On a bright morning in May, Martice Scales rolled through a field at Mequon Nature Preserve, turning over the hardy thistles that thrive in poor, overworked soil — a legacy of decades of conventional farming. Scales and his wife, Amy Kroll, practice a different kind of farming than this land has seen before: regenerative, community-focused.
The two are on a mission. They want people of color to feel comfortable with their hands in the earth and empowered to grow nutritious food. That, despite the painful history for many Black and Indigenous people whose ancestors were forced to farm or removed from their land.
“I’m trying to help and bring as many people of color here to see that there’s power in being able to choose to do this now,” said Scales, who is Black. He pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on food security and the value of self-sufficiency. “We have to take care of ourselves.”
Their operation, Full Circle Healing, is part farm, part healing center and apothecary. The farm is made possible by the Fondy Farm Project, an incubator program that has made land and tools accessible to farmers of color on a 40-acre site it rents from the Mequon Nature Preserve. But upcoming changes to that arrangement highlight the couple’s need to secure land of their own.
Affordable land access is one of the greatest challenges facing young farmers, whether they're trying to get started or maintain an operation. For farmers of color, who often lack generational wealth and face systemic barriers, the challenge is even greater. Advocates see an opportunity to change that in the upcoming federal Farm Bill, the massive package of legislation that sets the stage for food and farming roughly every five years. With the current bill expiring in September, they are calling on Congress to invest in solutions.
“They really want to move a million acres over the next decade to young and BIPOC farmers specifically,” said Scales, 36, speaking of his role as a land advocacy fellow with the One Million Acres campaign, an initiative of the National Young Farmers Coalition.
The campaign draws attention to how federal policy of the past has shaped land insecurity in the present. Colonial statutes outlawed non-white land ownership, while the Homestead Acts drove Indigenous land dispossession. After the Civil War, the promise of “40 acres and a mule” to newly freed families was broken. In the late 19th century, alien land laws prohibited Japanese and Chinese immigrants from owning land, and redlining in the 20th century stifled homeownership in Black neighborhoods.
For decades, land ownership was extended only to white men, and policies made sure land stayed in white hands. Today, 98% of farmland is owned by white individuals.
As older farmers retire, 370 million acres of farmland are expected to change hands over the next two decades. But it’s expensive: Farmland prices have doubled in the last decade. The next generation of farmers will need help to take up the mantle, a transition that experts say is crucial to maintaining supply chains and food production. According to a 2022 National Young Farmers Coalition survey, 59% of farmers under 40 reported finding affordable land as very or extremely challenging. The struggle was more widespread — 68% — among farmers of color.
Farmers of color may also face discrimination in seeking financial assistance — something Scales and Kroll said they experienced when they applied for a loan through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s socially disadvantaged and beginning farmers program in 2019.
After having a dream farm rejected because the house was “too nice,” Kroll said their loan agent suggested finding a farmer near retirement and volunteering, in the hopes that he might eventually give the family his land. The agent also encouraged them to look beyond the Milwaukee area for farms with housing, despite their desire to avoid communities where their children would be the only Black kids at school.
Kroll felt the loan agent wasn’t sympathetic to their needs, as a biracial family and first-generation farmers.
“She said the quiet part out loud,” Scales said. “She said, ‘We’re not used to loaning to people like you guys.’”
An opportunity for legislative solutions
Holly Rippon-Butler, land policy director for the National Young Farmers Coalition, said the focus on land isn’t just about having a place to farm.
“It’s really about having the security, having the ability to plan long-term, to know where you’re going to be, and to be able to afford that security,” she said. “Often, that means land ownership.”
In June, the USDA announced $300 million in grants to improve access to land and capital for underserved growers, with a focus on community-led projects. The one-time spending, a mix of ARPA and Inflation Reduction Act funds, was the first to directly address land access challenges for farmers of color.
Bipartisan legislation introduced this summer would make the USDA program permanent through the Farm Bill.
“If we’re going to really create opportunity across the board, we’re going to need a focus and investment on ensuring [that] the farmers who have been denied opportunity” are centered in new legislation, Rippon-Butler said.
Farmers of color are also leading innovation in climate-resilient agricultural practices. The 2022 young farmers survey reported that environmental conservation was a leading motivation for 87% of BIPOC farmers. Under their stewardship, farms of the future could play an important role in climate change mitigation.
The search for land continues
It’s something that Scales feels deeply: the wound of lost generational wealth. The legacy of farming in his family was interrupted when Scales’ grandfather, who could not read, was tricked into selling off farmland in Mississippi. The search for work eventually led him north into Wisconsin.
“If you go all the way back to even the Homestead Act, they didn’t pay for that land,” Scales said, referring to legislation that gave away nearly 10% of the area of the United States to private citizens, the vast majority of them white.
That land built equity and established ownership within families.
“They dispossessed that land from Indigenous folks,” Scales continued. “The government incentivized it and said, ‘If you can stay there for five years, that’s yours.’ But if I was to turn around and say, ‘OK, we were supposed to get that 40 acres and a mule.’ What’s up?”
Scales’ involvement with the campaign gained urgency after learning that Mequon Nature Preserve is moving onto the next phase of its wetland restoration at the Fondy Farm Project site, a development that would affect farmers as soon as next year’s growing season.
As a result, Scales said they would likely move to Kohl Farm Community Garden down the road, where they already rent a half-acre. But the rent is more expensive there and the space lacks shared amenities like the tractor.
“If we were to move our entire operation there, it’d be much more expensive and we’d have less access to tools that would be cost-prohibitive to us,” Scales said. Likely, they'd shrink their footprint to adapt.
Kristin Gies, executive director of the Mequon Nature Preserve, said the plan was always to scale back the 40 acres that Fondy has been renting, since the renewable lease began years ago. Farmed for more than 100 years, soil at the historic farm site is poor.
“We do, however, have in the master plan, about 20 acres that can remain in active agriculture in perpetuity,” Gies said. “We care about agriculture and teaching people how you can eat natives from the land and how to really work with the land, blending restoration and agriculture.”
Venice Williams, Fondy’s interim executive director, stressed that Fondy and Mequon Nature Preserve remain strong partners. She said, “As a part of our lease agreement, we have always known that this moment would be coming because it is a nature preserve.”
In the coming years, according to the restoration plan, farmers at the preserve will need to adopt Indigenous practices that integrate native trees and shrubs with crops like hazelnuts and elderberries. Williams sympathized with farmers who may, like Scales, prefer to leave, so they can grow what they want, how they want.
“This story is about land ownership,” she said. “We will continue to run into the same problems as brown and Black farmers until we own farmland.”
Fondy continues to seek land for the farmers, and recently announced a cooperative that plans to buy a parcel of land from the Ozaukee Washington Land Trust.
To Scales, the search for farmland is a sign that justice is still a work in progress.
“What justice looks like to me is the government doing everything in its power to empower those people that they have done historically for white men,” he said, speaking of marginalized Black, Indigenous, queer, and female farmers. “That’s going to look unfair to white men. That’s OK.”
Scales is not willing to compromise on that. He gestures at history — his own, the nation’s — that has landed him and his family in this precarious position now. "The whole time we've been here, we've been compromising," he said.
