Tape #505 - Limited Resource and Minority Women

Tape #505 - Limited Resources and Minority Women

Can we get started, and we'll see if more people come in or if we just have a nice discussion among all of us. Since we're a small group, we're going to start out by introducing the panelists, then what we'd like to do is go real quick along and just briefly introduce the people introduce the people in the room, so we all know who we're talking to and we'll do some quick presentations and then, we want to talk and answer questions and hear your experiences.

My name is Lorette Pachano. I'm the Executive Director of the Rural Coalition. And we're a coalition of about 100 minority and limited resource farm organizations in the United States and Mexico. We have farm worker groups, we have African American farm groups, we have Hispanic organizations of farmers, we have Asian farm groups, we have groups in the Midwest, we have EuroAmerican groups as well and poor communities and we work with groups like National Family Farm Coalition and others on agriculture policy, we've worked on trade issues and have been here in Washington for quite awhile and we've been working over the last couple of years with the Department of Agriculture on work that they finally started to do on civil rights at the USDA and the Small Farms Commission. And we had 6 members of our organizations are men and we got onto the Small Farms Commission including the only farm worker representative and we do a lot of activities in Washington and have a great group of colleagues all around the country working on these issues and what we've notice is you need to be addressing barriers as well as building possibilities at every step of the way. So that's what we're going to talk about today and we'll get some local stories and so forth. And then, let me briefly introduce Carolyn Prince and Georgia Good, then we'll go around and introduce everybody and then we'll start out with their presentations, as well. Carolyn, I didn't get a lot of background, so you can add a lot, but, and I've just met Carolyn this meeting, but she's the relatively new director of North Carolina Farm and Rural Families. It's an organization that's been around for awhile, but Carolyn's been there, what, somewhat more than a year, a year and a half and has been doing some excellent work on marketing and technical assistance for small farmers in North Carolina and she'll tell you more about then when we get started. And she and Georgia and sitting her sharing all their family connections in North Carolina. Georgia Good is the Executive Director of the Rural Advancement Fund which has been working for over 50 years in the Carolinas on black farm issues was really the first of the major black farm organizations and Georgia has been working in this work for a long time and she's also worked in forming community health clinics, and I'm proud to say she's the secretary of the Rural Coalition, our organization, she's on our Board of Directors, and then we have a newly forming organization called the National Counsel of Community Based Organizations in Agriculture set up just to work with the Department of Agriculture to represent the interests of limited resource and minority farmers. And Georgia is the co-chair of that organization with Greg Smitman of Intertravel Agriculture Counsel. We also work with Indian farmers throughout the country. So, you've got some real wonderful people. And then, why don't we just pass this mike around and have you all introduce yourselves, 'cause we want to know who you are and, you know, what connections we might find.

Hello, I'm Katherine Steidam, and I work for the San Francisco Sheriff's Department. I run a horticulture and training program for prisoners and former prisoners and we grow foods that we give to soup kitchen and also sell to restaurants. We also plant San Francisco street trees.

I'm Debra Livingston. I also work with the rural Coalition and this fine panel of esteemed women in agriculture.

Good morning, my name is Mary Peabody. I'm the Director of the Women's Agricultural Network and we do education and technical assistance for women interested in starting and expanding profitable agrelated businesses and farms and I'm hear basically to build connections outside because I'm located in the Northeast part of the United States where we're not very well connected.

I'm Delaura Shed, and I'm from Canada, from the Province of Ontario and I'm with the National Farmers Union so I work with women's groups.

Good morning, I'm Roberta Williams, from Antigo, West Indies. I am the Director of the Gilbert Agricultural and Rural Development Center, which is a church-based organization and we help youths set up agricultures enterprises in our country.

Hi, my name is Elana Claig, and I'm from Jackson, Mississippi, and I'm just here as a friend of one of the other presenters at another conference.

I'm Diane Rogers. I'm with the press from Canada, the province is Suschatuan.

Elizabeth from South Africa. I'm working with Agricultural Women in Farming there.

I'm from Washington, D.C. I'm Dr. Karen James, I work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Veterinary Services and I'm here to learn.

I'm Denarga Hollis and I'm with AIKA and know the experience the other countries because I need to learn their activities.

I'm Delarga Harris from Columbia. (Spoken in Spanish)

I'm Joey Bran from Australia. I'm just interested in coming to see what was happening at one of these meetings.

Hello, I'm Janelle Pain, I'm a graduate student at Ohio State University and I'm interning with the USDFAS this summer foreign AG service in the International Cooperation Development division and we're doing a lot of work in Africa this summer and I'd like to learn more about recruiting minority women on my campus that are already AG students maybe into the mainstream agricultural organizations that are already established and how we can work together.

Good morning, my name is Moselle Trotter, I'm with the USDA with Office Communications.

