The Agriculture Department’s new $8 billion farm aid program pays according to how many acres a farmer planted. Black-operated farms in the United States averaged 163 acres in the 2022 Census of Agriculture. The average for all U.S. farms was 463.
That gap is the reason Black farmers are watching the details of the Harvest Fuel Relief program, announced Oct. 19 by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. The department has published no estimate of how much of the money will go to Black farmers, and Capital B, which reported on the program’s rollout, found no such figure either.
The USDA says the one-time payments will use “a uniform formula” built on acreage reported to the Farm Service Agency, the Economic Research Service’s production-cost estimates and projected yields and prices. They are meant to cover part of the losses and fuel costs of the 2026 crop year. Farmers who planted corn, soybeans, wheat and other Title I commodities are eligible, along with specialty crop growers and fishermen. Payment rates for Title I crops are due in November. Pre-filled applications for row crop farmers are to be available in January.
“This $8 billion dollar investment will help bring certainty to our farmers during this harvest so they can continue to feed our nation,” Rollins said in the department’s announcement.
A formula that scales with land
Black farmers operated about 32,700 farms on 5.3 million acres in 2022, the most recent census, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. That is roughly 0.6% of U.S. farmland. About 84% of Black-operated farms had fewer than 180 acres, against 70% of all U.S. farms.
A payment tied to acreage will therefore be smaller, farm for farm, for most Black operators than for the large grain growers the program is built around. The department has not said whether it will report payments by race once they go out.
Even farmers who qualify say the money is thin. Jay Huggins, a 37-year-old row crop farmer in Okolona, Mississippi, told Capital B: “If you divide $8 billion by every row crop farmer in America, they’re not gonna benefit much from it.” He and other farmers also pointed to the timing, since the payments arrive after much of the harvest.
What was removed first
The program arrives after the USDA dropped the “socially disadvantaged” designation in 2025. Congress created it in the 1990 Farm Bill to steer outreach and assistance to farmers of color, and it covered the department’s 2501 Program and some loan forgiveness. The administration said the government had sufficiently addressed past discrimination. Black members of the U.S. Senate challenged that reasoning in January, arguing recent data does not support it.
The latest payments follow a $12 billion round of farm aid announced in December. At that time, PJ Haynie, a fifth-generation farmer and chairman of the National Black Growers Council, told NPR the money “needs to show up like Santa Claus underneath the Christmas tree.”
The USDA is to publish the commodity payment rates in November. Those rates will show how much a Black farmer with 163 acres can expect.
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