This is the first story in Capital B’s “Gatekeepers of the Land,” a multipart series that explores a small but powerful county committee system and its role in diminishing Black political power and resources for Black farmers. This project is a result of the Investigative Reporting and Editors Chauncey Bailey Journalist of Color Fellowship. It is also made possible with funding from the Data Driven Reporting Project.
Growing up in rural Georgia, Shirley Sherrod saw firsthand how Black farmers can lose their land and their lives trying to protect it. Her father, a landowner, received a loan in 1964 from the United States Department of Agriculture to build a brick house. But a local branch of the federal agency told him that a Black man couldn’t build a brick home.
“They [said], ‘You either decide to use blocks, timber, or whatever, but you couldn’t get a loan to build a brick house,’ even though all of the white farmers were getting [the loans],” she recalled.
The following year, her father was shot and killed by a white farmer who confronted him over a cow.
Her father’s experience with the USDA’s Farm Service Agency’s County Committee stuck with Sherrod. His killing, a reminder of the horrors of the past, fueled her work as a civil rights activist and former USDA employee. Only a few years later in the 1970s, she, too, experienced discrimination when her husband and their farm manager visited a county office in Georgia to get an emergency loan, she said.
“The guy said, ‘You’ll get a loan over my dead body,’” Sherrod recounted.
The USDA’s discrimination against Black farmers is widely documented, contributing to a historic decline in land loss. Yet, it’s also rooted in a little-known but powerful county committee system, where Black farmers have been denied resources, missed out on information about USDA programs, and blocked from getting elected to a committee. The committees are less powerful than they were at the height of Jim Crow, but Sherrod and others say they are still impacting the livelihoods of Black farmers.
Under the committee system, farmers elect their peers to give local input on federal programs. The USDA calls it an “advisory board.” However, these committees do more than make recommendations. They shape decisions on USDA disaster assistance programs, hiring, and outreach. The committees aren’t diverse, according to studies, experts, and a Capital B analysis of USDA county committee election reports. Not all farmers get to vote in the elections, and since 2002, when USDA began collecting data, there’s been shockingly low voter turnout.
The USDA has not responded to Capital B’s multiple requests for an interview about the role of county committees and the concerns of Black farmers.
Created by the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt established a program that paid farmers to voluntarily reduce how much they grow and created the county committees to administer the relief. White landlords could split the payments with their tenants. However, most refused to pay them and in some cases, evicted them. One economist estimated 2 million former tenants and workers became unemployed.
Trevor Findley, clinical instructor at the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School who researched county committees, told Capital B the original mission seemed to never have been fulfilled in the first place.
“Going back to the first Farm Bill, all of the benefits flowed to the landowner, and that largely remains the case today,” Findley said. “If the idea behind county committees is that they would be representative of agriculture in that specific area, then they are clearly missing the mark.”
How do these committees work?
This county committee system often remains hidden from public view, as the members report to a state executive director who then communicates to the Farm Service Agency. The committee is made up of three to 11 voting members. More than 7,700 members are elected to serve in roughly 2,300 county offices nationwide. Elections occur every year, but not in every county.
Traditionally, farmer participation in committee elections is low. In 2024, there were more than 1.79 million eligible voters, representing 53% of the total farmer population. However, only 147,508 ballots, or 8%, were cast.
By comparison, 29,923 Black farmers — 64% — were eligible to vote, but only 2,084 cast a ballot. And of the roughly 3,600 farmers who ran for seats, only 201 were Black.
“Black farmers realized early on you could be targeted for trying to push for things that should have just been normal in agriculture, and then it would get discouraged,” Sherrod said, referencing the low participation rates. “You run, and then you don’t win. There are people who can determine whether you get a loan … so you get tired and just try to exist.”
To run as a candidate or vote, farmers must “participate” in USDA programs — meaning they receive assistance, benefits, or services — or they must “cooperate” or give the FSA information about their farming operation.
The responsibilities of the county committee have diminished, yet they still provide input on commodity price support loans, conservation programs, and disaster payments. They provide outreach, make recommendations to the state committee, and conduct hearings.
A few years ago, in one rural Mississippi county, a state executive director witnessed a white crowd protest an interview with a Black candidate for the county executive director position. The state director – who now works in a different capacity – asked for anonymity in fear of retribution from the Trump administration.
On the day of the interview, the state leaders felt unwelcome walking into the local office. No one spoke. Before the interview began, everyone heard a loud banging at the door. Startled, the director opened the doors and a herd of mostly white people rushed into the small room.
