Why Do White People Own 98% of the Farmland?
Hint: it is not a coincidence
I am a white person living in rural Wisconsin. Someday I would like to buy farmland in a place near water, grow fruit trees and vegetable crops, build or buy a house, and retire living the good life. There are no barriers in Wisconsin that I know of to owning farmland, except me having enough money and there being a willing seller. It will be hard to save for it, but I could do it. On the surface this doesn’t seem like a racially biased system. So then why is 98% of the farmland in the US owned by white people?
How did we get here? Why should I care?
Besides being unjust, could this racially biased system also make it harder for me to buy farmland?
Who I am
As a white male, I know I can only speak from my own place of privilege within the system. I think that white people like me need to examine how systemic bias works and notice how we benefit. We also need to hear the stories of the impacts of racism in the voices of the people most affected. Please see the reading list at the end of the essay for links to other perspectives, or read more from BIPOC writers here on Medium.
The “drained pool” of farmland
Heather McGhee writes about the “drained pool” effect in The Sum of Us. Her prime example is the public pools that existed across the United States during legal segregation. When Federal court cases and laws mandated integration, many communities drained their pools, rather than allow race mixing. McGhee writes about how this drove a shift to private pool clubs and private pools in backyards, both of which were inaccessible to most white people as well as to Black people.
Is farmland in Wisconsin a “drained pool?” Does the racial disparity signal other disparities in ownership access?
White denial
The “rational” white person in me thinks that it is preposterous to think that the racial disparity in farmland ownership is the result of deliberately biased policies. It is plain to my rational mind to see that the first European settlers in this part of Wisconsin were white, and they/we got all the farmland, and our current situation is a vestige of who was here first (setting aside the fact that 1000s of Indigenous nations were actually here first). Farmland stays in families, and they aren’t making any more of it, so “finders keepers” — race doesn’t seem to enter into it, just being first.
I want to interrogate this seemingly rational thought.
If there is a disparity, it had to come from somewhere.
The racial wealth gap as an example
Let’s look at the racial wealth gap. A 2016 study revealed that on average, a typical white household holds $171,000 in wealth and a typical Black household holds just $17,000. My “rational” white self might argue that this is just the effects of white people accumulating wealth over a longer period of time. Most Black people living in the US before 1865 were enslaved, while white people had held wealth since they started arriving in the 1600s, so presumably they/we have had more time for our average wealth to grow. This is undoubtedly a factor, especially for old money families. But, like many Wisconsinite white people, most of my ancestors immigrated after the Civil War, and many of us have built much more wealth than $17,000. So there might be something more than time at work.
There are many biased policies that factor into the racial wealth gap, and a lot has been written about those policies. They include redlining, restricted access to loans, racial covenants and biased zoning, mass incarceration, differential access to educational opportunities, and more. Heather McGhee points out that each of these biased policies that led to racial wealth gap also affect most white people, but we can’t easily see these effects when we lump all white people together.
If we white people didn’t realize that the racial wealth gap was mostly created by biased policies, then we might assume that there was something inherently wrong with Black or Indigenous people. We might look at the racial wealth gap and think that “they” are lazy, not good with money, stupid, prone to criminal behavior, immoral, or any of a number of racist stereotypes, none of which are true. We might assume the same of poor white people, even Trump voters. But, if we corrected the biased policies and addressed past economic injustice, then we would see wealth rise for Black people, and also for poor and working class whites. It is easier (and more profitable) for those in power to blame people for their situation than to fix it.
Just like the drained pool, the biased policies that continue to cause the racial wealth gap don’t just hurt Black people, they also contribute to the general wealth gap which keeps poor and middle class white people down, too, with a government that functions largely to benefit the super rich.
Is it just a coincidence that white people own 98% of the farmland?
Similar to the racial wealth gap, the fact that 98% of the farmland is owned by white people is a biased outcome. But, is it just a coincidence? Did white people just get here first and now own all the land, like how most of the farmland in Norway is owned by Norwegians? Or are there biased policies that have led to this outcome?
It is not a coincidence.
By the way, a biased policy does not have to be “intentionally” biased. If it has a biased outcome, then it is a biased policy.
Ibram X Kendi contends that policies that had racist outcomes gave birth to personal racism, and not the other way around. For instance, the enslavement of African people led people of European descent to think of ourselves as superior. We looked at the situation of enslaved Africans, and thought that there must be a reason to explain it. If we believe Kendi (I do), then we invented racial differences to explain and justify the racist system.
