By Alexa Spencer
Chris Newman, the owner of Sylvanaqua Farms, went viral for his confession on social media: Racism in agriculture is real and alive.
“I’m a Black farmer. I hire white people to staff my farmer’s market stall so people don’t walk by without stopping.”
“I’m a Black farmer. People are either really excited or really angry when I talk about racism in agriculture.”
Chris Newman shook up the internet with his candid take on life as a Black farmer. In a minute-and-a-half Instagram reel, he made one thing clear: It’s not easy. The same evils that plagued Black farmers in the past haunt them today. His video garnered 19 million views, but there’s more to his message.
The 41-year-old husband and father runs Sylvanaqua Farms in Virginia — where he and his team grow and sell pastured meats and eggs — and Skywoman, an organization that helps people create successful food sovereignty projects. But what about the challenge of being a modern-day Black farmer?
Farming While Black
10 years ago when Newman decided to get into farming, “my people were saying, “Why are you going back to the plantation? What’s wrong with you?’” he says.
But now Newman says there’s been “a generational shift” in the way Black folks look at farming. “We see it as a form of liberation. We see it as a form of self-determination, of getting back to our cultural roots, of just kind of reclaiming ourselves on the land,” he says.
Only 1% of farmers in the United States are Black, and Newman says one of his biggest challenges is people do not expect a Black person to be a farmer.
“This is one of the things I talked about in the video and I wasn’t kidding about that,” he says. “I would stand at my farmer’s market stall trying to sell stuff and people would just walk by because they just figured I must be selling art or something.”
Newman says he “never ran into the really big stuff.” By that, he means “getting your loan application tossed in the trash” by the USDA’s Farm Service Agency.
A 2022 analysis by NPR, using data from the USDA, examined the disparities in the outcomes of direct loan applications across different racial groups.
Only 36% of farmers who identified as Black were granted loans by the FSA, 16% were outright rejected, and 48% withdrew their applications. In comparison, 72% of white farmers were granted loans, only 4% percent were rejected, and 24% withdrew their applications.
Newman says he also hasn’t run into the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service “refusing to come out and take a look at my place,” as other Black farmers have.
And when it comes to interacting with “a customer base that could be a little bit on the racist side,” Newman lets white family members run interference.
“I’m sending my wife. I’m sending my father-in-law. I’m sending that white dude I met at the market that one time to put in the application or talk to whoever. Like, they’re not going to know the owner’s Black until it’s too late,” he says.
Family Roots in Farming
Farming runs deep in Newman’s family tree. On the Indigenous side of his family, his father’s ancestors have been in the Maryland and Washington, D.C.-area for “a good 15,000 years,” and experienced their land being stolen by colonizers. On the Black side of his family, his mother’s father farmed peanuts, cotton, and grains in Virginia.
The family held onto his grandfather’s farm until his grandmother died at age 104. “Grandma’s medical bills got bigger and bigger and bigger and eventually they sadly had to sell the farm…
It’s not there anymore, sadly, to serve as a kind of an engine of intergenerational wealth,” Newman says.
What’s more common is for Black folks to be “systematically chased off the landscape,” he says.
A 2022 study published in the American Economic Association’s Papers and Proceedings journal found that between 1910 and 1999, there was a nearly 90% decline in Black farm ownership. The value of that land? A staggering $326 billion.
“Agriculture for people who did it well was an extraordinary source of wealth,” Newman says.
“We were literally the land base for the civil rights movement, funders for the civil rights movement. And there’s a reason we were so aggressively chased off that land. People knew what that meant, white supremacy knew what it meant for Black people to be on the land.”
Creating Solutions
Newman’s latest venture, Blackbird Holdings, gives first-generation farmers a shot at agribusiness through a pilot project he launched in 2023.
“We’ve created a holding company that’s going to have a poultry processing facility as a wholly-owned subsidiary,” he says. “And that’s eventually going to own feed mills that’s going to provide funding to the farms that provide the poultry and eggs to the processor.”
The best part? “Everybody made money,” he says. “We got a lot of people fed, but this year is going to be really the first year where we’re kind of scaling it up, trying to make sure that everybody is profitable.”
He says they’re also in discussions with two landlords. Newman plans to use the land as a launching pad for Black farmers who want to grow and sell produce but can’t afford to buy land yet. This proactive approach is especially significant given the region’s history.
“Since we’re in the South, we’re trying to approach these — let’s call them what they are. They’re former f***ing plantations,” Newman says.
He also says a local 2,000-acre historic preserve could be leased out for 99 years and used to train Black and Indigenous farmers.
“Give us access to that land. Give us access to your equipment,” he says. “Let us start kind of at the same place as white farmers who inherit land, equipment, tractors, combines, stuff like that. Put us on that level playing field so th at we can take off.”
This article was originally published in Word In Black.
