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. […]
Featured Resource: New Study on Land Access and Beginning Farmers in Coastal California
A new study published by The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development (FAFSCD) investigates land access. Read the entire study Land Trusts and Beginning Farmers’ Access to Land: Exploring the Relationships in Coastal California by Jessica Beckett and Ryan E. Galt Published online March 13, 2014 Abstract This paper examines relationships between beginner […]
FarmStart for the Next Generation
FarmStart from Sustain Ontario on Vimeo. FarmStart is a charitable organization that provides training to a new generation of farmers. FarmStart provides someone with an interest in farming with a small test piece of land to see if farming is for them. But a piece of land alone doesn’t make the farmer. In the second […]
$20.5 Million in Farmland Protection Funding Announced in NY
Governor Cuomo Announces $20.5 Million Available for Farmland Protection Grants Offered for First Time in Five Years May 14, 2014 Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced the availability of $20.5 million to aid farmland protection efforts and help prevent viable agricultural land from being converted to non-agricultural use. Eligible entities, including municipalities, counties, soil and water […]
Iowa Farmer Doubts National Geographic’s “Five Steps”
This article, entitled National Geographic’s ‘Five Steps’ Won’t Feed The World: An Iowa Farmer’s View was written by George Naylor and published by the Huffington Post. The brief article, “A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World” offered by Professor Jonathan Foley in the latest National Geographic magazine, clearly states the stark features of a global […]
Experience Speaks: Alternatives to Farm Ownership
Alternatives to Ownership: Land Trusts as Land Reform by Robert Swann In those countries where traditional land reform (redistribution of land to private owners as initiated by the central state – examples in Japan, Taiwan, Iran some South American countries, etc) has taken place, redistribution of land has resulted in some cases (Taiwan for instance) […]