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April 24, 2024 - RFK Jr. The Defender
33:16
Bill Gates, China and USDA Vs Black Farmers

Bill Gates, China, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and systemic farming injustices from government discrimination to corporate capture are discussed by farmer John Boyd and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this episode. Earth Day is this week. Happy Earth Day!

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Hey everybody, my guest today is John Boyd.
John Wesley Boyd Jr.
is an African-American farmer, civil rights activist, and the founder of the National Black Farmers Association.
He owns and operates Boyd Farm, which has 1,500 acres across three farms in Baskerville, Virginia, where he grows soybean, corn, and wheat, and currently raises 150 head of beef cattle.
For 14 years, Boyd was a He was a chicken farmer for Purdue Farms Breeder Program.
He was also a tobacco farmer for many years.
He is a fourth-generation farmer.
And in 1995, he was the Democratic nominee to Virginia's 5th District.
You have an extraordinary history and, you know, an extraordinary history of representing America's black farmers.
Can you give us some of the history and the history of black farmers?
Because a lot of the farmers are on farms that were part of the 40 acres of the mule program after the Civil War.
And some of them have occupied those lands continuously since.
But there's also been a history of profound discrimination, which I'm aware of.
Having lived two years in Alabama and met with a lot of the black farmers in that state, and it's chiefly to do with the denial of loans that are available to white farmers by USDA. There's a history of profound racism within USDA, as there is in other countries.
Agencies, like most notoriously, the CDC, but other agencies as well.
Will you give us a little bit about the history of Black farmers, and then let's talk about your history as well, which is an extraordinary story.
Absolutely, and thank you so much for having me, and we really appreciate you right here making a run for president, and I hope things go well here.
And my hat goes off to the Kennedy family.
Before we get going, Senator Kennedy was the sponsor of my bill that later went into law, Claims Remedy Act, later provided $1.25 billion for 20,000 Black farmers.
So Senator Kennedy was a pivotal part of that history.
So I wanted to say that before we got going.
At the turn of the century, there were over One million Black farm families in the United States in 1910.
We were tilling 20 million acres of land, primarily in the southeastern corridor of the United States.
My family was no different than other African American farmers on the southeastern corridor of the United States in the rich history of Virginia.
Many Black farmers, smaller scale farmers, the average size is 50 acres.
The average size of a Black-owned farm.
The average age of a Black farmer is 61 years of age.
And many were sharecroppers during the Jim Crow era.
As my mother's parents were, Lee and Ruth Robinson were also shared properties in my lifetime.
So a lot of people see this as a very old issue, but a lot of the history isn't that far, isn't that far ago, you know, as far as history relates.
So we've had a tremendous long history in the country, but also a long struggle of trying to stay on the land.
Today, as we speak, we represent 40,000 Black farmers that make a living full-time farming in the United States.
So our numbers are generally less than 1% of the nation's farmers today.
At the turn of the century, one in 14 was a Black farmer in this country.
So we've lost a lot of land.
We're down to about three and a half million acres of land that Black farmers own in this country.
So we've lost a lot of land, and we've lost a lot of farmers, and we also lost a lot of our history.
Which brings me to my grandfather, Thomas Boyd, and my daddy, John Boyd, Sr.
We passed in 2022.
Me and my dad worked together side by side on the same land that his daddy Owned by Thomas Ford, and I learned absolutely everything I know about farming from those two men.
You know, Brendan Thomas told me that the land knows no color, that it doesn't mistreat anybody, that people do, and that he could produce just as good a crop as anybody if he had the right amount of resources.
Rain and lime and fertilize like other farmers, he can produce just as good a crop as anybody, and that, you know, poor business.
It's better than a good job because you can't take away your business.
I can get fired tomorrow, but you can't fire me from my poor raggedy farm.
And you couldn't leave your PhD to your children, but he can leave his poor farm to his children.
These are basic things that I learned from my daddy and my grandfather that, you know, a hard day's work didn't hurt anybody.
And then I ran into the United States Department of Agriculture.
At the age of 18, I bought my first farm, and I bought it from another elderly Black farmer by the name of Russell Sally.
