Later in the interview, Stringfellow compared the stories of black farmers who were unsure which USDA employee had discriminated against them to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which he said he did not find credible.

While Conor Friedersdorf, in a blog post for The Atlantic, did not reference Stringfellow, he did present Foster’s analysis of the census as the most crucial piece of the writer’s argument. Foster had written that the agricultural census counted only 18,500 black farmers in 1997, yet there had been “nearly 100,000” claimants in both Pigford cases up to that point. (There were actually fewer than 63,000 submitted claims.)

“I just can’t trust a damn thing [Breitbart] publishes,” wrote Friedersdorf. But he also said he was nonetheless “struck” by the “gap between the total number of claiments [sic] and the total number of black farmers in America.” He continued: “If accurate, it suggests widespread fraud.”

In 2013, The New York Times published a story called “U.S. Opens Spigot after Farmers Claim Discrimination,” which echoed many of Andrew Breitbart’s main contentions, and alleged that the Pigford II settlement process had become a “runaway train” driven, in part, “by racial politics.” The Times reported that there were 16 different zip codes in which successful claims “exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997.” Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum expressed the conventional wisdom that emerged following the Times piece: “It was raining money, so [people] put out their hats.”

But a more careful approach to the data undercuts these claims. These writers failed to take into account several factors that suggest the number of successful claimants fell far short of the number of black people who farmed, or attempted to farm, over the relevant period. Far from “raining money,” it is likely that the majority of black farmers—and often-forgotten aspiring farmers—between 1981 and 1996 never received settlements.

Madeline Gray The walls at the offices of the Concerned Citizens of Tillery in North Carolina

While Fridersdorf referred to numbers from 1997—the end of the relevant period—the 1982 census shows just over 33,000 black farmers. This number is almost certainly an undercount. Various studies we reviewed have found undercounts of black farmers from between 25 to 50 percent prior to 2002. A 1978 Census Bureau analysis, for example, estimated that the 1974 figures undercounted black farmers by 53.3 percent and the 1978 figures by 34.8 percent.

If we adjust the 1982 census for an undercount between 25 and 50 percent, then we get between 44,000 and 66,500 black farmers that year.

Further, prior to 2002, the census counted only one farmer per farm, even though many farms have multiple operators. The 2017 Census of Agriculture counted roughly 1.38 black farmers per black-operated farm. If we increase our numbers by that ratio, we get between 61,000 and 92,000 black farmers in 1982.

But even these figures do not include aspiring black farmers, who were also eligible for settlements in some cases and could have formed a substantial share of those discriminated against by USDA. Many black families were forced to leave farming before 1981 because they were often unable to get credit from local banks or the department. As a result, there are a large number of black families with enough land to begin farming—often the biggest hurdle for new farmers—who nonetheless need credit to purchase supplies and equipment. A 1999 USDA survey found that black families were half as likely to farm their farmland as white families. A fair number of people from those families could have attempted to farm in the period covered by Pigford.