One way to insult a Black farmer

I've never been a farmer. Grandfathers on both sides were farmers, and my father worked in the woods hauling pulpwood for a paper mill and driving a bulldozer for a wealthy rancher back in East Texas. Those were all proud people. Proud, but poor. Hardworking, salt of the earth folks.

I've met some other proud people, people who were modest in possessions, but proud of their heritage, culture, and skills on the farm. One says he was the first to go to the no-till method of planting cotton in his area. When I met him he was driving a truck. He'd been washed out of farming. I could tell he was suffering from a broken heart and shattered dreams.

There are lots of ways of insulting people and one way for insulting a Black farmer is to make him work under a supervisory contract. He applies for operating loans, and the money comes in, but the county supervisor makes him appeal to him (or her as the supervisor is sometimes a woman, though not often) each and every time funds are needed to replace a tractor part or a part for a plow or whatever.

Black farmers observed their White counterparts working the land, growing their crops, spraying herbicides, and other things while they were driving up and down the roads wasting time. One Black farmer said that he had to drive 30-40 miles to the tractor dealer, get a bill, take it to the FSA office and give them the bill so that could in turn wrote a check, and then he would take the check to the tractor dealer to purchase the part. Then he'd drive back to the farm to fix the tractor.

Let's see now. How many extra miles is that? At what cost per gallon of gas? How much time does that take? And, the time is taken away from what farming tasks? How many hours to take care of it directly? How many hours to take care of it in this circuitous manner?

And, at what cost to the human being working under that system? One farmer said it was "an insulting thing," and another, "they was treating you like a child, that you don’t have sense enough to handle your money," and "it was embarrassing," that "they did the blacks that way but they didn’t do the whites that way. "

Seems to me like they said it pretty well.