He said, I have one question for you, Boyd.
Well, are you going to work?
And I told him, yes, sir, I'm going to work the farm.
And I said, but I don't know where to get money from.
He said, but under the Carter administration, they started a new program that's supposed to help Black farmers purchase land.
He said, but good luck with those folks at Fair Farmers Home.
They don't seem to care for Black people much.
That's how I got introduced to the government.
And my father said that government and Black people didn't go on the same sentence together.
Stay away from the government.
You know, as I sit here and talk to you, I wish I had listened to my dad, you know?
Long story short, it took me a year and a half to assume Russell Sally's loan.
So I never was granted a loan.
I actually just assumed his debt.
I didn't understand that at the age of 18.
But I was just glad to get the phone.
And it went downhill.
Just explain that.
Did you pay for the farm in cash or did you take a loan for it?
I took a loan out with a farm service agency.
I assumed Russell Sally's debt, which is the guy that I purchased, the other Black farmer that I purchased the farm from.
It took a year and a half to complete that process.
I was glad to get it, but I didn't know that...
And just out of curiosity, John, how much was that debt?
$51,000 for 110.5 acres of land in 1983, a very, very long time ago.
And now, as I sit here and speak to you, land is in my same county that I'm speaking to you in.
$15,000, $20,000 an acre.
And I was paying roughly $500 an acre back then for the same land in the same county.
And I didn't know that this guy didn't Like Black people.
I didn't know.
You know, I went to school.
I was a three-letter man.
I played basketball, football, and baseball.
And I don't mind telling you some of the guys I played ball with were white.
We were hanging out together.
We were having a good time.
We were chasing girls.
And I walked into, then it was called Farm Service Agency now, but then it was called Farmers Home Administration.
And it was like stepping back in time where this guy, you know, And he, you know, they saw Black Farmers one day a week, which was on Wednesday.
So we named it Black Wednesday.
We all knew each other, but we didn't dare talk about how this guy was talking to us, you know, downward and old fool and called us colored and Negro, whatever you people call yourselves.
And this is in the 80s.
And I didn't think that kind of stuff was still going on.
I wasn't a 60s child when your uncle was president and all that stuff.
And it went from bad to worse.
This guy spat tobacco juice on me.
Where was it?
Was it in Virginia?
He's in Virginia, in Mecklenburg County, Virginia.
All right.
And he has the door open.
He's talking loud and boastfully.
I'm not going to lend you any of my money, he would say.
He said it was his money and that in that county that he was the next thing closest to God because he lent more money than all the banks in that county, which was probably true.
But, you know, I told him, I don't know what God looked like.
I said, but he can't look like you.
I said, he can't act like you.
I said, he can't be nothing like you.
I didn't know God the way I know him now, but I certainly told him that.
He actually took your application in front of you and threw it in a garbage can, right?
He tore it up.
He tore it up and tossed it in the trash can.
This is going on.
I want you to get an idea for a nine-year period of time.
Nine years, I'm going back and forth, and farmers need operating loans every year to plant and harvest on time.
So I'm no different.
I'm trying to get a farm operating loan, and one particular year, I was in the office, and I was trying to get $5,000.
I started at $20,000, and by the time I left the session, I said, look, can I just get a $5,000 farm operator?
And he says, no.
And here comes Farmer Earl in, a white farmer.
He walks into the office, he greets him as Earl, and his whole voice and demeanor changed when Earl came in.
Hey, Earl!
And like they were friends, he passes Farmer Earl a check for $157,000, a farm operating money.
While I'm sitting here, and they're conducting themselves like I was invisible.
That's what I want people to do, like I was nobody.
The guy walks into my long-time session like I'm nobody, comes in, and he reaches and passes the check.
And back then, the check looked like a tax refund check.
Like you would get back then in the 80s and 90s.
They talked and on his way out, Mr.
Garnett said to him, Earl, I need you to come back in here sometime next week and fill out the paperwork because I just used last year's numbers to get you that long.
So Hill Farmer Earl hadn't even filled out the necessary paperwork.
