Dept. of Ag assigns ‘disaster areas’ in wake of 2023 drought
22nd April 2024 · 0 Comments
By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer
The federal government is coming to the aid of thousands of farmers across Louisiana straining under the weight of a lengthy drought that has all but placed many of their farms in jeopardy.
The Department of Agriculture declared 62 parishes “primary natural disaster areas” on April 3, making farmers in those areas, alongside those in bordering jurisdictions in Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas, eligible to receive emergency loan assistance from the Farm Service Agency.
Louisiana has battled a persistent drought since late 2022, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, followed by the Tiger Island wildfire in Beauregard Parish in 2023, the largest recorded in state history with that same year being the third driest on record for the city of New Orleans.
Farmers who have experienced extreme, severe or exceptional drought for eight consecutive weeks or more are eligible to apply for fast-track assistance. Emergency funding can be used to replace livestock, refinance existing debts or revamp a farmer’s entire business plan.
The deadline to apply for aid is November 25.
“I know a lot of producers who are struggling right now,” said Bruce Harrell, Louisiana field director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an association of Black farmers and landowners across the south. “But even though the assistance will be helpful, what these farmers need are grants not loans because once the emergency is over they’ll still have the debt.”
Black farmers have been at the center of Black America’s fight for economic justice and have suffered some of the worst financial disparities at the hands of the federal government of any group.
In 2021, Congress passed a $4 billion debt relief package for Black farmers as part of an economic stimulus package to mitigate past discrimination in the form of uneven distribution of loans and other aid, causing many operators to lose their lands and farms to bank seizure.
The debt relief package was the culmination of two decades of litigation but was blocked months after President Joe Biden signed the measure into law by a federal judge on grounds that the funding would unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race. Congress revised the proposal to include a wider category of disenfranchised farmers, a move that angered many and resulted in a lawsuit against the federal government by prominent attorney Ben Crump.
In May of 2023, John Boyd Jr., president of the Black Farmers Association, announced that he would not be supporting President Biden’s bid for reelection, citing the government’s failure to “protect Americans from farm foreclosures” by implementing a moratorium on asset seizure by banks. Boyd, in a statement, said farm foreclosures would be Biden’s legacy and the “fate of thousands of Black, Native American and other farmers of color” were being cruelly left to chance.
Louisiana is home to an estimated 2,500 Black farmers, according to federal census data, tying South Carolina for the third-highest number of Black farmers in the country. In 1900, there were approximately a million Black farmers in the United States. Today there are nearly 50,000.
“I am a fourth-generation farmer,” said Ashley Armstrong, who grows watermelon, peas and sweet corn among other crops on her family farm in Bastrop, La. “The drought really hit us hard. We had 15 acres of butter beans that we could not use because of the lack of rain this year.”
Armstrong, whose grandfather was a sharecropper, plans to apply for an emergency loan and has already applied for debt relief from the federal government’s multi-billion-dollar fund.
“We had to use pumps to irrigate crops that were not already irrigated, which unfortunately increased some financial costs for us,” she said. “Some crops could weather the storm while our corn and soybeans took a hit. So, it’s been rough, but we’re working through it. I do this because this is in my blood and being out there on the farm brings me a sense of peace.”
Last month, Gov. Jeff Landry issued a drought-related disaster declaration for the state’s nearly 2,000 crawfish farmers, among them more than a dozen Black producers, to release federal funds that will help farmers recover from one of the smallest crawfish yields in the state’s history.
“Producers are still trying to make it,” Harrell said, “but some of their losses have been very substantial and without financial help some of these farmers may not be in business come 2025.”
This article originally published in the April 22, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
