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 […]
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 […]
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. […]