He grants him a loan for $157,000, and I couldn't.
And he just finished telling me that he wasn't going to lend me $5,000 to plant my tobacco and cotton crop.
I mean, it's just awful.
And the way that he spoke to, again, I'm a very young guy during this time.
And everybody in the hallway are senior statesmen to me.
They're deacons, they're preachers, a couple had local officers.
And he was talking to them like a dog and lowered in the dirt on the ground the way he was talking to this guy.
And I finally ran across this lady by the name of Ava Marshall to come out.
I was giving a local speech at the NAACP. She heard me.
And she said, well, did you file any complaints?
I told her, yes.
I filed a number of complaints.
In the office, they had this little poster up there that said, if you feel like you've been discriminated against, send your complaint to Washington, D.C. And I kept sending in complaints.
I never heard anything.
And they went out and finally investigated Mr.
Garnett.
And they asked him, well, did you spat on him?
Mr.
Boyd, what do you think he said?
What?
He said, well, yeah, I accidentally missed my spat can.
I didn't mean to spit on that old boy.
They said, well, did you tear up John Boyd's application and throw it in the trash can?
What do you think he said?
He said, yeah.
He said, well, yeah?
I told that boy I wasn't going to lend him none of my money, and I didn't see much sense of processing his application.
I mean, he had carried himself this way and it became a common place for him.
Yes, he didn't even see anything wrong with it.
He saw nothing wrong with it.
Yeah.
I began to organize farmers and file lawsuits and 20 years later I finally went in court for a billion dollars and 83,000 black farmers came after the filing deadline.
And I spent 10 more years, and your uncle, Ted Kennedy, lead sponsor of that bill that passed into law that allowed 20 more thousand Black farmers to receive $50,000 in 12-5 for taxes, becoming the largest settlement in history for Black people in this country.
Which brings us to where we are now.
So, in both of those settlements that I just described, We were also promised injunctive relief in the form of land out of federal inventory and debt relief.
So that means for those farmers who are meritorious, that their debts will be forgiven.
We didn't get the debt relief, and after we won the first case, there was over a million and a half acres of land in federal inventory that came from black farmers.
And USDA, instead of returning the land to Blacks, they went on a national campaign to lease land to large-scale white farmers or sell land to them for pennies on a dollar.
So we never got the land out of inventory.
We never got injunctive relief.
So I turned back again to Congress in 2016.
I got the measure in the Farm Bill.
By the way, this 83,000 of these million acres Were from foreclosures, right?
Yes.
Oh, I want to be clear.
This is where they were foreclosing on.
Right.
So the farmer had not paid back his loans to this tobacco-spinning fellow that they were supposed to pay.
And this guy was, for example, I had a poultry contract where USDA were taking the payments out of my check and was supposed to be giving me credit on my loans.
No one knows what happened to the money.
I got no credit on my loans, and I wound up in farm foreclosure.
When they investigated him and asked him what happened to Mr.
Boyd's money that Purdue Farms was sending every week, he said, well, I accidentally applied them to another poultry farmer's assignment account.
And when they asked him for that name so that they could reverse and give me credit on my loans, They couldn't find that farmer.
I mean, this is government corruption, people, and it's worse, man.
But you said there were 83,000 farmers Yes.
They weren't all dealing with that one office in McElberry.
No, this is a nationwide problem.
Because they had hundreds of guys who were exactly like that in counties all over the South.
What I found out to be true was The further we went south, the more egregious the farmer's stories were from Black farmers.
And, you know, I want people that watch this to keep in mind I wasn't looking to do any of this stuff.
I simply wanted to farm, and I simply wanted to farm operating lawn.
I didn't want to do all this other stuff.
And I kind of got thrust out here, and I found out that this was a national problem.
And since that time, I've visited every president since Jimmy Carter, Republican and Democrat, in the White House to talk about these problems.
Only two acted.
One was Bill Clinton in the 90s that ordered DOJ to settle the case for us in the 90s.
And the second was during the Obama years.
For the Claims Remedy Act of 2010 that really paid the second settlement out.
I know President Obama put the money in his budget.
