Farm Size, Specialization Are Among Factors Influencing Financial Performance of African-American Farms in the United States

U.S. farms whose principal operators belong to minority racial and ethnic groups, including Black/African-American farmers, generally have had limited access to Government farm support programs partly because their farms and farm-related profits tend to be small. For example, African-American-operated farms accounted for about 1.7 percent of farms in the United States in 2017, and their share of the total U.S. market value of products sold was 0.27 percent, according to USDA’s 2017 Census of Agriculture. But African-American farmers received 0.17 percent of the total payments disbursed through the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP). The economic challenges of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic—such as increased production costs and reduced farm-level prices for certain commodities, particularly livestock—led to a renewed policy focus on the status and well-being of minority farmers.