In addition, the consolidation of farmland into fewer and fewer rich white hands, and the simultaneous industrialization of those larger plots meant that farmers in 20th century America either had to get big or get out.

Getting big for white farmers was by no means easy, but was certainly simpler than the Black farmer's experience.

White farmers could apply for large loans at local agriculture extension offices and could expect some help from their USDA agent who looked like them.

Black farmers on the other hand, like John Boyd Jr., had to fight tooth and nail to even get a small loan to buy the needed machinery, chemicals, and seed required to even begin to compete with white industrialized mega-farmers.

And while redlining and racist housing policies forced Black communities into undesirable areas in the city, the ag-extension agents were making it difficult for Black farmers to buy land in rural areas, let alone tend to it.

All of this led to the precipitous decline of Black farmers in the United States from 1920 to 1997.

Black farmers went from 14.3% of the farming population to 1.4% as of the 2017 agricultural census.

One estimate puts the "total economic hit to Black wealth from land loss could be in excess of $300 billion."

But despite the constant racial oppression, Black farmers still resisted.

Butting up against the racist exploitation of Black farmers is their ironclad resilience in the face of oppression.

It was Black farmers who popularized efficient farming on small acreage.

It is because of Black farmers that we have the Community Supported Agriculture models (or CSAs) .

And it's because of Black farmers that we have mechanized seed planters.

Despite centuries of racist oppression and exploitation, Black farmers have been at the vanguard of liberation and regenerative farming practices.

Take for example the Tuskegee Institute, an educational institution originally helmed by Booker T. Washington,

which fostered the research of George Washington Carver who traveled the country during the late 1800s educating Black farmers on the importance of crop diversification, composting, and proto-organic techniques to help sharecroppers "make enough profit to purchase their land, feed their families, and achieve economic autonomy."

Later on in the late 1920s and early 1930s, rural farmers from the "Black Belt" and communists from city centers banded together to resist the exploitative circumstances of sharecropping.

Historian Robin G. Kelley chronicles this in his book, Hammer and Hoe.

He writes that after the 1931 harvest in rural Tallapoosa County, for example, "several landlords withdrew all cash and food advances from Black tenant farmers in a calculated effort to generate labor for the newly built Russell Saw Mill."

As a result of this clear wage exploitation, "Black sawmill workers and farmers in the vicinity 'enthusiastically welcomed Communist leadership,'" and hundreds joined the local union.

The movement had seven basic demands like "the continuation of food advances…the right of sharecroppers to market their own crops… and a minimum wage of one dollar per day".

Kelley goes on to write, however, that although the newly organized laborers did achieve small wins, white fears of a growing Black farmer uprising quickly escalated the situation.

Egged on by the white landlords and the local sheriff, a group of deputized white vigilantes raided a meeting of organized sharecroppers "brutally beating men and women alike."

In the days that followed, violent raids and assaults of Black farmers continued, yet the union still managed to agitate for better conditions.

All over the country and across the late 1800s and into the 1900s, Black farmers organized themselves to create better conditions.

For example, the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union, which pooled money and resources to buy land for landless Black farmers boasted 1.2 million members at its peak.