Land Loss Trends Among Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers in the Black Belt Region From 1969 to 2018

For almost a century, the number of Black farmers and Black-owned land steadily declined. One of the primary reasons for that decline was and continues to be heirs’ property. More than 60 percent of Black farmers currently operate on heirs’ property.

Land is by far one of the greatest and most valuable assets African American farmers possess. The causes of under-utilization and loss of rural black land are numerous and complex, but none is more notable than heirs property. 

A USDA Forest Service publication on heirs’ property ownership across the southern U.S. highlights a kind of land ownership prevalent among lower wealth, African Americans in the Black Belt South, central Appalachian whites, and Hispanic Americans in U.S. southwest colonial communities.

Black-American culture has been tied to the land and agriculture for over 300 years. Research conducted in the Black Belt Region of Alabama is used to examine the importance of land, particularly the multigenerational ownership of land, on current farm participation and landholdings.

In 2020 Virginia adopted major provisions of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA) to help prevent involuntary loss of family land and the associated real estate wealth of that family land through a hierarchy of rights and remedies for tenant-in-common owners in a partition action.

This USDA factsheet provides definitions and resources on heirs' property.

The Center for Agriculture and Food Systems Farmland Access Legal Toolkit for Heirs' Property is a comprehensive collection of heirs' property resources including issue background, legal, and organization providing direct assistants to heirs' property owners.

The mission of the Heirs' Property Retention Coalition (HPRC) is to stem the tide of heirs' property land loss, particularly among low-income families of color in the southeast, so that such families can retain their ancestral land and maintain it as a sustainable asset for future generations.

This book addresses many challenges that have plagued disadvantaged families that own heirs' property and discusses a range of solutions to these problems.

The Georgia Heirs Property Law Center provides legal resources, education, and support to property owners, nonprofits, and municipalities to resolve heirs' property and related issues.