This is why scholars and activists focus so much on eliminating biased systems; because unless we change the policies and systems that lead to biased outcomes, we will continue to invent and maintain biased thoughts about affected groups, including Black people, Indigenous people, LGBTQ, women, working people, immigrants, and more.
What are the systems and policies that have led to 98% of the farmland being owned by white people?
Biased farmland policy #1: The doctrine of discovery
We shouldn’t have to say it, but white people were not here first.
To begin to discuss biased policy, we might have to go way back to the Doctrine of Discovery. This was a legal framework first put forward by the Catholic Church in 1493 stating that Christian nations could lay claim to lands that were uninhabited by Christians by getting there first and planting a flag. This is the legal basis for much of the land that was originally taken by Europeans. The underlying assumption is that Indigenous people’s claims do not matter because they were not technically people. To be a person you need to be a white Christian. Before we had a scientific understanding of DNA and such, it was common for white people to think of people of different skin tones as something like a different species, when it was convenient for them/us.
The Doctrine of Discovery was a moral and legal justification for taking the land from Indigenous people. That policy created subclasses of humans, and also conveniently justified enslaving Indigenous and African people. If a person argues that white land ownership is just because white people got here first, then they are actually referring to this policy, which was initially biased against Native people, but then, as some white people went around claiming all the land that they could “discover,” also functioned to freeze any latecomers out of easy access to land ownership, regardless of race, including me.
The Doctrine of Discovery has a legal partner in the dehumanization of people based on race. In 1677, in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, white rebels were treated differently from Black rebels in the legal punishment. Bacon’s Rebellion had been a wake-up call for the wealthy land-holding elite of the Virginia colony. White and Black poor people had rallied together to try to gain access to land and freedom. By punishing white and Black rebels differently, the elite used “racialization” to dehumanize Black people and separate the natural allies of landless white and landless Black people, who would otherwise have common cause.
Biased farmland policy #2: Private property
It is easy to forget that until the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of European and American white people lived in rural areas. Wealth was measured in acres of farmland, and a prime way to build family wealth was to claim land and “improve” it by clearing the forest or plowing up the prairie. For most of European history, land ownership and access to farmland was more important for wealth and security than having a job. Jobs, like soldiering or joining the clergy, were for “second sons,” who would not inherit the farm.
Individual land ownership for the masses is also a relatively new concept. For most of the Feudal period in Europe, land was composed of territory won in battle, which was given to the ruling class, who then extracted rent from their serfs. The people lived on the land at the will of the aristocracy, who could tax them or oblige them to fight in wars, or expel them.
Of course, Feudalism has all sorts of injustice baked into it. But within the Feudal system, there was something called the “commons.” The commons was land that everyone in the village had access to. There were rules and customs that prevented one person from taking more than their share of the commonly held resources, like grazing too many cattle or cutting too much firewood. There was a general abundance available to the whole community, but there was little incentive for individuals to put much labor into improving the land, because the bounty was widely shared.
The era of the commons ended with the “Enclosure” movement, which saw landlords putting up fences and renting or selling to individuals, who now had incentive to improve the particular land they were working on. The chief champion of enclosure was John Locke (1632–1704), whose disdain for “commoners” was only rivaled by his love of “property.” He claimed that people had a right to property through their labor improving it. Locke’s moral and legal justification for private property came just in time for European settlers in the Americas. By the way, the Founding Fathers loooooooved John Locke.
For the Indigenous people of North America, before contact with European settlers, land functioned as a vast network of commons, which were managed by the Native nations for the benefit of their peoples. Private property existed, but it was for individual items, like clothing, not for land. Land was thought of as territory to be defended, not property to be bought and sold. When the European settlers came, they brought with them the Doctrine of Discovery, where they claimed land in the name of their monarch, and they brought the policies of enclosure and private property, which they used to systematically exclude the Indigenous population from access to land.
The result was the gradual dispossession of Native people from almost all of the best farmland in North America. If the land had any value to produce crops, it was claimed, then enclosed and “improved,” and then bought and sold over and over. This was a biased outcome, in that it systematically benefited white people over Native people. It continues to have a biased outcome in that people who inherit property have significantly more access to land than the rest of us.
