Freedmen News Watch · October 5, 2026, 6:20 PM CDT
Key Facts
- From Exploring New Business Models to Global Expansion, Ample Growth Opportunities Exist For Black Farmers in West Virginia (via Black By God)
From Exploring New Business Models to Global Expansion, Ample Growth Opportunities Exist For Black Farmers in West Virginia.
By Jeffrey McKinney, BBG Folk Reporter Whether in times of triumph or hardship, there are mega growth opportunities for Black farmers in West Virginia, who are maneuvering a strenuous business landscape.
To help them reap a windfall, Black industry experts contend those entrepreneurs may do well to initiate new operating approaches, expand into unexploited businesses and seize partnerships to help enlarge their market reach locally, domestically and globally.
Now is a promising time for Black entrepreneurs to enter or expand in West Virginia agribusiness, says Dr. Clinton Arnold, assistant professor and chair of the Business Administration Department at West Virginia State University (WVSU).
He insists the strongest opportunities are not simply producing more undifferentiated commodities or limited to owning acreage.
Owning a large share of the value chain is important “They are in owning more of the value chain: specialty production, aggregation, processing, branded products, institutional sales, distribution, and agritourism,” Arnold says.
Others BBG spoke with agreed, pointing out Black farmers should be open to enlarging their product offerings beyond customary land ownership.
There are also businesses to be built in areas: transportation, cold storage, food manufacturing, technology, marketing, retail, and other industries linked to agriculture, says Jason Tartt, owner of T&T Organics.
He runs a 350-acre farm in McDowell County in West Virginia that mainly offers poultry products, forest botanicals, and honey.[1]
About the Freedmen News Watch
This series follows the news that bears on Black American freedmen and their descendants, the people freed from slavery in this country: citizenship and treaty-rights cases such as the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole Freedmen, the Dawes Rolls and Freedmen’s Bureau records, heirs’ property and Black land loss, reparations and descendant-based programs, and the history and memory of emancipation. It covers the hard news and the good news alike. Every passage is quoted as reported and linked to its source, and nothing is generated. The photograph on each post is a public-domain file photo from Wikimedia Commons, credited, and shows a place or monument, not the people in the story.
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Read the original reporting directly at Black By God — that page is the primary source for everything above.
References
- Black By God. From Exploring New Business Models to Global Expansion, Ample Growth Opportunities Exist For Black Farmers in West Virginia. ↩
Investigative methodology: this update was produced by scripts/topic_news_roundup.py from real Black By God reporting — not a language model. The quoted text above is verbatim from the source, cited; no analysis or interpretation is added.
File photo: Nicodemus National Historic Site 1STBAB-1 — National Park Service Digital Image Archives. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This image is illustrative and does not depict the people or events in this report.
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