Good morning, I'm Dramelle Worthin with Florida NM University, Tallahassee, Florida, which is one of the 1890 land grant institutions.

Hi, I'm Kim Berry, I'm with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and I'm ashamed that I don't know Carolyn or Georgia because I'm located in North Carolina.

Good morning. My name is Rosa Cherif. I'm from Mississippi, as a farmer. We raise pasture poultry and St. Croix sheep and vegetables, but the vegetables are kind of dry right now, we're in a drought for the past two months. But also, I'm with the Marian County Self-Help Organization that we're dealing with healthy food for families and future concerns of housing and employment and so forth.

My name is Judith Mocmood and I'm just gonna say ditto for everything she just said.

I'm Ellen Nolman. I work at the National Agricultural Library which is the largest agricultural library in the world and I wanted to make sure that you all knew about it and also to find out what kind of services we could provide.

Hi. My name is Carol Moss and I'm the National Project Director for Easter Seals for the Agribility Project which is a program in this country for farmers and ranchers and farm workers and their families who have disabilities, which is a minority group as well, so I'm here to see, to share what I can share and hear what I can hear.

My name's Michele Mosley. I'm with the State Government in the State of Tasmania, Australia.

Her name is Dorga Has and she's from Columbia and her husband works with AIKA. (SPOKEN IN SPANISH) She said the reason she's here besides that her husband works for AIKA and she's very interested in these topics, is because she worked many years with the development of the community as she was studying, and now that she lives in Washington, she's a member of 3 different organizations like BARCO and The Roundtable for Panamercian Women, which deals a lot with raising funds for scholarship for young women who are interested in these sort of topics, so that's why she's here. She said she also travels a lot because she's interested in supporting these programs and also that AIKA supports the Rural Women's Support Group.

If you have your simultaneous translation, turn it to channel 2 to get the translation of the Spanish to English. In the Rural Coalition, we have a lot of members in Mexico and we have our own simultaneous equipment, and it's muy importante (very important) that we can communicate with each other.

Good morning, can you hear me? I am Georgia Good. And I want to tell you just a little bit how I got started in working with limited resource persons because I was low income myself. I left Buffalo, New York with two children, 25 cent in my pocket and two suitcases on my arm and came back to Orangeburg, South Carolina where I had gone to college. I was hired by a team out of Washington, D.C. called the Transister Corporation; they were looking at 5 different sections of the United States as relates to health care and I was hired in rural Orangeburg, South Carolina for that purpose. We had a higher mortality rate, we had unskilled workers, it's an agriculture county, so we found so many things that was wrong in the whole health care arena. At that time, we were still going in the back doors of the doctor's office. We were in segregated hospital rooms and so I started organizing the people. When Transcentury left, I didn't have any resources. A man here in Washington, D.C. hired me as a consultant for $2,500 to put together a program. I got $25,000 from the Federal Government who was old HEW, to do a program and after that, I was able to get a $300,000 grant to do a family health center for the county and that $2,500 have now grown into 9 million. Now we're not talking about all the physicians that have come to that facility and have located their business within the city. We're talking about millions more and it can be done. But we need resources, we need money in order to do programs. I now work mainly on legislation with the rep, we work with coops, we work with struggling people, save the coop from foreclosure. We're now doing some greenhouses with those people. We have the young people during the holiday season selling pointsettas, they call all their friends and neighbors. People that never bought a pointsetta buys them. And this is called economic development, but it's on a limited scale. Ladies and gentlemen, we need money. You know, during the depression, my family talked about being able to do, they were sharecroppers at that time, talked about how they would put a few seeds in the ground, they could always go to the woods and cut some wood, and they could scrap up a little money for kerosene to have lighting. You can't do it anymore. We don't have much land left. I'm from Union, South Carolina. There was a time when we could just go from plant to plant. Now we don't have the skills. They bring the factories in but people from other places come to do the jobs. So we do service, so we're underpaid for service; cleaning the rooms, cleaning the yards, doing the whole bit. And people have all these million dollars they don't seem to understand that how much it takes to carry them or whatever their wants and needs, but they think that you can make $4.50 an hour, pay your rent, keep you lights on and feed your kids and do it. You know, we need to re-enter that conversation on welfare reform because that's going to be a part of the new evolving poverty. At some point, people used to could say, we can go. We can to the welfare department and get some food. We could go to the welfare department and they help me pay my rent. But I have women on the doorsteps are now saying, "you know, I want to reserve my little 2 months, my little 4 months, my little year, just for serious hard time. So we got to be about the business of we that have are gonna have to get serious. We got to get our sororities, and fraternities and we got to move from religion to Christianity. You know, there's a difference. You know, we could go across this country and we talk about Christian, we're a Christian, you got to get removed from being religious to being some serious Christians. Now, my country has now bounced backed into one of the highest infant mortality rate again and we have a family health center sitting there. I don't work that closely with it, but that's just an example. With the care, we got to be able to communicate to our young ladies mainly, to come to the doctor to save our babies and the cutdown on the neonatal rates, you know, these little babies that cost millions just to save? We got to be able to do that. We go t to empower people and all of the rural areas. And we do that by organizing. We got to be unselfish, we got be honest with these people. They know when you're honest and when you're not. Now, the reason why a lot of drugs are in our community, that's a supplemental income to many families. We don't understand it, there's a large amount of mamas out there, they know their sons and daughters are selling drugs and they don't like it, but that's a supplement to their income. WE need revolving loans, lady - minigrants, to set up different projects. You know, women can take a dollar bill and send it 100 ways, but it doesn't take a lot for us. We have to go and revisit that affirmative action and equal employment hiring practices. We still need to go to our legislators. Get to know them. So when they come to Washington, the man talk about, you got to make them see your face when they come to Washington making decision. We know there's a dollar that follows many of these people, but your face also have to follow these people. You know, when Senator Hollers talked about health car and health needs, I have been there. He knows me. Because he talked about hunger, he talked about health care. Years ago. So you got to make them sensitive. Since we are the prime caretakers of our children, and because of low wages and high childcare costs, we definitely got to do some things for working women. The answer is economic development activities that produces jobs, better jobs, decreases crime for children, less drug abuse, less child abuse, and better self esteem. Rural women and less aggressive than urban women, so we have to help them keep their self esteem and keep the faith. Often time, it just takes a little bit of us, who a little bolder than others, to encourage them on, but we got to get up off of it and really make those motions to help keep food on the table. The whole mental health issue. We have a lot of people that sleeping in the street. We got to deal with that, you know, for some odd reason, we are embarrassed by mental health in this country and any of us can get to be mentally ill. I take care of a lady that's a friend of mine that I met in Orangeburg who was a teacher, who taught me many things, but she now has Alzheimer. You know, when you don't know yourself and you don't know your best friend, and you don't know your children. You know, she never thought that would happen to her. So we got to talk about health care, mental health are, migrants and seasonal farm workers. You know, farm workers, they gather the food for us. It used to be, when I was on a group that gathered information for President Carter. The east coast was covered by black males migrants. The middle and the west was by families mainly south of the border. But now, it's mainly people from south of the border and we got to make it perfectly clear that these people have a life too and that they need to be treated in a most positive way. So I'm going to stop now and let the next panelist and then we can discuss some things further. Thank you.

