Most Minn. producers white, and change doesn’t arrive very easy

— Glen Stubbe, Superstar Tribune

RUTLEDGE, Minn. — Two Pine region farms, lower than 40 kilometers apart since the crow flies, are on opposite edges of a discussion over racial discrimination in U.S. farming that’s flaring anew but features deep sources inside the country’s history.

Outside the small town of Rutledge, Harold Robinson and Angela Dawson signed up with Minnesota’s tiny lineup of dark farmland owners a short while ago with a 40-acre secure order they constructed into a little hemp farm and cooperative without national services. The acreage had been symbolic: « Forty miles and a Mule » had been a post-Civil War army coverage that fleetingly directed possession of farmland to people free of slavery. White holders rapidly re-seized the majority of it.

« It felt exactly like a sign, » Robinson, a wiry Army veteran and former Hennepin region deputy, stated while he endured among large, fragrant hemp plant life in another of their brand new greenhouses. Lire la suite