They wanted another Black person — who had no management experience — to become the next county director. In order to be an eligible candidate, the individual must complete a training program. Their pick had not.
The state conducted an investigation and found the white man who led the siege was the father of one of the county committee members. They terminated the member.
Although the decision didn’t fall strictly across racial lines, it underscores the power dynamics at play — of white individuals willing to go to extreme lengths to secure their ally’s rise to power, the state director said.
In a different Mississippi county, the committee hired a white man who worked as a farm loan manager for three months, the director said. They dismissed a Black woman who was more qualified.
“What I’ve seen is that if they know you, you’re fine,” the director said. “If they don’t know you, or they don’t like you, then you have a huge problem.”
There’s been minimal efforts to increase diversity on the committees.
In 2013, a new rule allowed the secretary of agriculture to appoint a “socially disadvantaged” farmer for one year to serve as a voting member. This includes women and people of color. The state committee could also appoint a nonvoting adviser, if necessary, according to a final rule in the Federal Register. Many said the change didn’t really work, as evidenced by the final report of the now-defunct USDA Equity Commission.
Some growers and advocates have called for the committees to be abolished altogether.
On the surface, the boards seem democratic, Joshua Galperin says, but there’s a lack of transparency about how these committees work.
Galperin, who is faculty director of the Sustainable Business Law Hub at Pace University, told Capital B that the USDA is the only federal government entity that has this system of elected administrators. He pointed to other agencies like the Department of Labor that appoint advisers, but those advisers do not make or change federal policy.
“The way that USDA sells them is that these committees are democratic simply because there are elections,” he said. “[They don’t] acknowledge that there’s a lot more to democracy than just elections and equitable participation in elections. It’s the ability to speak openly about who’s running in elections and the process by which the work gets done once the elections are over.”
What happens when a Black farmer steps up
For years, Sherrod had made it her mission to help Black farmers run for county committees, but it’s been no small feat.
In Lee County, Georgia, she helped pull together a group of farmers, secured a voters roll, and assigned each person a list of people to contact about the upcoming county committee election.
“We kept it very, very quiet that they had no idea we had an organized effort,” she said.
It resulted in a win.
The next time she attempted to do the same, in a different county, it didn’t bear fruit. The county executive director picked up the ballots from the post office, but they never arrived at the local office.
In another election, Sherrod’s team encouraged the same Black farmer to run again. The ballots were hand delivered and he won. The Black farmer ran for reelection, but the county executive director challenged the results after they were certified and encouraged a white woman to run in the contest. Sherrod and her group appealed the decision to the state committee, which ordered a new election. Sherrod said her group also appealed to the federal government. An official told them “it was a personnel issue” so they couldn’t help.
In the end, the white producer got to serve, she said.
Over the years, more Black farmers have pursued county committee seats, though the total recently has decreased slightly.
Patrick Brown is one of them.
Brown, a fourth-generation farmer, grew up in the tobacco fields with his father in Warren County, North Carolina. He said saw his dad being discriminated against through the loan programs for many years. Despite delayed payments from the USDA, his father still had a crop in the ground and made a harvest.
“I watched that each and every year,” Brown said. “That’s why a farm program is not gonna stop me from farming.”His father passed away three years ago at 96. Now, 43, Brown continues the family legacy, farming produce, grains, and specialty crops on 550 acres across three counties.
Understanding Black farmers’ plight, he decided to get involved with the Vance-Warren County county committee — first as an adviser and then as a committee member. The committee’s bylaws do not mandate that the board provide information about USDA programs directly to every producer, Brown said. He wanted to ensure Black farmers did.
“They are not required to pick up the phone and call every farm in the county and say, ‘Hey, this program is available to you. You have two weeks to apply before the deadline,” he added. “A lot of times in the Black community, we get the information late, and then if we do get the information, we don’t share. That’s the point of me being on the county committee.”
Brown stepped down from his position in February to run for county supervisor. Committee members play the role of gatekeepers because of their access to farmers’ information and their voting power on funding applications. They can also deny or approve a raise for employees such as the county executive director, Brown said.
Even Brown said he was shocked when he learned about how much say so the committee has in other farm operations.
“If a person is looking to be insured for a lost commodity, such as a lost cow, during the winter months, it is really up to that community to vote whether or not that recipient will receive funding for what they lost,” he said.
Everyone Capital B spoke to — including attorneys — said the “antiquated system” should be disbanded.
In Brown’s words: There may be a little bit too much power there.