USDA Funding Goes to Tenancy Research in Vermont
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy announced $759,000 in U.S. Department of Agriculture funding for a three-year partnership between the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS) at VLS and the National Agricultural Library (NAL). The announcement was made September 24th at the Vermont Law School. The USDA funding will support dissemination of agricultural and food law research and the […]
More on the Wall Street Interest in Farmland
by Jim Hightower from his website We know from the childhood song that Old McDonald had a farm – but e-i-e-i-o – look who’s got his farm now! It’s groups like American Farmland, Farmland Partners, and BlackRock. These aren’t dirt farmers wearing overalls and brogans, but Wall Street hucksters in Armani suits and Gucci loafers. […]
Cooperative Farms in Upstate New York
By Kathryn Shattuck from The New York Times It was time for the running of the bulls. As Ron Cieri watched from his ATV this summer, his farm manager, Jim Ingram, unleashed five hulking males into a verdant Catskills pasture, where 80 brood cows — a patchwork of red, black and white — grazed with […]
Going Rural to Get the Farm
By Kathryn Flagg from Seven Days VT When Lila Bennett and David Robb set out to buy a farm in central Vermont, they had to get used to disappointment: Multiple land deals fell through at the last minute, and cash-bearing buyers outbid the husband-and-wife team on several occasions. “We had a lot of heartbreaking near […]
Project Profile: SOLEfood Farms
Across the country, continent and worldwide, urban agriculture is becoming a real solution for growers. Keep Growing Detroit aims to grow all of Detroit’s food within city limits and 596 Acres turns its eye to the public-owned vacant land in New York City. These groups serve to help growers navigate and transform city ordinances and […]
A History of Property
by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts from Creative Time Reports Recently in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, two women aged 30 and 23 knocked on an apartment door to gain entry and then demanded at gunpoint that its current occupants vacate the premises. As reported in the New York Daily News, by way of motive one of the women later […]
Is the Farmland Surge just a Bubble Waiting to Burst?
By Danielle Kurtzleben from U.S. News and World Report The auctions are unintentionally silent today at the Pine Lake Country Club. Plenty of farmers showed up on this drizzly fall morning, since it’s too wet to harvest. But as auctioneer Joel Ambrose tries to sell first one, then another field to the 40 or so […]
Latest on US Farmland Values
From USDA Land Values 2014 Summary, published August 2014 The United States farm real estate value, a measurement of the value of all land and buildings on farms, averaged $2,950 per acre for 2014, up 8.1 percent from 2013 values. Regional changes in the average value of farm real estate ranged from a 16.3 percent […]
The Decline of the Small Family Farm
By Roberto A. Ferdman from The Washington Post “Today’s farms are fewer and bigger.” That’s how the United States Department of Agriculture put it in the agency’s new Agriculture and Food Statistics report. It’s also, pretty clearly, what the chart above — which was included in the report (p. 6) — shows. Peak farm, as it happens, […]
Workers in Maine Buy Out their Jobs
By Rob Brown, Noemi Giszpenc and Brian Van Slyke from truthout.org On remote Deer Isle, Maine, the movement for a more just and democratic economy won a major victory this summer. More than 60 employees of three retail businesses – Burnt Cove Market, V&S Variety and Pharmacy, and The Galley – banded together to buy the […]