Thank you and good morning. My name is Carolyn Prince. I'm the Director of the North Carolina Coalition of Farming Rural Families. This is our the year, we're a non-profit agency and the core of our mission is to promote the south economic advancement of farmers and rural families. I've been on board since February of '97 and it's been an awesome task and I love every minute of it. To give you a bit about my background, I come from a long line of farmers, businessmen and educators. And I'd like to think that I've blended all of that into my current job. I've always wanted to be involved in work that helped people to help themselves. And what better way to do it than to help people who are still tilling the land. It means a lot to be able to feed yourself. And one of my favorite little comments is to remember a farmer when you sit down to eat, because without the farmers then, we would truly be in serious trouble. Our agency provides mainly marketing and technical assistance and we're finding that more of the marketing is needed by small farmers, male or female, and that we have some women that are the primary farmers on their land, but in most instances, they're in partnership with their husbands or with their grandchildren and running the family farm, and they do have a lot of say as to what is being raised and how it's being marketed. We've been able to expand the traditional marketing channels for the small farmers in North Carolina, and the past has just been retail sales maybe roadside stands, u-pick operations, those kinds of things, with the highway systems coming through that's eliminated a lot of the fine spots fro roadside stands. You know you can't put a roadside stand next to the interstate. And everybody's in a rush to get from one place to the other. There are farmers who rely on contracts with processors and we all know that when you sell your produce out of the field or your livestock right out of the pasture, then you receive the smallest amount of money for your product, for your commodity. And it's very difficult for small farmers individually to be able to break into the type of vertical integration activities that are necessary in order to add value to their products and to retain more of that money. In addition, some other marketing avenues have been that North Carolina school lunch program started a program this year and each school district in the state was contacted and told to buy locally. Ok. The channels were made such that it was easier for the farmers to deliver directly to the school cafeteria and to be paid within a short period of time instead of the usual long waiting period for reimbursement. In some instances, the farmers have been able to add value, maybe chopping the greens, or slicing the tomatoes, that sort of thing, to help provide fresh, nutritious products for the school children. In addition, in North Carolina, we have a lot of military installations. We've been able to get some farmers to have their produce being sole in the commissaries. And it's really rewarding to hear a farmer say, "well, I went back the next day and everything I had taken the day before was gone, they wanted all that I had." They promoted it as being fresh, they promoted it as being grown locally and by small farmers. They were able to help the farmers by giving them stickers made up with their logo or their name to help identify the produce, we put up signs and the actual section, saying, this is locally grown, this is fresh, and that has been a big help. In addition, we've had some contact from some processing plants interested from buying from minority farmers. If you are in the southeast, you may have heard of Glory Foods. They have a wonderful brand of greens and beans and peas and other types of foods, canned goods. They have very good shelf space and identity in the supermarkets. They will buy from the small farmers. They have very strict requirements in terms of tolerance for weeds, for defects or whatever. So our technical assistance is to help the farmers make sure that they can meet these requirements that's needed and requested by the processors. We find that barriers that may exist for some small farmers would be, as I said, locations for retail outlets, being able to have the volume that's needed for commercial wholesale contracts with place like grocery stores or processors, and to meet those needs, we are organizing farmers to form cooperatives so that they can have the volume and the extended harvest season that's often required by let's say a major grocery store. They would like to be able to sell sweet corn throughout the season and we can organize the farmers in different areas of the state and stagger the planning dates and they're able to extend the normal harvest season for something like sweet corn to be able to supply it on demand. These markets can be very unforgiving, so it's important to us that our farmers really adhere to the specifications that are required by the processors and the grocery stores, because once you've tarnished your reputation, it is very difficult to get that marketing outlet restored. The other thing that would be a barrier to small farmers would be having he capital to take advantage of some opportunities. For example, we had one processor that wanted 300 acres of sweet potatoes. They came to us in February. You plant sweet potatoes in April or May depending on the location. That wasn't enough time for us to scramble together the capital because we knew we'd get the money back but we needed the initial outlay for supplies and plants and so forth. So those are the kinds of things that we are faced with. We depend on migrant labor to harvest a lot of the crops. They may come and they're very organized as they should be, but they have certain requirements before they will even come to your field. It has to be a certain size, they have to be assured of a certain amount of income, they want their money, if not every day, then certainly at the end of the week. So that creates a cash flow problem for small farmers. Here again, having cooperatives will help them to eliminate some of these problems. The other area is that of adding value. Anything that small farmers can do to increased the value of their crop, whether its washing the cucumbers or the zucchini or the squash, grating and sorting them into certain sizes, packing them in standards boxes, taking something like sweet corn to a processing place where you can hydrocele it to remove the field heat, put it on a refrigerated truck. This adds value and you get higher prices for the money. Now, our agency has a packing shed in the southeast part of the state. We wish we had 2 or 3 in different parts of the state and that's a goal for the future under my administration, but at this packing shed, we have hydrocooling facilities, we just built a 600 square foot cold storage room where small volumes of produce can be held until you have a tractor trailer load, then transport it to a market. We have refrigerated trucks for transporting the produce under refrigerated conditions. We have a 2,700 square foot greenhouse that we've used as a demonstration. This past winter we had greenhouse tomatoes that were excellent tomatoes, almost as good as vine white, but certainly 25 times better than what we would get imported that were harvested at the green stage and then ripened with gas. There was good local acceptance from some local restaurants for these tomatoes and also at the Army installation. We treated this as a demonstration so that we can provide information to other small farmers that may be interested in a way of extending their income during what we call the off season, to do a greenhouse crop, whether its tomatoes or cucumbers, or bedding plants or other types of commodities that can be grown in the greenhouse. Many of you are aware of the situation with tobacco. A lot of small farmers rent allotments, they don't own them. So anything that affects this tobacco program, will have very serious repercussions for them. We want to be ready to assist them to investigate some non-traditional crops. In addition to the greenhouse project, we have a farmer that's working with catfish. She has six ponds. You may have met her, she's here at this conference. There is also a woman that is doing goats. Her goat herd was started with, I think, maybe 2 or 4 breeding stock that she got through another project a few years ago. She's doing quite well with that. She's an elderly woman, but she takes care of the goats. She has a ready mark with Hispanics in the area and also the other ethnic groups that appreciate fresh goat meat. So it's a small enterprises but it supplements her social security income, so she is able to stay on her family farm. Then we have what we call my okra ladies; two sisters who've never worked off the family farm. They live in the old home place and they knit and crochet and they grow okra, about an acre of okra. If you know anything about okra in this country, it's a southern delicacy, you either like it or you don't like it, but it's very expensive in the supermarkets, and usually what you see is a very poor quality because it has very strict requirements in terms of handling once you harvest it. So they were selling that okra for .75 a pound, just to get rid of it and you go to the supermarket and it's like $3.00, $4.00 a pound. Ok. So, that enterprises helps them tremendously. And last year, in my home area, okra was not available. We had a cold, wet spring and the farmers replanted about 3 or 4 times and they finally ran out of seed, there was not okra to be had. I think I must have imported about 100 pounds into my home town from different people, from my okra ladies in North Carolina. But it's those kinds of enterprises that help rural women to make ends meet. And women have always been the backbone of the family and have done all of the farmwork. You may depend on the men to plow the fields or to do the heavy work, but when it comes down to it, the women have taken care of the fields, they've harvested the foods, they've dried it, canned it, frozen or whatever, to provide for their family across the winter. So it's very important that agencies like the North Carolina Coalition of Farming Rural Families and other agencies and programs that help rule women and women farmers to continue in their work because it's very important.

