Losing ground

Al Letson:

Eddie was working in a tobacco field when an Army recruiter showed up.

Eddie Wise:

Let’s walk on up this way.

Dep. Coney:

I’m Deputy Coney with the Marshal’s Service. You obviously know what’s going on. Okay. The judge-

John Biewen:

Eddie takes the document and studies it. He has a round face and a farmer’s thick hands. He’s still a formidable presence at 72 years old.

Eddie Wise:

So I’m supposed to take my wife and just walk off.

John Biewen:

In the past, when dealing with USDA officials, Eddie’s been known to get angry and threaten violence. But this day, he’s calm and polite.

John Biewen:

Inside, the Marshals secure Eddie’s weapons.

Dorothy Wise:

Yeah?

John Biewen:

Yeah.

John Biewen:

That night, the couple would find a room at a low-cost motel.

John Biewen:

That’s Dorothy, in the farmyard.

Eddie Wise:

The Army sent me to Howard University to teach. I was teaching in the military science department. Air mobile operations, rappelling, jumping, air assaults. She was a grant manager for the college of medicine. She said, “The spirit of the Lord told me that the man that come in my life will bring everything.” She said, “I’ve wanted a farm all my life.” So, I told her, I said, “You’re kidding me.”

Dorothy Wise:

So I said, “Okay.”

John Biewen:

But in 2016, the U.S. government would take the Wise’s farm and run them off.

Al Letson:

So, how did that end up happening? The Wises claim that government officials discriminated against them for over 25 years and set them up to fail.

Speaker 7:

A court found the farmers had been systematically denied aid solely because they were black. Loans, grants, and subsidies that white farmers received.

John Biewen:

Dorothy and Eddie Wise found the farm they wanted in North Carolina in 1991. Almost no one buys a farm without a loan and certainly the Wises could not. That meant dealing with the U.S. Agriculture Department and its lending arm, then called the Farmer’s Home Administration or FHA.

John Biewen:

The Wises say all those things and more happened to them. The loan officer in their county office stonewalled them at every turn, they say. From the time they walked into his office in 1991 until their loan was finally approved in 1996. The loan officer, Sidney Long, is now retired. I reached him on the phone.

Carl Bond:

My father’s operation is up the main road, where they used to live. Both my mom and my dad now is deceased.

Carl Bond:

He came to my office. He said, “Would you assist me with this application?” I said, “Well, yes.” I said, “But didn’t you ask the loan officer that you got it from?” He said, “Yes, we asked him and he said, ‘We … you are a retired officer from the United States Army. Y’all should be able to do it.’”

John Biewen:

Is that a normal thing for a loan officer to say? To decline to help a farmer looking for a loan?

John Biewen:

I wondered, was Sidney Long just being ungenerous in refusing to help the Wises with their loan application or was he violating regulations? I called this guy.

John Biewen:

Carpenter says the requirement Carl Bond referred to, that loan officers help applicants with their forms, is based in law passed by Congress. Carpenter reads from an agency handbook from the time we’re talking about.

John Biewen:

So the Wises filled out the form with help from Carl Bond but now their loan officer, Sidney Long, told them their credit was poor. The Wises appealed to the National USDA Office and won. By this time, the FHA had become the FSA, the Farm Service Agency. The Wises told the state director, an appointee of the Clinton administration, about what was happening with Sidney Long. The state director intervened and approved the Wises’ purchase of the land.

Eddie Wise:

It took us five years to get it. We prevailed, I told my wife, I said, “When God is blessing you, man can’t stop you.”

Eddie Wise:

He drug the loan process out for seven damn months.

John Biewen:

Winter nights in North Carolina often dip below freezing.

Carl Bond:

Their loan would have fell under the socially disadvantaged loan fund so-

John Biewen:

I requested internal USDA documents on the socially disadvantaged farmer fund through the Freedom of Information Act. The documents back up Carl Bond’s memory. In 1997, the year the Wises applied, the fund ended the year with more than $200 million unspent.

Eddie Wise:

So he said, “Call Mount County and tell Carl Bonds I want him here and his supervisor.” He said, “By the way, Mr. Wise, Carl Bonds is black.” I said, “Good.” So, Carl came.

