Aallyah Wright and P.J. Haynie Transcript — Sept. 17, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:01):
For this next session of the local business journalism fellowship, we’re going to pivot to a look at the food chain. That’s a term that gets used a lot in business circles, but communicating how it functions and its role in local communities is very important. So you’ve all received some advanced reading about coverage of the USDA food business centers and how the current administration has cut funding, frozen grants, et cetera. So we wanted to take this as an opportunity to hear from two speakers who are going to give us insights into this policy change and the real world perspective, excuse me, of what this means in local communities for the people who produce food, the people who distribute it, and the communities that rely on them for doing that. First, we’re joined by Aallyah Wright. Aallyah is the Rural Issues reporter for capital B News. She’s now, I should say, a treasured member of the NPF family because she joined us earlier this month to talk to our widening the pipeline fellows about how Hollywood actually intersected with her hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi in the movie Sinners. Fascinating story, and I also can’t help mentioning that Aaliyah is now a member of the 20 25 26 Obama Foundation Leaders Program. So let’s give it up at this moment for that.
(01:53):
She joined us today to talk about her reporting on this issue of the food business centers and what that means. So she’s going to give us a good contextual understanding and scope of the issue and what it means. But when it comes to the of lived experience and learning from that way, I think we are greatly privileged to be joined by Philip J. Haynie iii, who also goes by pj. PJ got on a plane this morning at 5:00 AM from Memphis, from one of the farm property that his family owns to be with us this morning. He is a fifth generation farmer, and I cannot wait to hear the full story of that. He owns and operates Haney Farms, which is a grain farming business that produces corn, wheat, soybeans, and canola throughout the northern neck of Virginia. And you also have the farm in Arkansas as well, is that correct? Right. They grow rice in Arkansas. So this is going to be an incredible opportunity really for you all to understand again, this aspect of the local food chain and what some of the challenges, threats, issues that are involved. So thank you both for joining us. And Aallyah will get started with her presentation. And pj, why don’t you have a seat over here and then we’ll get back to it.
Aallyah Wright/Capital B News (03:27):
Alright. Can y’all hear me okay? Yeah. Okay. So again, I’m Aallyah Wright and I cover rural black communities across the country for capital B. One of my fellow colleagues is in this program. Hey, and I’m going to talk a little bit about how I reported the USDA Regional Food Business Centers and why that program is no longer here. Let’s see. Okay. So does anyone in here know what the USDA is or what the USDA does? Hold on. Oh, sorry. Or shout it loud and proud. We’re recording so we have to Oh, okay. Okay, gotcha.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Oh no, I was just going to say that they control the agricultural arm, but also food and commodities and things like that. Well, native communities call it commod, but things like snap.
Aallyah Wright/Capital B News (04:24):
Yes. Anyone else? Yes,
Speaker 4 (04:33):
They also do a lot of things as it relates to food safety and health along with veterinary medicine in regards to slaughterhouses and different aspects from that point. But then they do land grants and agriculture and stuff for farming land and purchasing of land.
Aallyah Wright/Capital B News (04:49):
Yes. So all of those things are correct. The U SDA a’s federal department that’s responsible for developing and implementing policy as it relates to agriculture, food, nutrition, and also some rural development in housing as we know, it plays a critical role in supporting our food system as well as our farmers. And so the USDA is a fairly large department. It has 29 agencies. One of the agencies that I’m often reporting on is what is happening at the food. I mean at the Farm Service Agency, which deals with a lot of loans, they have over a hundred thousand employees, and that works across 4,500 locations. But I put the asterisk there because as we know that it’s probably no longer accurate because of the firings that we’ve seen reported in the news from resignations and also some retirement offers that folks have accepted. And so when I’m thinking about the USDA, I’m also approaching stories with the context of how there’s been well-documented historic discrimination against farmers of color, particularly black farmers as a population that I cover for capital B and how the USDA is either continuing to perpetuate that harm, so I’m exposing wrongdoings or I’m looking at solutions, how are they trying to fix what they say that they’ve done to these farmers?
(06:25):
And so one of the programs that I looked at was the Regional Food Business Centers. Oh, okay. So I know this looks like chicken scratch because I redacted some stuff, but so before I get into this email that I was sent, just to give you a little bit of background about the Regional Food Business centers, they are basically, or we’re basically tasked with technical assistance, coordination and also capacity building. So how can they get farmers educated on how to access better markets? Or is there information about how to make your business more viable? Is there some support that you need? Do you need to purchase certain equipment like cold storage or processing facilities, even meals for grain, or do you need assistance with marketing support? How can you better market your business so that folks know that you exist? So these centers, there were 12 of them placed across the country to do this type of work.
(07:35):
So I knew nothing of this until one of my sources. I had actually spoken to him maybe a couple days prior about some initiatives that he learned about that would assist farmers in the Mississippi Delta region, which is where I’m from. He isn’t a farmer, but he works directly with farmers. And he was like, you know what? I think there’s something that you need to know. So he sent me this email. Actually, this was an internal memo that he shared within his organization, but he thought to share with me. So it was on July 17th, and as you can see, the subject is USDA terminates this program. And Secretary Brooke Rollins had actually announced it a couple days before, and I was like, Hmm, this is interesting. Why did they terminate this program? My first question, and then as I continued to read, this was actually a program that was implemented under the Biden administration, and it was geared towards supporting small farms and food businesses as a result of the pandemic.
