The Freedom Farm Cooperative and the pig bank

Why did Fannie Lou Hamer turn to farming?

By the late 1960s mechanical cotton pickers and weed killers were replacing the field hands of the Delta, and thousands of Black families in Sunflower County had neither jobs nor land. Hamer had grown up in that economy and saw that the right to vote did not put food on the table. In speeches she said that a family with a pig in the yard and vegetables in the garden could feed itself, and that people who could feed themselves were harder to push around. The Freedom Farm was her attempt to give families that independence.

How did the cooperative start?

It began in 1969 with 40 acres near Ruleville, bought with a $10,000 gift from Measure for Measure, a charity based in Madison, Wisconsin, that Hamer had met through her speaking tours. The SNCC Digital Gateway says she raised more money through contacts in Madison, and in 1970 the cooperative bought another 640 acres. Members grew vegetables for their own tables and cash crops such as cotton and soybeans to pay debts and wages.

Membership dues were a dollar a month and were limited to poor people. The Gateway reports that about 30 families could afford the dues, while about 1,500 families belonged in name and received food. White families in need were included as well as Black ones.

What was the pig bank?

The pig bank was a livestock loan program started with money from the National Council of Negro Women, then led by Dorothy Height. Families received a pregnant sow and returned piglets after the litter was born, so the herd kept growing and passed from one family to the next. The Gateway records a start of 35 gilts and five boars and says the bank produced thousands of pigs over the next three years. The Mississippi Encyclopedia dates the pig bank to 1968, a year before the land purchase, which suggests the two projects grew up together.

What else did the Freedom Farm do?

Besides growing food, the cooperative helped families find housing, paid for some young people's schooling and supported small Black businesses. The Mississippi Encyclopedia lists agricultural jobs, help with food stamps, housing, scholarships and help with home loans among its programs. Hamer also kept up her work with Head Start centers in the county during these years. See our page on education.

Why did it end?

The farm depended on donations, and when floods and drought damaged the crops in the early 1970s and Hamer's health declined, it could not pay its debts. The SNCC Digital Gateway says it never had the institutional support or steady federal funding it needed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia says it dissolved in 1974; other accounts give 1975 or 1976.

Why does it still matter?

Historians of food and farming now treat the Freedom Farm as an early example of community food work in the rural South. Sociologist Monica M. White's research on the cooperative, published in 2017 and in her 2018 book Freedom Farmers, brought it back into discussion among scholars and food organizers. In Ruleville, the farm is part of the story told by the Freedom Trail marker near the memorial garden.