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A new book of photographs captures a portrait of America's black farmers as their numbers dwindle.
University of Kentucky Press
March 2006
128 pages
ISBN: 0813123992
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
John Francis Ficara spent four years photographing black
farmers across America, witnessing firsthand the
difficulties faced by families who simply want to continue
living and working on their land. Black Farmers in America
reproduces in duotone over a hundred of Ficara's exquisite
photographs that capture the labor and joy of daily life on
the family farm. In these poignant images of financial
hardship, survival, and the people's bond to the soil, Black
Farmers in America documents for posterity the struggle of
black farmers in America at the end of the twentieth century
to preserve their heritage. In 1920 black Americans made up 14 percent of all the
farmers in the nation and worked 16 million acres of land.
Today, battling the onslaught of globalization, changing
technology, an aging workforce, racist lending policies, and
even the U.S. Department of Agriculture, black farmers
account for less than 1 percent of the nation's farmers and
cultivate fewer than 3 million acres of farmland. Inside
these statistics is a staggering story of human loss: when
each farm closed, those farmers, their spouses, children,
grandchildren, and the people they hired, all had to leave a
way of life that had existed in their families for generations.
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