I just wanted to also give you a note in terms of the list of people who are on the panel and we've changed around. Dorothy Barker's just come in, Savvy Horn, from Land Lost Prevention Project had to go back to North Carolina for a family matter and so Dorothy who works with us and she's been on another panel agreed to come and sit on. Shirley Shirades just came in and, you know, Shirley's one of our team that we work together with and Shirley, feel free, to join us in saying anything that you want. No, we understand, is there any work that you want to say before you go out?

I want to touch on a couple of points of some of the communities that are not represented here. We've been working with the Department of Agriculture for many, many years or sometimes we've been working against the Department of Agriculture. Right now we're probably doing a little bit of both and in the last 2 years, some of us met yesterday with the secretary and talked with him about some of these issues and we've been really trying to get the Department to recognize that it's not just a case of helping these poor, small and limited resource farmers that don't know how to do what they're doing. If you've been a black farmer in the state of North Carolina or Alabama and you've stayed in business for all these years, you must be a rocket scientist with everything that was against you. And one of the things we've been trying to say is people of color and small farmers have always been generally apart but the backbone of agriculture in the United States. And we try to tell the Department to reflect on this and remember they're not only a part of the past but a part of the future. There's a poster we've been talking about that was put out by Economic Research Service on the history of agriculture. And you look at that poster and what it says about African Americans, the first thing it says, it says, "slaves came into the United States first in 1619 and they displaced indentured servants". How rude. That's the kind of perspective of what does this mean? The way that history is presented. This country, it's economic basis was cotton, tobacco and the trade in human beings. That was the labor. Where did the land come from? Does the basis of U.S. Agriculture was from the indigenous people and there's nothing on that chart; there's one little reference to the indigenous people of the United States, but not only that, they were the first agricultural researchers on this continent. And the indigenous people of the North America have developed the crops that now provide 52% of our food supply. And the way our research service is structure at the Department of Agriculture, it goes through the states, and Indian people are told you have federal dollars that pay for extension services but you can't be a part of them because you're a separate nation and you don't pay taxes to the state and they have to pay for extension services on Indian reservations. And they haven't been able to do it. There were no soil maps for Indian reservations. Right now the disaster definitions in U.S. programs say that you have to a certain amount of acreage of land to qualify for disaster payments. And so what they'll do is they'll say, "well, there's all this land but the Indian disaster is separate from that and that reservation is too small to qualify, so even thought there's the qualifying number of acres, they cut out the Indian reservation and people there don't get the drought assistance. You know, these are some of the kinds of things that we're encountering. On our role coalition brochure, there's a letter we got from agricultural workers. We work with the agricultural workers and it was two workers in New Mexico who wrote to us, "we were working in the fields. As usual, the owner did not have the bottle of water for us that was part of the law. So we had to drink from the ditch. We know this water has many pesticides, but there was nothing else. We drank it. The next day we were sick. Because we missed a day of work, we were fired." And this is in the chili fields in New Mexico. Our chairperson runs an agricultural worker center built by the farm workers in El Paso and we're working with Rutgers University and what we're studying is we're having the workers come in every day and tell us what fields they worked in, what crops they were working on and we'll be able to know what pesticides they were exposed to. But they're also asked questions, "Did anybody provide water in the fields today? Were there field sanitation facilities to wash your hands, to use toilet facilities? And what we're finding is, approximately 80% of the workers don't have those facilities that are required by law. And, the issue of disability for farm workers is a very important one. One of the things that we want to be doing it preventing those disabilities. Carolyn mentioned the issue of negotiating between small farmers and farm workers. And that's a very important issue. One of the things that happens is you're not dealing with the farm workers, you're dealing with the labor contractor, and the labor contractor is somebody that generally exploits the people that they work with. We have some of our farm worker organizational members working to set up cooperative of farm workers to negotiate directly with farmers so that you'll have a contract and be able to work out payment plans. All these problems, if we put our minds to it, are something that can be solved. You know, if we're interested in food safety, we want to work together, we even tried to get a grant from the Department of Agriculture to do a demonstration grant to show how to educate farm workers and the most sustainable methods. But in the most modern sustainable methods to work with farmers so that there's a professional crew of farm workers that can come. You know, and would it be best if one worker built all of GM's cars. It doesn't make sense, we want to be employed in agriculture, we want it to be something that returns money to our communities. You know, one farmer and 4 ½ million farm workers would make it a more correct analysis. And then the other thing is that, you know, the African American farms were a backbone and it was a major place where it was from the farms that came the middle class. That's where the civil rights movement came from, was from the land. And you know you can fight an affirmative action over some jobs that somebody else owned, but the basis of people being on the land and having the independence of ownership is important for more reasons even than just feeding those families and feeding all of us. So that's why we've been so committed