Well, let me tell you what happened.
So after we After the article sponsored the bill that reopened the case for us that allowed us to have our cases heard based on merit, the White House came back and said, well, we don't have the money to pay for this board.
So I had to go back to Congress for two more years and get a line item in the spending bill, and it became a standalone bill.
That finally passed by unanimous consent at 1130 at night, you know, for the $1.125 billion.
So even after your uncle reopened the case for us, to have our cases heard based on merit, I had to go back to Congress again to appropriate the money to pay the farmers that were found meritorious.
Everything, and I hate to say this, it's been tough.
It's been tough, and the farmers are getting older, which brings me to why I wanted to talk to you.
Here we have a debt relief measure that passed.
It passed under the American Rescue Plan for $5 billion.
Raphael Warnock was instrumental on it, Cory Booker and some others sponsored that measure.
And then after it passed, USDA kind of dragged its feet on implementing the $5 billion, you know, getting it out to the 16,000 eligible farmers.
So USDA already know who the farmers are, already know what the amounts are supposed to be provided debt relief, and they dragged their feet to do it.
And I said, well, do it like you do other farm subsidies.
You know, you know what the amount is of government to government transaction.
You know, zero in the amount and send them the funds and everything's over.
They drug their feet.
And then we wind up, the white farmers started suing us in federal court around the country, in Texas and then Florida and all around.
And I had to organize our monies to defend ourselves in those courts.
And finally, after we won one or two motions, In federal court, the administration repealed it by another act of Congress in the IRA bill, spending bill.
So they took it all away while I was in court fighting, and here we sit in front of you.
We didn't get the debt relief, and it's going on for decades, you know?
And what I want to explain to people, I don't want people to look at this and say, these farmers want them They give them something.
That's not the case.
We were promised this debt relief back from the 90s.
We didn't get it in two settlements.
It turned to Congress in 2016.
It stripped the language.
We ended up getting it in 2021.
And then Congress, this administration, this president repealed it by an act of Congress.
And they haven't spoken the words debt relief to Black and other farmers at color since they repealed it.
Wait a minute.
What president repealed it?
This president.
President Biden?
President Biden repealed it.
Now he's, he's, he's stand firm on student debt relief, but he hasn't mentioned the word Black farmer debt relief since they repealed it.
And I saw him one time at the 4th of July celebration, and he says, hey, Boyd, you know, we're going to have an official meeting in the White House to discuss ways in which he thought would be helpful.
And I said, okay, that would be something that I could take the message back to 130,000 members around the country.
We have 130,000 members.
I said, that would give me something to take back to the farmers because they are blowing our phones up where we don't have, I don't have a message to tell them why you repealed it or what you're going to do.
We're just out of five billion dollars.
The meeting hasn't happened since I've been here, since I'm talking to you right now.
There's been no meeting.
There's been no Meeting in a senior level capacity at the White House.
No meeting.
No meeting from Secretary Bilsack in a formal capacity.
No meeting.
And I've said I'm not supporting this president's re-election bid because he hasn't told me what the next four years are going to look like for struggling Black farmers who are losing their land.
And also when Congress repealed it, it also lifted the farm moratorium that was in place, allowing USDA to individually now foreclose on those farmers who were looking.
So instead of getting the $5 billion debt relief, they're getting foreclosed on.
And Chuck Schumer Promised that he was going to look into it by some sort of remedy congressionally through a bill.
I told him that would be great and that would help push it.
There's been no bill from the Democratic leadership or Republican leadership, and it hasn't been any initiative from the White House to stop farm foreclosures.
Something that Bill Clinton, all they have to do is look at the same language that Bill Clinton used in the 90s to put in a farm moratorium.
And to keep it in place.
So instead of getting help, we're losing land.
Instead of getting the $5 billion, we're being foreclosed on.
And instead of getting the farm monies that we need to stay on the farm, we're not participating in federal programs at a level where we're competitive.
So we're looking for a new direction in this country.
The people that have been appointed, in my opinion, on the Biden administration, hasn't shown the backbone to stand up for systemic change that needs to take place.
