Historically, African-American farmers faced a long and challenging struggle to own land and operate independently. Since the beginning of the twenty century, land ownership by African-American farmers declined nearly 50% every 10 years (USDA NASS., 2014), which nearly tripled the loss of land of White farmers during the same period (Wood and Gilbert, 2000; Grant et al., 2012). Several factors contributed to this decline, including unfair policy legislation, institutionalized racism, the mechanization of agriculture and increases in agricultural technology (Reynolds, 2002; Hinson and Robinson, 2008; Wood and Ragar, 2012). These factors changed the landscape of contemporary agriculture and erased the narratives of structural discrimination and material inequities that historically burdened the African-American farming community.

Currently, African-American farmers are vastly underrepresented concerning both individual laborers and land ownership. According to a report from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), African-American farmers represent <2% of the nation's farmers, operate <0.5% of the country's farms and account for 0.2% of total agricultural sales (USDA NASS., 2014). Regarding land ownership, African-American farmers represent just 2% (68,056) of landowners (in comparison to 96.2% of Whites, or 3,412,080) and 0.9% (7,754) of total acreage owned (in comparison to 98.1% of Whites, or 856,051; USDA NASS., 2014). Overall, African-American farmers have been devastated economically, politically, and socially, and as such, are more likely to commit suicide, become depressed, and live in poverty compared to White farmers (Horst and Marion, 2019) these dire circumstances have all but eliminated African-Americans from the contemporary agricultural landscape.

Coinciding with this exigency, disparities in health and disease between various segments of the population (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation) have emerged as a pressing public health concern in the United States and become a major focus of public health research in recent decades (Centers for Disease Control Prevention., 2008). Studies have shown that diet is a primary contributor to disparities in many chronic conditions and diseases and represents an important area for examination (Satia, 2009). Yet, many dominant approaches that address diet-related health disparities employ top-down programs that locate meaning in dominant articulations of health communication (e.g., expert-driven policies and measurement criteria)–often assuming universality (e.g., Western-centric theoretical models), effectiveness (e.g., cause-effect rationales) and innovation (e.g., taken-for-granted need for intervention) in their methodology (Dutta, 2010). Often missing from these efforts is a focus on cultural communicative barriers which may limit or reinforce such disparities (e.g., lack of representation, cultural norms). Recent health communication scholarship has called for the restructuring of health agendas from traditional top-down approaches to more emancipatory models that incorporate nuanced cultural, structural and other barriers to commitment often obscured or overlooked in dominant paradigms.

One emerging model is the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA). This framework suggests that the exclusion of marginalized communities from dominant communication platforms is connected to their disenfranchisement and lack of access to vital resources (e.g., healthy food) and aims to address health disparities by opening spaces for dialogue to generate locally-driven agendas and policies. In this essay, we employ the methodological underpinnings of CCA to foreground the lived experiences and perspectives of a small cohort of African-American farmers living in the U.S. Mid-South using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Silverman, 2006). Similar qualitative studies have used the CCA to examine diet-related health disparities among marginalized populations (Koenig et al., 2012; Dutta and Jamil, 2013; Dutta et al., 2016), however this is the first to take an inductive approach to map emergent themes onto the core constructs of CCA (culture, structure, agency).

Drawing on the understanding that systematic land loss in the African-American community has contributed to wealth disparities between African-Americans and Whites (Doron and Fisher, 2002; Gilbert et al., 2002), we argue that the erasure of the African-American farming tradition within mainstream discourses has created communication inequities that disenfranchise the African-American community and may contribute to broader health inequities in food system. This paper contributes new knowledge to scholarship on the African-American farming crisis and informs future methodological directions of study. The following research questions guided our analysis: (1) How do African-American farmers in the Mid-South describe cultural and structural barriers and opportunities for African-Americans in the U.S. agricultural industry? (2) How do African-American farmers in the Mid-South describe legacies of racism, discrimination and other forms of inequities? The paper will unfold as follows: first, a review of literature examining contributions to the decline of the African-American farmer, health disparities and the modern food landscape. Then, we discuss our theoretical framework and method, and next, provide the results from the thematic analysis. The paper concludes with a discussion section at the end.

