Chapter 10: The Things We Do for Land

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INTRODUCTION

Sarah Mock: Two years ago now, I started this project with a question, about why some people own so much farmland. Earlier this week, I completed my final interview for this podcast, and it felt like destiny to be coming face-to-face once again with one of the same billionaire farmland owners that motivated that original question– 

John Hanson: If you want to get a rise out of rural folks, you could just walk into any coffee shop anywhere and say, what do you think about Bill Gates? We’ve got some huge outside investor owners. If you look at just the community at large and what’s left of it, the hollowing out of America has gone on.

SM: After all the ground we’ve covered here on the podcast, it felt fitting that the story would circle back here, to the beginning.

After all, every topic we’ve covered, from the legal origins of land ownership, to America’s troubled history with land possession and dispossession, to the impacts of politics and policy, technology and war, environmentalism and economics. They’ve each had, at their core, this same question about who owns land and who doesn’t. If this project has taught me anything, it’s that this might well be The Perennial Question of American agriculture, the common thread that connects not just American farmers, but Americans in general.

But while the question might be perennial– our answers to it, our ongoing methods of determining land ownership and access, are constantly changing.

So that’s where I’m going to leave you today, with two stories of change, not from our sweeping agrarian past, but from our uncertain agrarian present. These are stories about people who are unsatisfied with who owns farmland and who doesn’t today, and how they’re fighting their way out of the cycle of farmland consolidation that we’re stuck in, with a combination of tenacity, grit, and no small amount of hope. These are stories about altering trends and carving out a new future for our farmland and farmers, and they’re stories that aren’t yet finished being written.

As we go, we’ll reflect on what’s working, what’s not, and what tomorrow might hold, as we strive for a more perfect union between the people of the United States and the dirt that lay beneath our feet.

So one last time, this is The Only Thing That Lasts. I’m Sarah Mock.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

Part I: Anti-Farmland Consolidation and I-300

SM: Looking back over all we’ve learned about farmland, it struck me recently that you could really divide all the stories I’ve told here into two buckets. In one, the stories of the farmland owners and consolidators, in the other, the stories of the dispossessed.

In the first bucket, you’d find today’s billionaire farmland investors, but also European colonists, the homesteaders, early Farm Bill advocates, post-war technologists, and many modern conservation easement holders.

In the second bucket, you’d find Indigenous Americans, commoners and old west outlaws, agrarian populists and members of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, dust bowl migrants and, of course, today’s young and beginning farmers.

I think for most people, it’s not that we’d rather see more of one or the other, it’s that we’d like to see fewer of both– fewer elites hoarding farmland for financial gain, and fewer vulnerable people being kept from or torn away from the farmland they love.

Today, I want to start by thinking about the first bucket and how we might reduce the number of farmland consolidators.

But before we get into “solutions” here, I want to acknowledge that, to many, consolidation, and its cousin corporatization of farmland, are not problems at all. To some, this is the natural result of the richest, smartest, and luckiest people using their wealth however they want, and if what they want is to acquire vast swaths of American farmland, they’re free to do that. This is part of the challenge of acting on farmland consolidation– it’s not illegal, and to some, it’s less of a problem, and more of a goal.

But there are also plenty of people who worry about farmland consolidation and corporatization. They worry about the potential power companies and individuals could wield over our economy and food supply. They worry about what corners are getting cut, environmentally and in terms of human and animal health, on gigantic operations. And they worry about family farms losing access to their land and rural communities being wiped off the map as a result.

Maybe the simplest potential solution to farmland consolidation would be to just make rules about who can own farmland, and who can’t.

Now, actually putting these kinds of rules in place might feel almost impossible today, but it’s actually been done before. In fact, that guy you just heard from, who’s worried about the hollowing of rural America? He was a key leader in one of the most contentious and unusual anti-corporate farming campaigns in America’s history. His name is John Hanson, he’s the long time president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, and the work he did there to use policy and the law to prevent corporate farming in his state has become the stuff of legend.

But his story actually starts pretty simply. Once upon a time, he was a dairy farmer.