to doing this work. We've tried to work strategically with all of these communities together to get them to work together to really fight at the Department of Agriculture. In 1997, the Department issued a landmark report called The Civil Rights Action Team Report, Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and it laid out a lot of plans we just went through yesterday with the Department. A review of what they've been doing on their work and there's a long way to go, but there are more people moving there. One accomplishment that we have is one of our member organizations, we got their leader to apply and he's now the Associate General Counsel for Civil Rights at USDA and he brought his team of new attorneys and they actually sat there and were on a number of cases before we had to tell them to do it, you know, to really deal with what needs to be done. There's a migrant worker situation where we're buying out the farmers on like a popka but doing nothing fro the workers that are displaced. So it's trying to reverse the trend and go in and say there are solutions. Ye, and you can write and ask the Department of Agriculture. Ask the Department of Agriculture people here. Out of that report also grew the National Small Farms Commission and we had 6 members including the only farm worker member and, you know, when we get 6 out of 30 on any team, we're going to do a good job. You know, I think if we can get at least that much representation. We had Mung farmers, Indian farmers and farm workers and there is a section on farm workers, there's a lot on marketing and the Department is trying to implement that report and we're hoping that something good really happens out of it. We've also been working with communities in Mexico and throughout the United States and we're trying to create an arok coalition, something that we call the Supermarket, and it will be an electronic network where we bundle and sell products among all of our communities. We have, you know, small coffee producers in Mexico, we have the women make dried humiakas, dried hybiscus flowers and make a very delicious tea. There's sesame seeds. There's folks that are doing dairy up in the northeast. We have apple producers. We have somebody that would love for us to set up a juice manufacturing plant, and even with what we have in our communities, when you blend the seasons that we have from the northeastern United States out to the west coast down to Mexico, then Bricketton, Mississippi's been looking all over Mexico for where can we find okra that's available for sale at Christmas time. We have one of the coops down in Mexico is going to be harvesting 80 tons of Chili a day for 3 months and want to sell that. It extends the season in Mississippi by 9 weeks and you can get a better contract for selling those products. That's the kind of thing, but we're looking for just the investment which we haven't been able to find to get a computerized network and one or two marketing people to work with, all the marketing people. And we put the proposals in to USDA and the AKITA missions review them and they say, "small farmers don't use computers and they don't have the skills to do this work." Well, part of the thing is the determination that needs to happen and so that's what we've been trying to address strategically. We've been working on legislation. All that is in our world coalition report, the history of the work that all of these groups have been doing for 20 or 30 years and we're making some progress. We're also doing and we've done over the last couple of years an outreach training at USDA. We've been working with USDA to set up a small farms office that works with small and minority farmers. All of them together that deals with the civil rights issues. For people outside the United States, discrimination, exclusion is still a very big problem in the United States, its in the counties, its not only in the department, it's just the way society still is. And so we've been trying to deal with that. At the outreach training, we're trying to get the outreach office set up to strategically teach the department how to reach our numbers. Lou Guituirrez has gotten 300 new hispanic farmers in one county on the land. Now that's not the statistics. The Mung farmers in California have 1,200 new farmers. We want to see more new African American farmers on the land. We want to see more of this small Euroamerican farmers all over, and it can happen, it can happen on Indian reservations. Agriculture can resurge; it just requires investment. We've created a voter registration form for the USDA County Committee election so they could find new farmers. You know, we have counties where there are 50 more percent minority farmers and they're not represented on the county committees that make all of the critical decisions, and this has been a big issue. So its changing the structure at every level, but we have to work here, it's like with a crowbar at the national level, and the secretary's listening, but it's a big establishment we need to change. And, you know, our treasurer was here in town yesterday, John Zippert, from the Federation of Southern Coops. He works with Shirley. And just the kind of stuff you're dealing with, right now it's a court case they've taken, it's two counties very resistant to change. Four black churches were burned in those two counties in 1995 and the federal bureau of investigation used that as an opportunity not to find out who burned the churches, but to investigate the use of absentee ballots by African Americans. The older African Americans don't like to go and vote at the poles because they've been treated badly, so they get an absentee ballot and mail it in, and they found 14 questionable ballots. 7 questionable ballots out of 1,400 and they now have 2 people in jail. This is a county that had 75% of the black farmers voted in the county committee elections and still got no black farmer elected. These kinds of situations we're still dealing with and that's one of the reasons why it's very hard for black farmers to be able to do what they need to do and we have to keep on working on those issues so then we can get to doing all the kinds of ideas that Carolyn is talking about. Once we remove the barriers, we really believe that the small and limited resource in minority farmers are part of the future and we're gonna see more of them, and we're going to keep on working until that happens, and they're gonna bring us a safe food supply. So, that's what I'd like to say and I'd like to turn it over to Dorothy for a minute and then we're gonna open up the questions.