How the doctrine of discovery and private property were used in Wisconsin
From what I can piece together, this was what happened to the farmland in Northwest Wisconsin, where I live:
In 1825, a treaty decided land disputes between the Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples. This assigned ownership of the land I live on to the Anishinaabe. Then in 1837, a different treaty took almost all of the land in this area from the Anishinaabe for a penny an acre. In that moment, that land stopped being a commons and became property of the US government, except notably where the treaty specified the rights of the Anishinaabe to hunt, fish, and gather in perpetuity.
The US government, then, as now, was managed to benefit the wealthy elite. At the time, they did this through selling or simply giving out land. The newly acquired property was granted to railroad companies by the millions of acres — half the land for ten miles on either side of any potential railroad. This made the rich much, much richer. In our area, the railroad companies and the government sold much of the land on to lumber companies, which would “improve” the land by clearing it of valuable timber, and then sell the land on to settlers.
The US Government also used the land to settle debts from wars which were used to acquire land. These were called “land warrants;” and the land I live on became an individual’s property through a land warrant from the War of 1812, which had been bought and sold many times and eventually redeemed, some 30 years after the war. In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Congress passed the Homestead Act, which gave land to any white person who staked a claim by building a dwelling and plowing a field for five years. This was seen as a boon to the poor white people who were flooding the midwest from both Europe and the crowded Northeast, especially underpaid Union soldiers. This accelerated settlement and enclosure in the Midwest, and, of course, gave preferential treatment to white people.
There was a frenzy of acquisition and enclosure of land in our area from 1840 to the 1880s. During this time, the Native population was squeezed onto smaller and smaller pieces of land. The land that was left could not function as a commons to sustain them. Within one generation, they either were obliged to live on reservations up north, or they lived on the edges of white society, until there was no empty land left at all.
Private property was such a successful means of dispossessing Native people of their land, that when the US Government started to run out of land to sell or give away in 1887, Congress introduced the Dawes Act, which allotted the communally held lands on reservations into 80 and 160 acre allotments, to be distributed to tribal members for individual ownership. Remaining tribal lands were seen as “extra” and sold to white settlers and land speculators. This allotment process ended up with the loss of millions of acres more of tribal lands and many Indigenous people also lost their allotted land to swindlers, debt collectors, or to just needing to sell it to pay for living expenses.
Private property converted the land from a community resource to be cared for into a commodity to be bought and sold. This commodity could rise and fall in value, and it could contribute to individual and family wealth accumulation. The concept of private property is linked to extracting value from the land, through logging, mining, farming, or selling or renting the rights to extract value. All of this has happened in Wisconsin, often to the detriment of the land, despite what John Locke had said about private property improving the land.
So, several policies have resulted in white people displacing Native people to own nearly all of the farmland in this part of Wisconsin by 1900. These policies included the Doctrine of Discovery, the legal concepts of enclosure and private property, The treaties of 1825 and 1837, the Railroad Act, the Homestead Act, and the Dawes Act, among many others. The end result of these policies is a biased outcome, which makes each of these a biased policy.
If we believe Ibram X Kendi, then biased ideas flow from biased policies. Growing up, I was surrounded by racist stereotypes about Native people. The dispossession of their land and culture had led to widespread poverty and trauma. When I saw images of poor, alcoholic, unemployed Indians, it reinforced the racist stereotypes. But I was not taught the complete history of the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people, so it left me confused and racist.
Alien land laws and Asian immigrants
If the only biased policies related to farmland ownership were from taking the land from Indigenous people in the 1800s, then we might expect that over time, farmland ownership would start to equalize out, and mirror the racial and economic makeup of the nation. But that has not happened. In fact, over time farmland has been concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer white people. This suggests that there were more biased policies that maintained and grew the disparity in land ownership.
In the Western United States, specific laws were passed prohibiting Asian immigrants from acquiring citizenship, and then along with these laws, other laws were passed that prohibited non-citizens from owning land. This kept land ownership in the hands of white people and led Asian immigrants into roles which became the basis for stereotypes and prejudice.
Of course this is not the first time that a group of people has been systematically kept from land ownership. Jews had been kept from owning farmland in Europe for centuries. This led Jews to fill certain roles in their communities, like bankers and merchants, which opened them to scapegoating and blame if things ever went bad.
Land ownership has always been a path to security. Policies like these, that denied ownership of land to Jews and Asian heritage people, deliberately created groups of economically insecure people. We might ask ourselves: who benefits when there is a group of economically insecure people?