JH: When I went back and started farming and started milking cows among other things, in about 1973, there were 3,450 dairy producers in the state of Nebraska. Today there’s less than 70.

SM: Even before John returned to the farm after college, he’d been helping to raise the alarm about the massive pressure on family farmers in Nebraska. He showed up at the state legislature for the first time in 1969– there to raise his dffvoice about the fact that big money, out-of-state corporations were flooding into rural Nebraska counties like his, buying up land, consolidating livestock operations, and transforming Nebraska agriculture.

Chuck Hassebrook: People had seen the livestock industry, particularly, industrializing.

SM: That’s Chuck Hassebrook, who joined John and I for our sitdown. He’s the former Executive Director of Nebraska’s Center for Rural Affairs, and was an early ally of John’s against corporate farming in the state.

CH: You saw the pretty rapid growth of hog operations owned by non-farm investors. But I think the real crystallizing thing was that Prudential Life Insurance company bought, I believe it was 30,000 acres in Nebraska. 

SM: Between the corporatization of livestock production and the big land purchases by outside investors, people across Nebraska were growing increasingly concerned, especially when it came to one of the most fragile and beloved parts of the state– the Sandhills.

JH: We were seeing, big outside investors coming in and breaking up the Sandhills. Sandy grasslands were being bulldozed and disked up and turned into farmland. Because you could put a center pivot on a really, sandy quarter, and you put enough fertilizer and nutrients on it, you could grow corn. So you’re seeing a huge transition of Sandhills pastures into irrigated corn fields. And then of course, the folks that own this were big time operators out of Omaha. They were never out there, of course. They just went out and, gonna buy a chuck in the Sandhills development and make a killing. These guys come in and it’s just grip and rip.

SM: Many impacts of this transformation were devastating. John remembers times when huge dust storms were kicked up in the Sandhills, triggered by massive earth-moving operations as farmland managers shaved off the top of sandy hills and dumped the loose topsoil into the draws between high points to create level farm fields. These dust storms were often bad enough to make driving impossible, and even closed country roads as sand drifted onto the lanes. Which is to say nothing of the ecological devastation that was caused.

Ordinary Nebraskans, both urban and rural, were aghast at these developments. And they quickly went to the state legislature, looking to put a stop to this kind of large-scale, corporate agriculture. And there was precedent for this. Many states across the Midwest already had corporate farming laws on the books that prevent certain types of businesses from owning farming operations and farmland.

And the effort to strengthen these measures started out strong. With farm communities, churches, and organized labor aligned behind this effort, multiple bills were introduced that aimed at limiting the kind of organizations that could farm in the state.

But one by one, each of these efforts failed.

JH: The pressure of the organized and the big money, the commercial land managers, was just enormous. So all of the big dogs were hiring good lobbyists, the best lobbyists in the business to let their air out of our tires. Because all of the big dollar players were not casual about this issue. This was their big opportunity to cut a fat hog and get rich quick, with all of this cheap Nebraska farmland.

SM: Eventually, after multiple failed efforts in the legislature, organized money seemed to draw the trump card. In 1981, Nebraska Attorney General Paul Douglas proposed that anti-corporate farming laws were actually unconstitutional in Nebraska. But for John, Chuck, and their myriad allies, this wouldn’t be the end of their effort. It was just the beginning.

JH: Okay, if it’s not consistent with our constitution, then fine, let’s change the constitution. So, this was, see ya meet ya, raise ya. And we’re up against all the odds, we’ll be up against all of the money. I think, Chuck, most of the estimates that were made, was, we’d be outspent 10 to one, that proved not to be the case. We were outspent 12 to one.

CH: And that became a big issue in the campaign, in fact, much of what we argued was, they’re out here trying to buy our state now they’re trying to buy your vote. And the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I’m pretty sure it was like 200,000 or 300 that Prudential dumped in. It was a lot of money. And, it just I think in the end, worked against them for that very reason. 

JH: Oh, it absolutely worked against them. It confirmed the negative public perception of these big, rich, ruthless, no good so-and-sos, who were out, taking advantage of the land, taking advantage of family farmers. And they were just a bunch of selfish money grubers who would do anything for a buck.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: This is the origin story of the Nebraska state constitutional amendment that would go by the name Initiative 300, or I-300. For anyone who’s looking for a playbook for a citizen-led action to create rules against corporate farming in their state, John and Chuck’s story is a good starting point. 

