USDA To Give $18 Million To Historically Black Universities

As of 2007, only 1.3 percent of American farmers identified as black (compared to 12.6 percent of all Americans). The average age of the American farmer is over 58 years old and rising. These are not meaningless statistics; agriculture is a vital industry in this country and we’re running out of people who are willing to do it.

To that end, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced this week that the USDA is making $18 million available to historically black land-grant universities. This is a complicated category, so here we go: Land-grant universities are a large group of institutes of higher education that were created thanks to a law passed in 1890. (There was a prior version of the law but everyone talks about the 1890 one now, so we will too.) These universities were originally focused on agriculture, but have since blossomed into a huge array of schools. Mostly they’re big state universities now, like Penn State, the University of Arizona, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but there’s variation. Some private schools, like Cornell and MIT, are land-grant universities.

Also in the land-grant category are several historically black universities, including Tuskegee University, Langston University, and Prairie View A&M University. It’s those that the USDA is enabling now. The schools will have to apply, but the grants will be made available to all historically black land-grant universities. From the USDA:

The program focuses on advancing cultural diversity in the scientific and professional workforce by attracting and educating more students from under-represented groups. Grants are awarded in the categories of research, teaching and extension with a focus on NIFA’s priority areas of sustainable bioenergy, food security, childhood obesity prevention, climate change, and food safety.

This isn’t a huge amount of money; just last October the USDA awarded $113 million to support specialty crops (which includes everything from fruits and vegetables to trees) in rural communities. But these grants are beginning to show a pattern. Last year, the USDA gave another $18 million to beginning farmers, an effort in the same vein as this new one. It could be more money, but at least it’s going to the right places.