(08:43):
We know that when the pandemic happened, a lot of farmers did not have access to their markets anymore. Folks weren’t able to even reach their customers, and there were also some farmers who had more demand that they could actually fulfill. So there was a lot of different challenges happening. And so this was one of the programs aimed to help support them so that they could actually sustain themselves. And so I was like, okay, I need to learn more about this. And later down in the email, he’s given more information that there is four centers that are being shut down immediately, and they have not even yet dispersed any of the grants to the farmers. I should also go back to say that although this was a program that was implemented in the American Rescue Plan Act of 21, the first announcement that this was actually going to happen and these funds would actually go out to farmers was in 2022.
(09:42):
So a lot of folks really didn’t get things up and running until 2023 and also 2024. So it’s a very slow process. One to define where the food business centers would be, who are the universities, the nonprofits, the organizations that would be coordinating all of this work, and also who are the farmers and food businesses who actually need this support? And so I continued to read that there were eight of the centers that could continue to administer their grants through May, 2026. I should also say that this was supposed to be a five year commitment. So they were supposed to actually continue this work up until, I want to say 20 27, 20 28 or something like that. So this is cutting, of course, that work and eliminating a lot of what they actually could do. And then this is just some more information. And then these were the centers so thankful for my source because they just gave me everything in this email for me to follow up with the reporting.
(10:48):
So I was like, oh, I’m from the Delta, I’m from Clarksdale, and this center is in my hometown. And I was just looking at some other places. And so I decided to reach out to some of these centers. First of all, I would say I was on a very short deadline, so I had to move as quickly as I could. And so as I started to look more at this, what I learned was some of this language was actually from the press release from the USDA. So I wanted to confirm whether this was true or not saying my source would lead me astray, but to still have to double check. And I wanted a lot of questions came up for me. One, if these were the four centers that were closing, which were the centers that were still going to be able to operate? What states are within these centers?
(11:37):
How many grants had already been dispersed? Who was actually in the process of about to dispersing grants? How much money was actually allocated for this program? How much money has gone out? And what essentially are farmers and food businesses, literally, what does it look like? What does the support look like for people when they are receiving either this direct financial assistance or this technical assistance in real time? What does that work look like? So I started reporting, and these are some of the numbers that popped up. I talked about, it was a five-year commitment, but it was 400 million over five years. And as I started to do research, I found this report, let me get the name of it so that I am accurate. So it’s a semi-annual performance progress report that the USDA put out to show the impact of what this program has done so far or what these centers have done so far.
(12:41):
And this is only from July of 2023 to December, 2024. If I had more time, I would’ve dug deeper to look at a longer timeline and how much more has happened. And these are only just a few stats from that. So I learned that in this time period, over $600,000 have been distributed in what they call sub builder grants, which are small grants that goes to these farmers or food businesses. This is the number of organizations and businesses that have been served. These are the individuals that actually received technical assistance, and there were new farms or businesses that were created as a result of this work. So as I’m looking at this, I’m like, oh, there are some really good things happening just based off this small period of time with what these centers have been able to do. But I’m like, okay, these are just numbers.
(13:40):
I need to talk to people. So in the midst of doing this research, a lot of people didn’t get back to me. Some people said they would talk to me and then they said, call me back tomorrow. Call me back tomorrow. And every time I called them back, they didn’t get back to me, but I was able to talk to some folks out of the Southwest Center, which is basically California, Nevada, Arizona, and I want to say some tribal communities. And one of the folks I talked to was Farmer Ken. And Farmer Ken is from Ohio, but he’s been living in Southern California for a long time and he grows vegetables, fruits, herbs, and I think flowers. And before I get to Farmer Ken, I want to talk about Tracy Celia, who is the director of the Southwest Center. And she talked a lot about the different things that they were able to do with their funding. First of all, they were awarded $35 million, but prior to the USDA deciding to eliminate the program, they were only able to get out 1.6 million. So that’s a small chunk of that 35 million that they were actually able to utilize.
(15:03):
And so one of the things she talked about that they were able to do was one higher hire experts to conduct financial literacy courses. They were able to do business plan development with farmers, figure out ways to get them access to capital. I mentioned earlier like purchasing this equipment that they needed to store their fresh foods longer, and they were able to do some workforce development training. One of the things I mentioned earlier is just how difficult it can be for small farmers to get access or get their products into a grocery store. For example, one of the things that they were able to do was get one of the farmers, her baked goods, she had this vegan brand of baked pastries that she was actually able to secure a contract with Costco, and she was able to get her stuff in the Costco. They were also able to build a relationship between a local school and the farmer, and that farmer was able to sell her strawberries in the local school that was near her neighborhood.
(16:20):
So all of the things that these farmers had previously had challenges with these centers were able to help them overcome those obstacles and actually not only build stronger relationships, but also be able to diversify their income. There’s a lot of farmers that I talk to who say that they would love to farm full time, but they have other jobs because farming doesn’t always pay the bills. And farming is not necessarily a hobby for a lot of people. They actually want to be able to sustain themselves to thrive and actually make a living from what they’re doing. And so one of the things with Farmer, Ken, his access or his market that he would usually use would be farmer’s market. So direct to consumer, he would set up shop and he would be able to sell directly to the customers in his neighborhood. However, there were some natural disasters.
(17:25):
The fires happening in California that shut down his market. And so he talked a lot about how he’s been able or working towards diversifying his income, doing speaking engagements. He’s been trying to do some workshops, and a lot of that work came from the support that he received from the Southwest Center. So they hired him to actually go out and train farmers because he had already built the connections with a lot of those farmers who either needed some help with their business plan or they needed new tools to support their farms or whatever those different things that they needed. He was able to receive some income from this program to actually do that work. And so sometimes, yeah, one thing that farmer, Ken was saying that he’s well versed in grant opportunities, resources that come from the USDA and he knows how to actually do grant writing, and he has time to actually do that.