And the rule they envisioned was relatively simple: Anyone could buy land or engage in farming in Nebraska, but if you wanted to do it using an LLC, or a limited liability corporation vehicle, some owner of the LLC had to either live on the farm or be engaged in day-to-day labor and management.

CH: And so what it really said is that these investors who wanted to come in, or big companies that want to come in, could come in, but they had to do it on the same legal basis that most family farmers were doing. It was always about, do the people who work the land, have the opportunity to engage in farming, without being disadvantaged against high rollers who can use the corporate tool to gain unfair advantages and to be able to walk away from the liabilities of their operation by using limited liability. 

JH: Being accountable for your actions, having to accept responsibility, for the damage you do. That really resonated with folks.

SM: To many, this was a common sense rule. It did not restrict corporations from owning farmland altogether– after all, many family farms were organized as LLCs, mostly because it made them relatively more secure in the eyes of lenders. But these local farmers were still on the land and in the community, accountable to their neighbors by virtue of their presence, whereas those out-of-town LLCs were not.

So these family farm and rural leaders had their goal of limiting corporate farming in the state, and they’d fashioned the tool they needed to achieve it– Initiative 300. Now all they had to do was overcome big money advertising campaigns and lobbying efforts funded by their deep-pocketed adversaries, and convince their fellow Nebraskans to amend the state constitution.

The battle continues, after the break.

[BREAK]

Intro:

This podcast is made possible by Ambrook. Ambrook builds financial management software for farms, ranches, and businesses across the American supply chain. It’s an all-in-one platform that simplifies accounting, record-keeping, and payments workflows while empowering operators with visibility into the health of their business. Here’s Mira Grinsfelder, a Product Specialist at Ambrook based in Minnesota, on how the culture at Ambrook creates a one-of-a-kind experience for customers.

Outro:

That was Mira, a product specialist at Ambrook, on how Ambrook’s culture inspires her work. Tune in to the rest of the season to hear from other members of the Ambrook team on why they chose to join and what motivates them to build the financial layer powering American industry.

Now, back to the show.

[END BREAK]

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: So faced with the failure of legislation to limit corporate farming in previous years, in the early 1980s, the people of Nebraska themselves decided to amend the state constitution by putting I-300 to a ballot referendum.

And honestly, this was a knock-down drag-out fight. I think many of us look around today and see what we think is one of the most divisive moments in American political history. But I don’t know– the fight for I-300 was awfully brutal for an effort that was mostly fought face-to-face in places like school gyms and church basements. Even so, John remembers these debates fondly, like one between pro-corporate surrogate Glen Williams and the anti-corporate farming advocate Bob Warwick.

JH: One night, Bob Warwick got into it with Glen Williams. And Glen he was melting down. And so I’m in between him and Bob Warwick, in this church basement and Bob said, Glen, I’m not worried about you. You are one of the best blood suckers I’ve ever met. You’re doing a great job of stealing from all these big, rich, out state, ruthless corporations because you charge ‘em way more money than you should. You do a terrible job, and I’m all for screwing ’em, and you’re the guy to do it, but, if we pass this law, I know you’ll find somebody else’s screw at which point I had to physically put keep Williams from popping Bob Warwick and say, maybe we ought to just take it down a notch and then afterwards I said, Bob, I said, Glen Williams just about slowed you. And Bob said yes, and you kept it from happening. It’d been a great public relations achievement if he’d have hit me. 

SM: Tough talk and PR aside– the grassroots efforts of the pro-I-300 folks did end up winning the day. With 57% of the vote, the people of Nebraska changed the state constitution in 1982, requiring that LLCs engaged in farming have an owner that was actively involved in day-to-day labor and management of the farm. 

And the impacts followed quickly. The change acted as an effective ban on the kind of vertically integrated meat-packer feeding operations that had taken over the pork and poultry industries elsewhere. Compared to states like Texas, Kansas, and North Carolina, where consolidation of livestock operations amped up considerably in the 1980s and ‘90s Nebraska saw significantly more family farm beef feeding and livestock operations continue on.

