farmland for the next generation

credit: AFT

The success of the next generation of farmers and ranchers is crucially dependant on whether they can secure suitable land to start and expand their operations. According to the 2012 Census of Agriculture, the number of new farmers and ranchers in the United States decreased 20 percent from 2007 and hit a 30-year low. In acknowledgement of this barrier for young farmers, the American Farmland Trust have just recently announced that 24 experienced educators will serve as Land Access Trainers to help beginning farmers and ranchers secure agricultural land. This will be part of a nationwide, four-year-long project and the chosen trainers are located in each of the 10 U.S. farm production regions. The American Farmland Trust is a national nonprofit organization that works to protect farmland, promote sound farming practices and keep farmers on the land.

call for film submissions

photo credit – Nino Rocha

Tales from Planet Earth, an environmental themed film fesitival, is looking for submissions to the upcoming 2017 event in Madison.

The theme for this years festival is ‘Land’! Does that resonate with you?

“Standing Rock. Idle No More. The Landless Worker’s Movement. Across the globe, land dispossession—both past and present—is bringing together new alliances and collective actions in the struggle for the rights and sovereignty of local peoples to determine their own futures. The 6th biennial Tales from Planet Earth will showcase stories that inform, challenge, and inspire audiences to rethink relationships to land in an era where greed, corruption, and resource demands are swallowing up ancestral and customary lands, severing cultural traditions rooted in the earth, and threatening the livelihoods, sovereignty, and self-determination of communities throughout the world.”

Filmmakers interested in having films considered for the festival should email the festival project manager, Peter Boger, at pgboger@gmail.com no later than May 1st with a brief synopsis of their film and any other relevant information. We will follow up if we are interested in viewing a screener of the film to consider for the festival program.

 

hudson valley farm incubator program– deadline to apply jan.6

Apply for Glynwood Farm’s Business Incubator!

The deadline for initial applications and letters of intent for Glynwood’s Hudson Valley Farm Business Incubator (HVFBI) has been extended to January 6, 2017, with the 2017 program beginning in early next May.

HVFBI is taking the “long view” on supporting a new generation of farmers in the region, equipping participants with the tools and guidance to successfully get there. Visit their  website for more information.

gh founder severine live on the radio this week

 

Two ways to listen to Severine speak on the Agrarian Trust and the ongoing symposium in Northern New Mexico in New Mexico. First, listen here to hear her on Santa Fe Public Radio’s The Garden Show. Second, Severine is live today on Family Farm Radio! Get your listen on!

harry, friends, we cannot wait

We can do this

.

another free farm offer

More info here.

ever needed help renting farmland? then you can help these people make an app for that.

Farmers who have, would like to, or are currently leasing farm land, you input is needed!

Imagine that after a tiring search of rental properties, you have finally found the right plot of land to farm on, but you have little experience with legal matters and feel like your lease agreements are written in a foreign language– I know, I know, you’re saying, Imagine?! That is literally my life; just bear with me– imagine that in this moment, when it is probably a Friday night and no attorney will be available until Monday, that you can actually use a well-designed online app to get personally-tailored legal guidance.

This is exactly what researchers at Vermont Law School’s fantastic Center for Agriculture and Food Systems are working to create: a first-of-its-kind Farmland Lease Builder mobile app that will provide legal guidance tailored to individual farmer situations and draft leases to be used in conversations with attorneys and in lease negotiations. The idea is that farmers would to be able to use the free app to get as far as possible toward building a useful lease before they need to talk to an attorney. The app will be tailored to sustainable and organic operations — encouraging longer-term land tenure to facilitate stable farm businesses and investment in soil-building.

They have reached out to the Greenhorns asking if there are farmers or farm advocates in our network that would be willing to be interviewed by the researchers about their leasing experiences. Are you? If so, express your interest in the comments or contact Amanda N Heyman directly at amanda@jamborheyman.com.

smart phones come from mountains

This video is put out by Fairphone, an Netherlands-based company that produces smart phones with opaque, open, and more socially-responsible supply chains. If this sounds like a plug for the company, it’s not, per say. If you’re going to get a smartphone, Fairphone is obviously a great alternative to larger corporations. But, what we  really appreciate about this video is that it draws our attention no only to issues of responsible sourcing but to the larger reality that every new smartphone draws precious minerals out of mountainsides.

just food? conference, march 25-26, cambridge

JUST FOOD?
FORUM ON LAND USE, RIGHTS AND ECOLOGY

A CONFERENCE EXPLORING LAND AND THE FOOD SYSTEM: HOW LAND AFFECTS WHAT WE EAT, WHO WE ARE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT WE LIVE IN

March 25–26, 2016

Wasserstein Hall, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts

This year’s Just Food? conference will examine the relationship between people and land, primarily through agriculture and food. Conference events will explore the legal, moral, policy, health, historic and environmental aspects of our modern domestic and international food system, with a focus on the intersection of land and justice. The conference will bring together scholars, farmers, activists, practitioners, and other authorities to discuss the growing concerns about who has access to land, how agriculture changes land, and who is marginalized or dispossessed by our current system. Our goal is to educate attendees, empower them to make changes, and engage them in a larger dialogue about food.