(18:32):
A lot of farmers don’t. Some of them don’t even know how to access the applications or know where to look or know if they meet the requirements, or again, if they even have the time to sit down and go through those documents or applications that are sometimes super long and time consuming. So they just don’t do that. So he was able to do that too, support people with getting grants. And so other things I wrote down that organizations were able to do, so one of those things was create a new food hub in rural communities where there were limited transportation. I would love to know actually what that looked like. I wasn’t able to talk to the center who created that. And also, again, providing networking opportunities. Again, some of these folks are so far out and they don’t often have places where they can meet other farmers or folks who are in the industry. And so this helped to create that cross collaboration with these different folks. I don’t know, did I do something
Speaker 5 (19:46):
Pointed to your,
Aallyah Wright/Capital B News (19:53):
I don’t know. Did I break it? Okay. So if you were doing this story, how would you cover it? How would you localize it? There’s a lot of questions. Again, I was able to get a real voice to describe some of the real local impact. Talk a little bit about some of the numbers I found, saw some reports, but there’s a lot that I didn’t get to explore within that piece. If you were covering this, what are some of the steps that you would take or some of the Oh, we don’t have time. Okay, that is fine. So cover your mic and running. Oh yeah, that’s true. I forgot we’re recording. So the first thing, I just of course, find your coverage. Here’s a map, and I’m pretty sure y’all probably have already seen this.
(20:47):
So one other thing I’ll mention is that September, I’m forgetting the date, but basically a lot of the eight centers that were able to allocate the rest of those grants were through September. And so their work is basically coming to an end. So I would look there for those places. And again, going back to those centers who never even got a chance to distribute any of that money. And part of it was because of the funding freezes that happened. So yeah. And then there’s a list on the USDA website that has contact information for these directors and people who are over these centers. And I just threw this in here. I don’t know how much data y’all work with with the census of agriculture, but it has a lot of farm data from all sorts of demographics from, bless you. Thank you. There’s racial data, there is congressional district data, of course, state and national data.
(21:49):
I mean, it talks about the different crops and the number of acres and there’s just a lot of stuff. But I will give one caveat. There are farmers I’ve talked to who don’t trust the USDA for a number of reasons as we know. And so they also don’t trust the census and they may not fill it out. So that data may not be as accurate as it can be, but it does give us a look at the landscape of agriculture. I can share this too, but this is the link I was talking about with the website information and yeah, that’s how you can reach me. That’s all I have. So I will pass it over to our farmer extraordinaire.
Rachel Jones/NPF (22:42):
Absolutely. I think we have the lived experience right here, and so we wanted to make sure we get, why don’t you join me up here, pj. In fact, Lee, you want to come here too. I really would just love for you to start out with your family’s history, how the first farm was purchased, and then feel free to just share the main points that you want these journalists to take away about this issue.
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (23:10):
Gladly. Good morning everyone. I’ll do that. And I’ll go back. I’d like to comment on the USDA and what it does just from my windshield.
(23:20):
For those of you I haven’t met, my name is PJ Haney. I’m a fifth generation farmer. My family hails from Northumberland County, Virginia, which is in the northern neck, the northeast corner of Virginia. My great great grandfather was the first African American to come out of slavery, and he purchased 60 acres of land on September 14th, 1867, just outside of heats Virginia in North Homeland County. And by the grace of God, my family still owns that original 60 acres. Today we still farm a portion of that and we have expanded to over 9,000 acres, a combination of owned and leased land across four counties in Virginia and four counties in Arkansas where we are on the coastal plains. Due to our sandy soil profile, we do a lot of what’s called double cropping. We plant a winter wheat when a barley, when a canola, that crop goes in the ground in October, November of the calendar year, winter wheat will get up about six inches tall like grass.
(24:27):
And then once the soil temperature starts to cool down, that crop will grow dormant. It’ll frost on it, snow, ice, whatever spring comes around. And when that soil temperature starts to warm up, that crop will start to grow. And about June, we’ll start harvesting that winter crop. And then because we’ve got some calendar days left before the first frost, we go in with the planters and we plant soybeans right behind those combines. And those soybeans start in June and then they’ll be harvesting those in October, November. And we’ll plant a maturity that will kind of grow kind of fast. And the first frost of the fall kills the growing season. So that’s typically around about October the 15th when we get our first frost. And because we’re so close to the coast there, the frost kind of lays off because of the water temperatures a little bit further than it does inland, and that helps us mitigate.
(25:17):
Growing up, I was my dad’s walking shadow, I had four younger sisters, so I didn’t stay in the house much at all. And from the time I was seven years old, I was everywhere. Dad, when I was the shadow, if he had a meeting at the bank, I sat in the corner. If he had on the track, I was sitting on the side. And I’ll never forget, every time we would go into the John Deere store, I’d want a toy or I’d go over to the books. And this one particular day, dad said, you’re too big for a toy.
(25:49):
So it was one Sunday afternoon, as we typically did after church right around to the John Deere dealerships. The new equipment would be on one side of the lot, the used equipment would be on the other. And we would ride this one day, dad stopped at this particular tractor and we would keep a key in his pickup truck that would start any John Deere tractor in the whole country. He said, Hey son, let’s check this one out, starter up. So as I had done a hundred times before, I go check the engine oil, I go check the high transmission oil and I go, fire up. Alright, rev it up a little bit. How does this sound? Sounds good, daddy. He’s all right. Back it up and just drive it around and see if you hear any noises in the transmission. I did that and I done it before.