Since the end of slavery, African-American farmers have struggled to gain economic capital and self-sustainability (Smith, 2004). The rapid and continual decline of African-American farmland can be somewhat attributed to advancements in agricultural technology and the mechanization of equipment, which increased the productive capacity of farms exponentially (Brown and Larson, 1979; Brown et al., 1994). Compared to White farmers, African-American farmers had far more difficulty accessing these transformative technologies (Wood and Gilbert, 2000; Green et al., 2011). Further, during this period of rapid innovation, structural changes in agricultural policy, such as “New Deal” era farm subsidy programs, favored large-scale farms, which were mostly owned by Whites, and African-American farmers were systematically targeted by discriminatory banking policies (e.g., mortgage foreclosures) and forced acquisition of their farmland through “heir property” (Reynolds, 2002; Hinson and Robinson, 2008; Schell, 2015; i.e., fractioned land ownership and partition sales). Together, these events marginalized the African-American farming population and erased much of their contributions from the modern agricultural landscape. Scholars have not yet considered how the erasure of African-American farming in the modern food landscape contributes to significant health inequities in the food system.

Research indicates that African-Americans suffer disproportionately in comparison to Whites in terms of disease incidence and mineral deficiencies related to nutrition (Wang and Chen, 2011; Kirkpatrick et al., 2012). For example, data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) III (1999–2002) found that African Americans were 43% less likely than Whites to meet USDA fruit and vegetable guidelines (Casagrande et al., 2007). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Centers for Disease Control Prevention. (2017), African-Americans are nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than their White counterparts, with prevalence rates of 13.4 and 7.3%, respectively. Although several factors have been identified as possible culprits, such as socioeconomic status (Eyler et al., 2004; Bahr, 2007), psychosocial factors (Watters et al., 2007, 2008) and cultural factors (Kumanyika et al., 2005; Boyington et al., 2008), one potentially overlooked contributor is the erasure of the African-American farming tradition within mainstream discourses and subsequent communication inequities that emerge as a result.

The erasure of the African-American farming tradition detached much of the African-American community from their connection to the land and prevented African-American farmers from competing in the modern agricultural landscape (Balvanz et al., 2011; Daniel, 2013). Moreover, dominant tropes of health and healthy eating practices universalized values specific to Whites and White culture (e.g., eating organic food, tropes of “getting back to the land” and “putting your hands in the soil”) and largely ignored contributions and cultural histories from other groups. For instance, the Alternative Food Movement (AFM), which is a social movement based on developing alternatives to the corporate agribusiness domination of the global food system, emerged as a potential model to improve food access and alleviate food system-generated issues, such as food insecurity (Burdick, 2014; Grauerholz and Owens, 2015), but there have been no significant initiatives by leaders of the AFM to involve African-American farmers or an acknowledgment of their farming tradition in health-promoting initiatives.

Further, AFMs seek to build community and promote inclusivity, participatory democracy, and serve as spaces of contestation against the globalized food system (Kloppenburg et al., 1996; Goodman et al., 2012), but despite these purported benefits, most AFMs see people of color as marginalized and disenfranchised populations, and these narratives have profound influences on who participates and leads the movement, what is considered “healthy” food, and how resources are allocated (Myers and Sbicca, 2015; Broad, 2016).

Scholars such as Guthman (2003, 2008) and Alkon (2012) argued that the valorization of dominant tropes in alternative agriculture such as “community” and “democratic values” embodied Whiteness and reproduced privilege by emphasizing rhetorics of individual-level accountability and personal responsibility, and obscured or ignored altogether many of the structural constraints which contributed to the creation of such realities. Similarly, Slocum (2006, 2007) characterized AFM institutions as “White spaces” with regards to market vendors, patrons, and management. The spatial coding of AFM institutions as “White spaces,” along with rhetorics of individual-level accountability and personal responsibility, may function as a barrier toward the participation of African-American farmers because it perpetuates the same system that historically disenfranchised their land rights and displaced them economically (Allen and Guthman, 2006; Holt-Giménez et al., 2011; Alkon and Mares, 2012; McClintock, 2014).

