Succession Plan has the Community in Mind
A 153 year-old family farm in Saratoga Springs, NY gets a plan for the future that could include education, a farm incubator and more. From an article Dennis Yusko in The Times Union: One of the city’s last and best-known farms would be preserved as a community resource under a partnership planned between its owners, […]
Farming Under Police Surveillance
Michael Segalov uncovers the story of Yorkley Court Community Farm: (from Munchies) “The pattern of land ownership is complex, but in the UK today, it’s all owned by someone. It’s enclosed,” Frank White tells me as I’m helped over a series of fences and chains, past a 25-foot watchtower that wouldn’t look out of place on […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]