But even after the amendment was passed, citizen enforcement remained important to its success, as lawmakers and state regulators were still reluctant to stand up to deep-pocketed interests.

JH: We found that Tyson, for all of their strengths, apparently just had a really hard time trying to understand English. And so they’d come to Nebraska and would clearly violate our law and folks would turn them in. And the attorney general is saying, well, why don’t we maybe just let ‘em feed out this batch of hogs, ’cause they’ve already got ‘em and everything. And then we just tell ’em not to do it next time. And I said, Don, you are going soft on crime. And I said, the day I do a “your soft on crime” press release, your life’s gonna change. And so, okay. What do you think we should do? I think it’s illegal to feed hogs in Nebraska. I think Tyson needs to take their hogs and go someplace else. So for 20 years, our state was significantly different then other states based on our ownership structure, and it was significantly better. And so we still have remnants of that in our state.

SM: John is hinting here at the ending to this story. After more than 20 years in effect, and after weathering multiple legal challenges relatively unscathed, the Eighth Circuit Court declared the I-300 amendment unconstitutional in 2005– on the basis that the U.S. Constitution bars states from advantaging state residents over out-of-state residents when it comes to real estate ownership.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

From John’s perspective, the undermining of I-300 was not exactly unexpected. He’d seen an industry-backed cabal go state to state, working to root out corporate farming laws that prevented them from participating in farming. He saw that coordinated machine come to Nebraska, where it used lawsuits to challenge I-300 while simultaneously attacking local planning and zoning authorities to weaken local oversight. Many of these efforts have been successful in Nebraska, and today, not only is I-300 unenforceable, but corporate ownership of hogs, among other things, is now permitted under state law.

But the demise of I-300 doesn’t mean there are no more options. Anthony Schutz, a law professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, sees many paths to bringing I-300, or something similar, back to life. For one, the Supreme Court could overrule the Eighth Circuit Court ruling. Or, the language could simply be amended in order to avoid the court’s concerns. Alternatively, if the federal legislature were to pass a law which explicitly gave states the authority to determine farmland ownership rules in their state, that could override these constitutional concerns. And New Jersey Senator Cory Booker proposed just such a bill in recent years, the Farmland for Farmers Act. But, Schutz notes, there doesn’t seem to be much appetite left for that fight.

Anthony Schutz: Nebraska is now of the nine original corporate farming law states. The only one that has no restrictions on corporate farming, and hasn’t had any restrictions on it for 20 years now. 

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: When we think about solutions to farmland consolidation and corporatization, the story of I-300 is illuminating. First because, for those who think that policy– changing the rules– is the key, the I-300 effort shows that, yes, change can happen. Policy can be put to work to serve the people. It takes grit, good organization, and a willingness to do things that make very wealthy people very uncomfortable, but it can be done.

But the I-300 experience also shows that changing laws is not a cure-all. Laws can change, but that means that they can be changed against the will of the people too. Plus, the fight doesn’t end on election night. It takes continuous effort to enforce laws and to prevent them from being tampered with.

Put another way, the I-300 experience shows why policy change is necessary, even if it’s not sufficient. Because while I-300 wasn’t a panacea, John believes its absence has made life harder for those who’d like to follow in his footsteps. Those who’d like to get into farming while they’re still young.

JH: Dairies and hogs were two things that you could do if you’re willing to do the work that you could get started in agriculture. These were sweat investments. These were things that had cash flows. And so, the dairy industry now, five 6,000-head operations, instead of 50 cows or 100 cows or 150 cows. And so all the small dairies, for the most part are gone except for some kind of, either specialty cheese or some other kind of specialty. A very unique and relatively small thing. But the conventional dairy is for the most part a thing in the past in Nebraska.

SM: For John, the issues at stake here go well beyond use of the corporate structure in agriculture, or even farm and farmland ownership. 