Another way that the African-American farming tradition gets marginalized within contemporary discourses is through the appropriation of indigenous African farming techniques, particularly in the organic farming sector. Racism is embedded within the roots of the organic farming sector and can be traced back to Nazi Germany and the nationalistic British Soil Association, whose teachings were adopted by organic farmers in the 1970s by the political leanings of the New Left with the rise in back-to-the-land and counter-culture social activism as a way to promote social equality (Guthman, 2008; Alkon, 2012). Several scholars have drawn attention to how revisionist interpretations of organic agriculture in mainstream U.S. culture worked not only to mask the historical contributions and challenges of people of color in food production but also re-centered the small-scale White farmer as the American agricultural icon and face of organic farming (Allen, 2004; Alkon and McCullen, 2010). In Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, Penniman (2018) described how modern forms of polyculture (i.e., the process of growing plants of different species as a way to increase plant biodiversity and make crops more resilient to climate variability and extreme weather conditions—a staple in modern organic farming) can be traced back several 100 years to indigenous farmers from countries in the West African region such as Ghana and Nigeria, yet often West Africans were not acknowledged for their historical contributions to the movement. Similarly, Guthman (2011) highlighted that many contemporary organic agriculture spaces were often burdened by their implicit attachment to Whiteness, which prevented such arenas from adequately engaging with concerns of attribution and ownership.

A combination of the legacies of sharecropping and tenant farming, issues of “heir property” and the discriminatory federal policies has severely impacted the ability of African-Americans to own and operate land. In the context of health disparities, public health scholarship has identified both land ownership and maintaining a cultural connection to the land as important social determinants of health (Olson and Anderson, 2013; Breitkreuz et al., 2014). However, to date, studies have not explored how the erasure of the African-American farmer influences the conversation about broader health disparities in the U.S. In this article, we draw on the CCA to foreground the lived experiences and perspectives of a small cohort of African-American farmers living in the U.S. Mid-South as an entry point to address this underexamined area of research. Below is a description of the central tenets of the CCA.

The CCA is a methodological and theoretical framework for examining and interpreting the lived experiences of marginalized communities (Airhihenbuwa, 1995; Dutta, 2008). Drawing from subaltern and postcolonial studies theory (Fanon, 1963; Freire, 1972; Spivak, 1988), the CCA suggests that understandings for interpreting health are generated through mutual dialogue between community members and interventionist. Opposite of dominant approaches of health communication, whose agendas are controlled by outside experts, the CCA foregrounds the importance of listening to local communities to better understand how health issues become interpreted and communicated. For researchers, the CCA marks a shift from their traditional role as an interventionist, who directs and implements campaigns, to that of a listener who participates in dialogue with community members (Dillon and Basu, 2013).

Fundamentally, the CCA links listening with social change, in that it centers on engaging with the broader structures of erasure and domination, with the ultimate purpose of disrupting oppressive methods of organizing through grassroots efforts (Desmarais, 2007). Through this process, the emphasis on listening in the CCA becomes grounded within a transformative agenda of social change and justice (Dutta, 2014). The CCA is situated at the intersection of culture, structure, and agency.

Culture refers to the localized values, beliefs, and philosophies of a group or community. Structures refer to how resources are organized in society (Airhihenbuwa, 1995). In the context of health, structures exist at the micro-level (e.g., community-level medical services, means of transportation, channels of communication and health-promoting resources such as food access), meso level (e.g., media platforms) and macro-level (e.g., national and international political coalitions and health organizations; Basu and Dutta, 2008). Structures across these different levels work symbiotically and can either hinder or improve an individual's ability to engage in health-promoting behaviors. Agency refers to the ability of individuals to enact choices and negotiate structures that incorporate their lives.

As a guiding framework, the CCA is well-aligned to critically examine dominant discourses of African-American farming. It adds to the understandings of how African-American farmers describe barriers and opportunities for farming in the agricultural industry in three primary ways: (1) it de-normalizes dominant narratives (e.g, economic and sociological/demographical data) of African-American farming in the U.S. by highlighting alternative paradigms; (2) it privileges non-traditional forms of resistance as an entry point for upsetting the status quo, by challenging hegemonic norms and taken-for-granted assumptions; and (3) it centers on engaging with the broader structures of erasure and oppression, with the ultimate goal of disrupting dominant modes of organizing through grassroots activism.

Two major themes emerged from the thematic analysis: (1) erasure of the African-American farming tradition and land loss; and (2) solutions for change. Based on the core principles of the CCA, below is a presentation of findings that emerged from the interview data.

In this qualitative study, we applied a culture-centered framework to reveal some of the unique lived experiences and perspectives of a small cohort of African-American farmers in the U.S. Mid-South and drew attention to the role of critical methods as an innovative approach to addressing the African-American farming crisis. The experiences of participants were encompassed by two themes, which were the following (1) erasure of the African-American farming tradition and land loss; and (2) solutions to change.

