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A warming planet, complex geopolitics and fierce competition means business operations are under more scrutiny than ever before.

Returning to Singapore this July, the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit is uniting leaders and investors

to explore how sustainability efforts can bolster resilience

and mitigate risk. Learn more at Bloomberg.com slash sbsd-singapore. That's Bloomberg

live.com slash sbs dash Singapore. As I dug into how my family gained and then lost control of a plot of land in East Texas,

I learned that we were part of a broader trend.

For black Americans after slavery, owning land was freedom.

It was autonomy and, importantly, economic security, because

farming was big business back then. And some black families have been farmers for generations

all the way up to the present day. Take one black farmer in Virginia, John Boyd, who grows wheat and other crops. He also raises cows.

I really was trained as a farmer by my dad and grandfather. My mother's parents were sharecroppers.

And I also worked on their farm as a little boy. So I got to see it on both sides, you know, what it was like

to own your farm. And I also got to see what it was like having grandparents as sharecroppers.

John comes from a long line of black farmers whose legacy stretches back to the end of the Civil War.

His farm is located in a southern Virginia town called Baskerville. In 1868, the 14th

Amendment granted citizenship to black people, and after the Civil War, despite many obstacles,

black people were able to purchase some of the very land they'd been forced to farm under slavery.

By 1920, black men operated around 14% of all the

farms in the U.S., but over the years, that share of black farms declined and in a big way.

Today, black people operate less than 2% of farms in America.

White people basically run the rest.

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