Jake - Healing Grounds Chapter 2

Cultural access to land is important for more novel innovation and proper access. Uses for certain food products, possible companion planting strategies, agroforestry techniques, and more are being lost as a result of certain cultural perspectives being excluded from meaningful agricultural representation. If 20% of America was Vietnamese but only 1% of agriculture was Vietnamese led, then there is a good chance a large market for certain Vietnamese food goods (think rice, shallots, ginger, etc.) would be left unfulfilled. If more of this hypothetical America was Vietnamese, there would be a good chance these Vietnamese farmers would have more insight into fulfilling this market demand, and possibly improve the cultivation of these target crops with cultural agricultural techniques in the process. Right now our general thinking of agriculture is extractive, exploitative, and eroding. This cannot sustain itself, and rather than trying to reinvent agriculture, we ought to turn to the myriads of existing agricultural techniques across the many cultures of the world, including many in our own country, and learn what we should be shifting towards for a sustainable yield from sustained soil in the future

Going onto black land loss specifically, a 98% drop in land ownership is a bewildering statistic, and it shows that blacks had land access but rarely now do. This shows that during the get big or get out era, the wider black perspective and knowledge did not get taken into account. Although more plausible than slave reparations since the loss of black land ownership is generally over a century more recent, compensation for this loss is still hard. As white land ownership also dropped 67%, this era of personal land loss wasn't only a black issue, but did affect them disproportionately. Trying to improve food justice by trying to restore black land ownership would inevitably only heighten tension among other groups, chiefly those affected by the 67% drop of white land ownership. This then leads into the problem of where if you can't enforce something, you have to encourage it instead, and that can end up riddled with inefficiencies and NIMBYs.

Finally, when it comes to any social justice you have to ask the question "what can/should I do?" Understanding that this is a culturally sensitive problem, I - a white 19 year old man - am not the solution to black participation in agriculture. I personally believe the role I play in this is primarily to not impede any potential possible change, but rather to cheer on from the sidelines while not be the driver of any trends myself. I generally don't believe in solving racial issues by solely looking at race, instead I believe if group A is disproportionately discriminated against, helping ALL discriminated people would just so happen to disproportionately help group A. I'm not saying I'm correct and my thinking is flawless, but I really do want to avoid any situation were any one group sees societal backlash for receiving "unfair preference".