cultivating the asian american farm

by adrienna wong

We often think of Asian Americans as an urban or suburban population, an assumption supported by the fact that currently, the vast majority of Asian Americans live in metropolitan areas. This perspective, however, does not acknowledge the degree to which Asian American history is rooted in rural and farming communities, nor does it acknowledge the very real issues of Asian Americans living in rural areas today. For example, the US Department of Agriculture expresses concern about the high poverty rate among rural Asian American families. According to a 2000 USDA estimate, 27% of API families earn about one fourth of the poverty level amount for a family of four. In order to grasp the challenges facing rural Asian Americans today, it is necessary to understand the history of agricultural developments in the United States, and how race and ethnicity have interacted – and continue to interact - with the agricultural industry.

Asian Americans have been involved in farming and agriculture since the first Asian immigrants arrived in the United States. American demand for agricultural labor, intensified by periods like the asparagus boom in the early 1900s, brought Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese farmworkers to the United States to work on commercial farms and Hawaiian sugar plantations. Like today’s Latino farmworkers, these laborers did hard work for low, unfair wages while always facing the threat of violent racial hostility. To withstand the racist environment around them, they formed communities in areas like Stockton and Locke, California, complete with their own schools and community publications. Asian American workers also organized together to strike and form unions. For example, Japanese sugar beet workers joined with Mexican workers in 1903 in one of the first farmworker strikes in the United States. Decades later, Filipino farmworkers unions took part in the strikes that led to the creation of the United Farm Workers in 1965, with Filipino organizer Philip Vera Cruz as the UFW’s vice-president.

Some early Asian immigrants were able to purchase lands and start successful farms, both for subsistence and commercial purposes. As early as the 1860s, Chinese immigrants were starting their own farms to grow crops that would cater to the tastes of Chinese miners. Japanese American farmers organized farming cooperatives to improve growing and marketing of their vegetables and flowers. Asian American farming contributed new farming techniques and crops, introducing vegetables and strains of rice that had not been previously cultivated in the United States. Asian American tenant farmers also contributed mightily to Californian agriculture by reclaiming thousands of acres of farmland from the swamps of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The influx of immigrants and refugees from Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 70s led to the establishment of many family-owned small farms in California and in the Midwest. Today, roughly 1,000 – 2,000 farms in Fresno County alone are owned by Asian American families.

Asian American farmers have faced a variety of challenges. In the early years of Asian American farming, racist laws regulating land and agriculture made it difficult for Asian Americans to access the resources necessary to participate on equal terms in the farming industry. Asian Americans were largely prohibited from buying land by legislation like the 1913 Alien Land Act. These land-owning restrictions were made harsher by legislators during World War II, due to heightened racism directed against Asian Americans. The enhanced restrictions closed the loopholes in the 1913 Act that Asian American farmers had used to resist the law. The courts in the early part of the 20th century also ruled for discrimination against Asian Americans in farming. For example, in 1923 Webb v. O’Brien declared sharecropping illegal because it was a way for Japanese Americans to indirectly possess and use land. That same year, Frick v. Webb banned Asian immigrants from owning stocks in corporations formed for farming. The Alien Land Act was not declared unconstitutional until 1952. By that time, other major changes were taking place that would seriously threaten the ability of Asian Americans to run small farms sustainably.

The period following World War II was characterized by the growth of industrial agriculture, a mode of farming that continues to dominate today. Industrial agriculture is a form of market-oriented farming carried out by large corporations In contrast to Asian American small farms, which grow a variety of Asian vegetables and fruits, large industrial farms generally produce one crop on a large scale. These agricorporations benefit from government subsidies and credit that enable them to buy and use expensive technology like chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and genetically modified crops. The increased development and use of these high-tech chemically and genetically-modified farming techniques produce high yields and high profits for corporations, but this comes “at the expense of fair labor use, biodiversity, subsistence farming, and soil quality,” says Hallie Chen, cofounder of UC Berkeley’s Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology (SAFE), “The changes bypass small farmers.” In other words, the growth of industrial agriculture made independent small farms with diverse crops and more earth-friendly farming techniques “economically unviable” at a time when Asian Americans were finally allowed the legal recourse to purchase land for farming.

The problems that today’s Asian American family farmers confront are compounded by the fact that many are refugees with limited English and a lack of familiarity with government regulations. Southeast Asian farmers in California have been fined up to $25,000 for using relatives in the field, which is traditional within Asian family structure, but violates rules related to workman’s compensation insurance. They are disadvantaged by the amount of paperwork and bureaucracy necessary to get loans or to become certified as organic farmers. Traditional Southeast Asian farming techniques are not applicable to the climate in the United States, but these immigrants have not been given access to cutting-edge organic and sustainable techniques that boutique farms targeting wealthy customers have been able to establish. As a result of these complications, many Southeast Asian farms have resorted to buying the chemical fertilizers and equipment popularized by the growth of industrial agriculture, purchases which severely eat into their profits. Farming is so difficult and unprofitable that many second-generation Asian Americans who grew up on farms are leaving rural areas and the traditional farming lifestyle of their parents behind.

Despite the disadvantages that Asian American small farmers face, they have been able to find a market to tap into with their produce. Asian American farmers have been able to sell their produce at farmer’s markets and ethnic grocery stores. This produce is even hitting the mainstream; according to the Fresno County agricultural commissioner’s office, the sale of “oriental vegetables” is increasing, rising from $10.3 million in sales in 2003 to $15.7 million in 2004. In total, California’s Asian vegetable farms produce between $75-100 million a year. Most importantly, they sell vegetables traditionally used in Asian cuisine to the Asian American communities in urban/suburban areas like the San Francisco Bay Area. Although Asian American rural and farming communities are often invisible to us, they continue to provide us with the taro, daikon, and bok choy we associate with our heritages and our homes.

Farmers Markets in the Bay Area:

For more information on S.A.F.E.: visit www.agrariana.org