Biased land policies and Black people
The biggest place to look for biased policies in land ownership is in regards to Black people.
At the end of the Civil War, the South was mostly agrarian. There was little industry, and just about the only pathway to wealth was land ownership. Union General William Tecumsah Sherman had promised the formerly enslaved people of South Carolina 40 acres and a mule, and a quantity of former plantation land was allotted to newly free people. But after the assassination of President Lincoln, President Andrew Johnson reneged on that promise, and he returned all lands to the former white owners. Instead of reparations and land, Black people were deliberately kept landless, while some white landowners even got reparations for the loss of their enslaved “property.”
Without land, nor an industrial economy to provide jobs, many Black people in the South were obliged to enter into employment in service of white landowners through the system of sharecropping. Sharecropping was debt servitude and functioned as a different sort of slavery. In addition, the “Black Code” laws were passed to fill the jails of the South with Black men, who could then be rented to white landowners as prison labor, a legal form of slavery. These policies enabled white land ownership to continue in the South, despite the population being half or more Black in many counties.
It should be said that before the Civil War, there was a large population of white people in the South who did not own land or enslaved people. For these people, the racist policy of slavery hurt them by depressing the value of their own labor. This kept most of them from building wealth and owning land. After the war, the continuation of slavery through sharecropping and convict labor continued to hurt poor white people. First, it depressed the value of their labor, and second it caused many poor white people to have to become sharecroppers or convict labor themselves. Biased land policies favored a few white people, but hurt both Blacks and poor whites.
As the Industrial Revolution churned away and factories were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Great Migration of rural Black folks to Northern and Western cities from the South got underway, and continued from 1916 to 1975, with more than 6 million people leaving the South. Even though most of the migrants had backgrounds in agriculture, owning farmland in the North was inaccessible to them. It was already in white hands. Also almost every Southern Black carried trauma related to exploitive agricultural work. So most of the Great Migration to Wisconsin ended up in the Milwaukee area, far from Northwest Wisconsin, where I live.
Even if Black migrants had wanted to farm in Wisconsin (or elsewhere in the midwest), federal policies for FHA loans and other policies made it nearly impossible for Black people to get the cheap, secure farm loans that were easily available to white people. These biased loan policies helped keep white people in land ownership, and slowly eroded the ability of Black people to own farmland. In 1920, nearly a million Black farmers owned a combined total of 41.4 million acres. This was over 14% of all farm owners at the time. Today that number is just 49,000 Black farm owners (just 1.4% of the nation’s farm owners), owning just 4.7 million acres. This is nearly a 90% loss. If the problem were just the aftereffects of slavery, then we would expect an upward trend, not a loss. This was about biased policies at work.
It wasn’t just policies that forced Black people off the land and kept them from buying new land. Personal racism, which Kendi says is the result of racist policies, was and is still an important factor, in and of itself, in perpetuating the cycles. In Wisconsin, when land comes up for sale, it is often sold to a family member or a neighbor, but failing that, my guess is white sellers would be more likely to sell to white buyers. Furthermore, rural white communities are not very welcoming of outsiders of any race. In The Bone and Sinew of the Land, Anna-Lisa Cox details how Midwest rural communities systematically excluded and oppressed Black pioneers. Today, while as a white person I mostly feel comfortable in rural Northwest Wisconsin, more than one friend who is not white have told me that rural Wisconsin does not feel safe or welcoming to them.
How farm consolidation and land speculation hurt everyone
Like the drained pool, the biased trend to have farmland in the hands of fewer and fewer white people also hurts the majority of white people. Since even before Andrew Johnson gave the plantations back to the former owners, Federal and State farm policies have continued to slowly result in the concentration of land in fewer and fewer hands. Agriculture policies have forced farms to “get big or get out.” Commodity payments go to the big farms and keep them in business.
In an era of consolidation and low commodity prices, the way big farms can make money on small margins is by farming more land. Nowadays, in order to make money in farming, you need a lot of land and big investments in machinery. This scenario favors people who have inherited land and good relationships with bankers. This means that the “buy-in” for beginning farmers, white or Black, is prohibitively expensive and inaccessible. This is not intentionally biased, but it has that effect.
When policies are put in place to favor big farms over small farms, one way that farms can get big is to become corporations. Many farm families become corporations, so technically much of what we call “corporate farming” is still family farming, but there are other actual corporations and people who see farmland as a potential investment.
