In a recent letter to Governor Gavin Newsom, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins threatened “immediate legal action” if the governor were to adopt policy proposals produced by a state-appointed body called the California Agricultural Land Equity Task Force.
When the Trump administration threatens legal action against what is essentially a policy brainstorm, it may be a sign that the goal is to score political points rather than offer careful review. It also suggests that the proposed policies touched a nerve. The task force’s recommendations to diversify farmland access and ownership and the USDA’s reactionary response reveal deep fault lines about who should be served by agricultural policy.
The task force report, which resulted from several years of rigorous investigation and analysis, offers California a jolt of policy courage for rethinking farmland management. If the legislature abandons its advice, the state would squander an opportunity to confront a legacy of injustice and to build land policies that serve the majority of farmers while strengthening the food system.
“The task force’s recommendations to diversify farmland access and ownership and the USDA’s reactionary response reveal deep fault lines about who should be served by agricultural policy.”
California’s Challenges
California is the top agricultural producer in the U.S., yet many of its farmers struggle because they lack stable access to land. Farmland in California is more expensive than almost anywhere else in the country, its ownership is highly concentrated, and it is being steadily lost to development and other pressures.
Farmers from communities of color are particularly disadvantaged when it comes to land access, in large part because of a long history of racist treatment at the hands of government. That includes the colonial dispossession of Indigenous tribes, the “sundown laws” that kept Black farmers out of many rural communities, the internment of Japanese farmers during World War II, and current government technical assistance programs provided only in English.
In recent years, however, the state has taken steps towards acknowledging and addressing its own role in perpetuating racial injustice within agriculture, most notably with the 2017 passage of the Farmer Equity Act (AB 1348). This act officially defines the category of “socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher,” as members of groups that “have been subjected to racial, ethnic, or gender prejudice,” and requires the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to better serve these producers, including through the establishment of a Farm Equity Office. In a 2020 report to the California Legislature, also required by this act, the CDFA identified four major challenges facing socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, first among them being lack of stable land tenure.
Against this backdrop, the California Agricultural Land Equity Task Force was established by the California Budget Act of 2022 (AB 179) as an independent, 13-member body. Its primary mandate was to provide the governor and the legislature with policy recommendations to address inequalities in the state’s agricultural land ownership, access, and control by the deadline of Jan. 1, 2026.
“The report that emerged from this measured process offers evidence-based reforms for better governance of California’s agricultural land.”
To produce this report, the task force conducted a statewide survey, consulted experts in law, food security, and agricultural economics, performed 20 site visits to diverse agricultural operations, convened 33 subcommittee meetings, held one-on-one consultations with California Native American tribes, and convened an interagency review panel representing 11 state departments to refine the final policy recommendation. Neither the governor nor the legislature is required to act on the advice of the task force. It may be years before any legislative action arises from these policy ideas, if ever.
In our estimation, the report that emerged from this measured process offers evidence-based reforms for better governance of California’s agricultural land. The task force’s suggestions included: establishing a state-run program to track land market trends, thereby increasing public transparency around ownership and use; returning state-owned agricultural land to California Native tribes, beginning with land already promised in treaties; passing an Agricultural Tenants’ Bill of Rights, to protect farmers who often rent expensive land on informal and predatory leases; and creating a variety of funding mechanisms to enable land acquisitions by “priority producers,” whose historical exclusion from equitable land access has been formally recognized by the state.
The evidence gathered by the task force shows why new thinking on farmland policy is justified. While 5 percent of landowners now control almost half of the state’s total cropland, the majority of producers—63 percent—operate on small plots that account for less than 10 percent of total acreage. Racial ownership gaps are prevalent: Producers identifying as White own 82 percent of all farm acreage compared to just 0.3 percent owned by Black or African American producers.
The concentration of land ownership is only worsening with time; between 2017 and 2022, California saw a 13 percent decline in small farms under 180 acres, even as the average cost of land spiked to $12,000 per acre, an increase of 40 percent during that period. These trends are intensified by a “financialization” of farmland ownership, in which institutional investors such as university endowments and real estate investment trusts treat California’s soil as an object of speculative investment rather than a resource for public benefit.
Core Findings from the Report
The report’s findings depict a reality of concentrated and homogenized land ownership that is bad for all Californians and the future of our food system. As the supply chain disruptions of the COVID pandemic revealed, concentrated systems create vulnerable chokepoints. This became clear when worker illness at meatpacking companies led to shortages, and when dairy farmers dumped fresh milk because of sudden drop in demand from large buyers. Consolidated farm operations create a fragile system centered around a singular logic of productivity, rather than the kind of operational diversity that fosters food system resilience. Brittle systems don’t bend, they break.
