Greene County Democrat

Tag: Attorney Monica Rainge

  • Federation of Southern Cooperatives/LAFholds 57th Annual Meeting


    Ms. Mignon Clyburn accepts the 23rd Estelle Witherspoon Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of her father, U.S Congressman James E. Clyburn, Thursday August 15, 2024 and Mr. Cornelius Blanding ,FSC/LAF Executive Director, addresses the gathering at the 57th Annual Membership Meeting held at the Federation’s Rural Training and Research Center in Epes, AL.

    By John Zippert, Co-Publisher

    The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund held its 57th Annual Meeting on August 15-17, 2024. The Federation is the largest organization speaking for 10,000 Black farmers and other low-income rural people across the South.

    The Federation works with 75 cooperatives and community development credit unions working, mostly in rural communities across the South in persistently poor counties, with people who have been underserved with government and private resources.

    The first day of the Annual Meeting on Thursday, August 15th was held in Birmingham and featured the 23rd. Estelle Witherspoon Lifetime Achievement Award Dinner. The recipient of this year’s award was Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina. Clyburn has had an illustrious career in the House of Representatives, but he has also worked in support of Federation’s agricultural cooperatives in his home district.

    Due to the Democratic National Convention, Representative Clyburn was not able to attend the dinner. He sent his daughter Mignon Clyburn to accept the award in his honor and she did well in representing him in her remarks, praising the memory of Ms. Witherspoon and the work of the Federation. A video of Federation Executive Director Cornelius Blanding, presenting the award to Clyburn in his Washington office, was also shown.

    The second and third day of the meeting was held at the Federation’s Rural Training and Research Center, near Epes, Alabama. The second day began with a panel of USDA programmatic staff talking about their programs and ways to make them more effective in reaching Black farmers and other low-income rural people. Two USDA Under-Secretaries, Homer Wilkes for Natural Resources and DR. basil Gooden for Rural Development were present and made some remarks.

    NRCS Chief Terry Crosby spoke about his agency’s programs of conservation services and climate responsive agricultural practices for crop, livestock and timber farmer and landowners. Zack Ducheneaux, Farm Services Administration (FSA) Administrator spoke on steps to make farm credit more accessible and flexible. “We want to try to get to ‘yes’ in our lending policies and delivery. We have reduced collateral requirements to no more than 125% of the loan amount. We have made our lending more flexible with lower payment at the start, rising as more income is produced by the agricultural operation,” said Ducheneaux.

    Special Session on DFAP

    Attorney Monica Rainge, USDA Deputy Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, who presided over the recent DFAP (Discrimination Farmers Assistance Program) held a special session to review the program. DFAP dispersed $2.1 Billion funding in the Inflation Reduction Act, Section 22007, to farmers who were discriminated against for race, gender, ethnic background, sexual orientation, and other forms of discrimination, before January 2021, in the USDA farm loan process.

    The USDA DFAP program received 58,000 applications and awarded funding to 75% or 43,242 farmers or persons who wanted to farm. 15,000 applications were rejected because they were incomplete or had other flaws.
    20,000 applicants, who attempted to farm, by going to a government farm lending office, but were denied a loan and were not able to farm, received between $3,500 ad $6,000 in compensation.

    The remaining 23,000 farmers, who did farm and had various discriminatory experiences in applying for or servicing their loans, received between $10,000 and $500,000, based on a review process, that has never been fully explained by USDA. 889 farmers received the maximum award of $500,000. The average check was for $82,000. The states of Mississippi and Alabama had the largest number of successful applicants, with Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Oklahoma, California rounding out the top ten states.

    Rainge explained that, as of now, these funds are taxable for the farmer recipients, at the Federal and state level. The farmer will receive an IRS 1099 form, by the end of the year and will have to list these funds as income on their 2024 taxes. Farmers were encouraged to seek out tax assistance to assist in minimizing the tax consequences of this payment.

    Farmers who are receiving income assessed payments, such as SSI, food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid, or are in a bankruptcy, must report these funds as income and may have some reduction in government benefits as a result. These impacts vary from state to state, and farmers were encouraged to seek help from Legal Services programs or their own attorney on the best ways to report these funds.

    Rainge indicated, “DFAP was not a perfect process and there may be problems, errors or omissions in the implementation of the DFAP program.” She said, farmers with errors or omissions could call the DFAP hot line number at 1-800-721-0970 and report their concerns and complaints. She also said that the process was over, almost all of the money has been expended and that there is no formal appeal process.

    Some farmers who received lesser amounts of funding questioned whether the distribution of funds was equitable and related to the impact of the discrimination or based solely on the farmer’s economic losses.

    One successful 84-year-old Greene County vegetable farmer, said he had been farming for over sixty years and trained his son in farming, and then he received half as much from DFAP, as his son. This was one of several situations raised where there was an unexplainable dichotomy between the financial benefits of DFAP, with people in similar situations, with similar information on their DFAP applications.

    The third day of the meeting, Saturday August 17th began with the Mattie Mack Pretty Hat Prayer Breakfast and continued with the official Federation membership business meeting. We will report on these events in next week’s issue.

