PRESS
“The three biggest hurdles to implementation and success in the U.S. are land access, knowledge transfer, and access to all types of capital, including funding, resources, and support,” says Ian McSweeney, co–executive director of The Farmers Land Trust.
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Land access is particularly challenging for younger and mid-career farmers, notes Kristina Villa, a biodynamic farmer and co–executive director of The Farmers Land Trust. “Prices are extremely out of touch with reality: They’re so incredibly high that no farmer can afford them.”
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“Moving at the speed of trust means engaging in productive conflict, holding each other accountable and focusing on the results that we’ve committed to,” Smith-Brubaker said.
The challenges for agriculture and the planet at large are daunting but surmountable, she said.
“There has been so much happening this past year, including losing entire crops to flooding, masking in the fields due to the Canadian wildfires and, according to USDA, 2023 has shaped up to be a year where we had the biggest decline in farming income in 93 years.”
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According to the Young Farmers Coalition, the vast majority of the next generation of farmers want to use regenerative practices but face barriers to land access. Tennessee Local Food board member and co-executive director of The Farmers Land Trust, Kristina Villa, says that in addition to land access, farmers need land security.
“Typically when the movement talks about land access they’re talking about needing farmland to grow food. I feel like the conversation should shift to land access and tenure,” she said. “Most farmers in this country are paying too-high prices for short-term land access, which doesn’t allow farmers to practice regenerative methods that we know can build soil, heal earth and feed communities.”
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In an era of rapid urbanization and expanding human infrastructure, the unrelenting loss of land exacts a profound toll on our natural world. It’s a sobering fact that, according to the Center for American Progress, every 30 seconds we witness the equivalent of a football field’s worth of precious green space disappearing beneath the relentless tide of development. This persistent destruction threatens the quality of life in our communities and the ecological balance that sustains life on our planet.
The new paradigm that we are committed to means imagining a different model of land ownership. Building upon the conservation land trust and community land trust models that have been around for 100+ years, The Farmers land Trust is going beyond solely conserving land, and is helping to push forward a new way of protecting land that addresses ownership, access, use, and tenure. >>> Read full article here
Our relationship to land is based on our cultural context. Land can represent seemingly opposite concepts simultaneously: unchecked power and community justice, reparative equity and wealth hoarding to name a few. Many experience and witness our disconnection from the land and from each other through the global and local impacts of colonization and privatization. >>> Read full article here
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