Gilbert et al. (2002) attributed African-American farm and land loss to the forced sales due to “heir property,” lack of access to government programs, and continuing racial discrimination by lenders and government agencies. Similarly, Green et al. (2011) stated that the plantation political economy, sharecropping systems, limits on civil rights and discrimination by the USDA were responsible for the decline. The congruence of grievances between farmers across studies and from many different regions of the United States suggest that discriminatory policies and a social and economic climate may have prevented African American farmers from thriving in America, which implies that solutions to address this crisis should inolve system-level changes.

However, despite the structural challenges African-American farmers face, farmers cited education, and awareness as an entry point to address the crisis. While farmers drew attention to larger-scale barriers such as the unequal and racist lending practices of loan allocation from the USDA, the solutions that they proposed centered on rhetorics of empowerment and self-sustainability and were located exclusively at the community and individual levels. This highlights a level of dissonance between how farmers perceived the crisis and how they felt compelled to act on it. Research highlighting material and symbolic forms of empowerment and individual-level solutions for change among the African-American farming community has been well documented (Balvanz et al., 2011; Fiskio et al., 2016; Touzeau, 2019). While these previous studies highlighted the crucial role of community and individual-level solutions in addressing the crisis, for widespread social change it is imperative to shift the broader conversation to more structural level interventions (e.g., federal loan reform, farm subsidy programs). More importantly, it is critical to gain the confidence of African-American farmers, who have traditionally been self-reliant—perhaps based on their justified distrust and disillusionment of the system—to participate in such reform efforts. Approaches such as the CCA, with its focus on grassroots organizing and collective agency, can serve an integral role in facilitating such endeavors.

We asserted in this paper that the erasure of the African-American farming tradition within mainstream discourses created communication inequities that disenfranchise the African-American community and may reinforce health disparities among this population. Previous critical health communication scholarship similarly drew attention to the role of communication as an enabler of exploitation (Acharya and Dutta, 2012), stigmatization (Newman et al., 2014) and marginalization (de Souza, 2009) in health contexts. However, because our research questions targeted broader cultural and structural barriers and legacies of racism and discrimination, we were unable to make explicit associations between the erasure of African-American farming and population-level health disparities. Nonetheless, our findings (e.g., participant responses regarding land loss and wealth disparities) do present unique entry points for public health professionals to conceptualize these disparities in a broader context. Below we provide several examples of how practitioners might expand their scope of assessment when addressing diet-related health issues, particularly within low-income communities and communities of color.

One way that practitioners can think about addressing diet-related health disparities in is by highlighting the importance of including farmers of color in health-promoting initiatives such as the AFM. Previous scholarship has highlighted the multitude of benefits of AFM, particularly in the context of community-level food access, an issue that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color (Goodman et al., 2012). Despite these benefits, ample evidence has documented that many of these communities are not participating in the movement (Slocum, 2007; Agyeman and Alkon, 2011). For public health professionals, exploring aspects such as spatial geography and the role of institutional cultures in encouraging African-American farmers to participate in the movement may improve diet-related health outcomes in these communities. Examples might include culture-centered outreach efforts to African-American farmers, provision and subsidy programs to help alleviate financial barriers to participation and calls for more diverse management and leadership positions within these spaces.

Another way that practitioners might expand their scope of assessment in addressing diet-related disparities is by incorporating ways to address the cultural erasure and re-appropriation of the African-American farming tradition and related practices, particularly in the organic farming movement. Past studies have drawn attention to the implicit Whiteness in the production, distribution, and consumption of organic food (Guthman, 2014). As the philosophies and values of the movement have shifted away from the influences of traditional African practices in recent decades, much of the African-American community may not be able to identify with the movement's revisionist roots and feel excluded from participation. By working to complicate this narrative and de-center the movement's implicit attachment to Whiteness may provide public health professionals an entry point to better address diet-related disparities within communities of color. Examples might include more inclusive imagery and representation in marketing and promotional materials (e.g., food conferences, farm tourism, community-supported agriculture stores), efforts to promote preservation and acknowledgment of African-American contributions to the movement (e.g., key individuals, moments) and rethinking dominant narratives about organic farming in the U.S.