Good morning, I'm Dorothy Barker from Outswit, North Carolina and I am the Director of a non-profit organization. We started with Reverend Ziti Harris of Durham, North Carolina and Dr. Benjamin Chaves. And the mission then was to keep North Carolina's two remaining black dairy farmers on their land as owners and operators. So we had to come up ways with creative financing to do that. And after we done that, we made connections with other groups, the help of Project International, helped us when we had a disease in our herd that killed over 50% of it. It helped us during a time when there was a drought in the mid 80s. The Mennonites and Ralph Page, the Federation, I had met Shirley Sharad, but we hadn't met the Executive Director. Then making linkages with other organizations helped this other farmer who, we thought that we were limited resource but he had lost an arm due to a farm accident and they were living in a small house so the habitat built them a home to help them and they helped them with resources. It was a community effort, where they could not get money, he couldn't money from the federal government. I think he was borrowing from another agency. So, these are the kinds of things that we started in 1987 and our organization has grown today with funding starting in '95 and we were working with the Kellogg Foundation, a very small organization. But what I had to do was to go out and to find the needs of the minority and limited resource farmers in a 7 county area and after I did that, we tried to find self help initiatives that would help them to get back into or stay on their farm as owners and operators. And some of the problems that we ran into, there were a lot of barriers and the women who were trying to take ownership of their land through by if their husband had passed, brother or some male figure in the family had passed, they could not acquire this land. It was two cases now with the new civil rights, well, it's not new, but since 1997, working in the east, it is 2 women that they have lost their brother and the Farm Service Agency will not sell them their land. They're putting it up for foreclosure. I have another lady farmer who had her inheritance was an old farm house and about 25 acres, but before her and her husband could obtain money from Farm Service Agency, no then, it was Old Farmers Home Administration, she had to give up her heritage, she had to give up her house. Either sell it, or turn it over to another family member which she did, and they told them to purchase another house, so they got a mobile home and after they did all of the paperwork that was required by the agency, then they would not loan them the money for them to go into their operation. So what I did during the, when they started having the meetings with Secretary Glickerman and bought out all of the discriminatory practices with USDA, I connected her with the firm, hoping the she could get good representation because she did not have the monies for a lawyer and their case was a part of the class action. As a result of these practices, our Farm Service Agency, OFMHA, a lot of families have been dislocated, dismantled. I have seen big, viable men reduced down to about 175-150 pounds, maybe that is the size that they should have been, but this is the size that they were not, they were big, viable pillars of their community and they are reduced down to people dragging oxygen tank, they're walking with walkers, they're in wheelchairs, and they are someone want to give them a plaque and honor them for the service that they have done. Why not have given them monies to help with their organization, not give it to them, but give them an opportunity to even at least apply for these services. I have seen people, and as well as myself, go into Farmers Home Administration and apply for a tract or apply for a loan and they will tell you that there is no money in this program. And just finding out last year that you are supposed to be able to put in an application whether there is funds or not, and then you are to be notified when those funds come in, this does not happen. And even if you go in on the 29th, they will tell you on the 1st of September there is no money in this fund. So these are some of the barriers that we are facing and these things need to be stopped. I don't believe that these things are happening in the 90s and some of the people said that when they came out to the sale of our family land in November of 1997, that we don't believe that this is happening here in Outswert, North Carolina, but it happens. Some of the other things that the farmers have run into as women is that they will tell them, I had a lady that wants to start a business and her husband had borrowed money from Farmers Home Administration and they told her, well, we have loaned your husband money and our assets will not be covered. We cannot loan you money, and besides, whose going to help you do this work, this is no work for a woman, you can't do this. And I was told myself that you'd better not start another entity. We loaned you money for dairy cows and that is all that you're supposed to do with any proceeds that come from this money is to go back into the business. Some of the other things that I've done was to help farmers to get certified organic, hopefully that they could get a better price for their product. That was hard, because most of the farms have been just ate up with chemicals because this traditional tobacco allotment. But we have to make that transition from tobacco because we don't own allotment, we don't own the poundage. The majority of us rent poundage. The poundage that we have from our farm, we did a demonstration last year growing organic tobacco and did a comparison of the monies that you get with organic tobacco to get with commercial, and the Santa Fe Tobacco Company located after talking to us several leaders, they located in Oxford. And we had 4 farmers to sign up, but only just 2 of us participated. But this year we had another farmer added. And we did a comparison as to the prices that you get. We had a capacity for about 13 acres of tobacco. And they told us in a consent order that we could keep the tobacco poundage to help pay for the house and the 20 acres that they let us keep and at the day of the auction, the tobacco poundage was the first thing that they sold. So these are some promises and things, and this happened all through the federal court. So if you do not have the support of, you just wonder, how can do these things when there are rules and they make new rules every day to fit their criteria. If they have a rule and it seems as if you're going to benefit from that law or that rule, they will make a new rule.

