In Illinois, Black-owned farms collectively make up only 18,659 acres

October 24, 2021 11:00 AM

Conservationists See Rare Nature Sanctuaries. Black Farmers See a Legacy Bought Out From Under Them.
Tony Briscoe, photography by Rashod Taylor, special to ProPublica (Oct. 14, 2021)

Ward remembers a time when much of Sweet Fern Savanna belonged to Black farmers, including him. Peering beyond the barbed wire fencing and signs threatening to prosecute trespassers, he could see the patch of land where he once grew soybeans. The small patch of land — two adjacent parcels, totaling 3 acres — represented a chance for him to carry on a family legacy that extends back 60 years in Pembroke. Ill and unemployed, Ward lost his properties after he failed to pay $1,511.40 in taxes; they were purchased about a decade ago at county auctions by the preserve’s owner, an 85-year-old conservationist from Chicago’s south suburbs.

“How did they get all of this?” Ward wondered aloud.

posted by Not A Thing (15 comments total)

Those interested in learning more about Pembroke Township may be interested in Pembroke: A Rural, Black Community on the Illinois Dunes (chapter 9 discusses the specific issue of conservation orgs).
posted by Not A Thing at 11:04 AM on October 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

In broad terms, I think that finding a balance between "good for human communities" and "good for non-human-centered ecosystems" is going to be, in the long-term, one of the thorniest problems that sustainability and environmentally-conscious movements face, and I think it's underappreciated as the broad phenomenon it is. People tend to just see it case-by-case as NIMBYism and be pretty dismissive. But you've got (for example) people who want to just cover the American Southwest in solar panels as an urgent necessity to address global warming, and other people who see doing that as utter wholesale destruction of some of the most pristine, untouched ecosystems in North America...and both sides are right. Some ugly choices will have to get made.

Most of the time, those ugly choices almost invariably end up going pro-human-activity, so a story like this where the conservationists are coming out on top are rare. It's not a coincidence, I'm very sure, that the people losing out to conservation efforts happen to be extremely poor members of a marginalized community. That's not surprising but it is shitty.

With all that having been said: I am....deeply suspicious of efforts to make the Nature Conservancy and conservation efforts in general seem like the bad guys in this story. Here's the giveaway:

Over the years, commercial farmers and real estate speculators have purchased land lost or sold by Pembroke residents.

They go into this in more detail, later on:

Cole argues that the landholdings of private conservationists are dwarfed by the acreage held by outside commercial farmers. Like private conservationists, they, too, have also purchased tax-delinquent property at county auctions, contributing to Black land loss, Cole said. And because the assessed value of farmland in Illinois is based, in part, on soil type (and the soil in Pembroke is considered poor), they pay little in taxes.

“We’re dealing with two extremes: locking land up in conservation and locking in commercial ag,” said Cole, who is board president for the Community Development Corporation of Pembroke and Hopkins Park.

“I’ve told the mayor, you’ve got the same issue on both sides, but you’re only looking at one.”

That's my read on this, as well. It would be one thing if the out-of-town conservationists were driving up land prices by paying more money than the locals could afford, like some sort of rural analogue to gentrification. But that's not what's happening here: what's happening here is poor black farmers are making so little money at farming that they cannot afford to pay an annual bill of ~$1500. (Or in one case mentioned in the article, $580.) Usually paid in quarterly installments. If you can't cover that - for long enough that the county takes your land for non-payment of taxes, which is not something that happens immediately - your farm is going under. It's not economically viable. That's true whether or not the Nature Conservancy buys it up, or a big commercial farmer or real estate developer buys it up. That's just not how the cause-and-effect works; the Nature Conservancy is only getting involved after you already couldn't pay your taxes. And the Nature Conservancy isn't "Goliath" in this story, despite what one of the locals is quoted as saying. They're almost certainly focusing on this town precisely because the land is so low-value, and they've done the math and figured out they can make a lot of conservation impact for their dollars here.

