Herbert L. White
THE CHARLOTTE POST
First in a series produced in partnership with Pulitzer Center.
Farming has always been hard.
It’s expensive, labor intensive and rarely includes days off. For Black Americans, it’s especially daunting as decades of racial discrimination, economic uncertainty, generational attitudes and land displacement have decimated the ranks.
“There’s a lot fewer black farmers now,” said Joseph Fields, a third-generation farmer in John’s Island, South Carolina. “You’ve got to have interest in going to the farm service and talking to them. … But farming is something you’ve got to love to do and want to do. You keep going, keep going, and find a way to sell your product and deliver your product.”
The Post is launching “Fading Harvest,” a series produced with support from the Pulitzer Center that examines challenges Black agriculture producers face, why their livelihoods are endangered and initiatives to open opportunities long denied. The reporting includes Carolinas farmers like Fields revealing their concerns and expectations for the future as well as advocates and policy makers who offer competing visions on whether decades of racial discrimination from federal government to county extension agencies should be addressed.
“What it says about the country is that we still have a long way to go and acknowledging who we are as a country,” said Gbinga Ajilor, chief economist at the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a USDA senior advisor for rural development during the Biden administration. “And it’s not just in agriculture, but we see in so many other sectors throughout the country.”
Those perils have impacted farmers’ numbers even as agriculture remains a vital industry in North Carolina and nationally. A 2025 analysis from Farm Flavor using USDA data found that North Carolina generated $20.6 billion in agricultural sales — eighth highest in the U.S. and 3.4% of the country’s total of $599.9 billion.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2022 census of agriculture, there were 46,738 Black farmers, 1.4% of the nation’s nearly 3.4 million producers. Their numbers represented a 4.5% slide from five years previous when the census counted 48,697. The number of total farmers fell from 3,399,834 to 3,374,044, a drop of 0.8% over the same span.
In North Carolina, the numbers are marginally better. According to the USDA, there are 2,058 Black producers – an increase over 2017 when a little more than 1,500 were counted – and make up 4.4% of the state’s 46,000 farmers. A third of the Black producers are women. In the early 20th century, an estimated quarter of North Carolina’s farms were owned by Black people.
“When we talk about black farmers, we’re looking at 100 years of issues that they face,” Ajilor said. … “I think about the [President Donald Trump] tariff scheme and how much the tariffs have really impacted farmers all across the board where you have issues where the president’s put tariffs on other countries so other countries pull back their importing, but also just tariffs on a lot of goods.
“For farmers, there’s tariffs on steel, tariffs on aluminum, tariffs on fertilizer, so you have the export markets decreasing, and then their input costs are going up. This makes their margins a lot thinner, which for Black farmers, are already difficult.”
Fields, though, is determined to remain with the soil his grandparents bought in 1903.
“Farming is a job,” he said. “It’s not a hobby, it’s a job. You can lose and you can make money. I love to do it. I love farming.”