(26:29):
No noises. He said, how’s it sound? It sounds good, daddy. He said, all right, you like that tractor? I said, yeah, daddy, I like this tractor. It’s got air conditioner. I like this one. He said, all right, well, your daddy’s going to buy you that tractor. And by golly, daddy, I come home after Friday after school and daddy’s got the tractor sitting in the yard. And on Fridays when I got out of school, wherever my dad’s crew was working, he’d have them move my tractor to the field. So if he had four tractors running, I’m the fifth tractor waiting to get in line behind the other guys. So at eight, 10 years old, I’m doing the same thing that 40 and 50-year-old guys are doing. Working on the farm. I was a big boy. I didn’t want to play sports. I didn’t want to chase girls. I just wanted to go get on that tractor and have my air conditioning radio. And that’s all I did.
(27:18):
I was very skilled at it. So at a very young age, I became one of his best skilled, cheapest paid employees on the whole farm. I still wear that title today, but I was able to focus my effort on something that challenged me, which was operating a big machine. And that kept me out of trouble that I didn’t focus on anything else. So I took that skill. And I’ll never forget when I went to high school, I was in the future Farmers of America competition. They had a tractor driving competition and I was a freshman and I beat the incumbent kid who was a senior, and that kid’s dad was the biggest white farmer in the county. And it didn’t dawn on me till years later, but the FFA teacher said, Hey, we need to redo the course this after school. Can you stay after school this afternoon?
(28:03):
And I said, yeah, that’s no problem. And that afternoon, other farmers, that other kid’s dad was there watching us do the course. And after I got older, I realized that that guy didn’t believe that I beat his son. So he had to come and watch it himself. And it’s just simple. A little rope score. You just pull a four wheel wagon out of a stall and back it into another one. You don’t cross the line. But just having to prove myself early on, fast forward, I go to college and I figured my dad knew how to grow it. I wanted to learn how to sell it. So I studied agricultural economics. And I’ll never forget, I came home one weekend and I walked down the lane and got the newspaper from my dad and I bought it in and on the front page of the newspaper, it was a black farmer cries foul, and it was a picture of John Boyd and he was talking about what happened and the lending practice.
(28:50):
And dad said, man, this same thing has happened to me. How do I get in touch with this guy? So I went on the computer, I figured out I got a phone number, I called. I said, yeah, I’m looking for John Boyd. He said, this is him. I said, hold on. Gave the phone to my dad. They talked for three hours and some of the same challenges that my father had faced as far as being denied loans and equipment being shot up and buildings being burned up. The discrimination was really, really rancid and it was uncontrollable in rural America. Okay? So my dad and John started the National Black Farmers Association. They were here in Washington, protest for mules with the mules. My dad bought the mules and he and John would travel around the country just to shine a light on the issue of black farmer inequity.
(29:36):
And I’ll never forget, I had to haul the mule to Atlanta, and it was a picture of me on the cover of Jet Magazine with a pair of bib overalls holding the mule for a black farmer protest. That day. We were saying a prayer. I had my hat on, and I say all that to say that I’ve had a front row seat at black farmer inequities most of my life. That same tractor that dad bought me one night, dad leased a big farm in the county, biggest farm in whole county white landlord gave him the opportunity to lease it. He leased it, and we were in the planting season and we parked all the tractors on the line. The next morning we came back to the field. Every one of those tractors was shot up with bullets, hole, flat tires, radiators, antifreeze just running on the ground.
(30:25):
And that’s an image that I still have in my head to this day. And it didn’t discourage me, folks. It just lit a fire in my belly to prove to those who didn’t want me here that I’m just as entitled as they are. You see, the land doesn’t know any color. You take care of the land, the land will take care of you. That’s all I’ve ever been taught. So if I go and plant on time and fertilize on time, if I have the resources to do that, you plant God will give the increase. Now, that’s my story. So fast forward, I graduated from Virginia Tech with ag econ degree, came back to the farm. I’m farming with dad, and he says, listen, you got four younger sisters. I’ll support you with that college degree. You have to hang on some corporate office wall if you want to, but I really could use your help to get your sisters through school and after we get them through school, if you want to go corporate America, I’m glad to support you.
(31:20):
Well, that was my green light to live my childhood dream and go to work every day with my dad. So he said, listen, I really need five crops in three years. I want you to give me wheat and we’ll double crop beans, wheat, double crop beans, and we’ll rotate the corn. On the third year. He said, we’re going to buy two thirds of our acreage is going to be double cropped. The other third is going to be in corn. And he said, we can roll this thing and we can make it work. And in the meantime, we started a trucking company, something to just have additional income because our income stream is very cyclical. We plant and spend a lot of money in the spring, and we got to wait all year to harvest, and you got to take care of diesel fuel and chemicals and payroll and repairs all year.
(31:59):
So you needed, my granddaddy always said, you got to have something making your money while you sleep. Granddaddy was in the hog business. He raised hogs and ferre to finish and livestock. So trucking was our source of non-farm income, and we had a lot of accounts where we live, especially serving this northeast corridor. So I’ve spent more time in an 18 wheeler on the New Jersey turnpike than you would ever imagine right now. But we didn’t have the ability to walk into a bank and get a loan. So we had to do what most other farmers didn’t have to do is truck and landscape and cut trees and all that other stuff to make the money to support our hobby of farming. 2009 rolls around, and I’m on the track that one day I’ll never forget, I get a call from a guy who was with Monsanto and he says, Mr. Haney, I said, yeah.
