Farmer's push for USDA discrimination payments is just latest chapter of lifetime fight

Marvin Sanderlin knows it will be easy to show the U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated against him when he applies for the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, or DFAP. The federal agency already admitted it in writing.

Part of the Inflation Reduction Act, DFAP is meant to pay farmers who were discriminated against by the USDA’s loan programs. The USDA has a long and well-documented history of discriminating against Black farmers like Sanderlin, although DFAP payments are available to anyone who faced discrimination in the loan programs.

Sitting in his truck early in the morning, Sanderlin, who farms corn, wheat and soybeans near Stanton, Tennessee, opened a dust-coated leather satchel and pulled out a 30-page, carefully kept letter from a USDA monitor. On the last page, the monitor concludes Sanderlin suffered a “fundamental miscarriage of justice.” USDA loans he received from 1981 to 1985, the monitor said, were less than they should have been and the denial of a loan he sought in 1990 should be reconsidered.

“Why should we have to go back and prove anything to the USDA now? They have already admitted it themselves. That’s stupid,” he said.

Sanderlin, who turned 69 in December, spent a year in the '90s getting that letter. But it was not the only time he faced discrimination as a Black farmer in Tennessee. Nor was it the only time he fought back. He joined a group of farmers that in 2002 staged a sit-in at the USDA office in nearby Brownsville.

“We wanted fairness. They were turning all the Black folks down. They pretty much put us all out of business,” he said.

Everything is changing

Sanderlin turns his whole body to look to the side. His neck hasn’t moved since a tree he was logging fell on his head. The doctors said the injury should have paralyzed Sanderlin, or killed him. But a few months after he got out of the hospital, he was back at work.

Sanderlin’s house is on Joe Sanderlin Road, named for his dad. His grandfather was the first one in the family to farm. And Sanderlin will proudly tell you about how many Black farmers still work the land around him in Haywood County. But he has seen the number of Black farmers in West Tennessee dwindle over the years.

Everything around Sanderlin is changing. The massive, $5.6 billion BlueOval City plant, where Ford will make electric trucks, is rising up amidst the fields Sanderlin and others farm. The back roads Sanderlin drives daily are rutted from traffic and heavy machinery. Lots that were recently in the middle of nowhere are now up for sale as commercial properties.

“That’s going to be the worst nightmare Haywood County has ever seen, that Ford plant,” Sanderlin said.

Sanderlin has a strip of land the state wants to expropriate for a road, but he is fighting for a higher price. Land is suddenly valuable in Haywood County.

How much money Sanderlin might get from the DFAP program is unknown. It depends on how people in a room far away from Haywood County judge his application. It also depends on how many farmers apply for a piece of the $2.2 billion budgeted for the program.

Sanderlin’s hopes for the DFAP program are modest. He just wants a little debt relief on money he owes the USDA’s Farm Service Agency.

“If they write that off, I won’t ask for anything else,” he said. “It ain’t that much.”

He declined to disclose the amount of the debt.

The future of farming

These days, Sanderlin is thinking about his adult sons, Matthew and Joseph, and how they will make a living from farming.

“My days are finished. I’m done. I’m just out here because I love being out here,” he said.

Agrotourism, he thinks, is the future of farming in Haywood County. But his sons, he knows, will have to find their own way as farmers. They will have to figure out how to make a living doing something they enjoy.

He does tell his boys to never borrow money from the USDA. He doesn’t want them to ever deal with that agency.

“That’s what I shelter them from,” he said.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: USDA discrimination payments: A Black farmer's long fight for justice