In contrast, the report highlights evidence from landscape ecology that shows how increasing the diversity of farming operations would boost rural economies, build adaptive food suppliers that can withstand shocks, and strengthen the resilience of California’s agricultural economy overall. Farming landscapes representing a mosaic of smaller parcels with complex growing practices are better at achieving biodiversity, economic stability, and food provisioning.
The USDA’s Claims
Yet the USDA is apparently racing to defend an agricultural system in which landownership is concentrated in the hands of the relatively wealthy and white. In her letter to Newsom, the Secretary of Agriculture offered a legal and moral rebuke of the Land Equity Task Force policy ideas. The legal complaint implies the proposed policies would violate the Constitution’s rights to property and equal protection. This legal claim rests on a sensationalized read of the actual policy proposals.
First, the USDA alleges the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause is violated by “redistribution” and land-use restrictions. However, there is no plan for compulsory redistribution in the policy proposals; instead the report proposes voluntary incentive programs such as tax credits for landowners and new land funding, which rely on mutual agreement rather than state coercion.
Second, Secretary Rollins claims that “The pursuit of a noble lifestyle in agriculture should transcend the pernicious identity-based politics that only serves to drive division.” The USDA cites Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvardto argue against government’s taking race-conscious action to remedy “general societal discrimination.” Such action, according to the USDA, would be a purported violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
But the task force report simply documents specific state-sponsored injustices that lie at the root of current land inequity, such as the series of Alien Land Laws that effectively barred most Asian immigrants and their children from owning land in California into the 1950s. This history of identity-based domination over farmland needs to be confronted, rather than dismissed as political correctness.
Finally, the return of tribal lands is a matter of government-to-government relations, not racial politics. The report calls attention to 18 treaties negotiated in 1851 and 1852 by U.S. government officials that promised approximately 8.5 million acres, or 7.5 percent of the state, to 120 villages, bands, and tribes. Congress never ratified these treaties and kept that secret, leaving the tribes with the false expectation that legal protection of the negotiated “Indian nations” would eventually come. Instead, while agreeing to the end of hostilities and to conform to United States law, the tribes suffered an increase in violence and dispossession, especially as the Gold Rush brought more settlers and their land claims to the region.
While the “substantial constitutional concerns” of the letter are overwrought, they do raise an important question. If the USDA aggressively repels even the most measured reforms to farmland property, then can there be a meaningful change to food systems that are now under increasing stress from unequal distribution? Property should be a tool to achieve ecological balance, economic stability, and democratic flourishing, not an unassailable monolith that defies legal experimentation.
“Rollins is defending the legacy landowning farmers only, neglecting the incredible diversity of small farmers, farmhands, fruit pickers, beginning farmers, and small business owners who didn’t inherit property, but make California’s agriculture the powerhouse that it is.”
The moral arguments made in the letter are even more revealing about the USDA’s priorities in the current political climate. Rollins writes: “All people should be treated equally and what California has proposed directly targets those who work from sunrise to well past sunset, faithfully tending our nation’s land and livestock. Hardworking farmers, ranchers, and agricultural producers all deserve a shot at the American dream and they should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin.”
This is exactly right. The problem is, Rollins is defending the legacy landowning farmers only, neglecting the incredible diversity of small farmers, farmhands, fruit pickers, beginning farmers, and small business owners who didn’t inherit property, but make California’s agriculture the powerhouse that it is.
The USDA’s rhetoric paints a picture of an agrarian version of the American Dream that transcends identity—but ignores the reality that for most of its history, the state of California restricted that dream to a narrow set of farmers. In our view, the task force does focus on those who faithfully tend the nation’s land. It is time that all such farmers have access to land and a say in policy.
How Should the California Legislature Respond?
The task force’s mandate is essentially completed. The goal was to honestly confront the deeper origins of why California’s agricultural land distribution looks and works the way it does. Having done this, the proposals are now in the governor’s hands. His state budget proposal this year, which includes funding for Tribal Food Sovereignty projects and modest land access funds for socially disadvantaged farmers, demonstrates an awareness that land equity is good overall agricultural policy.
The USDA letter threatens to upend this momentum. The governor can choose to abandon principles of equity in favor of appealing to an imagined mainstream voter. Or, he can stand up and present a vision for an alternative future—one in which the government enables broad-based land access for all those eager to produce food, not just the privileged individuals and institutions that already own it. A broad constituency of those currently excluded from California’s land wealth are waiting to celebrate such a bold vision.
The post Op-ed: The USDA Wants California to Abandon Farmland Equity. It Shouldn’t. appeared first on Civil Eats.
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