While this biased system of land ownership policies was set up to help existing farmers, now it is endangering all farmers and our food supply. Currently there is a global pool of money that is looking for places to park money where it will grow. Bill Gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the United States, with more than 269,000 acres. Chinese billionaires are also trying to buy US farmland, and as of the start of 2020, Chinese investors controlled more than 192,000 acres of US agricultural land. Recently, an investor bought a piece of Iowa farmland for the incredible record price of $22,000 an acre. In all, foreign investors own over 30 million acres of US farmland, and that isn’t even counting domestic investors. When farmland becomes an investment vehicle like this, it is not just aspiring Black or Indigenous farmers who are priced out of the market, it is any new farmer.
It is ironic that the people who have benefited from all of these deliberately biased policies that were meant to prevent poor people from gaining wealth and land ownership are vulnerable when someone who is even richer wants to buy and hoard land, regardless of their race. It is the proverbial “chickens coming home to roost,” as Malcolm X so famously said.
So yes, land ownership policies since the Doctrine of Discovery have favored white people and dehumanized BIPOC. Sometimes the policies were intentional, and other times outcomes were incidental to the intentions of the policy makers. These land ownership policies have not favored all white people, instead they favor the small subset of white people who already own land, and now it is becoming harder for them, too.
Prohibiting people from owning land or making it nearly impossible for them to own land has had the effect of creating a permanent underclass of people who are forced to work for low wages. This has the effect of depressing wages everywhere and affecting all working people. This is happening globally, as well as in the United States.
Land ownership policies have had a similar effect to the policies that make it impossible for undocumented workers to claim legal status. While it affects the undocumented, it also drags down wages across the board.
Likewise, the consolidation of land into fewer and fewer white hands has the effect of globalizing the food system and driving down prices. A globalized food system that depends on a few corporate producers is less resilient and more prone to disruption than a localized, diffused system that depends on small farms and processors. We would all benefit from anti-biased land ownership policies.
So what are we going to do about it?
What is required is solidarity across races and ethnic backgrounds to push for reforms that benefit everyone. That includes white people like me.
If we were to imagine an equitable land ownership policy, then it would involve policies that encourage new farmers by means of tax policy, loans, grants, and trainings, and policies that discourage consolidation and land speculators through tax policy, regulation, and anti-trust laws. These policies, if applied equally, could help white people and BIPOC alike. Just removing the system of government support for corporate farms could begin to level the playing field.
Beyond creating equitable land ownership policies in the present, we must address historic injustice. This means some sort of updated “forty acres and a mule” policy to encourage Black farm ownership, and some sort of “Landback” that actually gets land back in the hands of Indigenous folks — perhaps by recognizing that the Dawes Act was unconstitutional.
One idea that might go a long way to supporting new farmers is to bring back the commons. If the government or independent agencies or groups of people could take farmland and create something like a land conservancy, they could give space and equipment for new farmers to get started. If multiple farms could function on one piece of land, there could be synergistic effects.
The end of biased ideas will come when we end the biased policies and repair the damage done by past policies. We need equitable land policies. I need equitable land policies.
Afterthoughts
The “rational” white guy in me looks at this essay and still wonders. If private property is biased, then isn’t it possible to make the case that anything is biased? That guy might never be convinced. Or maybe there is just a lot of bias out there.
Coincidently, I am less and less interested in personally owning land. Instead, I’d like to be part of something like a commons.
A word about language
Throughout the essay, one could easily replace the word “biased” with the word “racist.” Because of the fragility of white people, including me, the word “racist” triggers them/us to feel attacked and flip into defensive mode, shutting down our thinking and the possibility of change. In this essay, I want to speak about how racial bias is a tool by the owning class to mask other biases, including bias against other white people. I want to get to a point of solidarity, and invite white people like me to see our common cause, so I have catered to their/our fragility. I think that catering like this is part of the problem; we can’t have a functional discussion if we can’t even hear the word “race” without flipping out.
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Reading List:
Heather McGhee: The Sum of Us
Ibram X Kendi: Stamped From the Beginning
Isabel Wilkerson: The Warmth of Other Suns
Anna-Lisa Cox: The Bone and Sinew of the Land
Leah Penniman: Farming While Black
David Bollier: Think Like a Commoner
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You are invited to check out my serial novel Climate for Change: Letters From the End of the World:
https://medium.com/climate-for-change/climate-for-change-introduction-5331d5ab9313
