Advanced BioFuels USA

by Sara Wyant (Agri-Pulse) As the deputy secretary of agriculture, Krysta Harden was in a unique position to encourage more diversity in agricultural organizations. She knew many farmer leaders personally and they trusted her insights.

At the 2014 Commodity Classic, she delivered a fairly strong message in a private session, telling the almost all-white male audience of farmer leaders that they needed to encourage more diversity in their membership and leadership.

“It was basically a message that, if you want your organization to have a bright future, you need to be more diverse,” recalls Ray Gaesser, the American Soybean Association president at the time.

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Despite progress on gender diversity, why isn’t agriculture looking more racially diverse? And what should be done about it? The answers are as complicated as the sometimes controversial and emotional dialogues surrounding race relations in the U.S.

Some industry leaders told us that they grew up not knowing any Black, Latino or Asian individuals in their respective geographies. Others said they have tried to recruit a more diverse set of employees and sometimes failed. 

“Like many who are engaged in agriculture here in America, I am from a small rural town and really didn’t travel that much while growing up,” noted an Agri-Pulse subscriber who responded to our request for perspectives on this topic. “Our world is formed by those we interact with and for most of us, that is an Anglo-based group of friends and neighbors. While this isn’t bad or wrong it also doesn’t give us the perfect perspective on everything.”

Some groups told Agri-Pulse that they offered jobs to black college graduates, only to be turned down because of the location of the job.

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“If we stand idly by while our friends and neighbors suffer — as too many of us have done for too long — we are complicit in their suffering. Now is the time to step up, to heal these wounds, to build a just and equal society,” NFU President Rob Larew said in his organization’s statement.

However, Larew said in an interview that, “while statements like these, about racial injustice and the need for diversity and inclusion, can help, the challenge that any organization has is, how do we live that policy?

“A lot of what we need right now is not trying to figure out what the answer is but talk to the folks whose experience this has been,” he said. His organization, which had its first black voting delegate in 1920, featured an all-black panel, focused on black land loss and retention, USDA programs and other issues during its 2020 annual convention.

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Wisconsin Farmers Union hosted a training program earlier this year to help members better understand systemic racism and to better understand the experiences of one person versus another. Larew says it’s an effort he’d love to see more of.

“Real change is going to mean more uncomfortable conversations, more listening and more willingness to consider ideas and approaches that we haven’t considered before,” he said. “We know that what we’ve done before, up until this point, hasn’t been successful.”

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The crop insurance industry has been encouraging black students to get involved in agriculture in a variety of ways, including the National Crop Insurance Services 1890 Scholarship Program, said Laurie Langstraat, vice president for public relations with NCIS. Since 2010, more than two dozen students who attend an 1890 university and are majoring in some discipline of agriculture have been provided scholarships spread over 4 semesters.

The Farm Credit Council and its members have been trying to support programs and build relationships with black growers and black students for many years, in hopes of improving their recruitment efforts. “It’s a big priority for us,” said Van Hoose, the group’s CEO.

Earlier this year, Farm Credit took the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Challenge, committing to create strategic partnerships with the nation’s 99 HBCUs and acknowledging that they produce “top minority talent” that are “part of your diversity and inclusion efforts.”

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For now, the 2017 Census map shows the strongest concentration of black farmers in southern states.

Several years earlier, Farm Credit partnered with Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Related Sciences, a non-profit devoted to “foster and promote the agricultural sciences and related fields in a positive manner among ethnic minorities.”

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The group has over 2,000 members in 38 states, not including their high school program (Junior MANRRS) that they are in the process of building, says Ebony Webber, chief operations officer for MANRRS.

She’s heard from several agribusiness leaders about the challenges they have in recruiting diverse candidates and suggests part of the problem is that companies only look at places where they are used to hiring, mainly major land grant universities.

“How are you focused on recruiting diverse candidates if you aren’t going to the historical black colleges and universities, and other minority serving institutions?” she asks.

Another problem for recruiters is that a lot of these students don’t come from a traditional ag background, so “their experience may look a lot different. You may not be able to connect with them in the same way as you can with a student who grew up on a dairy farm, because it’s not valued as such,” she said.

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Some black farmers say that they are open to working with their white counterparts in farm organizations and agribusinesses, but need to develop a new level of trust after suffering so much discrimination at the hands of USDA and others in the past.

“The discrimination process that black farmers went through decades ago, didn’t only affect that generation. It was genocide for the future generations, because no one wanted to go into the same struggles and walk in the same footsteps,” said Philip J. Haynie III, chairman of the National Black Growers Council, who farms in Virginia and Arkansas.

Haynie says he’s been in more conversations with companies this year about how to be more inclusive in agriculture than ever before. He tells Agri-Pulse there are several things most agribusinesses could do differently to try to have relationships with black growers.

“They have to be willing to convey to growers they are sincere. They’ve got to put their money where their mouth is and invest in some diversity training for their own employees,” he said.

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Haynie recalls a NGBC meeting at Monsanto headquarters in 2008 when then-CEO Hugh Grant asked black growers assembled in the room if they were taking advantage of their zero-percent seed financing programs. A black grower who farmed 8,000 acres in Texas said he didn’t know such a program existed and was borrowing a couple of million dollars, paying interest at the bank instead. Grant was livid, Haynie recalls.  READ MORE