Cooperative Farms in Upstate New York
By Kathryn Shattuck from The New York Times It was time for the running of the bulls. As Ron Cieri watched from his ATV this summer, his farm manager, Jim Ingram, unleashed five hulking males into a verdant Catskills pasture, where 80 brood cows — a patchwork of red, black and white — grazed with […]
Workers in Maine Buy Out their Jobs
By Rob Brown, Noemi Giszpenc and Brian Van Slyke from truthout.org On remote Deer Isle, Maine, the movement for a more just and democratic economy won a major victory this summer. More than 60 employees of three retail businesses – Burnt Cove Market, V&S Variety and Pharmacy, and The Galley – banded together to buy the […]
Farmland Meets Finance
from Food First Farmland Meets Finance: Is Land the New Economic Bubble? Madeleine Fairbairn | 05.26.2014 May 2014, Land & Sovereignty Brief No. 5 At the turn of the 21st century, farmland was still considered an investment backwater by most of the financial sector. Although some insurance companies have had farmland holdings for years, most financial […]
Featured Resource: Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems
Heroic Endeavors: Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS) by Leslie Hatfield | from EcoCentric The movement toward simpler food can be complicated. Entrepreneurs looking to start farms, farmers’ markets and food hubs quickly learn that when it comes to starting and running one – on top of the day-to-day work involved […]
What do you mean when you say . . .
Leasehold Estate: A leasehold estate is an ownership of a temporary right to hold land or property in which a lessee or a tenant holds rights of real property by some form of title from a lessor or landlord. Although a tenant does hold rights to real property, a leasehold estate is typically considered personal […]
Not Exactly Right, Wall Street
Published by The Cornucopia Institute in response to the Wall Street Journal Article slamming the organic movement. The Wall Street Journal opinion piece “Organic Farming Is Not Sustainable” published May 15, 2014 by Dr. Henry Miller misrepresents the industry and is riddled with factual inaccuracies. Dr. Miller attempts to discredit organic agriculture’s environmental benefits on […]
The Lexicon of Sustainability Highlights Land Trusts
From the Lexicon of Sustainability: In some parts of the U.S., a farm is worth more for its real estate than for what it grows and valuable food-producing land, which has been carefully tended for generations, is lost forever. Conservationist Bob Berner of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust explains how land trusts provide guidance and […]
Too Local?
The Poland and Polachek families have been stewards of the land in Loudoun County, VA for generations. In an article published by the Washington Business Journal, one farmer says the Poland Farm “sticks out like a sore thumb” in a sea of sub-divisions west of Washington, D.C. The article describes the farm as the hole […]
New Flemish Land Access Initiative
A recently established cooperative aims to purchase or acquire usage rights over land, and subsequently renting it out to to farmland to small-scale, short-chain organic farmers in Flanders. Its main goal is to provide professional farmers with an opportunity to gain firmer footing in today’s agricultural system through durable (long-term) usage agreements. In so doing, De […]
FarmStart for the Next Generation
FarmStart from Sustain Ontario on Vimeo. FarmStart is a charitable organization that provides training to a new generation of farmers. FarmStart provides someone with an interest in farming with a small test piece of land to see if farming is for them. But a piece of land alone doesn’t make the farmer. In the second […]