yes, it goes back at least a century and much of the problem is related to loans and the fact that African American farmers who applied for loans from the USDA were routinely denied them and other forms of technical assistance and support that they needed to thrive in the agriculture industry.

Matt Katz: What does that mean for farmers? Like what are the prospects for farmers who aren't able to secure these federal loans from the USDA?

Nadra Nittle: Well, the farmers who weren't able to secure loans were prevented from doing things like buying the equipment that they needed to improve their farms, to expand the size of their farms, and to compete with white farmers who typically have larger farms up to quadruple the size of Black-owned farms. These policies effectively prevented African Americans from having a level playing field in agriculture.

Matt Katz: What kind of tangible losses did that amount to? Can you put a number in terms of how much Black farmers might have lost as a result of discrimination from the USDA?

Nadra Nittle: Well, we know that they lost somewhere around 90% of their farmland. In terms of a dollar figure, we can guess, around billions of dollars of wealth was lost. Some might even say more than that, but advocates for Black farmers argue that it wasn't just African American farmers who were deprived, but their families and that the racial wealth gap we see today between African Americans and white Americans is directly related to this massive loss of farmland from the early 20th century to today.

Matt Katz: Nadra, in the last segment, we referenced the Pigford versus Glickman, this was a class-action lawsuit brought against the USDA by Black farmers accusing the Department of discriminating against Black farmers who sought loans in the '80s and '90s. What were the plaintiffs alleging and what was the final result of that suit?

Nadra Nittle: The plaintiffs were alleging that they faced over racism, meaning that they would go in to apply for a loan and their loans would be thrown in the trash. John Boyd Jr, the head of the National Black Farmers Association said that when he went in seeking assistance from the USDA, he was actually spat on by an official there. So we're talking about pretty in-your-face racism. If you're Black, you need not apply.

Matt Katz: Yes, then what came with the suit?

Nadra Nittle: In the late 1990s, in 1997, there was a settlement paid to Black farmers for a little over a billion dollars, and then during the Obama administration, there was another settlement paid, widely known as Pigford II that gave farmers another $1.25 billion.

Broken down by all of the farmers who were affected, there wasn't much money to each individual farmer, so we're talking in the thousands of dollars, which didn't compensate for the generations of discrimination.

Matt Katz: In your recent article in Eater, which was an incredible deep dive into this issue, you reported that white landowners possess 98% of all farmland in this country. The portion of the stimulus that just passed Congress that's directed at disadvantaged farmers should help Black farmers buy more land. Do you expect that number to maybe go down and Black farmers could, because of this bill, get a larger piece of farmland in this country?

Nadra Nittle: Well, because of this bill, what the National Black Farmers Association is hoping is that there will be fewer foreclosures, so Black farmers who own their land now should have an easier time being able to hang on to it. This part of the stimulus bill should also open up more credit for Black farmers, allowing them to possibly buy more land, but I think we would need the passage of Cory Booker's Justice for Black Farmers Act to really help Black farmers acquire more farmland, especially those who do not currently own farmland today. That legislation from Booker has some provisions that would make it much easier for black farmers to get farmland.

Matt Katz: That would allow people who aren't in agriculture now to get into that business and to start buying land and cultivating crops?

Nadra Nittle: Yes, that's the plan.

Matt Katz: What's life like for Black farmers today? Can you characterize it before I let you go, we got just a few seconds left?

Nadra Nittle: Today, Black farmers own much less land than their white counterparts, but there is renewed interest from young Black farmers to owning land, growing their own food, and doing that as an act of resistance.

Matt Katz: Nadra Nittle is a Senior Reporter for Civil Eats. She's also a contributor to Eater, where her recent story on Black farmers gave me personally an education on a world I knew little about. Nadra, thank you so much for coming on The Takeaway. We really appreciate it.

Nadra Nittle: Thank you.

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