You know, if I was Ag Secretary, the first thing I would do And President Obama asked me this when he brought me into the White House.
He said, well, thinking about sending me to the USDA board, what would you do?
Your first day, what would you do?
And I said, well, the first thing I would do is I would tell all of the farmers, including Black farmers, that USDA is open for business for all farmers.
Come in and apply for these resources.
The second thing I would do is those people who are government bureaucrats and political parties that don't want to service all farmers, I would ask them to leave.
I would ask them to leave.
If you've been here too long blocking, if you don't want to service oil farmers, then you should leave.
These are two things that don't cost any money.
It just calls for what my granddaddy would say was gauze and gumption.
You know what that is.
They come in and they do the same thing.
They say, well, we know that there's problems.
We're Black farmers, and we go through the four-year scenario, but we haven't had the systematic change.
So in other words, nobody's been fired for the act of discrimination, except for a Black woman, Shirley Sherrod.
She got fired for speaking up.
So the only person who got fired It's Shirley Sherrod, and there's been no heads rolled.
So we've received over $2.5 billion over the course of four decades, and not one person's been fired for the act of discrimination.
So it doesn't send a penalty for those who've been found guilty of discrimination.
I'm going to stop and listen to you and then take some questions and whatever.
I can tell you that when I'm in the White House, you're going to be out there the first week, and I'm going to get rid of those people in USDA and get that money.
That $5 billion is not money that is an entitlement.
It's money that was a loan that Black farmers were entitled to way back then and was stolen from them through discrimination.
You know, you can testify that it was personally stolen from you, and that's what the court found.
It was stolen from them.
It was given to every other farmer.
It was given, if you were black, you got it, but if you were black, you wouldn't get it, and that's wrong.
And I don't think anybody who...
The values of this country think that's a good idea.
I'm going to fix that.
USDA is broken from the top down.
It's not run for small farmers.
It's run to benefit big ag, the Monsantos, the Cargills, the four big meatpackers that illegally control all the slaughterhouses in our country and our Shaking down the small farmers and the consumers at the same time.
I'm going to end that.
They're all owned by BlackRock, you know, which is running the government today.
Get us off of the chemical agriculture and the big, you know, corporate agriculture.
And USDA was created to help the small farmer and help consumers get wholesome food, which we don't have anymore.
We've got, you know, we've got things to eat.
They're commodities to eat that don't have any nutrients in them, that don't have any minerals, that are loaded with chemicals that are poison.
And the small farmers, the backbone of America, Thomas Jefferson said American democracy is dependent on the control of our landscapes by tens of thousands of yeoman farmers, each with a stake in our system of government, each with a stake in our capitalist system. each with a stake in our system of government, each Each with a stake in our capitalist system.
And it's in the national interest to keep small farmers on the farm.
It's a national security issue.
You know, right now, they're selling the farms to China, to Smithfield Food.
Something I've been very outspoken on is that, you know, China is at these auctions, and they've got The little white guy with the ball cap, you know, bidding for them.
And then when you check the deeds, it's owned by China.
You know, they bought historically black colleges, St.
Paul's and others.
They went in and bought these college campuses.
They're buying land next to military bases.
And again, it's something that the Democratic Party hasn't addressed.
You know, when you have the big guys such as Bill Gates, who owns land right next to my Right next to my farm, and he sends different people over here wanting to buy my land.
Instead of seeing how he could work with farmers and keep them on the farm, he's telling people, stop eating beef and start eating some of his imitation beef, whatever it is.
And insects.
And, you know, his play, he's working on, with Apple, on these robotic farmers.
They're going to put robots on the farm.
There's not a lot of land, and it's going, it's not in the mainstream media.
How much land Bill Gates is...
He's the biggest agricultural landowner in America today.
Yes, and so he owns this data processing center that pretty much joins my farm here, and he hasn't once reached out to me.
We have 130,000 Our farmers around the country to say, hey, boy, what can we do to help your members or what can we do to work together?
Never once.
And he's right here in my community, is what I'm saying.
So he's bad for the country.
He's bad for farmers.
