Shorlette Ammons comes from a family of tenant farmers in eastern North Carolina. Her grandfather raised hogs and grew row crops. In high school, she worked summers in tobacco and cucumber fields. Working with farmers, she said, was her calling.
She did exactly that at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, created by the state in 1890 to provide agricultural education to Black Americans while maintaining segregation. And she worked on equity in food systems at North Carolina State University, the state’s primary educational institution for farmers, which didn’t allow Black students to enroll until the 1950s.
In both positions, she connected Black farmers to technical and financial resources and helped to eliminate the barriers that they continued to face in getting access to programs and funding.
So she was honored, she said, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tapped her to serve on the its Equity Commission. The commission was created in 2021 through the American Rescue Plan to address the agency’s history of discrimination, after former President Joe Biden issued an executive order to prioritize equity across all government agencies.
“People of color, farmers of color—we’re still here. This effort to erase us hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work this time around . . . . The work doesn’t stop just because the report’s crumpled up and thrown in the trash can.”
“I didn’t go in there with the mindset that we were going to flip the USDA upside down,” said Ammons, now the co-executive director of Farm Aid, a nonprofit organization and festival that supports small family farms. “But we knew that we could make some strides and kind of create a path so that some of those past and historic wrongs were on the way to being made right.”
Past lawsuits and reporting have found that, for decades, the USDA purposefully and systematically denied farmers loans and other support based on race, contributing to a massive decline in the number of Black farmers in the U.S.
In February 2024, after three years of research, public meetings, and subcommittee meetings, the commission—which included civil rights advocates, diverse farm group representatives, and rural development experts—presented its final report to former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. It included 66 detailed recommendations laid out over 87 pages, the first of which was simple: “Institutionalize equity within the Department.”
Instead, within President Donald Trump’s first two weeks in office, USDA officials scrubbed the report and information on the Commission’s work from the agency’s website.
It’s one of several initiatives at the USDA that has already hit the cutting-room floor as a result of Trump’s executive order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”
At the end of January, the Office of Management and Budget sent a memo directing the USDA to analyze its programs for anything that involves diversity, inclusion, accessibility, environmental justice, or equity. Career employees who previously worked on equity programs have already been put on leave. Employees within the agency say the sweep continues, with no clear sense of which programs might be next on the chopping block.
In addition to ending initiatives Trump considers related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within all federal agencies—including those that touch the food system, like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—the order extends beyond the agencies themselves, requiring recipients of federal grants to certify they don’t operate “any programs promoting DEI.” The order also encourages the private sector to end DEI programs.
That puts into question the future of the USDA’s many grant programs that focus on supporting and feeding underserved farmers and communities. (Most of those programs are authorized and funded by Congress, but Trump has already defied laws meant to maintain checks and balances on other fronts. His abrupt firing of the independent inspector generals is one example.)
On January 31, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) posted a list on X showing more than $110 million in “contract cancellations” related to DEI at the USDA. But it’s unclear what the list refers to, and the USDA did not respond to detailed questions about the number or other points in this story by press time.
What constitutes “DEI” is also still unclear. In the original order, Trump argues he is putting an end to “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) that can violate the civil rights laws of this Nation.” As laid out in the order, that might apply to a wide range of varied efforts, from “equitable decision-making” requirements to “promoting diversity” to “advancing equity.”
But advocates like Ammons and other individuals and groups across the country who have been working for decades on racial justice in the food system say it’s just another example of the age-old effort to erase the country’s still-recent record of slavery and race-based discrimination and stall progress toward a fairer future.