One of the programs that I did start was Black Women in Today's Agriculture and from that North Carolina ANT University has taken up that program and has started. And they told me that black women in today's agriculture was... I didn't mean to say that... I could either go to minority women in today's agriculture or just have women in today's agriculture. So, I took that name off and retried, we came up with some self help projects. And one of the things that we did we grew peppers, we grew flowers, we grew alufa and tried to market that. And we got markets for the luff. I had youth programs, Youth in Today's Agriculture, and we did tomatoes. Steak tomatoes is one of our biggest cash crops. And from those tomatoes, the first participant was able to do a down payment, made about $5,000 after expenses. And how we did that, we could not afford the boxes. And that is what Pearl was talking about, was coop building and that is good if you can coop and I thank her because she afforded me the opportunity to go to Eps, Alabama to be trained in coop business. And that is one of the things that we need, we needed those programs and when I came to Washington in '97, I discovered that they did have a fund for that. But they have these funds, they have these programs set and they're in Washington, D.C. How do we get them down to the local level? I know that you have to get your county commissioners, your county director for Farm Service Agency, letters from the University, you have to get support letters. But, you know, I'm told, if you can get the support from your county Farm Service Agency official, that will help you in getting your proposals in getting monies down for your state. But they tell us all these good and wonderful program and they're on paper and they're in Washington, but we do not qualify for them when we apply for them. It's very hard. So as a group of women and a very strong group of women, I hope that we can ban together and try to asset some of these funds that are there. I had one lady that wanted to, what we did as a result of the AFS Kellogg Foundation, we had some demonstration money in because what I tried to do was to tell them that we could not run to all of the state facilities to bring farmers there. It was hard to get them there to see a demonstration. So I fought for them to put demonstrations on the farmer's farm that they may reap an economic gain after the demonstration is over because the college mentality was, if you can't do a demonstration of a farmer's farm, he's just going to plow it up. But if you put that demonstration on that farmer's farm and he can get his neighbor to come over and take a look at it. And he will do that. If you can get a lead farmer in the community and they will be that mentor for the next farmer, you can do some successful projects, because we have done some. But the thrust of it was to make sure that after they did this demonstration and the colleges had documented their lessons learned, that the farmer could sell their product and help put money in their farm where they could not borrow money. And what we tried to, we did a demonstration to let you know that farming can be 12 months. And so we did these demonstrations, and farming can be done on 12 months, and if you plan on laying crop, you would have money to start your operating money for the spring. So, I'm gonna end now for time, but this is just some of the things that are happening in North Carolina and something about our non-profit organization Operation Spring Plan.

