Farm Worker Rights Battle in the Strawberry Fields
From Civil Eats by Steve Holt For many, a red, ripe strawberry elicits sweet memories of sunshine, summer, and childhood. Glorietta, a strawberry picker in California, has quite a different relationship with the fruit. Hunched over picking for up to 10 hours a day for a mid-sized commercial grower, Glorietta—who asked that we not use […]
Farmers walking away from their leases in the Midwest
A report from Reuters News Service: Across the U.S. Midwest, the plunge in grain prices to near four-year lows is pitting landowners determined to sustain rental incomes against farmer tenants worried about making rent payments because their revenues are squeezed. Some grain farmers already see the burden as too big. They are taking an extreme […]
Feeding the 1 percent
From grain.org: Since the global food crisis of 2008, there has been a massive wave of private sector investment in agriculture. More money flowing into agriculture means more innovation and modernisation, more jobs and more food for a hungry planet, say the G8, the World Bank and corporate investors themselves. But does it? Looking at […]
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 […]
Organic Dairy Training Program in Maine
Wolfe’s Neck Farm Secures Major Grant from Stonyfield to launch an Organic Dairy Farmer Training and Research Program For many years, the story of dairy farming in New England was a story of decline. But, a new program being launched by Wolfe’s Neck Farm in partnership with organic yogurt maker, Stonyfield, hopes to change that […]
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 […]