Highlights from our Summer 2018 newsletter:
This summer has been full of building relationships, exploring new connections and configurations, and laying a firm foundation for Agrarian Trust to continue our work to create an agrarian commons.
How do we cooperatively own and steward land for food sovereignty, soil and ecosystem health, community benefit, service to the watershed, and more? Agrarian Trust’s proposed method is a new form (legal, cultural, and financial) of land ownership to support land access for the next generation of farmers, and we make the path by walking it.
We’d like to share our progress over the last few months and an invitation to deepen your own involvement.
Our team recently returned from trips to Massachusetts, Missouri, and Tennessee, where we met with an inspiring and diverse group of farmers and advocates to share and reflect on the models we’re developing for community-based farmland stewardship. Check out our team reports from the field below for more on our many travels and new developments this summer.
This month, we also continued our work with our legal team at the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC). We’re currently moving forward on collectively building out our 501c2 agrarian commons structure and strategically exploring best locations to launch this work. Overall, our focus continues to be on developing community-based land ownership and investment structures that we will put into practice in the coming years. As always, we’re grateful for their collaboration and dedication to furthering sustainability and equity in agriculture and land ownership.
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Our FaithLands initiative has really taken off, and the media is starting to take notice! Check out this feature story in Civil Eats. We also noted related coverage from the BBC on faith-based farms. Our thanks to Robert Karp for his beautiful reflections in “Creating an Ecosystem of Faiths for the Future of the Earth.” Karp is former Executive Director of, and current Strategic Advisor to, the Biodynamic Association, where we will be presenting on FaithLands this November at their annual conference.
Growing out of the gathering organized by our sister organization, the Greenhorns, FaithLands has brought together faith-based organizations from around the country under a shared vision of connecting religious traditions, agriculture, and stewardship, inspiring a spiritual and ethical revolution in our relationship to each other and the land. Our appreciation to our staff and board, especially Jamie and Severine, for fully engaging in this growing initiative.
We hope to see you at the Biodynamic Conference on November 16th, when our team will be presenting on the work of FaithLands and the development of the Agrarian Commons.
