The “Machine That Eats Up Black Farmland”

After decades of discriminating against Black farmers and ignoring their complaints, the USDA is promising to do better. Again.

- By Kathryn Joyce, Nathan Rosenberg, and Bryce Stucki

Once, Valee Taylor and Renee Stewart’s family was among the largest Black landowners in North Carolina’s Orange County, a rectangle of farm country running north from Chapel Hill.

In the 1930s, after a life of sharecropping, the siblings’ grandfather, Berea “Burrie” Corbett, turned $40 worth of gold coins his parents had given him into a 1,300-acre tobacco farm in tiny Cedar Grove, becoming a pillar of the local Black bourgeoisie. He built a church and a school for the local Black community.

Taylor and Stewart had helped run the farm during high school and college. After careers in law enforcement and pharmacy, respectively, they decided to return to the family business. In 2009, aided by a loan from the US Department of Agriculture, they launched a high-tech aquaculture operation in a 10,000-square-foot building that stood where their grandfather once grew tobacco. Taylor Fish Farm’s organic tilapia soon turned up in grocery stores around the South and was the first Black-owned farm to supply food to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The siblings enjoyed rapid success until a series of natural disasters forced them to take production offline and the USDA delayed their request to defer loan payments. Stewart lost the 80-acre tobacco farm she’d posted as collateral and developed a heart condition from the stress; her doctor, she recalls, “worried I was going to take my life.” Taylor had a nervous breakdown that landed him in the hospital.