  • 200 attend National Heirs Property Conference in Atlanta

    Members of opening panel to provide history and context of the problems of Heir Property among Black landowners and families. R to L: Jerry Pennick, Attorney Faya Rose Toure, Charles O. Prejean, Wendell H. Paris and John Zippert

    Special to the Democrat by John Zippert, Co-Publisher
    Over 200 interested participants attended the first National Heirs Property Conference in Atlanta, Georgia at the Airport Embassy Suites Hotel from December 4-6, 2019. The conference was co-sponsored by the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, the nation’s foremost organization of Black farmers and landowners.
    The two-day conference was divided into two tracks, one for landowners with heir property issues and one for community-based practioners working on land issues, government agency staff, lawyers and other professionals.
    Heir property is land that is held in common by a number of family owners, when the original owners die without making a will and describing the way the land is to be passed down. More than half of the 3 million acres of farmland owned by Black families in the South is now owned in this way. Agricultural economists and other academic and professional experts suggest that this is a $2 billion problem facing the Black community in the South.
    The greatest problems with heir property come when there are family disputes on the best use of the land. In some cases, a family member may sell their undivided interest to someone outside the family, allowing that person to petition the courts for a “partition sale.”
    The courts will order a public sale on the courthouse steps, which often results in the sale and loss of the land to the family for less than its true value.
    Heirs property and partition sales have contributed to the loss of Black land ownership in the South from 15 million acres in 1920 to 6 million in 1960 and now 3 million in 2019. Since the Civil Rights Movement, heirs property and partition sales have led to the loss of over 2 million acres of Black owned land in the South.
    The owners of heir property also have problems accessing commercial bank loans and Federal USDA credit, conservation and other programs because they cannot show clear title for purposes of leveraging the land for loans and program services. The Federation working with other organizations was able to enact changes in the 2018 Farm Bill which provide a path and alternative forms of documentation to provide access to USDA programs and resources for families with land in heir property status.
    The 2018 Farm Bill also includes authorization of a $10 million a year program of relending to community based organizations to provide loan assistance to families who need financial help to clear titles and use their land in the most suitable and productive ways.
    Cornelius Blanding, Executive Director of the Federation and Attorney Monica Rainge, Director of the Federation’s Land Retention Program convened the program and discussed the importance of the issue of heir property to the continuing community and cooperative development goals of the Federation. They also showed a video from Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, who championed getting the section providing assistance to heir property landholders into the Federal legislation.
    Cornelius Blanding introduces the opening panel and had a dialogue with them on the context, history and implications of the heir property land issue on Black families.
    Attorney Faya Rose Toure (Sanders) of Selma, who conducted a seminal heir property study for USDA in the 1980’s spoke on the significance of the loss of Black land coming out of slavery. She spoke on the need to curtail petition sales and deal with the root causes of the problem in racism and White Supremacy.
    She said she hoped the conference would look at “land reparations” as one of the solutions to the broader problems of Black land loss and wealth inequality in the country.
    Charles O. Prejean, first Executive Director of the Federation, who lives in Atlanta, spoke about the Federation’s long term view of the helping people to hold on to their land and develop cooperatives as a way of using it for beneficial progress and community betterment. He spoke to the history of the Federation’s merger with the Emergency Land Fund in 1985 to further these common agendas.Wendell H. Paris, who was the Federation’s first staff member to live and work on the land in Epes, Alabama, reminded everyone, “That land is the basis of all wealth.” He spoke about some of the Federation’s early history in dealing with land retention.
    Jerry Pennick, who helped start the Emergency Land Fund and worked for many years after the 1985 merger as Director of Land Retention commented on his work with Rose on the heirs property land study. He observed that the USDA has been very slow to respond meaningfully to this problem and hoped that the government will move more swiftly to implement the new provisions in the 2018 Farm Bill.
    John Zippert, who retired after fifty years of work with the Federation, highlighted the work of the Federation with the Panola Land Buying Association (PLBA) in saving 1300 acres of land in Sumter County, Alabama, where the Federation’s Rural Training and Research Center is located.
    The second day’s plenary session featured a talk by Gary Black, Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture, on the importance of land ownership and agricultural and forestry development to the state,
    The remainder of the two-day meeting was spent in parallel tracks. The more than 100 landowners present were in Track 1, dealing with the problems and issues of heir property, how to develop a family tree to account for all of the heirs, the Uniform Heir Property Petition Act, a uniform piece of state legislation adopted by 13 states, which assists heir property owners clarify title and basics of a succession plan. On the second day, landowners heard various strategies to help utilize their land in the most productive and profitable ways.
    In the estate planning section of the workshop, landowners were introduced to the idea of forming a family trust, corporation, LLC or other means to own the land in a legal structure that separates the ownership from the individuals but allows for collective and democratic decisions about its use and benefits for the family. The Federation is working with many families to institute these progressive solutions to the problems of heir property.
    The community-based practioners examined many of these same issues in their parallel track and discussed ways to marshal resources too assist landowners with these problems.
    At the evaluation session at the end of the program, many of the landowners expressed appreciation for the information and learning provided by the Conference. Several participants expressed that they were leaving with hope that they could work on and help to resolve their family heir property problems.
    Attorney Monica Rainge, Conference Coordinator said, “This is the beginning, not the end of this process. This Conference was to give you some suggestions and a direction, for you to return home and work on your heir property issues. The Federation is ready to continue working with you and help you find options and solutions. We will be planning future conferences and events about this problem.