(32:48):
He said, my name is Dwayne and I have Mr. Reed on the line. We’re calling to invite you to a black grower advisory council, meaning that we’re hosting here at Monsanto, the leadership here, some things have come out in the media about Monsanto’s acquisition of Delta Pine Land cotton seed company, and it’s been told that it’ll be detrimental to black farmers. So the leadership of Monsanto wants to know why. I said, well, dude, I appreciate the invitation, but what I do is different than most black farmers. He said, what do you mean? I said, sir, we’re not raising any watermelons and collard greens around here. We’re a 5,000 acre row crop operation. Two thirds of this is double crop. I’m planting and harvesting seven, 8,000 acres a year, and I don’t know any other black farmers doing what I do, so I appreciate the invitation, but I probably have to decline.
(33:38):
He said, well, we are quite aware of the size of your operation and we know how much your company spends with us, and to your surprise, there are going to be some black farmers at this meeting your size and some even larger than you. When he said that, I stopped the tractor right in the middle of the field. I said, wait a minute. You mean to tell me that there are black farmers out here farming in more land than we are? He said, yes, sir. I’m not going to say what I said on the phone, but I said, you got to be kidding me, dude. He said, no. I said, where are these guys from? He started telling me about the brothers in Tennessee farming, 9,000 acres, Texas 8,000, Alabama 6,000, Florida, Georgia. I was like, okay, hold on. When is the meeting? I said, you signed me up.
(34:23):
I may not have much to offer on this cotton deal. I don’t grow cotton, but I need to meet these other black farmers. That’s where they fired me to St. Louis. I walk into the Monsanto corporate boardroom, and there are 11 other black farmers sitting around this table that I’d never seen before, nor heard their names. And when they started making introductions, there was Kenneth Ray Snead from Tennessee, 9,000 Acres, Snead, brother Farms, there’s Mr. Jd Jacobs, Rockwall, Texas, 8,000 acres, the bridge force from Alabama, the Louisiana, the Gilberts from Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas. I was speechless. One, it was the first time I’d ever been in a room and I wasn’t the biggest black farmer. But two, that meeting changed my life because it opened up a whole network for me that I never knew existed prior to that meeting. I thought I was the largest black farmer in the whole damn United States.
(35:18):
If you had said, pj, I’ll give you a thousand dollars for every farmer and you can name me farming over a thousand acres of land, I couldn’t have done it. I didn’t know anything. My world was very pale, white and stale in northeast corner of Virginia and not much diversity at all. I’ve been involved in manners my whole four years in college. That’s minorities in agriculture, natural resources and related sciences. But I never met another black male or female who was aspiring to go back to the farm. I was, most of these students were going to corporate careers or working at USDA or something like that. So I didn’t know anybody pulling the same plow I was every day on the farm. So now that I had this network, I was just floored. So I’m calling these guys on a regular basis, Hey man, these guys are quoting me $800 a ton for potash.
(36:08):
What are you paying for potash right now, pj? We at five 50 on. I said, okay, I figured that on, right? Lemme go shop somewhere else. Hey, man, you got a new combine last year, did you? He said, yeah. I said, well, I just quoted one and they want 750,000. What’d you pay? We paid 600 for irs, pj, we bought it from this guy down here. I’ll give you the name. So it just let me realize that I had to gut check the salesman and the people that I was currently dealing with because I wasn’t getting fair treatment. When I go to the local coffee shop in the morning, the neighbors, they’re not going to tell me the good sweetheart deals that they have or everything going on. So I was isolated. So now that work opened up wider for me. I’ll try to speed up if you need to.
Rachel Jones/NPF (36:51):
What I wanted to make sure is that we have plenty of time for the journalists to ask questions, but I wanted to get you to pivot from having this broader perspective to then realizing that there were still major challenges for folks like who access the food
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (37:08):
Business center. Well, so I’ll get there. While we were at that meeting in St. Louis at Monsanto headquarters, the CEO asked 11, the 12 of us a question, how many of you guys are using our 0% seed financing and chemical rebate programs? And only one or two hands went up in the room and the older statesman from Texas, he said, wait a minute, 0%. He said, I go to the bank and draw my line of credit. I don’t know nothing about that. So the CEO was irate that they had programs out that a 8,000 acre corn farmer didn’t know about. And that was the light bulb moment because we realized right then, and there was information that corporate ag companies were policies that they were setting up, but it wasn’t being disseminated down the gravel roads where black farmers lived and operated. And that’s why we started the National Black Growers Council to be the conduit between corporate ag and black row crop farmers.
(38:04):
Okay, so what I was telling you, the type of work we do, we’re row crops. So we’re not produce vegetables and no veggies here. We’re all corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, canola, peanuts, cotton, the commodities that grow across large acres and black farmers we’re the smallest herd of commodity of all black farmers. You can shoot a rifle from any angle in the city here and hit a black urban farmer growing vegetables or produce or something like that at your local farmer’s market. But you’re trying to find a commodity grower that’s growing corn or soybeans. And the real disparity is when these federal programs come out, you see an urban farmer that’s growing a half acre of produce is not subject to any ARC or PLC programs that the government sends out for farmers. USAID I is buying big commodities for farmers to keep the pipeline regulated.
