Young Adult Children Struggle With Financial Independence

When Netley Clay Logan fed the cows one spring evening, she noticed Queeny was missing.

She worried about the Black Angus heifer all night. The next morning, Clay Logan roamed her 80 acres of rolling farmland in Franklin County, about an hour south of St. Louis.

She called for Queeny as she searched, and finally found the young cow lying in a ditch. She had gotten stuck in a creek bed.

Clay Logan wept when she found her.

"After Queeny died, I never named a cow," she said.

Surviving on a farm means protecting as much as you can -- even your heart.

It's something her family has done for generations, weathering the challenges facing farms across the country. This summer, her family farm will earn the Century Farm designation from the University of Missouri Extension Program for 100 years of family operation -- a unique achievement for a small, Black-owned cattle farm.

Black farmers account for just 1.4% of the country's 3.4 million total producers. The USDA Census of Agriculture counted 46,738 producers who identified as Black, involved in decision-making for 32,653 farms across the U.S. in 2022. The number of Black-operated farms has declined nearly 8% since 2017.

Clay Logan traces her family land back four generations to Andrew Inge, born into slavery in 1858 in St. Clair, Missouri. He was 7 years old when slavery ended in the state. He raised award-winning mules, and people traveled from all over to buy his well-trained animals.

Clay Logan isn't sure how Inge was eventually able to purchase his 600 acres.

"Someone in the area was willing to sell to Black families," she said.

Black land ownership peaked around 1910 at roughly 16 million to 19 million acres nationally. It collapsed dramatically over the following decades, with Black farmers losing about 90% of that land due to many factors: discriminatory USDA lending practices, tax foreclosures and partition sales of heirs' property, to name a few -- and, in some cases, fraud, violence or racially motivated coercion, according to agricultural historians.

But Inge held on to 360 acres, divided among his four surviving children. One of them, Grace Clay, was Clay Logan's grandma. In 1926, Grace and her husband cleared her portion of the land and started the family farm.

Clay Logan's father, Chauncey Clay, grew up on the farm and ran a cow-calf operation there. Clay Logan remembers rushing home from school with her older sister, changing into their play clothes and heading to the barn to feed the calves.

"When you have a bottle-fed calf, they become so attached to you," Clay Logan said. "They will follow you around. You're pretty much the mama."

After high school, she left the country life behind for college. Clay Logan graduated from Central Missouri State University (now UCM) with a degree in communications and worked at radio stations in St. Louis, Miami and Detroit.

When her father developed health problems, she had already purchased the family acreage. At first, she wasn't interested in running the farm herself. She considered turning the land into an assisted living community, but the infrastructure costs prevented that.

She said God told her to take what she had and do something with it. So she quit her job and took a three-year hiatus to learn more about cattle farming.

She started with seven cows and took classes through the National Resources Conservation Service and the USDA. Her father, uncle and neighbors guided her. She added electricity to the farm, put in new fences, added a watering system, cleared more land and created new pastures.

Clay Logan was thriving in her new life and providing opportunities to family members in the process.

Clayton McDaniel, 36, the son of Clay Logan's cousin, grew up on the family farm. He studied finance, worked at local banks, then discovered a love of teaching. He now teaches agriculture and leads the Future Farmers of America group at St. Clair High School -- growing it from 50 students to 220.

He took over the farm's cow-calf operation in 2023, and Clay Logan's original seven-cow herd is now 52 strong.

Life on the Clay family farm rolls on with the changing seasons: She's planning farm tours this summer and a celebration when they receive their Century Farm sign. As soon as school is out, McDaniel will be keeping an eye on the birthing cows and their calves.

Clay Logan, now 66, does see one problem looming on the horizon: She has no children, and McDaniel is still single.

"We need an heir," Clay Logan said. "You might want to put that in your story."