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Georgia’s newly elected agriculture commissioner has outlined how she plans to spend the money at her disposal and it isn’t to help every farmer who is struggling to make ends meet. Her plan is to spend money on farmers by race.

This Facebook reel is going around because it is a summary of Commissioner-elect Katherine Juhan-Arnold’s promises to help farmers. As reported by AtlantaFI in this podcast clip from a conversation with Juhan-Arnold, she has already promised that the Department of Agriculture under her leadership will steer a lot of state funded assistance to the state’s Black farmers. She said that the department has a budget to “allocate funds” to the group of people she calls “our black farmers.”

That is the policy of a soon-to-be officeholder who has not yet taken office for the Agriculture Department. The money of the department is to be used to favor Black farmers above other farmers. That is not a plan written for every farmer who is in desperate straits.

Agriculture is not a niche in Georgia. According to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture, there are roughly 67,000 farm producers in the state and some 2,700 or so of those are Black (roughly 4% of all farm producers). The Department of Agriculture is a wide-ranging regulatory body that includes the work of food safety, animal health and all of the various farm programs in 159 counties of the state. It is not a private charity.

All of the programs Juhan-Arnold is talking about are being offered by the current department, which already has outreach programs to small and beginning producers. But what is different here is that she is promising to allocate funds from the state budget to Black farmers, which is a very nefarious use of a public department to classify citizens by race before any applications are even written.

This is the kind of program that can quickly run afoul of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. There are so many other race-neutral ways to deal with the problems of need, poor credit, being a beginning farmer, and dealing with heirs’ property. Note that Juhan-Arnold decided on race as the way to categorize.

She defeated Republican Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper on November 3 and has yet to begin taking the oath of office.

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