(38:57):
That’s not happening on the smaller scale. So the commodities are the large acres where these large growers really benefit from across big acres. You talk about subsidy programs and these disparities and things like that. Now, lemme just say if I can, USDA US Department of Agriculture has a presence in every county, throughout every state in the whole United States. Local farmers go in to report their acres of corn, their head of cattle, whatever that county office reports to the state office. The state office reports to Washington and all these economists in Washington do all these supply and demand projections and the waley reports to figure out, do we have enough corn planted for the cattle on feed? Are we going to be short? Are we going to have a supply or deficit? That’s how the big old wax ball of USDA works. The challenge with that for farmers that look like me is on a local level, that local county office is governed by a county committee, and that county committee is made up of the good old boys in that county who make the decisions on who gets loans, who gets disaster payments, who doesn’t.
Aallyah Wright/Capital B News (39:59):
And it’s supposed to be an elected position, right?
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (40:01):
Yes, it’s an elected position, but here’s the kicker. You have to be voted on, you have to be nominated by someone and then voted on. So here I come back and I’m the most educated producer in my county, young, educated wants to get on. I can’t even get on because I don’t get enough votes. And those local, that good old boy clique right there is what really makes the assertion. That was the whole domino effect of black farmers in the eighties. That’s why the whole black pharma class action lawsuit, most of you weren’t even born when all that happened. But the civil rights arm of the USDA was disembarked on the Reagan administration. So when farmers had complaints to file, there was no one to go send those two. So after the whole class action lawsuit, they found a whole room full of complaints from all over the country.
(40:49):
In 1920, there were a million black farmers in the country. African-Americans owned 16 million acres of land present day. They less than a thousand black row crop farmers in the whole US and African-Americans only own 2 million acres of land. Now, the difference between that 16 and that two is 14 million acres. That acreage didn’t erode off the coastal plains of Virginia or erode off the coastal plains of California. That acreage changed hands. And when you have these shady people sitting in these county offices that are going to come in and say, Scott, Patricia and Catherine are on that county committee and say, you know what? Scott owns that land between us and if we want to get it, all we got to do is slow his loan down and he’s not going to make his crop.
Speaker 5 (41:32):
So
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (41:32):
Scott will go in February to apply for his loan, hopefully get it in March to go planting, but guess what? He won’t get his loan approved until July and Scott’s got nothing but a green thumb. He doesn’t know anything better to do. He goes to planting. Well, come harvest season while y’all are harvesting 200 bushel corns, Scott’s only harvesting 75, and that’s not enough to pay his loan back. And then you foreclose on him, and then Catherine and Patricia end up with Scott’s land and everything that was happened like Domino’s all over the country. So the disparities, and what I’m trying to say is so based on those historical factors of from the eighties, the historical inequities of the past are still creating present day disparities. And when these systems hit farmers, it hits black farmers three times as hard as whites. Black farmers only get 25 cents on a dollar compared to white farmers and farm subsidies right now through payments because it’s all based on historical acreage and determinations and all that happened back during the crux of discrimination in the eighties. Even the safety net programs for prices and crop insurance and all that thing, all that, it all stems from your land, the productiveness of that land, et cetera, et cetera. So when we see these impacts like this, it hits the black farmers twice as hard. Now here’s the thing. Let’s talk about food. I’m a commodity grower. I grow wheat. That wheat is processed into flour, okay? And that flour goes for various purposes. I can name you black wheat farmers, but I cannot name your black owned wheat processor. Okay?
(43:11):
I can name you black corn farmer. I cannot name you black corn processor. I can name you a black soybean farmer. I cannot name you a soybean processor. African-Americans came over as slaves to pick cotton. We still grow cotton. I was just in Clarksdale yesterday and seeing all the cotton fields over in Mississippi, but there’s no black owned cotton gins in the whole United States. Blacks are not involved in the processing sector. And I’m very fortunate to own one of the only black owned rice processing plant in the whole United States, and we’re struggling for capital right now to keep that afloat.
(43:44):
But I try to explain to people the value of the processing, and I use this example and it resonates very easily with people. Let’s think about a hamburger. You, the cattle farmer Maxwell got up this morning and you went down to the pasture and you saw where that bull had broke the fence down for the third time. You say, you know what? I’m going to sell that bull. He’s crazy and he’s just getting on my nerves and I got to keep fixing. So you go load him up on your trailer, you take him to the livestock market, and when you pull into the parking lot, you see a sign on the wall that says beef, a dollar 50 a pound. Okay? You back up, drop your gate, he hits the scale. He weighs a thousand pound. A amount is going to write you a check for $1,500 and you’re going to go back to the farm happy.
(44:22):
Alright? A thousand pound dollar 50 pound 1500 bucks, right? Easy math mine’s going to process that animal. Now that thousand pounds, she’s going to end up maybe about 700 pounds of meat. You got head, hoof, bone, gut, everything that you can’t use. If she grinds it off a hamburger meat at $10 a pound, that’s $7,000 that she’s going to be selling for. Now, Miller has a fancy burger shack here in DC where she’s selling quarter pound hamburgers for $10 a pop. Well, that 10 on a quarter is 40 on a pound, and that 40 on a pound is $28,000. On that 700 pounds of meat, Maxwell only got 1500. Okay? You’re not even getting 10% of the total spend. You had all that risk from calf to cow seed to stalk, you fed it, vaccinated, everything, and you don’t get it. So what I say is the processing part of food is very important. That’s where the money is. These big companies that are reporting billions profits a year and things like that, they’re not on the farm and putting diesel fuel in tractors every day like I am. They’re on the processing. They don’t have the risk involved. So we have to understand that and we have to create opportunities for our children to come back in and we close this gap across rural America.
A J Johnson/Bridge Detroit (45:37):
Okay. Good morning, I’m Alina Johnson. I’m with Bridge Detroit. Did you say that your grandfather bought this land on this date in 1867?
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (45:53):
September 14th, 1867.