The truth is, in this story it sounds like the way of life they're mourning the loss of, and the town that's slowly dying, would all be vanishing with or without the Nature Conservancy; it'd just be going to Big Ag instead. It also sounds like the Nature Conservancy is (perhaps belatedly) making an effort to be better neighbors and communicate better with the community now; you can bet the real-estate speculators and big commercial farms wouldn't bother doing that.
posted by mstokes650 at 12:49 PM on October 24, 2021 [29 favorites]

Before I get into this, there seems to be a general problem of "we want this land to be solely for conservation" vs "you are keeping us from being able to use this land as we have for X amount of time". See these two previouslies.
posted by ockmockbock at 1:06 PM on October 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

I see a certain parallel in San Benito County California. It's a mostly rural, mostly latinx county, south of Silicon Valley, that's roiled by conflicts over development.

Short end: the latinx population wants to see more employment/opportunities for social development by encouraging new business and startups.

The more well-to-do mansion owners of Aromas want zero-growth caps, urban growth boundaries, and generally want to block all further development of the region, except for wineries.

It's a conflict that ends up pitting environmental progressives against social justice and labor progressives, and stoking that conflict is the one thing that has allowed the Republicans to maintain a toe-hold in the county.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 1:14 PM on October 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

It's a mixed bag on certain issues but the sense of converting it into land use that explicitly bans the former owners and residents from using said conserved land feels pretty bad. The people here clearly have a connection to this land even after they can't farm it in an economically viable way and locking them out from traditional use is fucked up.
posted by Ferreous at 2:08 PM on October 24, 2021

It's a mixed bag on certain issues but the sense of converting it into land use that explicitly bans the former owners and residents from using said conserved land feels pretty bad.

But that's literally the difference between being an owner and being a former owner.
posted by kickingtheground at 2:32 PM on October 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

“How did they get all of this?” Time.

In the town where I live, there is a strip of land along the interstate that is mostly timber with some houses and a mobile home park. As a part of the city plan, it's supposed to stay this way as a part of creating a natural feeling for those entering town from the exit adjacent to that location.

A few years ago, a development plan was submitted to the city the one of the owners He wanted to turn a chunk of the land into stuff you'd normally find at a major exit from the interstate. This guy had been slowly buying up property around his house for decades and he had finally decided to sell out to a development company for millions.

Basically, anything can get done as long as one is willing to bid his time and play the long game.
posted by Fukiyama at 2:53 PM on October 24, 2021

I was talking to an older Greek farmer years ago, out in Syracuse, Utah.I used to take pictures for the Utah Department of Agriculture. We were looking down from an overpass onto his old best friend's farm. Gus was out in his field, it was a place I bought produce. The farmer I was talking to had hoed beets for his grandmother out on that land, when he was a kid, he had the 150 acres in red onions. He was telling me he had it all but it was too late. His kids didn't want to farm, at all, and he had just sold 75 of his 150 acres for $5,175,000. I asked why it was too late, he said he had had five heart bypasses, wrecked his knee with a tractor clutch, he was just worn out. He was in his late seventies, early eighties then, a fit looking man, driving a small beat up pickup truck. I went on down to Gus's farm and bought three large onions, three large red peppers, two eggplants and 6 large tomatoes, for $4.50. He told me I was being overly generous. Small farming shouldn't be a losing proposition.
posted by Oyéah at 3:19 PM on October 24, 2021 [11 favorites]

Small farming shouldn't be a losing proposition.

There's no should or shouldn't. Farming is a commercial venture and ultimately survive on it's profitability. Unless you want to treat the act of farming as a conservation effort in itself, or a niche hobby supported by outside activities/spouses, etc.

This particular story seems to play out as a battle between two different conservation efforts. Conservation of small farming and the community it supports is at a disadvantage here by reason of being more or less not viable commercially. Farming in general seems to carve out a special exception to exist in the minds of many, on the basis of "way of life" arguments. Which I find a romantic, sentimental notion, but difficult to justify rationally. If you have a "connection to the land", even though you can't utilize it in a sustainable way, should you be somehow supported to continue as you had done traditionally, because of tradition?

