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.