We have to begin to push back.
We need someone who's going to push back against that, push back against China, purchasing farms.
And people are asleep at the wheel with this because Once they own the land, such as the Smithfield Foods, the first thing they did was start eliminating contracts for farmers.
So instead of increasing contracts to America's farmers, they went in and decreased it and then sending most of their meat directly to China.
So we have to have some checks and balances, but all of these things we can't do in China.
You know, I can't go to China and purchase their land.
I can't go to China and do all of these things.
As a matter of fact, if I want to visit China, I need a special visa to bring America's farmers in to look at what they're doing in China.
But they can come here and do all of these things, buy land on a military basis, steal our seed technology.
That's food security.
That's national security.
President Biden hasn't said much.
Matter of fact, I heard him say very, very little about what he's going to do to really put some checks and balances in for China and people like Bill Gates.
We're producing right now, Mr.
Kennedy, one billion dollars, one billion pounds of beef, less than we were last year.
And instead of farmers continuing to produce beef, They're selling their whole herds because they're going out of business.
We have a farm crisis in this country.
The highest diesel fuel prices in history.
The highest seed prices in history.
And this administration isn't talking anything We're on the wrong side of immigration.
I want to talk to you about all these things.
We're on the wrong side of immigration.
We bring people in.
We give them spending accounts.
We give them credit cards.
We put them up in apartments.
What does that say to the Black community, my forefathers, who were slaves in this country?
And my grandfather, Lee and Ruth Robinson, who were sharecroppers, what signals does that say to them?
Oh, how about I take some Black people and I'm going to run across the line to Mexico.
Let me see how far I get in these other countries by breaking the laws in those countries.
These are things that we have to take a real hard look at.
We have the right laws on the books for immigration, and if people want to come to this country, they should come the right way, the way that everybody else has came to this country, through the laws that are on the books.
Not pushing down the gates and doing all this This chaos that you see going on, and the president hasn't shown enough leadership.
What immigration needs in this country is a leader to say, you know what, I'm going to close the border until we can find out and stabilize things on immigration in this country.
I don't want anybody to look at this interview and say, John Boyd doesn't like it, the government doesn't like it.
That's not what I'm saying here.
I'm saying it looks like a third world country on our border.
And the president isn't doing enough about it.
You know, he's showing up down there, you know, Willie Charlie, come late here.
And when he should be taking a more leadership role in this country and say, you know what, we're still the leaders of the world and we're not going to let people break the law coming into this great country.
So this is the land of opportunity, and people should come here and respect our border the same way we respect theirs.
We just can't go to these other countries and do these kind of things that they're doing right here in the United States.
Well, John Boyd, you make a lot of sense to me.
Everything you said makes sense to me.
And, you know, when I go to Washington, I want you there with me, and we're going to fix USDA, and, you know, I'm going to fix the border.
I want to be your Ag Secretary.
I want to be your Ag Secretary.
I want to be interviewed for that position anyway.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, if you're not Ag Secretary, you're going to help me select the Ag Secretary.
So one way or the other, we'll figure it out.
We'll do it together.
And I'm so glad to talk to you today.
How can people support you?
How can they find you?
Well, they can find us online at blackfarmers.org.
And I have a personal website, www.johnboyjr.com.
We're out here fighting on the front line.
We're fighting for survival.
And I want people to look at this and know that I'm fighting for America's farmers, not just for black farmers.
Farmers are hurting in this country.
We're losing our livelihoods.
And we're at the last of the totem pole.
And farmers should be at the very top.
You know, you may not meet a doctor or lawyer today, but you need a plate of food, some healthy vegetables, at least one meal a day every day.
You know, respect America's farmers, support America's farmers, and you'll see our country turn around again.
If you want our country to turn around, invest in America's small-scale farmers, put them on some land, give them the tools that they need to succeed.
It's really easy, but we choose to make it difficult.
Put America's farmers first.
John Boyd, thank you very much.
Thank you for being such a warrior, and I look forward to meeting you face-to-face.
I've spent some time with you and getting to know you better, so thank you so much for having me.
Good to see you, John.
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