The Federation of Southern Cooperatives: Helping African American Farm Owners

Posted: 12 February 2003

Since 1967, the Federation has been working to help black farmers hold on to their land so they can pass it on to the next generation.

By working together, black farmers create opportunities for themselves and their community.

By Kristina Canizares

Every morning for more than 50 years, Rosa Lee Murphy gets up, puts on her boots and goes out to take care of her farm. She and her husband bought their two hundred acres in 1938 and raised their 12 kids in a little clapb oard farmhouse between two peanut fields.

Her neighbors, Johnnie and Ulysses Marabel, have been working their 650-acre farm for 56 years. Their peanuts, cotton and collard greens paid for all 10 of their children's college degrees.

But times have changed. U.S. agriculture has become increasingly unfriendly to the family farmer. Consolidation of the food industry has left small farmers with higher costs and fewer places to sell their produce. The profit margin has dropped so low that many farmers are losing their land, especially African-American farmers like Ms. Murphy and the Marabels.

"Used to be you could raise most anything you wanted to and get a good price. Now it's harder, the produce I plant don't bring the money it used to," said Ms. Murphy. "The cooperative helps."

Ms. Murphy and the Marabels are members of the South Georgia Vegetable Producers' Cooperative. Like 35 other black-owned co-ops across the Southeast, they receive support from the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. Since 1967 the Federation has been working to keep black farmers on their land by providing technical, legal, and marketing assistance. They urge their members to form cooperatives to enable families to hold on to their land and pass it on to the next generation.

"The thing about a co-op is that we can buy and sell together," explains Cornelius Key, a farmer and Agriculture Specialist for the Federation. :We get together so we can get a cheaper price for what we buy and a higher price for what we sell. Individually, we're too small."

Key explains that buyers today are no longer interested in negotiating their purchases with hundreds of different farmers when they can buy everything they need in one stop from a corporation. A cooperative allows farmers to work their own land while doing business as a group, increasing their negotiating power.

"All over the country we're seeing mergers," said Key, "we're doing about the same thing. It is a way to stay on the farm, and the farm is our way of life."

The Federation supports individual co-ops' efforts to create their own new markets. The Flint Rivers Farmers' Co-op, of which Key is a member, often had excess produce that they couldn't sell to the regular buyers. With help from the Federation, the co-op purchased a building along a well-traveled road, fixed it up with a new paint job and air conditioning, and opened their own farmers' market.

The Flint Rivers and South Georgia Vegetable Producers’' Co-ops also benefit from an Oxfam-supported collaboration between the Federation and Red Tomato, a nonprofit broker that buys from small farmers and sells to major supermarkets in the Northeast. The Federation worked with five cooperatives, in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina, to teach the farmers how to grow seedless watermelons, which are in high demand in the Northeast and command higher prices. During the summer of 2002, the co-ops sold 13 truckloads of watermelons, 468,500 pounds, through Red Tomato and another 130 truckloads to brokers in the Southeast.

"It was a crazy time--such a big push for everyone involved," said Shirley Sherrod, the director of the Federation's Georgia office. "But it all worked out."

Work out it did, the co-op ended up making $450,000, a coup that not only paid bills, it inspired confidence.

"When you've never done something, you don't know if it's going to work or not, and you have fear that it's not going to come through," explained Ms Murphy. "That's changed now--next year I'm planting more watermelons!" Even more than a way of life, farming has formed the economic and social foundation of the African-American community for generations. Historically it was one of the few independent business opportunities available to blacks in the countryside, and it was passed on from parent to child. Most of the Federation's 12,000 members have farming in their blood, and little other work experience.

"We grew up here, so if we don't farm, we don't have nothin' else to do," said Ms. Murphy as her neighbors nodded.

Land ownership is also an important source of pride and identity within the African-American community, which has struggled so long for recognition. Ms. Marabel explains, "No matter what, we're not going to sell our land. If we sell it, we ain't going to have nothin' here for our black people. This is our community. Most of us came here in slavery times. If we lose this land we'll never get it back."

In order to keep farmers on their land, the Federation believes they must do more than sell to big brokers; they must form mutually beneficial partnerships with other underserved communities. They are working to develop a unified labeling system that identifies their produce as coming from black-owned family farms, and they are marketing their foodstuffs directly to where it is most needed. Through partnerships with the Georgia Citizens Coalition on Hunger, a nonprofit based in Atlanta, and government programs such as the School Lunch Program and assistance for Women, Infants and Children, the Federation provides needy families with affordable food as well as income for farmers.

All of the cooperative members agree that, though the times are tough, the cooperative is the key to their future as farmers. As one cooperative member said, "We know the only way we'll survive is together."

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