Kansas
Related: About this forumBlack Farmers In Kansas Hope New State Office Can Help Reverse Trend Of Land Loss
The number of black farmers in the U.S. is shrinking down to less than 2% of total farmers and many are losing their land.
Members of the Kansas Black Farmers Association are working with the state in hopes of reversing that trend.
JohnElla Holmes, the groups executive director, comes from a long line of wheat farmers in Graham County near the historic town of Nicodemus. Holmes' great-great grandparents settled in the area in 1877, on pieces of land the family still owns.
However, more than 2,000 farming acres in Nicodemus alone have been lost in the last five years.
Read more: https://www.kmuw.org/post/black-farmers-kansas-hope-new-state-office-can-help-reverse-trend-land-loss
Farmer-Rick
(11,407 posts)Humane, healthy and sustainable farming is disappearing because the small guy can't compete with the brutal, diseased and destructive farming practises of the filthy rich who own the million acre farms or devise abusive contracts for intensive animal farming.
It's soooooo much easier to farm if you don't give a crap about the damage you are doing, with your chemicals and lazy methods, or the pain you are influcting on the animals you are about to slaughter.
Filthy rich farming practises are taking the humanity out of farming.
When I farmed for a living, there was this sense of connection, a feeling of protectiveness towards the land and the animals I raised. It was a feeling that I was being entrusted to care for a small piece of the universe. I bet you 90 percent of farmers today no longer feel that.
OhioVoterBlue
(16 posts)New user here.
Unrelated to the topic of race in the message, though it is unfortunate. I know the struggle goes back generations.
Can we get the term Wel-farm trending? The MAGAs, despite their use of social systems, claim to hate welfare in all its forms. The bailout for the farm sector bc of donnie the clown's trade war has forced him to pay off the Ag sector. Its pennies on the dollar but subsistence none the less. Wel-farm is welfare.
I cannot be the only one seeing their grocery bill go up and up and up on the basics...
Vote out TЯaitoЯ-Pensive 2020
marble falls
(62,063 posts)OhioVoterBlue
(16 posts)Helping all farmers is welfare. Those conservative values of letting the market speak for itself are false when portions of the supply and demand are funded by the government. You want tax dollars going to save the last of the typewriter companies? What about a farm that produces something no one wants? Black, white, no difference, that wasn't my argument.
marble falls
(62,063 posts)a living wage in fair competition to corporate farmers is not welfare. Its leveling the playing field and provides some sort of governor on corporate avarice.
Subsidizing the sugar and corn industry (which cheapens the cost of soda pop and crap cereals, all sorts of cheap nutritionless "foods" to keep the wealthy rich is welfare. Keeping what we eat healthy and affordable isn't.
Did you also have problems with affirmative action and school busing, too?
OhioVoterBlue
(16 posts)Are benefitted equal or greater than that of the independent competitors and are able to withstand greater market shifts over the long term. I'd be in favor or limiting corporate farms subsidies to zero, but that's a pipe dream.
Same argument for federal funds going more to under performance schools in lower tax districts, high tax districts don't need nearly as much if any, but that would also be argued in court as unfair treatment.
Affirmative action is not relevant to this argument as it usually doesn't involve fed tax dollars, unless you are arguing for state universities. I'm fine with admission standards to mirror the under 40 population demographic.