Celebrate Black Farmers & Agricultural Inventors

There were nearly a million farms operated by Black farmers around 1920 which the census at the time noted made up about 14% of the total U.S. farms. Today the National Agricultural Statistics Service identifies less than 50,000 black farmers in the United States, making up just 1.4% of all US farms.

These numbers tell a story and It is important that we recognize, celebrate and honor the contributions and perseverance of black farmers throughout our country’s history in the face of slavery, racism, discriminatory practices and federal programs that have made access to land and capital extremely difficult. 

Farmers, Inventors, Scientists, Activists

African American farmers, horticulturists, botanists, teachers, inventors, and entrepreneurs helped revolutionize our food systems and promoted sustainability and stewardship of the land from the earliest days of our country. Here’s just a few of them:

Henry Blair (1807-1860) was a farmer and inventor born in Maryland in 1807. He was issued patents for a corn planter and a cotton planter, which limited the labor and time involved in planting fields of these important crops. He was the second African American to be issued a United States patent.  

George Washington Carver (1864-1943) was a scientist, inventor, and educator who developed crop rotation practices to regenerate depleted soil, fixing nitrogen by alternating the planting of corn and cotton with legumes like peanuts. He published bulletins for Black farmers to educate them on sustainability practices and uses of other crops to diversify and increase their livelihood. He also promoted organics through the use of natural pest control methods and use of compost to add nutrients to soil. He received his masters in 1896 from Ohio State University, where he was its first Black student, and then became its first Black professor. He then taught and continued his research at Tuskegee University for 47 years. 

Frederick McKinley Jones (1893-1961) was a self-taught inventor, engineer, and entrepreneur who invented the mobile refrigeration technology that revolutionized the agriculture and food industries by allowing perishable products to be stored year round and shipped anywhere. He patented his system in 1940 and co-founded Thermo King Corporation. He received patents for numerous other inventions including air conditioning units, movie ticket dispensers, thermostats, and combustion engines. 

Booker T. Whatley (1915-2005) developed the direct-to-consumer models used for today’s CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), You Pick agriculture in the 1960s and 70s. He was an Alabama horticulturist, author, and professor of agriculture at Tuskegee University who promoted regenerative agriculture practices and sustainability, both environmental and financial, for small farmers.

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was a former sharecropper, civil rights activist who ran for the U.S. Senate, and a pioneer of Black farming cooperatives. She founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1969, establishing a “pig bank” to provide free pigs for Black farmers and a land bank to purchase farmland that could be owned and farmed collectively.  

Karen Washington is a farmer, activist, and co-founder of Black Urban Growers, a non-profit founded in 2009 that promotes urban farming as a means of providing access to fresh, local foods, especially in food deserts. 

Pandora Thomas is an Afro-Indigenous permaculture educator, farmer, speaker, co-founder of the Black Permaculture Network, and chief steward at EARTHseed Permaculture Center & Farm in Sebastopol, CA, the only Black-led farm in Sonoma County. EARTHseed is a non-profit agricultural organization that holds regular “Black to the Land” gatherings to offer Black and Latino people an opportunity to connect to the roots of Afro-Indigenous earth wisdom.   Earthseed has been inspired by the works of Octavia Butler in her Parable of the Sower Series.  

We work with EARTHseed Farm and  if you’d like to support them please consider a donation to the non-profit EARTHseed Permaculture Center & Farm.