At the same time, I find conservation efforts occasionally obnoxious and self righteous, assuming a moral superiority that exists because enough people (usually outsiders) are willing to grant it on some kind of principle. And willing to wave away objections arbitrarily.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:45 PM on October 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

There's no should or shouldn't. Farming is a commercial venture and ultimately survive on it's profitability.

In a world full of food insecurity, that seems to be a flaw in the system of capitalism. Which isn't to say that small farming is going to be the most sustainable from an environmental standpoint, but I wouldn't agree that market forces should be the ultimate determining factor.
posted by Pryde at 8:06 PM on October 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

Market Forces your door open, and takes what it can from you, if you incorrectly play it's game.
posted by Oyéah at 10:35 AM on October 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

In a world full of food insecurity, that seems to be a flaw in the system of capitalism.

I mean, not really? The problem for the farmers is that the system of capitalism has resulted in food that's so cheap that they can no longer make a living producing it. But too-cheap food does not make food insecurity worse.

You could argue that it's not capitalism that's making food cheap, but subsidies, which end up benefiting big-ag at the expense of the small farmer. You could try to subsidize small farms more, somehow, to even the playing field... but it's probably the nature of subsidies that they tend to go to those organizations with enough people to deal with bureaucracy and have the scale to make it worthwhile.
posted by alexei at 2:11 PM on October 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

I mean, not really? The problem for the farmers is that the system of capitalism has resulted in food that's so cheap that they can no longer make a living producing it. But too-cheap food does not make food insecurity worse.

Unless the premise that food should be treated as a commodity and source of profit in the first place is questioned. It's a bit of a paradox that food can be too cheap for farmers to make a living off of it, but not cheap enough that everyone can afford to eat sufficiently and healthily.
posted by Pryde at 10:33 PM on October 25, 2021

Probably worth noting that many other countries have agricultural policies that are specifically intended to keep traditional farming practices viable. Indeed, that's still the nominal rationale for a lot of US farming policies, although in the US case it's just a pretext for subsidizing Big Ag. Whether any of that is a great idea, truly free market agricultural policies seem to be pretty scarce among countries that can afford an alternative.

It may also be worth noting that the land in Pembroke is so valuable from a conservation standpoint because the farming practices there were much less damaging to the environment than elsewhere along the Kankakee. (Compare the prairie remnants in Pembroke to TNC's work further upstream at the Kankakee Sands, which required re-terraforming thousands of acres of cropland.) That would suggest the potential for meaningful partnerships with the community, although that would require TNC to step away from the ahistorical idea of pristine wild land (which generally can only exist as an artifact of forced removal or genocide). The article suggests TNC might be moving toward such partnerships, although I'm a bit skeptical that TNC's commitments to that goal are any more sincere than its corporate donors' commitments to environmental preservation.
posted by Not A Thing at 10:25 AM on October 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's interesting to me how closely this fits in with the usual environmental injustice pattern: Black or Indigenous communities are forced into the most marginal and unwanted land, often by law, and then the low value of that land (or the low income from it) is used to justify either depriving them of it entirely, or placing polluting industries there that would not be tolerated elsewhere. Not to go too far with that -- certainly most people would rather live next to a closed nature preserve than a toxic waste dump if those were the only choices -- but the dynamic is similar enough to show how counterproductive a color-blind environmentalism can be.

On that note, it's worth restating that the difficulties of Pembroke are not some random output of the glorious free market; they are a product of centuries of deliberate policy. The history of Pembroke is complex, but the very fact that this Black farming community was limited to marginal land that was still available after the Civil War is a product of deliberate policies of excluding Black people from Illinois before that date. And of course violent racial exclusion in rural Illinois didn't end after the Civil War either. On top of all that, racist federal agricultural policies have wreaked havoc on Black farmers for the last century and are set to continue doing so under the Biden administration.)

This is a big and complicated story, but IMO any version that doesn't begin and end with race is going to obscure more than it can illuminate.
posted by Not A Thing at 10:50 AM on October 26, 2021 [1 favorite]