I'm from Ontario. And we're rich with history of people, the slaves crossing up, the going up and so forth and two things I want to mention. One day the farmers simply dropped their tractors and what and had a meeting. And they formed an organization called the National Unity. They decided they weren't going to have any more prejudice in Canada and everybody was going to be treated alike. T make a long story short, they worked several years and succeeded in getting the passing of the government for our civil rights and human rights. But when you read about it, you think the Canadian government did this, isn't it so nice. But it was the colored farmers of the Dresden area. And if you're familiar with Dresden, you know Harry Beaches Stone wrote the book "Uncle Tom" and this is where the man, Tom, resided and farmed and because he couldn't get loans and help, he went to England and the Queen granted money and land to the people there. So if you go north of Nolan Sound, you'll find that the people there are agricudhariadis, they're not half-breeds, and the land was given to them by the Queen. But if you come from Michigan up, there were slaves who have their freedom and I just want of mention my husband's great aunt. There's no slavery in the Shad history, and Maryann was on a farm, she taught school, she believed everybody should have an education. She got paid in grain and food and what not because nobody had any money. She's had no one to fight for her rights, so Mary crossed back over at the age of 60, obtained her law degree, and when she came back, they would not accept her because she was a colored farm woman. Back she went, she got a higher degree, and when she came back, they were forced to accept her in Canada. She won her cases and they refer to Mary as the black beauty with the sharp tongue. And all of this has come about because of people on a farm, farmers at the grass roots, fought for this. One thins we feel that these people of color, not rewrite the history book s for the Board of Education, but put us between the pages where we deserve, and let the work know exactly our contribution to Canada, and again, it's farm people, that have done this.