Farmland Meets Finance
from Food First Farmland Meets Finance: Is Land the New Economic Bubble? Madeleine Fairbairn | 05.26.2014 May 2014, Land & Sovereignty Brief No. 5 At the turn of the 21st century, farmland was still considered an investment backwater by most of the financial sector. Although some insurance companies have had farmland holdings for years, most financial […]
Featured Resource: Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems
Heroic Endeavors: Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS) by Leslie Hatfield | from EcoCentric The movement toward simpler food can be complicated. Entrepreneurs looking to start farms, farmers’ markets and food hubs quickly learn that when it comes to starting and running one – on top of the day-to-day work involved […]
What do you mean when you say . . .
Leasehold Estate: A leasehold estate is an ownership of a temporary right to hold land or property in which a lessee or a tenant holds rights of real property by some form of title from a lessor or landlord. Although a tenant does hold rights to real property, a leasehold estate is typically considered personal […]
Virginia Farm Needs Farmer, and a Plan
by Courtney Langley from the Virginia Gazette JAMES CITY – The county is looking for a good realtor to help assess, market and sell a 100-acre farm and a residential lot, both in the upper county. The request for proposals issued Thursday afternoon outlines interest in selling the Crawford house the county acquired last year, […]
Guardian Reports Small Farm Loss a Risk to Our Future
by John Vidal from The Guardian Corporate stranglehold of farmland a risk to world food security, study says Small farmers are being squeezed out as mega-farms and plantations gobble up their land The world’s food supplies are at risk because farmland is becoming rapidly concentrated in the hands of wealthy elites and corporations, a study […]
Not Exactly Right, Wall Street
Published by The Cornucopia Institute in response to the Wall Street Journal Article slamming the organic movement. The Wall Street Journal opinion piece “Organic Farming Is Not Sustainable” published May 15, 2014 by Dr. Henry Miller misrepresents the industry and is riddled with factual inaccuracies. Dr. Miller attempts to discredit organic agriculture’s environmental benefits on […]
First Nations Farmland Lost in Western Canada
From farmlandgrab.org A company that once billed itself as the largest corporate grain farm in the country is no longer growing crops in Western Canada. One Earth Farms, a subsidiary of Toronto-based Sprott Resource Corp., has sold its machinery and has terminated lease arrangements on hundreds of thousands of acres of cropland across the West. […]
The Lexicon of Sustainability Highlights Land Trusts
From the Lexicon of Sustainability: In some parts of the U.S., a farm is worth more for its real estate than for what it grows and valuable food-producing land, which has been carefully tended for generations, is lost forever. Conservationist Bob Berner of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust explains how land trusts provide guidance and […]
Too Local?
The Poland and Polachek families have been stewards of the land in Loudoun County, VA for generations. In an article published by the Washington Business Journal, one farmer says the Poland Farm “sticks out like a sore thumb” in a sea of sub-divisions west of Washington, D.C. The article describes the farm as the hole […]
Farm Profile: Loud Pond Farm
On Saturday, April 26th, in Berkeley, California, Wes Jackson spoke to a crowd gathered for Our Land Symposium where an audience of folks engaged in the work it will take to recover America’s farmland eagerly listened. To paraphrase some of what he offered as necessary in this reimagining, we must be motivated by intrinsic rewards, […]