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Black land loss is a real issue, but it is trickier than the race hustlers want to acknowledge. The number of U.S. farms peaked sometime in the mid-1930's at something over six million. A third of the nation's population still lived on the farm. Then came mechanization, which brought with it massive consolidation. There followed a long era of "get big or get out," and that is not entirely over yet. Today there are around two million farming units in the U.S. as measured by USDA, but that's based on annual sales of just $1,000. That includes the little hobby farms -- "rural residence farms" -- and roadside produce stands supplied by people with a few acres given over to intensive gardening. The reality is that about 150,000 large commercial farms, mostly family owned, produce three quarters of the nation's agricultural output.

The small guys persist with farming as a hobby and because they like a rural lifestyle. The mid-size farmers work in town, or their wives do, and earn most of the family income off the farm; they run the farm as a side business and are getting constantly squeezed. The farmers large enough to afford the best technology do pretty well; those guys may talk country to fool you, but they are extremely sharp, and the technology they are using today will take your breath away. Almost all of them are college grads, many with advanced degrees, and here and there Ph.D's in hard sciences. (I know a Ph.D plant geneticist who left the lab to come home and take over the family farm. That was a lifestyle decision. That's not an uncommon story.) They're running multi-million dollar high tech businesses with massive capital costs, so you'd better believe they know finance and marketing as well.

So: how did black small farmers get disproportionately edged out in the consolidation wave? Discriminatory lending by rural southern banks and criminally negligent school systems for the black folks was certainly part of it. Until fairly recently, banking was extremely local and many rural areas had only a single bank serving a small town or rural country. If the banker is Henry F. Potter, 'ya got a problem. Small farmers banding together to gain market power against banks, the big grain elevator and the railroads is a big part of late 19th and early 20th century rural history. Black farmers had these problems in spades.

But black people also had a huge issue with lack of clear title. Black farmers tended to be poorly educated. (A lot of white farmers were educationally shortchanged too, and most of them went under as well. Modern farming is knowledge and capital intensive.) The old black sharecropper might have put together a few acres and added to it over the years. But he probably didn't have a will. He died and his six kids all had a claim. They couldn't all farm the plot, so most of them moved into town and agreed to let Cousin George run the farm with whatever informal financial arrangements the family thought fit. George ran the farm successfully, but when he and his six siblings passed away, with an average of four kids apiece, there were now 24 partial owners.

Guess what? Want to buy more land, buy modern equipment, invest in irrigation, tile the fields, whatever? To collateralize your land, you have to have clear title.

Oops.

Can all the partial owners be talked into signing on the dotted line? Sometimes, but often not, and that meant that the next generation farmer was financially hamstrung. He had a very hard time growing. The attraction of selling out and taking a better paying job in town loomed larger and larger. And sooner or later, some of the relatives, who have now been off the farm for two generations, decide they want their share of the money. The only way to raise it is to sell out and distribute the proceeds.

Strong wills and clear titles are good things. Did a black sharecropper in 1880 understand that? Maybe not. And if he did, was there a white lawyer in town in Ringworm, Alabama, that he could trust? Or afford? Maybe not.

That's why black farmers got squeezed especially hard.