For him, all of these efforts, at their core, are about the survival of family farms and rural communities. This has been a lifelong fight for John, and the reality is, the strain he sees in the countryside is as dire today as it ever has been. He knows because his organization helps run a farm crisis hotline, which is swamped right now with high financial stress phone calls.

JH: It’s about a 50-50 deal between those that still have a management option left that might let them last another year, maybe two at the most. And the other half are pretty much liquidation and salvage. They’re out of options. They’ve already reorganized a couple times. So these are generational operations that have been in the business, four or five, six generations that we’re losing.

SM: It’s heartbreaking.

JH: Well, it’s heartbreaking, but it’s also not good for America. The relationship between land and people is about a lot more than just money.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: While John, Chuck, and their allies continue their efforts to stem the bleeding caused, in part, by farmland consolidation and corporate ownership, elsewhere, advocates are taking a different tack.

Rather than trying to set the rules for who we don’t want to farm, what if we instead focus on who we do want to farm, and how to arm them with the tools they need to wade into the fight?

That’s after the break.

[BREAK]

Intro:

This podcast is made possible by Ambrook. Ambrook builds financial management software for farms, ranches, and businesses across the American supply chain. It’s an all-in-one platform that simplifies accounting, record-keeping, and payments workflows while empowering operators with visibility into the health of their business. Here’s Evan Rieth, who works in Product Operations at Ambrook based in New York. He helps farmers decide if Ambrook is a good fit for their business, a skill he learned first hand on his own farm.

Outro:

That was Evan, an operations team member at Ambrook, on how farmers like him use Ambrook today. Tune in to the rest of the season to hear from other members of the Ambrook team on why they chose to join and what motivates them to build the financial layer powering American industry.

Now, back to the show.

[END BREAK]

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: So when it comes to the farmland consolidation bucket, we have folks like John and Chuck, working to create policy to stem the flow of farmland into the richest hands.

But what about that second bucket– the one containing those who have been dispossessed of their farmland, or who never had access to it in the first place. There’s a whole community of people working to reduce the number of people in this bucket too. These are the pro-farmland-access warriors, who are aiming to give those without access to farmland, like young and beginning farmers, the best shot at getting, and staying, on the land.

Prominently among this group, you’ll find the likes of Kristina Villa. Kristina didn’t grow up on a farm, far from it. She spent her teenage years in a city, working in food banks and soup kitchens. She came away with a deep interest in food security and access.

Kristina Villa: Which then led me to really start thinking about where does food actually come from and how can we solve this food access issue from a more rooted point? And that led me then to agriculture thinking, oh, if we just grow our own food, then we don’t have to be subservient to the larger food paradigm.

SM: Kristina started with a garden, but her ambition quickly snowballed. She ended up moving to the oldest and largest organic farm in Tennessee, where she spent years learning to live, work, and eat like a farmer.

KV: Managing cattle, managing a CSA, market gardens, et cetera. And then met and fell in love with my partner. And then when we were ready to become farmers on our own, we were struck, then, with the reality that farmland was completely out of reach for us. And I think that’s when my life paradigm really switched to believing that food was the root cause of so many injustices in our world, to then switching to realize that it’s deeper than food access, it’s actually the land. Because if people don’t have access to land, then they can’t grow food for themselves.

SM: Around the same time that Kristina was having her realization– someone else was headed in the same direction. That someone was Ian McSweeney, who started off his career in social work, but much like Kristina, realized the human problems he cared about were being perpetuated not just by people, but by systems– systems like real estate and finance. He knew that if he was going to address the root causes here, he had to understand them, so he began learning about land, and found his way into community-centered land conservation work.

Ian McSweeney: And through that started to work around the country with farms and started to be pulled into like consultation with elder farmers wondering, what do I do? Like I’ve built this farm, I have this community, and I have this wealth in certain ways, but I have no next generation or I have a next generation to pass it to, but the finances just don’t work. And that’s what brought me to Tennessee.

KV: Ian strolled into our kitchen and, he was like, ‘Oh, I have this idea for how land could be held in commons.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ I’m like chopping up vegetables. And he is like telling me all about it. And then finally I’m just like, ‘That sounds crazy. No farmer is ever going to want to do that.’ And then I like went back to chopping vegetables

SM: Ian’s pitch to Kristina, made during dinner prep and half-scrawled on scraps of paper, went something like this.

