More Black students embrace the potential of agriculture

​​Growing up in Memphis, Emmanuel Wallace could not even say where the closest farm was located. Now he is working on a master’s degree at Tennessee State University’s College of Agriculture.

Wallace is among an increasing number of Black students drawn to studying agriculture, both at historically Black schools like TSU and traditionally white schools. Over the past decade, enrollment in TSU’s Department of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences has more than doubled. At the University of Tennessee, the Herbert School of Agriculture has seen non-white enrollment rise over the past four years. Currently, 15% of the undergraduates are non-white.

“When I first started getting involved in agriculture, the population of minority students at any type of conference was slim to none,” Wallace said. “But now, I see that it is growing.”

Black farmers in America have suffered a long history of well-documented discrimination. At the start of the 20th century, Black farmers owned 16 million acres of farmland. By the 1990s, they had lost 90% of that land while over the same period white farmers lost only 2% of their land.

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