A full conference schedule, when it becomes available, will be posted. But please feel free to register here now!

hydroelectric damn threatens farmland in BC

Impact of Site C Dam on B.C. Farmland Far More Dire Than Reported, Local Farmers Show

By Sarah Cox • Thursday, January 7, 2016 – 12:43
Reposted from DESMOG CANADA

“Clay and Katy Peck are just the type of young farming family that B.C. Agriculture Minister Norm Letnick says his government wants to support to ensure “a reliable food source for years to come.”

The Pecks own a 65-hectare farm in the Agricultural Land Reserve overlooking the Peace River, and are preparing for organic certification of a fruit and vegetable business to serve the northern area around Fort St. John.

The couple’s farm is high enough above the Peace River that it is not included in BC Hydro’s tally of 6,469 hectares of farmland — an area larger than all the farmland in Richmond — that will be destroyed by the Site C dam and its vast reservoir.

But the Pecks, along with other Peace Valley farmers, stand to lose significant amounts of farmland and crops to Site C in previously uncounted ways. The likely impact of Site C on agricultural land has been routinely underreported and will be far more dire than widely expected, according to scientists and information found in BC Hydro reports.

Work on the $8.8 billion dam project began in August and continues around the clock despite three on-going court cases by First Nations, missing federal government permits, and BC Hydro’s continuing failure to demonstrate the need for Site C electricity.

In addition to the agricultural land BC Hydro counts as permanently lost to Site C, another 5,900 hectares of farmland falls within what BC Hydro calls a “stability impact zone” and is at risk of destruction. BC Hydro insists a further 1,125 hectares of farmland — an area about the size of four Stanley Parks — will be lost only on a “temporary” basis during the next 10 years, but farmers and a soil scientist question whether topsoil on the land can ever be replaced.

The list of agricultural land lost temporarily to Site C includes 203 hectares of agricultural land in a Flood Impact Zone that may experience “crop losses when flooding occurs,” according to BC Hydro. Collapsing Peace River banks will create a landslide-generated wave that will sweep over an additional 174 hectares of prime farmland. Since water will not remain on the fields forever, BC Hydro does not include these areas in its tally of permanently lost farmland, even though flooding and waves can cause soil erosion and leave behind debris.

“In my view this is a permanent loss,” says Vancouver soil scientist Eveline Wolterson. “It’s like a tsunami. Essentially what it does is it eats away at topsoil. It will all get washed into the reservoir. They’ll never be able to restore those soils.””

Read the whole article on DESMOGCANADA!

how pope francis is reviving radical economics

Excerpt from: How Pope Francis is Reviving Radical Catholic Economics- Some Catholics have been quietly practicing them all along.

By Nathan Schneider

September 9, 2015

My friend Ryan Patrico, a doctoral
student in history at Yale, noticed something curious while studying the German nuns whose convents wound up in Protestant regions in the early, bloody days of the Reformation. He focused on those nuns who refused the option of relocating to Catholic areas where they could practice their faith more freely. They understood their vows as being not only to certain kinds of prayers and allegiance to a pope, but to stewarding a certain plot of land and shepherding the surrounding economy. “Their Catholicism bound them to a place,” Patrico writes. They felt their salvation was tied up with caring for the land.

These nuns are a reminder that Pope Francis isn’t coming out of nowhere with his often perplexing “small is beautiful” form of ecological economics. He calls for urgency in confronting the climate crisis, while declining to put his trust in modern technology and markets for the solution. His sources of inspiration are seemingly lost causes: the remaining vestiges of indigenous agriculture, cooperative business models, and a call for the mass rejection of consumerism.

To read more, Click Here!

next weekend in providence, ri: land and water conference

Activists working on issues related to land and water and academics from the humanities and social sciences will gather to discuss tensions between environmental stress, ecological realities, and human institutions.

Find out more here: http://landandwaterconference.com/

a new economy on the land: severine fleming, agrarian

SEVERINE FLEMING, Agrarian

A New Economy on the Land

Severine is a farmer, activist, and organizer based in the Champlain Valley of New York. She is founder and director of The Greenhorns, a grassroots cultural organization with the mission to promote, recruit and support a growing movement of young farmers and ranchers in America.

The entering generation of Agrarians has demonstrated a bold vision to build thousands of farm businesses for local food security. We need many more to succeed. Many who try are confounded when they try to find durable land access and tenure. Severine argues that we need to design and enact new frameworks for community land-ownership. All of us benefit from the revival of these farm-steads, and the initiatives of young farmers, orchardists, and dairymen and women. Today, the macro-economy imposes extraction, speculation and degradation of our land, but that will not worktomorrow. How can our water-shed, our food-shed, and the historic cultural landscape inform the new economy we need? How can eaters reconnect meaningfully with both the eco-system and economic system that will sustain the quality of the places we love?

agrarian trust’s land and job opportunities!

Farmers, Farm owners and land trusts send us your RFPs, job openings or proposals here.

Sample Farm Job/ Land Opportunities:

• Raw Farmland for Lease Warwick, NY (8/31/2014)
• Reise Farm: Request for Proposal Puyallup River Valley, WA (8/8/2014)
• Year-Round Vegetable Grower/Farmer Wanted to Start CSA Maitri Farm Amenia, NY (7/16/2014)
• Farm for Sale James City County, VA (6/1/2014)
• DiMeo’s Farm for Lease Johnston, RI (5/12/2014)

CLICK HERE TO VIEW ALL LISTINGS!