We’re hiring! Grow the commons with us 🥕
We’re excited to announce that Agrarian Trust is growing! I hope you’ll take a look at these new roles on our team and consider sharing with your colleagues and networks. We’ve reached a pivotal moment in our work and can’t wait to welcome four new members to the team.Â
Exciting Land Rematriation Updates
Agrarian Trust and an Indigenous collective are raising funds to support the long-term viability of a land rematriation project within the ancestral homelands of Nipmuc People in an area known as “Bogastow Farm.”
How we catalyze the commons 🌱
Agrarian Trust Summer Newsletter | June 2024 Whether the solstice found you basking in the sun or keeping cool in the shade, we trust you’ve been enjoying the bounty of local farms. It’s been […]
Celebrating Okra Fest 2023: A Conversation with Cam Terry
We recently had an opportunity to connect with Cam Terry, a farmer in Roanoke, Virginia who is currently raising funds with Agrarian Trust and Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons to acquire […]
Global Spotlight: Community Land Scotland
The Agrarian Trust is just one of many organizations across the world dedicated to the advancement of community control of the land. In Scotland, state-level land reform and grassroots organizing have led to the widespread practice of community land ownership. In 2010, Community Land Scotland (CLS) was founded to act as a shared voice for community landowners in Scotland and to provide support for communities as they navigate the complex world of purchasing and managing land as a community body. Today, its members “manage 560,000 acres of land, home to some 25,000 people.” As models like the Agrarian Commons gain traction in the United States, it is worth studying the examples of our global partners. CLS deploys a compelling mix of policy work, training, and networking opportunities to support community land ownership in Scotland.
What is Agroecology?
Agroecology is simply a continuation of these millennia of knowledge accumulation. Any one definition of agroecology as a practice would be incomplete. It reaches beyond a limited set of techniques or ideas, instead embracing the efficacy of agricultural techniques produced on a regionally, culturally, and ecologically specific level.
Key Findings From National Young Farmers Coalition’s 2022 Farmer Survey
According to the survey, 59 percent of farmers surveyed reported that finding affordable land was “very or extremely challenging.” An even higher percentage of BIPOC farmers—68 percent of Indigenous respondents and 66 percent of Black respondents—gave the same response.
The Agrarian Commons, Land Stewardship, and the Racist History of Land Conservation
As a land conservation organization, it is important for Agrarian Trust to grapple with the racist history of land conservation, and to imagine new models of land stewardship rooted in racial equity and active care for the land. The Agrarian Commons model is a clear step in this direction.
La Via Campesina
La Via Campesina coined the term food sovereignty in 1996, against the background of an increasingly globalized food system, which heavily favored large agribusinesses over small-scale farmers. The World Trade Organization (WTO) pressured countries to dismantle their local agricultural system, to lower prices, and become competitive on the global market. In order to drive labor costs down, farming became increasingly centralized, driving peasants and Indigenous people off their land at unprecedented rates. Aggressive copyright law and genetic engineering by large agribusinesses robbed peasants of their seeds, rendering them reliant on a volatile global market of pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Cheap produce flooded local economies, destroying the livelihoods of farmers who were unable or unwilling to compete.
What can we learn from Deshee Farm? A Visual History
While farms like Deshee failed to take hold in the United States and had significant limitations, its story serves as a reminder that the privatized corporate farming that dominates U.S. agriculture was anything but inevitable. Grassroots organizing by tenant farmers played a key role in securing innovative, state-funded programming whose scale and vision matched the needs of the moment. Had there been more resources to fund similar efforts and more time and autonomy for the members of RA farms to develop the necessary institutions and cultural practices to effectively govern their shared resources, we might have been living in a different, more cooperatively focused world.Â