Underrepresented Communities in Agriculture in the US

This blog began with a daydream. It was a warm day, I’d just had a large lunch, and it was the first day of school. I learned that the theme for my Journalism course would be agriculture, and Wizard-of-Oz-esque scenes of farming landscapes leaped to mind. I saw the hard-working farmer toiling away in his fields, felt the relief of the wind on his sweaty brow, heard the whirr of the tractor in the distance, and glowed in his pride as he surveyed the fruits of his labor. I was so close that with one puff I could have blown the straw hat right off his head.

And then I realized two things about my farmer. First, that he was a he-farmer, and second, the he was a white he-farmer. Strange, given my own personal non-he, non-white characteristics. Was my mind just playing the statistics game with me? 96% of US farms are, after all, operated by white farmers, and only 14% of all farms are primarily operated by women. And let’s not forget that white men in general make up 40% of the total US population. So maybe my imagination is just a  finely-tuned statistical machine, boiling down everything I need to know about the American farmer into a few neat outputs: male. white. hard-working. sweaty.

But as anyone who took a stats class beyond mean, median and mode knows, reality is never as simple as a few convenient outputs. African American farm workers are three times as likely as their white counterparts to be injured in the line of farm-duty.  About 22% more farms are run by women now than in 2002. And that hard-working, sweat-on-the-brow farm worker I was imagining? Probably Hispanic, like the 83% of farm workers who identify themselves as such. He’ll probably own his own farm someday soon, as the number of farms primarily operated by Hispanic owners grew by 10% between 2002 and 2007, while those operated primarily by white farmers fell in the same period.

So food production is not color-blind, and not simply male-dominated. There’s something going on in American agriculture that’s not clearly black and white. There are complex stories behind the statistics, difficult issues behind the daydreams, and a changing structure in the American countryside that mirrors overall changes in the country’s demography. What does this mean to those who work in the system? And what does it mean for American agriculture?

These are the kinds of issues I’m trying to understand through this blog. Outside government-sponsored studies and a few dedicated academics, there’s not a lot of talk, particularly in the American media about non-white communities in agriculture. So I welcome comments and new perspectives on the issues addressed here.

As a word of caution to the reader: I’m not a farmer. My first-hand knowledge of farms consists of childhood memories of weekend trips, and traumatic visions of watching chickens necks being wrung in fascinated horror. Also, if I have a race, I don’t know what it is. My ancestors enjoyed the taboo of interracial marriage long before it was cool, and I have more mixed blood than a particularly gruesome episode of Law & Order. Oh, and I’m also not American. But I do live in Wisconsin, and that counts for a whole lot more than just cheese.

*Unless otherwise cited, the data in this post come from here.