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BIPOC farmers facing challenges

SISTERS NAIMA AND Leah Penniman take a break from hoeing the land at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, N.Y. The farm and Leah Penniman’s book inspired the film “Farming While Black,” which will be screened in Middlebury on Aug. 27.

A century ago, Black farmers owned an estimated 14% of the country’s farmland. By 2017, that number had dropped to below 2%. The picture is similar here in the Green Mountain State, where just 17 of Vermont’s 7,000 farms (or 0.33 percent) were Black- or African-American-owned in 2017.