Just Food? Forum on Land Use, Rights and Ecology
Agrarian Trust will host panels on land issues at the Just Food? Forum on Land Use, Rights and Ecology, a collaboration of the Harvard Food Law Society and Food Literacy Project, March 25th and 26th, 2016, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA REGISTER NOW Early bird rates through February 25th. This year’s Just Food? conference will examine the relationship between […]
Land, Co-ops, Compost: Boston Neighborhood Takes Back the Land
Growing local food starts with the land, and the current flourishing of food initiatives would not have been possible without residents fighting to control their land and development in the 1980s. Today, the Dudley neighborhood, which sits between Roxbury and Dorchester, has a 10,000-square-foot community greenhouse that has become a hub for the local food […]
How To Revive A Neighborhood: With Imagination, Beauty and Art
Watch this video of potter Theaster Gates’ TED talk. “Gates, a potter by training and a social activist by calling, wanted to do something about the sorry state of his neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. So he did, transforming abandoned buildings to create community hubs that connect and inspire those who still live there […]
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 […]
Women Farmers Need More Rights
An article by Eleanor Goldberg in the Huffington Post addresses the rights of women farmers across the globe. Across the globe, 805 million people are struggling with hunger. But that figure could be significantly reduced if female farmers just had the same rights as their male counterparts. Now that more men in rural areas are taking jobs […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]