Evolving Land Trust Practices Through the Ancient Commons

This month we are featuring The Farmers Land Trust and their work around building localized and equitable commons networks for regenerative farming communities.

This piece is co-authored by the founders of The Farmers Land Trust, Kristina Villa and Ian McSweeney. Kristina narrates for us.

Kristina Villa is a farmer, communicator, and community coordinator who believes that our connection to the soil is directly related to the health of our bodies, economy, and society. With over a decade of farming, communication, and fundraising experience, Kristina enjoys using her skill sets to share photos, stories, and information in engaging ways which help to inspire change in human habits and mindsets, causing the food system, climate, and overall well-being of the world to improve. Kristina has spent the last several years of her professional career saving farmland from development and securing it in nonprofit land holding structures that give farmers, stewards and ranchers long-term and affordable access and tenure to it. Most of her work in the land access space has focused on equitable land security for BIPOC growers, addressing the inequities and disparities in how land is owned and accessed in this country.

Ian McSweeney’s life’s work is centered on the human connection to land and each other, framed through the understanding that food is a universal point of connection and agriculture is one of the greatest polluters of land and water, and a primary activity that separates people from the land. Ian has been a social worker focused on developing and operationalizing outdoor experience-based education, a real estate broker and consultant focused on prioritizing conservation, agriculture, and community within land development, and a director of a private foundation focused on assisting landowners and farmers through customized approaches to farmland ownership, conservation, management, and stewardship.

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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. These realities are magnified by historic and present day land injustice and are even more felt by those who grow food and cultivate land through experiences of significant financial, market, climate, and stress factors. 

Our cultures and societal structures are built upon belief systems that are created by the stories we are told. Land ownership, access and tenure, equity, and connection are unjust, and the truth of this is beginning to be understood by a greater percent of the population. The narrative of pioneering homesteaders acquiring land as the fabric of our national manifest destiny necessarily crumbles as we acknowledge that many of us live on stolen land. We need stories and models that strive toward land justice and reconciling our relationship with land. 

As it relates to our farmlands, new and beginning farmers identify land access as a primary barrier to farm viability, while existing and retiring farmers must destroy what they have built over a lifetime or more by selling their farms for development and speculation, simply to afford to retire. On average, 37 mid-size farms close permanently every single day in this country given these barriers and others. The successful transition of agrarian land and businesses is what will sustain agriculture, culture, and community resilience. 

Farms are on the decline while farm sizes are on the rise. This is indicative of things like Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and large scale monocultures. The landowners see farming operations solely as a financial investment rather than community one. 

Land trust and nonprofit land ownership structures have had a profound impact on defining and structuring ownership, access and tenure, and connection; however, by and large, they have not addressed land justice and equity on the scale needed. At The Farmers Land Trust, we are taking parts of the land trust structure to build new models of land tenure alongside and within the communities and cultures farming today.  The Farmland Commons builds upon and evolves precedents set over the past 100+ years by conservation land trusts and 50+ years by community land trusts, and focuses on agriculture, food systems, and agrarian communities.

We believe land should be held in commons and that so should knowledge and resources. We believe our only hope to counter climate, food systems, and farmland soil and ecosystems collapse is to decommodify farmland and establish new and old relationships with the land. We believe that the Farmland Commons is a necessary and innovative land-ownership model that addresses and transforms the current realities of how land is owned, how tenure and equity are conveyed, and how land stewardship is carried out. This model challenges the current model of land ownership that is biased towards the wealthy and large-scale agricultural corporations, and offers a new, sustainable approach for the small, regenerative farmer.  

The Farmland Commons Model connects local, regional, and national nonprofit structures through 501(c)(2), 501(c)(25), 501(c)(3), and other aligned entities. Nesting multiple entities, partnerships, and relationships in the land-holding structure is needed to bring about a resilient and durable framework to support the individual farm, the local community, and the national network. We think that by balancing local voices and autonomy with regional and national support a collective mission grounded in aligned values, vision, and diverse perspectives is possible.

The Farmland Commons brings about farmland decommodification into community centered nonprofits for agricultural stewardship, cultural refuge, and the commonwealth by ensuring active use by farmers and stewards who hold secure, equitable tenure for regenerative, chemical-free agriculture. Commons are community centered, democratically run, limited scope non-profits that are established to hold title to lands, steward and manage those lands, and convey secure and affordable lease tenure to those practicing regenerative agriculture and ecological stewardship.  Removing barriers to farmland tenure advances economic justice by allowing farmers who would otherwise not have access to land and capital (down payments and debt financing) to get on land, and for their investments in their farm equipment and natural assets (like soil) to accrue in value. The model also enriches communities by building sustainable, local food systems managed by people who live in the community, rather than a farming ecosystem dominated by outside large-scale farms. This directly addresses the deleterious hallmarks of conventional agriculture including (1) absentee landowners, (2) production of bio-fuels, animal feeds, and a narrow range of staple crops, and (3) the precarious working conditions of the people working the farm.

The seeds of change must be viable, diverse, abundant, and adaptable.  We see the Commons as a localized and evolving seed bank that is beginning to germinate and flower across the country. Our work within the Farmland Commons is to support local communities through raising awareness and engagement, connecting stakeholders, and collaborating on fundraiser campaigns. Our hope is that more farmers and farming communities may have secured, long-term tenure to their local lands to engage in ecological stewardship and the decommodification of land as well as catalyze and feed their communities without harmful chemicals or depleting our soils. Our work is also to provide the resources and tools necessary to create Farmland Commons, making them an open-resource for other organizations and communities to use. Combined, these two complimentary efforts show the world what is possible with a third, and new type of land trust, the Commons Land Trust. We believe this is one way the land trust movement may evolve to be reflective of an ancient past, and a potential future where everyone has the ability to be in relationship with land, healing injustices and building collaborative, resilient networks for land, food, people, and planet.