John Biewen:

That’s how Carl Bond came to take over as the Wise’s loan officer even though Bond was assigned to other counties and his office was 50 miles away. It was an extraordinary move by the FSA. Carl Bond sums up the situation that Eddie found himself in after most of his hogs froze to death in the winter of 1997-98.

John Biewen:

Bond extended the terms on the Wise’s loan and allowed them to make small payments on their interest, payments they could manage while they gradually built back their herd. This kept them on the farm for more than a decade.

Eddie Wise:

Once they’re slaughtered, they’ll be processed into pork chop sizes, real steak bone, pigtails, pig ears, all the goodies. All of the above.

John Biewen:

But the hog operation wasn’t bringing in a lot of money.

Speaker 1:

But the farm was alive. Eddie and Dorothy had the life they wanted, as one of the few remaining Black-American farm families. Eddie dreamed that someday he’d pass the farm on to his son.

Speaker 1:

Eddie still had those dogs in 2016. The US Marshals took them away, even though they were pets, not farm animals. The Marshals told the Wises they took the dogs to the pound, were they were given to three different families.

Eddie:

We weren’t going to take $50,000. Because $50,000 was no money.

Speaker 1:

They didn’t know how. They tried suing on their own, but again, they needed to prove that similarly situated White farmers were treated better. They couldn’t, and the case was dismissed. The Wises moved on.

Carl Bond:

They reviewed everything that I did on the Wises. I would send it up to Raleigh and they would go through it with a fine-tooth comb. And then they would say, “These are some things we find, you get these things corrected.” Then everything was good.

Carl Bond:

After reviewing, they came back and said, “We don’t think the number of hogs that we see on this balance sheet is correct.” So, that’s when the state directly said, “Okay, let’s go ahead and have a farm visit.”

Carl Bond:

That was unusual. I think they wasn’t trusting my say-so. They were trying to damage me.

Carl Bond:

You got a Black loan officer, assisting with a Black farmer. They may think, “Hey, he’s doing too much for this person,” but at the end of the day, I was doing everybody like that. I treat everybody the same.

Eddie:

He said, “Eddie, the state director wants to do a farm visit.” I said, “Hell yeah! Bring his White ass out here. I’m going to get some answers today.” And so, they roll up in the driveway, and everybody piles out, and Carl starts introducing. I said, “Who in the hell, curved my incomplete farm plan to the state office?” So Carl’s supervisor backed up, he said, “I did, Mr Wise.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because Mike Huskie told me to bring it.”

Eddie:

So Carl said, “Eddie, how many sows do you have?” I said, “I don’t know, Carl. Let’s count them. There’s 9 in here and 118 pigs.” So we go to the second building, and there’s nine more sows. I said, “We’re not through.” We go to the first building and here’s 10 more sows. So now there’s 28 sows. On my farm plan, I was only listing 14.

Speaker 1:

Eddie had just 14 the last time Bond visited the farm, so that’s the number he’d put down in the draft plan. Since then, Eddie had bought and raised 14 more.

Eddie:

He completed my farm plan in January and submitted it. State record signed off on it, and everything. So everything was fine. We thought.

John Bewin:

That is the computer program approved the plan. But the Wises say their loan officer, Paula Nichols, never told them that. Instead, the same day that printout was done, the Wises had a meeting with Nichols at her office. She told them they were being loan servicing, the flexible terms they’d had with Bond that allowed them to pay what they could at the end of the year. Now Nichols told them, they’d have to start paying $3,100 a month. That would have taken the bulk of their total income making it impossible to feed their hogs and pay their other bills. They got up and left.

Eddie Wise:

I told my wife, I said, “Brown Sugar. Let’s go.” She said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “I’ll tell you when I get outside.” So when we got outside her office, I said, “She’s lying. She’s violating the regulation. And I’m not going to argue with her because all I’m going to do is get pissed off and get arrested.”

John Bewin:

Also in the file, there’s another computer analysis.

John Bewin:

So how did people in the FSA office get from an approved farm plan, to one that got rejected? First a little background. Bond explains that a hog producer’s annual farm plan for an FSA loan amounts to a fairly simple calculation. This many sows will product X number of piglets. They’ll be fed and slaughtered and sold, bringing in this many dollars, against the estimated expenses.

