daisypusher wrote: In my former neck of the woods, farmers were encouraged to borrow money to modernize/expand their operations. Those farms were the first to go bankrupt when the price of produce did/has not kept pace with the cost of production. The additional cost of debt service broke them first. Later many of the other family farms went belly up as that trend continued.
You could tell who those folks were by whether they drove the old reliable John Deere or the shiny Massey Fergs!
The black farmers did not sue the government because they were black. They sued the Federal Government because of systemic and blatant discrimination in qualifying for Department of Agriculture loans that white farmers received (which a jury found to be the case). If your family is from Georgia, I can see where you would think that blacks always got a better deal or that there was some hokey pokey going on, but that simply isn't true. There are many family farms in the Midwest, especially in Kansas and Oklahoma, that are black-owned.