Right now, he argued, it’s almost impossible for young farmers to buy and own land. There, Kristina agreed. But ownership, he continued, is not actually necessary– it’s secure access that farmers need to build a business and plan for the future. Coming from the world of conservation, Ian knew that it was not only possible, but common, to separate out the different rights associated with land. Conservation easements separate them out to extinguish them– like say, extinguishing the right to development. But that, he realized, wasn’t the only way to separate and use rights. Access rights, or in other words, farming rights, could also be separated from the land, and handed over to a farmer, say, in the form of a 99-year lease.

The question remained of who owned the land, but Ian had a vision for that too. He proposed a group of community-based non-profits would come together under a unique IRS structure that allows them to hold title to land and lease it out, but not use it themselves. Since the group could not use the land themselves, they would in turn be motivated to provide a long-term lease to a farmer. Ian envisioned the group as a small collaboration of hyper-local non-profits with deep community connections, working alongside a national non-profit who could help them raise the money necessary to buy the land in the first place.

KV: Do you see how big and overwhelming that sounds? Especially if someone spends their days hoeing butternuts and milking cows all day and you’re like, it’s just outrageous. It’s like, no, of course I’m never gonna get involved in all that.

SM: Though that might have been Kristina’s first reaction, but it only took a few months of learning and mulling over Ian’s pitch before she reached back to him, and by that point, she was all in. Since then, the two have teamed up to start the very kind of national non-profit that Ian pitched as the lynchpin of the scheme– what is today The Farmer’s Land Trust.

KV: Farmer’s Land Trust works nationally to protect farmland, but also move it into community ownership to then give long-term, secure, equitable tenure out to next generation farmers using organic regenerative biodynamic practices.

SM: The Farmer’s Land Trust calls this work by a name that’ll be familiar to longtime listeners– farmland commons. And today Ian and Kristina are proud to be part of a growing movement of folks setting up these commons in states across the country.

The Farmer’s Land Trust model looks like this. The deed to a parcel of land is held locally by an entity run by a board of local stakeholders who are responsible for managing leases, charging a nominal, below-market rate to cover the land’s insurance and taxes, and do literally nothing else. But even that, for Kristina, was initially cause for alarm. That’s why farmer leaseholders also have a seat on the board of stakeholders, and so get to participate in creating their own lease terms.

KV: They have an affirmative vote on the board. So nothing can pass without them being part of it. And there are many ways that we’ve built in more power and authority for that next generation farmer within this model.

SM: One of the sources of this power and authority is simply the length of the lease term. For anyone who’s ever rented… anything, the idea of a 99-year lease term probably sounds outrageous. But that’s sort of the point here, as in most states, 99 years is the longest legal term allowed. Though the Farmer’s Land Trust model doesn’t give the land outright to the farmers involved, it does give them guaranteed access not only for the whole of their life, but likely for most of their children’s life as well. That means that whether a farmer wants to pass the lease to the next generation in their own family, or sell it when they sell their farm business and retire, they are free to do that under the lease terms. At the same time, the community continues to hold the deed, and can ensure that the farm continues to be a farm. That term also ensures that the farmers have the incentive to invest in farming well.

KV: Most ag leases are year to year or at the most five years to comply with NRCS needs or so forth. But that is not long enough for farmers to build the infrastructure that they need or to want to invest in soil health or perennials or any of the other things like fencing or wells or whatever it is that farmers need. They need a longer runway to be able to invest and then realize the improvements and so forth from those investments. So that 99-year lease gives them that length of term needed to be able to implement and then see the benefits of these regenerative practices that we all know are really important.

SM: Kristina and Ian will be the first to admit that this work is not easy. Though Kristina has come around to the benefits of the model, many farmers they meet are still attached, for one reason or another, to owning their land outright. For others, the idea of a community board, or of a 99-year lease agreement, or of having to work at times with non-profits and lawyers, is just too much.

Even beyond concerns from farmers, Ian worried that there might be concerns from the public– that this work would be seen as socialism or communism, that too few would believe that anything besides private property was a viable path forward.

