Congressmen from Georgia and North Carolina have introduced a bill this week that would help Black farm families better position their generational land for agricultural production. The measure — titled the Heirs Education and Investment to Resolve Succession, or HEIRS Property Act for short — would provide legal services toward resolving heirs’ property issues, which often take months or years.
Heirs’ property is one one of longest-running tragedies affecting Black farmers and Black-owned landowners. This complex issue involves land passed from generation to generation without standardized legal paperwork, often the result of an ancestor who died without a will. More than 60 percent of Black farmers currently operate on heir’s property, and it has made these growers unable to adequately leverage the equity in their land. These landowners are also at elevated risk of losing their land due to foreclosure or forced sale to predatory developers.
“In order to make sure America continues to produce the highest quality, most affordable food and fiber, we have to support the family farmers who are the backbone of our agriculture industry,” said Rep. Sanford Bishop, who co-sponsored the bill with fellow Democratic Rep. Don Davis. “When there is no clear title of landownership, it makes farmland vulnerable to predatory land speculators, which has cost families — and our country — millions of acres of lost farmland over the last century. It affects all agricultural producers but has hit Black farmers particularly hard. This bill will make sure that there are community resources available to families to help them navigate heirs’ property legal issues so that they can keep family land in agriculture from generation to generation.”
Heirs’ property can be mitigated through appropriate business entities and succession planning. As part of the 2018 farm bill, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was authorized to establish a re-lending program for heirs’ property to provide access to capital that may assist in resolving title issues. However, many heirs still cannot access legal services or take on additional debt to clear their titles due to systemic barriers like limited resources or being socially disadvantaged.
The HEIRS Property Act would amend existing law to direct the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture to work with nonprofit organizations to provide pro-bono legal or accounting services in resolving ownership and succession of farmland for underserved limited-resource or socially disadvantaged heirs. The bill would also reauthorize the Heirs Property Intermediary Relending Program.
In 1910, Black people owned about 16 million acres of land in the U.S.; today, it’s less than 5 million. And that’s an improvement from the 1980s, when the number had been closer to 3 million acres. About 95 percent of today’s farmland owners are White and just 0.52 percent of the total farmland in the United States is owned or operated by a Black farmer.
“Legal and quasi-legal trickery over the last century greatly contributed to Black farm owners losing nearly 90 percent of their farmland, and to the 98 percent decrease in the number of Black farmers. Today, just one in 72 farmers is Black,” said DeShawn L. Blanding, senior Washington representative in the Food and Environment Program at UCS. “We need provisions in the next food and farm bill that will help keep Black farmers on their land and assist with ownership and title issues that put them at risk of losing their land. The HEIRS Property Act will help farming families resolve ownership issues that are preventing them from investing in their farms or accessing USDA programs and services, and protect their families’ legacies from predatory sales.”
The loss of farms and farmland over the past century has been extreme and disproportionate for the Black community, and it continues in part due to heirs’ property issues.