A J Johnson/Bridge Detroit (45:55):
Well, happy birthday to you and me. Thank
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (45:59):
You.
A J Johnson/Bridge Detroit (45:59):
Congratulations.
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (46:01):
I forgot about the day. Is that Thank you.
A J Johnson/Bridge Detroit (46:04):
Yeah. Today is my birthday too.
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (46:06):
Happy birthday.
Rowan Hetzer | Dayton Business Journal (46:09):
Birthday. Happy birthday. Hi, I’m Rowan with the Dayton Business Journal. I have a question. I cover manufacturing and I know that that’s kind of like a similar business in that way. One of the big things that I’ve heard from my sources is a big struggle for them is succession. And with you being a fifth generation farmer, I’m curious to know what succession planning looks like for you. Is that completely reliant on staying in the family or is that you have a close family friend who wants to inherit it because at some point you are going to have to pass that torch. So what does that look like for you? What do you struggle with that? What do you succeed with that? What’s that look like?
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (46:45):
Great question. Great question. So I have three children. I have a daughter that’s in her second year of medical school at Wake Forest School of Medicine. I have a son who’s in his first year of law school in the University of Michigan School of Law, and I’ve got a 17-year-old that’s a senior in high school, okay? The conversation I had with my kids over the winter, I said, listen, I only want you to farm if you want to. I don’t want to force you. I said, the greatest gift that you could have is to live your dreams and pursue whatever career you want to have in life. That was my greatest gift of going to work every day with my dad. However, I don’t want you to have to take any wooden nickels. If something happened to me, them good old boys are going to be lined up outside the funeral offering.
(47:27):
How can I help you? And I want you to look old Billy Ray in his eye, and I want to say, Billy Ray, this is what I want you to do. I’m going to lease you daddy’s farm on the east end of the county. But what you’re going to do, you’re going to bring that rice to my rice meal. You’re going to bring that corn to my corn elevator. You’re going to bring that soybeans to, and I want you to be in control of what comes off your land. Then you’re going to lease Jimbo to hunt rights over here, and then you’re going to lease Billy Bob. You control what comes off. And then you don’t have to take any wood Nichols, therefore, you can only farm if you desire to. What I have done, and this is the reason I’ve started Haney Family Foods, is to get all of my family involved, to take what we grow and go from field, from farm to table, from field to fork. So what I have in Virginia, we grow canola.
(48:14):
If I just sell canola off the truck, it’s worth a certain value, but I have a processor going to process that canola for me and make it in canola oil. And we’re going to market that for food companies, okay? Food service distributors, the rice that we grow at the farm in Arkansas. We have a rice mill. We’re the only black owned rice mill in the whole United States. We’re going to process that rice that we grow and sell it to rice for food distributors to capture more value for what we do. I don’t want to learn how to grow anything new. I just want to get the most value for what I know how to grow first. The same way that hamburger existed from that cattle farmer that Maxwell had to that burger that a mill had, the same way the wheat is, you can go in the grocery store and there’s $5 for a two pound bag of flour versus I only get $5 for a 60 pound bushel of wheat that I sell.
(49:04):
Okay? So the money is in the processing. No, black farmer told me one time, he said, son, the closer you get to the mouth, the more money you get. And he’s right. You have to take out those steps in between. So when I look in the rice and grains out, I see pearl barley, you’re paying a pound, a dollar 95 for a pound bag of pearl barley. Well, hell, I only get two bushels for 45 pounds that you sell $2 a bushel for a 45 pound bushels. So we have to, in order for me to sustain the legacy here, and my sisters are involved, my kids are involved, my nieces and nephews, it’s starting a food company that they can take the land and lease it out and control what comes off of that land to be still in the food business and not have to be forced to buy $5 gallon diesel fuel, $800 ton fertilizer, $800,000 combines and farm every day if they don’t want to. Does that help?
Marlon Hyde | WABE News (50:05):
Marlon Hyde, WABE News in Atlanta? I wanted to say thank you both of you. First one, Aaliyah, while you were talking, I looked and saw that the Southeast RFBC literally seized operations this week or two days ago. So how would you recommend reaching out to the people who organize partners? And just so that I could potentially follow that story down, and for you, Mr. Haney, how do you see, not necessarily the pharma industry as a whole, but specifically the case for black farmers in a case where we’re under an administration that hasn’t supported farmers the way that many may have expected?
Aallyah Wright/Capital B News (50:51):
So I would start by looking at the USDA website for that particular center. They have listed some email addresses for the universities, the organizations or the nonprofit leaders who have been a part of organizing those centers. So I would start there. I would see which states are a part of that. And that Southeast, you said Southeast Center, right? Yeah. That Southeast Center may have its own website and they might actually list out all of the partners. So I would just start there and start emailing people. And to that question that you asked pj, I just kind of wanted to say a couple of things.
(51:37):
One, I’ve been talking a lot to black farmers in the South who have applied for grants. They never received them. They were frozen or what have you. And despite the challenges, they’re still motivated. They’re not allowing what’s happening to stop them from doing what they’re doing. They’re talking about they’re still energized to bring in the next generation of young farmers. So how can we get them involved on the farm? How can we pull our resources with a farmer that’s next to us? What can we do as a community of farmers to make sure that we’re all able to get through this? And a lot of them, especially the older farmers are like, well, we done been through worse. So it’s not like we can’t get through this.
