Can’t Make It Rain, Can’t Change Colors

Third-Generation African American Cattlemen Farm in Bedford Co., Va.

Andrew Jenner
Virginia Correspondent

MONETA, Va.— After a few minutes’ search, Curtis and Danny Wright find the day-old Charolais cross calf in the upper corner of the pasture, hunkered down in a patch of tall grass. It is mid-day, sunny and warm, smack in the middle of fall calving season on the brothers’ Bedford County farm.

Danny prepares the ear tag – #1306 – while Curtis ties and weighs the calf.

Eight-five pounds, right where it should be. They stain the calf’s navel with iodine, spray fly repellent beneath its tail, and hold the animal close for a few moments to calm it before turning it loose. Danny, 41, and Curtis, 48, climb back in the truck and head off to work the handful of other new calves, hiding in the trees at the bottom of the hill.

The brothers, third-generation family farmers, devote all their farming energies to beef production, keeping about 240 cows in several herds on their 1,200-acre farm. The Wrights sell most of their yearling steers by tele-auction through the Virginia Quality Assured program. Their bred heifers and bulls mostly go to private buyers, and they sell a small, but growing, number of steers directly to consumers. Eventually, the Wrights hope to send all their cattle to this more lucrative market.

Like all farmers, the brothers are dogged by a familiar set of worries – if the rains will be enough, or feed prices will go even higher, or the endophytes in the forage will cause trouble come spring. At lunchtime, Danny chats on the phone with a poultry litter broker. Commercial fertilizer is getting too expensive to use on their pastureland. On a clear day they can hear the motorboats on Smith Mountain Lake, five miles distant. The shoreline is completely ringed with vacation homes, now, and new development is stretching out toward them, with an unwelcome effect: the Wrights’ land values have ballooned over the past decade.

But like very, very few of their farming colleagues, the Wrights are black.

The latest NASS Census of Agriculture counted a few more than 30,000 black principal farm operators in the U.S. – about 1.4 percent of the 2.2 million total principal American farm operators. While that figure is generally higher in the south, just 3.5 percent of Virginia’s 47,383 principal farm operators are African-American.

Farming in America hasn’t always been such an overwhelmingly white occupation. In the early 20th century, about one in seven American farmers were black. Since then, a number of factors have driven most of those African-Americans farmers out of agriculture. One of the biggest reasons, according to John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, was persistent, systemic discrimination by the USDA.

“A lot of people just don’t know [about that],” said Boyd, a fourth-generation black farmer from Virginia’s Piedmont region. “It’s really an untold saga.”

African-American farming advocates like Boyd say that decades of discriminatory lending practices by the USDA put black farmers at a consistent disadvantage and ultimately forced many off their land. In 1999, the USDA effectively admitted as much by settling a class-action lawsuit brought by hundreds of black farmers claiming to be victims of racial discrimination.

Farming, Boyd continued, is difficult enough by itself. “Add discrimination on top of those challenges,” he said, “and it makes it very difficult for us.”

The Wrights’ own family farm got its start in 1935, when their grandfather, Gill Wright, bought a small farm in Bedford County. He raised “the whole shebang” (as Curtis phrases it) – cattle, hogs, chickens, corn and tobacco.

Gill’s son, Randolph, eventually joined him, and, by the time they were eight or nine, so did Gill’s grandsons Danny and Curtis. By the time the two brothers were getting their start, the black farming community as a whole had entered serious decline. The Wrights themselves, though, had done well, adding more land to their operation, and increasingly concentrating on their intensively managed cow herd.

Growing up, Curtis and Danny heard stories about the obstacles their grandfather faced as a black farmer in segregated Virginia. Gill Wright said he thought his crop had to be twice as good to fetch the same price as a white neighbor’s. Things are different today, the brothers say. Their skin color isn’t the same hindrance today that it was for their grandfather, but occasionally the Wrights get a taste of older times. Sometimes customers seem surprised that black men like the Wrights can raise good cattle. Sometimes getting a loan comes harder for them than others.

“[It feels like] we have to give blood where a lot of people can just walk in and get one,” Danny said.

None if it has been enough to keep the brothers from success. The Wrights’ strategy for dealing with lingering prejudice is to accept its existence and go about their lives on the farm. To dwell on it, to allow it to make them angry – those are ways to allow prejudice to defeat them.

“If we [had done that], we wouldn’t be where we are today,” says Curtis, gesturing across his pasture – one of the many the family has acquired since Gill bought his first modest piece of land 75 years ago.

There are more calves yet to tag, and more to come tomorrow and the day after that, and so many things to do. In the scramble, race is a simple fact on the Wright farm – an issue at times, perhaps, like the weather or the commodity markets, but not something that keeps them up worrying at night.

“It doesn’t bother us,” Danny says, before he and Curtis head back to the truck. “It’s like the rain. You can’t change it. You can’t make it rain. We can’t change our skin color.”