Dear John,

How do farmers lose land? As Kenya Crumel of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance says, it's not like losing a set of keys: "Nobody's just accidentally losing land." Rather, she explains land has been taken – specifically from Black farmers – through a variety of means over the last century.

The decline is staggering! In the 1920s Black farmers held somewhere between 15 and 19 million acres of land and represented 14% of all American farmers. Today, Black farmers represent 1% of all American farmers and own as little as 2 million acres of land.

In the latest episode of Against the Grain: The Farm Aid Podcast, we hear from Kenya, Shirley Sherrod of the Southwest Georgia Project, and from Farm Aid artist Kyshona, about their experiences with land, legacy and farming. You'll learn how farmers and organizers are fighting back to both defend and reclaim farmland and, of course, you'll enjoy musical performances from the Farm Aid archives.

Last year grassroots organizers around the country successfully curbed the expansion and new construction of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), commonly known as factory farms. These local wins are creating a lot of momentum to shift the power from corporations to communities. 

Several of Farm Aid’s partners participated in these winning campaigns. But, since these wins are localized in rural communities, you may not have heard about them in national news. To learn more, we reached out to partners in Oregon, Indiana and Minnesota to get the scoop and show how these wins can reshape our farm and food from the ground up.

We were lucky to speak with Alana Henry at the Farmers for Climate Action: Rally for Resilience in Washington, DC, last March. Alana, a farmer from Young Family Farm in Kansas City, MO, works hard to bring nourishing food to her community. She told us how addressing climate change is an urgent matter, and how the time is now to fix the problem and not in ten years when it's too late.

Watch more from Alana and other farmers we met in DC.