Carl Bond:

You have to show your documentation of what you was doing, how you come up with those figures.

Carl Bond:

Just so we could be on the safe side and wouldn’t have to be coerced.

Stephen C:

If somebody has historically had 12 and half pigs per sow, per year, that’s what should be used in a cashflow.

John Bewin:

Paula Nichols is now the FSA’s Farm Loan Chief for North Carolina. I reached her at her office in Raleigh. She said she couldn’t comment because of the Wises’ legal action against the agency.

Aaron Martin:

Mike was just very strict about debt.

Aaron Martin:

And I think he felt like he was serving the government well in protecting the government’s interest in, “Here’s this debt. And it must be repaid.”

Aaron Martin:

Mike told me that there was nothing anybody could do. If they wanted to contest it, they would have to hire a lawyer. Well, I was just not having any of that. It was not their fault. It was the agency’s fault.

John Bewin:

Martin says he overruled Huskey and the FSA covered the cost of its mistake. He says, “Huskey would have left it to the farmers to solve the problem.”

John Bewin:

Huskey says he knows what I’m working on.

Stephen C:

When you’re working with a farmer, when do you decide, when do you know alright, it’s time to-

Bonn:

They were supposed to give him the opportunity to keep his house and have 10 acres of land around his house for his sake, which was to been in the pond in front of his land about five acres behind the house, where he could have a garden at, but he was never offered that.

Speaker 3:

And he’s supposed to be offered that?

John Biewen:

In April 2016, Gary Grant held a press conference in front of the Farm Service Agency offices in Raleigh to call attention to the eviction of the Wises. Just a few reporters attended. Grant and other black farmer advocates say even though the USDA admitted widespread discrimination when it settled the Pigford lawsuit in 1999, it did not hold any employees accountable.

Gary Grant:

I never have understood why people did not become outraged when the government settled with black farmers in 1999 and not one agent lost a job. Actually, they got promoted. Not one federal employee.

John Biewen:

We asked the USDA if anyone was ever fired after the findings in the Pigford settlement. They didn’t answer that question or any other that we out to them. So I went to the guy who was at the top during much of this time. I set up an interview with Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture during President Obama’s two terms. He said he didn’t know about the Wise case, and couldn’t comment on it directly, but he says if Paula Nichols or someone else in the FSA office manipulated Eddie Wise’s production numbers, that’s a violation of agency rules.

Tom Vilsack:

If there was no justification and no reason to change the number from 10 to eight, that certainly is something that sounds unusual and certainly it is something that wouldn’t, in my view, wouldn’t pass the smell test if that’s in fact what happened.

Tom Vilsack:

And what I can tell you is that we saw substantial reduction in the number of program complaints. These would be people coming in and saying that they weren’t being treated fairly. So, we did see progress. That is not to say that there can’t be a circumstance or situation where, for whatever reason, something goes awry, because you’re dealing with 90,000 employees, 90,000 to 100,000 employees.

Speaker 6:

Hello, Mr. Wise.

Ronnie Wise:

The garden is behind the shed, and then what I have in pots, I have in front. But the raised beds we do back behind the shed. Being back here is like being back as close to North Carolina as I can get without being in North Carolina.

Eddie Wise:

That was the whole thrust of my livelihood, that’s why I worked, I want to pass the farm on to my son. That was a done deal, but I can’t pass something on to him that the government has taken. Kinda hard to do. Hard to even think about.

John Biewen:

Eddie is now at his sister’s house in Williamstown, the little town he grew up in in eastern North Carolina. The Wises didn’t want to impose on family after getting evicted, so they stayed in that little motel for eight months, until finally Eddie’s relatives insisted.

Eddie Wise:

My sister and my brother in September evicted me from the hotel I was in.

Eddie Wise:

Yo, little girl. Are you sleeping in again?

Eddie Wise:

You haven’t had anything?

Al Letson:

John Biewen brought us the Wises’ story. Every case is different and complicated, but this nation’s economy was built largely on black farm labor, in bondage for hundreds of years. After the Civil War, freed slaves were promised 40 acres and a mule so they could be self-sufficient as farmers, but that promise was broken. What followed was a century of share-cropping and tenant farming. To this day, black farmers are still waiting for their 40 acres and a mule.