Team,

In his new role on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Cory is dedicated to addressing a key intersectional issue that’s long faced our country: racial injustice within the agriculture industry.

In 1920, 14 percent of our country’s farms were run by Black Americans, with nearly 1 million Black farmers. Today, that percentage has shrunk to less than 2 percent, with less than 50,000 Black farmers left across the nation. What happened?

Throughout our country’s history, a legacy of discriminatory lending and racist land ownership policies by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) resulted in generations of Black farmers being driven off their land and robbed of the wealth and resources they could have otherwise passed on to their kin.

Without the same federal farm assistance granted to white farmers, Black farmers lost millions of acres of farmland, causing them and their families to lose hundreds of billions of dollars of intergenerational wealth and drastically reducing Black representation in agriculture.

Cory wants to formally address and correct the USDA’s legacy of discrimination, protect the small number of remaining Black farmers, and empower a new generation of Black leaders in agriculture by passing the Justice for Black Farmers Act.

This legislation would start to right the wrongs of the past by ending the USDA’s discriminatory practices once and for all, providing funding and assistance to the country’s remaining Black farmers to prevent further land loss, restore farmland to Black Americans by giving land grants of up to 160 acres to existing and aspiring Black farmers, create a Farm Conservation Corps, empower HBCUs to expand their agricultural programs, and more.

Let’s make this bill a reality and achieve racial justice in agriculture. Let Cory and the Senate know you support his bill by adding your name and becoming a citizen cosponsor of the Justice for Black Farmers Act now.

By passing this visionary bill, we can end the longstanding injustice in farming, get more young Black leaders engaged in this critical industry, and empower them to use sustainable practices to fix our broken food system and reduce farming’s impacts on climate change.

— Team Booker