In April of 2013, Kendra Johnson, Severine Fleming, and Kristen Loria completed the guidebook “Affording our land: a farmers guide to farm finance options.” It has been at the head of our growing Resource List and is available for free to download. This guidebook is meant as a compilatory resource for farmers looking for land, as well as service providers who are supporting farmers and/or landowners in this shared goal.
Our goal for 2014 is to focus on the cultural conversation about land, continue gathering and documenting case studies and models, and research and preparing to build the mechanism for land transaction in 2015.
Other goals for our program:
1. Build the issue of Land Access through public programming, press outreach and messaging.
2. Support the network of practitioners as well as farmers looking for land.
We have an exciting schedule of confirmed activities for 2014!
1. Paicines First Principles of Agrarian Trust Meeting March 13-15, Paicines CA
- We will convene a meeting of about 20 stakeholders to refine the underlying principles that will guide our work together with Agrarian Trust.
2. Symposium on Land Access, April 26, 2014, Berkeley CA
- A day-long symposium addressing many aspects of our focal land access issue. Co-sponsored by Chelsea Green and the Berkeley Food Institute.
Tentative Speakers List: Wes Jackson, The Land Institute, Joel Salatin, Polyface Farm, Sjoerd Wartena, Terre de Liens, Elizabeth Henderson, Peaceworks Farm NY, Gary Nabhan, Author/ Professor, Raj Patel, Writer/Activist, Eric Holt-Gimenez, Food First. We have also invited Janaina Stronzake of the M.S.T Landless Peasants Movement (Brazil) and Winona LaDuke of the White Earth Land Recovery Project.
3. Professional development workshops
- Starting on March 29, 2014 Agrarian Trust will be convening 10 workshops. Organized regionally, these will generate “open source” curriculum modules for use by farmers and farm service providers for professional development. We will be sending notifications about all these workshops at a later date.
We hope you will continue to watch out for innovative models, and forward them along to us at the Agrarian Trust team.