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (52:26):
Mentioned Atlanta made me think that I’m very fortunate because I have a Haney family. Foods has rice sitting in Atlanta right now. There’s a black food distributor that distributes rights to hospitals and restaurants. And so I am in the city of Atlanta right now. I’m looking to go to more cities across the country. I love to talk to you guys about that. But going back, here’s the thing, bro. People eat every day. No farms, no food, right? And if this administration doesn’t watch it, these farmers are going to be forced out of business. And when you sit down and say your grace over your dinner plate, when you open your eyes, you’re going to realize everything on that plate is coming from China.
(53:07):
So it’s only 2% of us, two people out of a hundred feet, the whole a hundred. Now, this administration can send troops to cities and the National Guard, I was on a C NNN segment yesterday and I told ’em they need to send the National Guard to Arkansas. So Arkansas is their number one rice growing state in the country right now. And when the government dismantled U-S-A-I-D, it was the nail in the coffin for the rice prices, the rice market, because we’ve coming off of two years of big crops of rice with low quality during the harvest season. Over the last two years, hot temperatures, which are normally seen this time of year, caused that rice crop to dry down too fast in the field. On Monday, the combines are harvesting. We had 20% moisture, and by Fridays it’s down to 12. And that rice dries too fast.
(53:54):
It’s just like concrete drying too fast. It gets brittle, right? So when the meals buy that rice and go to mill, it breaks up really bad and the meals don’t want to pay for broken kernels. Broken kernels of rice are worth half the value of whole kernels of rice because they only use for pet food. So what it does, it caused the farmers to get a lower price for what they’re selling. Well, U-S-D-A-S-A-I-D would come in and put these tenders in and say, okay, we got to order of 20% brokens going to Afghanistan, or 20% going to other countries. And that would just take that product out of the pipeline. I talked to a broker a couple of weeks ago, and before Harvard started, she was said that she knew of over 5 million bushes of rice sitting in the Arkansas delta right now, the Canton with no home for it. Old crop rice from last year.
(54:40):
And you look on tv and there people in GA are starving with a pot in the hand begging for food. What the hell folks? How are we going to help people? And what that did, it regulated the supply. It was the overflow valve. When you got a bunch of excess crop and the supply is building up and demand is starting to go, USDA would open that gate and it would shut. That product would go to other countries, it would regulate, it would keep farmers farming. I had multiple farmers call me over the last month, say, pj, I can’t sell my old crop from last year. Can you take it? Nobody’s buying old crop with high broken percentages. So it’s sad where we are at this point.
Rachel Jones/NPF (55:18):
I think we can take maybe one more question, then I’m going to ask both of you to give some concrete story ideas. So one more, is there one more Rachel question? No. Oh, okay. Alright. So why don’t we, then you have contact information for,
Aallyah Wright/Capital B News (55:36):
Yeah, you can just reach out to me.
Rachel Jones/NPF (55:37):
I’m happy. And we’ve also shared your email, Pete Jay, but why don’t we wind this discussion down by having you start with, give us one or two really ideas they could take back to their newsrooms right now. Ladies,
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (55:51):
Gentlemen, I tell people all the time, I don’t care where you go in the world, regardless of your age, race, religion, or political affiliation, food connects us all. There is no culture without agriculture. What we have to do in order to make sure we have a future crop of farmers, if we don’t plant seeds today, there’s no harvest tomorrow. So I got to make farming sexy for this next generation of young black men and women to want to be involved in agriculture. You like chemistry, go design the next damn herbicides and insecticides. We’re spraying on the crops. You like marketing, showcase this new John Deere tractor or combine that we’re harvest you like accounting. Do the financing for the agriculture affects everybody. Food, fiber, fuel. You can wake up this. If you woke up this morning and your computer didn’t work, you’d be fine. Your car didn’t start, you’d be fine. Your cell phone didn’t work. Your bank account closed, you’d be fine. But if you cannot bite a biscuit or drink a cup of coffee, Houston, we have a problem. So everything starts with agriculture and I just want you to make sure you understand that. And when you look out the window at who’s involved in agriculture, there’s not enough people that look like me. Aaliyah.
Aallyah Wright/Capital B News (57:06):
Yeah. To that point, one thing I am trying to do more of is highlight what the modern day farmer looks like. To PJ’s point is not always having to be on the farm. There’s other careers in agriculture that folks might be interested in who may not want to be necessarily a farmer in that way. So I would say, yeah, just go after or try to find those interesting avenues that are, where are putting younger farmers into, or younger folks into agriculture, or if there’s different programs or initiative, folks are starting to create that intergenerational connection or relationship. I would find ways to do that. So how can we have a different narrative about what farming looks like?
P.J. Haynie, III/Farmer (58:00):
Last I want to add, there’s a farm financial crisis going on right now. Farmers are in trouble and right now farm foreclosures are up 55% from 2023. 77% of all farmers voted this administration and they’ve turned their backs on farmers right now. And when these farmers start going out of business, and this is not a black or white issue, it’s everybody, it’s hurting.
(58:23):
But because of the disfranchised of the past, it hits black farmers twice as hard. But we need to focus on how do we get this administration’s attention to take care of farmers. It’s only two of us out of a hundred, 2% feed the a hundred percent. And if you can’t take care of that damn 2%, who are you going to help? And we can devote all these resources for going everywhere else. We can’t even kick care about food security is national security, ladies and gentlemen. So I love to talk to you more about it through stories, but we need a cry for help to this administration to get the president’s attention to make sure he keeps farmers on the farm. Put a mandatory moratorium on farm foreclosures and agribusiness foreclosures immediately.
Rachel Jones/NPF (59:02):
I was already president of the Aaliyah Wright Fan Club and now I am the president of the PJ Haney Farm Fan Club. So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank these two powerful speakers who helped us.
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