More Black students embrace the potential of agriculture

​​Growing up in Memphis, Emmanuel Wallace could not even say where the closest farm was located. Now he is working on a master's degree at Tennessee State University’s College of Agriculture.

Wallace is among an increasing number of Black students drawn to studying agriculture, both at historically Black schools like TSU and traditionally white schools. Over the past decade, enrollment in TSU's Department of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences has more than doubled. At the University of Tennessee, the Herbert School of Agriculture has seen non-white enrollment rise over the past four years. Currently, 15% of the undergraduates are non-white.

“When I first started getting involved in agriculture, the population of minority students at any type of conference was slim to none,” Wallace said. "But now, I see that it is growing.”

Black farmers in America have suffered a long history of well-documented discrimination. At the start of the 20th century, Black farmers owned 16 million acres of farmland. By the 1990s, they had lost 90% of that land while over the same period white farmers lost only 2% of their land.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s loan programs have been rife with problems. The Biden administration is trying to right some of these past wrongs through the $2.2 billion Discrimination Financial Assistance Program.

One man's story: Farmer's push for USDA discrimination payments is just latest chapter of lifetime fight

Before emancipation, enslaved African Americans often worked on farms. Once they gained their freedom, many Black Americans left rural areas for jobs in large cities as part of the Great Migration. That painful past also discouraged Black students from pursuing careers in agriculture.

Black students studying agriculture, however, see a changing attitude among their peers, who are drawn to the field by new job opportunities and a commitment to the importance of food.

A changing field

Wallace did not plan to study agriculture or even attend TSU, which like all land-grant schools has had a strong focus on agricultural studies and research. But as a high school student, he attended a summer program at TSU where he did research with goats on the school’s farm.

“I learned just how wide and deep agriculture can go,” Wallace said. “Prior to that, I always thought that if you’re majoring in ag you’re going to be working on a farm.”

Wallace’s master's thesis, for example, looks at the urban tree canopy in Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville.

Chandra Reddy, the dean of TSU’s College of Agriculture, notes that his students are more likely to work in labs or with technology, as changes in farming have reduced the need for manual labor. Reddy also sees students of all backgrounds drawn to agriculture once they learn about the job opportunities.

“Our land-grant system, we’re producing 30,000 graduates, and the annual demand from a job perspective is about 60,000,” Reddy said.

The weight of history

“My family's perception of agriculture from my grandparents to now was slavery,” said Stephon Fitzpatrick, president-elect of the national student group Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Related Sciences, or MANRRS. "And they don’t want their child to experience it.”

Fitzpatrick, like many Black students with an interest in agriculture, had to win over skeptical parents when he enrolled at Tuskegee University in Alabama.

“That’s another thing that needs to be talked about," he said. "It’s not so much just getting the students, you have to get the buy-in of the families.”

The growing focus on farm-to-table cooking has made agriculture fashionable, drawing more young people of all backgrounds to the field.

Social media has also played a role for Black students in agriculture.

Tyler Flagg, a senior at Tennessee Tech University, grew up seeing his grandparents farm in Murfreesboro. He understood farm work, and he wanted that life. But Flagg has seen his Black peers find their farming role models online.

“They never saw anyone like them doing it, and now with social media they see other people that look like them farm more,” Flagg said.

More: What the thorny — and tremendous — history of Black-owned land means to Southern farmers

Writing a new story

As a longtime professor at the University of Tennessee’s Herbert College of Agriculture and the faculty adviser to the school’s MANRRS chapter, Sharon Jean-Philippe has seen the growing interest in agriculture among Black students.

“They are learning that agriculture is bigger than crops,” she said.

For Jean-Philippe, it is crucial that more African Americans have a role in how food is grown in America.

“It plays into the health of individuals and the health of populations,” she said.

Wallace, the agriculture grad student at TSU, believes it is vital for Black voices to be part of the conversion about food in this country.

“If you aren’t in those rooms, these decisions will be made for you,” he said.

This younger generation, Wallace believes, can change the story of African Americans in agriculture.

“We can reclaim that history, to show that we can fit in this field, we can bring new ideas,” he said. “We all share this common goal to help the world as agriculture and the world population is growing.”

Todd A. Price is a regional reporter in the South for the USA TODAY Network.He can be reached at taprice@mac.com.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: More Black students in Tennessee embrace agriculture