Land Access Strategy: La Montañita Co-op’s La Montañita (LaM) Fund
The 14,000-member La Montañita Co-op runs the La Montañita (LaM) Fund, a member-funded micro-lending program for food system producers and cooperative businesses in New Mexico. The fund provides affordable one-, three-, and five-year notes for small- and medium-scale projects that increase sustainable production.
Land Access Strategy: The Community Land Trust and Indian Line Farm
In a uniquely collaborative arrangement developed by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires, the Berkshire Highlands Program of The Nature Conservancy, and farmers Elizabeth Keen and Alex Thorp joined together to purchase Indian Line Farm in southwestern Massachusetts. The aims of the partnership are to preserve the first CSA farm project in North America, to maintain it as a working organic farm, to protect the adjacent sensitive wetlands, and to provide small-scale farmers access to affordable farmland.
Land Access Strategy: Student-Driven Farms | Book & Plow Farm and Amherst College
Book & Plow Farm is the result of a student-driven initiative to get local food into Valentine Dining Hall at Amherst College, a small liberal arts school in western Massachusetts. The farm functions as a private, for-profit business farming on college-owned farmland. The farm has a contract with the college to supply vegetables for campus dining commons as well as to be an educational resource for the school. Book & Plow was selected through a proposal process. The college offers the farmland as well as some financial support for infrastructure.
Land Access Strategy: Tablehurst and Plaw Hatch Community Farm, UK
The Tablehurst and Plaw Hatch Community Farm initiative was born in 1994 when it appeared that biodynamic Tablehurst Farm might be lost after more than 25 years of careful husbandry by Emerson College. The college could no longer support the farm and, following a major community fund-raising drive, agreed to sell the farm assets to the community while retaining ownership of the land.
Creating an Agrarian Commons
How do we cooperatively own and steward land for food sovereignty, soil and ecosystem health, community benefit, service to the watershed, and more? Agrarian Trust’s proposed method is a new form (legal, cultural, and financial) of land ownership to support land access for the next generation of farmers, and we make the path by walking it.
A Digital Map Leads to Reparations for Black and Indigenous Farmers
The map’s creators say they envision an equitable distribution of land and resources in the country.
Ford Foundation President: To address the climate crisis, we must address inequality
Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, recently published a profound statement about the importance of addressing inequality to fight climate change. Offering insight into these intertwined issues, which have become the defining challenges of our time, he focuses on the fundamental role of land.
Making Land Access For Young Ones in the Buffer Zone
Fascinating article about preferential treatment in USDA grants programs by those landowners who move Conservation Reserve Program land to “beginning farmer” opportunities.
More US Farmland Owned by Overseas interests
From The Center for Rural Affairs: A recent report from the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that foreign holdings of U.S. farmland doubled between 2004 and 2014. Foreign investors now control 27.3 million acres of farmland. Among the leading foreign owners of domestic farmland is the Chinese firm Shuanghui. The same firm purchased pork […]
New Land Access Training Program Will Help Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Secure Land and Succeed in Agriculture
NORTHAMPTON, MA, July 18, 2017—American Farmland Trust announced today that 24 Land Access Trainers will help beginning farmers and ranchers secure agricultural land as part of a nationwide, four-year-long project. AFT selected the trainers, who are located in each of the 10 U.S. farm production regions, through a competitive process. AFT picked professionals from Cooperative Extension, state departments […]