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Rural Race and Ethnicity

A look at the outcome of moving from DEI to disadvantaged criterion in allocating grant funds Mary Emery*, Mary Emery, raquel Johnson,

This research note focuses on how the recent Supreme Court decision and the court decisions finding bias in the USDA farm funding patterns have resulted in practices that seem in the end to actually result in increased patterns of inequity. These court decisions all had a focus on the discrimination – what is allowed and what is not and the impact of past and current actions. With the Supreme Court decision that raised legal challenges to any programs that highlighted race as a criterion for preferential treatment, many programs switched to the place-based criterion of disadvantaged county in an attempt to make program assets available to those the original legislation sought to support. The Regional Food Business Centers Program that emerged from the Keepseagle and  Pigford court decisions that determined that USDA had unfairly disadvantaged Black and Native farmers was an attempt to redress those wrongs.  However, with the 2021 Supreme Court decision that determined race could not be a factor in selection of grantees, they changed the criteria from race to disadvantaged counties in an effort to direct the funds to those farmers that had been left out of past USDA programs. Did that shift to place-based disadvantage increase chances that BIPoC farmers and food-related business owners would achieve parity in funding? Our analysis of data from one of Regional Food Business Centers encourages us to rethink this option. Using application data and review criteria that provided extra points for those applying from a disadvantaged county, our data shows that that disadvantaged county designation actually increased the chances of white farmers and food-related businesses receiving funds in those disadvantaged geographies.