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Introduction
In a drive across the Oklahoman countryside east of Oklahoma City, it is impossible to not notice how eastern red cedar now covers much of the land that used to be prairie and pasture. Once planted as a buffer to soil erosion, the tree has become ‘invasive’ in its voracious spread throughout the Great Plains region. Now red cedar poses numerous ecological problems: it threatens biodiversity, propagates wildfires, exacerbates drought and diminishes grazing land profitability by up to 75% (Harris, 2018). Estimated economic losses from red cedar encroachment were $447 million in 2013 (Smith, 2011). In nearby Nebraska, a study estimated that between 2004 and 2013, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resource and Conservation Service (NRCS) spent $8.5 million on combatting red cedar through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) authorized under by the Conservation Title of the Farm Bill (Simonsen and Fleischmann, 2015). Nonetheless, the amount of red cedar has continued to increase in Nebraska at dramatic rates, doubling from 2000 to 2017. In Oklahoma, red cedars had encroached on an estimated 12.6 million acres by 2013 (28% of the landscape), from 1.5 million acres in 1950 (Misa, 2016). Thus, the fight against red cedar continues to be a losing battle. However, someone who has spent much of their life in the area and is deeply embedded in the farming community might notice something else striking about the landscape; red cedar is much more prevalent on African American owned land than it is on white owned land.
In this paper, we show how historical and ongoing discrimination toward non-white farmers in Oklahoma is hindering the fight against red cedar on their land. This disparity in turn hampers the USDA's regional efforts to address red cedar and support farmer resilience. (We focus on the case of Black farmers in Oklahoma, but parallel stories could be told for other historically discriminated farmer and ranchers across the country [HDFRs]1 particularly the many tribal and indigenous communities, farmers and ranchers of the state.) We show that this occurs through two broad processes. Firstly, despite years of efforts by African American and other farmers of color to transform systems of injustice through legal, statutory and regulatory changes, discrimination by the USDA in delivery...