The Role of Agricultural Subsidies in Transforming the U.S. Food System
By Sophia McLoughlin
A senior thesis submitted for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies
EXCERPT
6.4 Parity for Community Land Trusts
The following policy recommendation is grounded in conversations with Ian McSweeney, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of the Farmers Land Trust, whose work focuses on transforming land tenure systems to better serve ecological stewardship and community resilience.
An ideal future Farm Bill must take bold steps to ensure that the transition of farmland over the coming decades is both equitable and ecologically responsible. As the U.S. faces mounting climate instability, market disruptions, and the aging of its farming population, over 30% of farmland is expected to change hands in the next 15 years (American Farmland Trust, 2025). This presents a rare and urgent opportunity to redirect land ownership away from extractive corporate models and toward systems that prioritize long-term land stewardship, equitable access, and community benefit. Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and Farmland Commons models offer a transformative alternative to conventional land acquisition and management, particularly for historically marginalized communities that have been systematically excluded from land ownership.
Currently, the Agricultural Land Easement (ALE) program under the Farm Bill’s Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) provides $450 million annually to support land conservation through conservation easements. However, these funds are only available to traditional conservation land trusts—entities that, while successful at preserving natural spaces, often fall short when it comes to promoting equitable land access, addressing the dispossession of Indigenous communities, or embedding social and environmental justice into their land stewardship frameworks. Conservation easements frequently maintain inequitable ownership patterns and can even incentivize short-sighted land management.
By contrast, CLTs and Farmland Commons models integrate equitable land access, sustainable stewardship, and community ownership directly into their structure. These models do not merely conserve land—they ensure it is used to grow food, provide livelihoods, and sustain communities in ways that are both socially and ecologically beneficial. A future Farm Bill should reflect this potential by expanding ACEP eligibility to include CLTs and Commons Land Trusts as qualified entities, and by broadening the definition of “qualified real estate interest” to allow for fee-title ownership by these organizations. This would allow federal funds to support innovative lease and tenure models that align with long-term stewardship goals.
Importantly, this expansion must also be accompanied by a significant increase in funding. ACEP currently meets only a fraction of the national demand for agricultural land protection. Doubling the program’s budget would not only provide parity for CLTs and Commons models but also strengthen the overall impact of federal conservation efforts. A forward-looking Farm Bill should seize this moment to democratize land ownership, ensure that public dollars support both conservation and community, and protect the future of American agriculture for generations to come.