Lastly, public health professionals can expand their scope by addressing the important role of maintaining and preserving land ownership among communities of color. A primary grievance in the narratives was the lack of education on the part of the African-American community when it came to owning and preserving land, which has resulted in them losing nearly 15 million acres since 1910–and subsequently, much of their political, social and economic power. From an ecological perspective, land ownership has been shown to posit several benefits, including generational wealth, food security, and political autonomy (Chowa, 2007; Binder and Binder, 2016; Pfeffer and Killewald, 2017). Over time, encouraging land ownership may contribute to a reduction in wealth disparities among these communities.

The CCA is uniquely situated to address components of the African-American farming crisis. Dominant discourses observing this phenomena are centered on exploring historical timelines using top-down, evidence-based data such as census tracts, policy documents and government reports, and therefore do not reveal the perspectives of African-American farmers themselves (Reynolds, 2002; USDA NASS., 2017;). By de-normalizing dominant narratives and highlighting alternative paradigms, privileging non-traditional forms of resistance by challenging norms and taken-for-granted assumptions and engaging broader structures of erasure and oppression, the CCA adds to understandings of how African-Americans farmers describe barriers (e.g., legacies of racism and discrimination) and opportunities for farming in the modern landscape.

The CCA has been used by other scholars to address diet-related health disparities among marginalized populations (see Koenig et al., 2012; Dutta and Jamil, 2013; Dutta et al., 2016), however this study is the first to take an inductive approach to map emergent themes onto the core constructs of CCA. Employing this two-step strategy to our data analysis was beneficial in several ways. To begin, because our study was not focused on making explicit connections to health (e.g., studying the effects of discrimination on farmer's health), we had apprehensions about applying the CCA as an a priori conceptual model. Having the freedom to create operative descriptions of CCA constructs that mirrored our context-specific research setting and apply them as they emerged across the data allowed us to resolve some of the ambiguity we felt selecting categories during the thematic analysis. This freedom also allowed us to make clearer and more accurate connections between the participant's narratives and broader health disparities.

This study has several limitations. First, the sample size was small and regionally homogenous. A larger and geographically diverse sample of African-American farmers would allow for broader and more nuanced analysis. Additional studies that include farmers from these locations would provide stronger evidence and more nuanced findings. Second, the study comprised mainly of older farmers. Due to the array of documented challenges that younger African-American farmers face, including these perspectives would provide a deeper and more accurate contextual narrative. Also, there remain unexplored dynamics of African-American farming, such as how the recent trend of immigrant farm labor has affected current African-American farmers. Future research in this area should seek to incorporate these concepts.

In conclusion, this study is significant because it contributes new knowledge to scholarship on the African-American farming crisis. Historically, the foundations of agriculture in the U.S. have been built on the skill and expertise of African-American farmers. Initially brought over in the slave trade in the early 1600s, African-American farmers supplied not only the manpower, but a unique skill set to farming that White landowners did not possess (Littlefield, 1981). Unfortunately, as time has gone on, African-Americans have not been properly recognized for their contributions to the agricultural landscape, which has had several deleterious effects for the African-American community, including disparities in wealth, rates of poverty and food insecurity.

Over time, this combination of effects have led many public health programs to target African-American communities for healthy food campaigns aimed at alleviating the associated economic and health-related costs of diet-related health disparities. However, many of these programs do not go far enough in their intervention efforts, often addressing surface-level symptoms instead of systemic root causes. If public health professionals and policymakers are to be committed to establishing health equity among marginalized sectors of society, it is essential that they listen to these narratives of discrimination, struggle and meaning-making and work collaboratively with African-American farmers and communities in seeking spaces for structural transformation toward addressing land loss and health inequality. In this paper, using the CCA allowed us to critique dominant narratives about the legacy of African-American farming, connecting the erasure of African-American farming to the broader context of wealth disparities.

The datasets for this article are not publicly available because of participant privacy. Access to data can be made available upon request. Inquiries should be directed to Andrew Carter, andrew.carter@sjsu.edu.

Jessica McMorris, Beverly Jacobik—University of Memphis IRB board. To participate in the study, individuals had to self-report as Black or African-American, own or work on a farm for over 1 year in the Mid-South (e.g., Arkansas, Mississippi, or Tennessee area), and be over 18 years of age.

AC drafted all major sections of the manuscript. AA assisted with revisions and structuring of the manuscript.