Land Access for Next Generation Farmers
Voting is such a powerful tool for impacting our communities that it’s often said that “your vote is your voice.” If that statement strikes you as naïve, consider the resources invested in voter suppression in just the past decade, in which partisan and racial gerrymandering reshaped the electorate wholesale.
In the United States today, 98% of farmland is owned by white people. That raises some critical questions. Namely, how can we in the land trust community—historically white-led and governed—achieve racial equity and social justice in our work for land access for the next generation of farmers? In our latest post, we reflect on how the Racial Equity Institute’s “Groundwater Approach” provides a powerful framework for understanding racial inequity and creating systemic change.
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.