Hey, it's Sinon Radio, I'm John Bewin.

Our summer mini-series of re-broadcasts, aka a few of my favorite things, continues.

This episode we originally posted in 2017, it dropped during our seeing white season,

and even though it kind of fit right in with that series, it really was a separate project.

An investigative documentary that I'd worked on for a year and a half in collaboration

with the excellent radio show and podcast reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

We called the episode Losing Ground.

It's a story of stark institutional racism, but it's a love story too.

Stick around at the end for an update.

If I ask you to picture an American farmer, what image floats to mind?

Final shirt, overalls, chances are the farmer you're picturing is white, and with good reason.

More than 9 out of 10 American farmers are white today.

But of course in a longer view of things, black people have played a huge role in American

agriculture.

The nation's economy was built largely on black farm labor, in bondage for hundreds of

years, followed by a century of sharecropping and tenant farming.

That plan at the end of the Civil War to grant the freed slaves, 40 acres in a mule so

they could be self-sufficient as farmers, that promise wasn't kept.

Still somehow a century ago, African American families owned 15 million acres, one seventh

of the nation's farmland.

But then through the 20th century, black farmers lost their land at a much faster rate

than white farmers, and are now fewer than 1% of American farm families.

...