So they’ve moved deliberately, working with individual farms and communities, one at a time, rather than trying to make sweeping generalizations about the right way to organize farmland everywhere. They weren’t trying to create a political movement like the one in Nebraska, they’re simply trying to help individual farms transition from private to community ownership, helping older farmers retire with dignity and helping younger farmers get a chance to make a go on the land at the same time.

And yet their mission does look similar to John and Chuck’s when you think about the sacrifices it requires.

IM: To take one project and to replicate it in another state takes $10,000 in legal costs. It takes hours and hours of time to bring together people and nonprofits. So there’s far more work than the stories tell, right? And people see the success, they wanna replicate it, but not everyone wants to do all the work needed to bring about that same success.

KV: I think all of that is so true. Working in community is really hard. If this were easy and straightforward then other people would be doing it and we would not be in this crisis. It is really hard, to navigate land transitions, create these legal structures, like all of this is really hard, but then add in the extra layers of having to work in community with people, and then it becomes so much harder. If we were to just be working in isolation and solo, like that’s why people love that. ‘Cause independence lets you do whatever you want whenever you want, and community slows you down. But community also then gives you more strength and support to go further.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: Unconventional models, like that of the Farmer’s Land Trust, are far from the only farmland access solution on offer today. In addition to non-profits and land trusts, there’s also farmlink programs that connect retiring farmers to new farmers to facilitate transitions. There’s organizations working on unconventional financing options to make farm mortgages less burdensome, and there’s even just creative individuals, like the couple that gave away their 80-animal goat farm via an essay contest because they wanted their land to stay a goat farm.

And yet I have to admit, all of these farmland access tools are really just a drop in the bucket. I’m not sure that any of these tools have a good shot at turning back the trends in farmland ownership and access that have only become more extreme in recent decades. Maybe there’s other, more powerful tools left to be explored, like the idea of federally-owned farmland similar to grazing lands that Levi Van Sant mentioned a few episodes ago. But for now, there doesn’t seem to be any viable, silver bullet solutions to systematically prevent farmland consolidation or improve farmland access.

To me, it’s worth pointing out the biggest reason why this is true. Because regardless of our desire for fewer billionaires and more young people to have access to farmland, almost nobody who owns farmland today wants to sell their farmland cheap, wants the price of their real estate assets to decline, or wants to limit their own ability to give or sell their land to anyone they please. This isn’t just greed either– for many farmers, their land is their only retirement. If they want to age with dignity, giving land away for cheap or for free, is simply not an option. This is the bind that we, collectively, are in today. Sure, some billionaires and companies own farmland, but a lot more is owned by regular farmers. But transitioning that land from farmers to farmers at scale looks increasingly impossible.

So if there’s one thing we can be pretty certain about, it’s that the number of people in both of our buckets is likely going to grow. If current trends hold, farmland will likely continue to consolidate and new and beginning farmers will continue to struggle to gain access to farmland.

All indications suggest that the biggest individual farmland owners in the U.S. will continue to be billionaires and deep pocketed institutions and their collective holdings will continue to grow. Right now, the top 100 US landholders own almost 2% of our country’s landmass. That’s a hundred people, out of 330 million. But even ordinary commercial scale farming operations will likely continue to add acres and get bigger as time goes on. A hundred years ago there were nearly 6 million farms in the United States. Today, just a hundred thousand farms own the majority of U.S. farmland and grow the vast majority of food, feed, fuel, and fiber in America, and that number is likely to shrink even further.

As Ian and Kristina point out, and Chuck and John’s story illustrates too, trying to change the trends around who owns farmland and who doesn’t is very, very hard. It’s hard because there’s not just a lot of money and power, but also 400 years of culture and tradition, working against those changes. The American experiment was always an experiment in private land accumulation, and as one source advised me, when I was thinking about how we might undo that trend, it would be wise to assume that it will take at least as long to undo this knot, as it took for it to form in the first place.

Though I mean to leave you with the truth, I don’t mean to leave you without hope. And for me, that hope comes from farmland itself.

See, while the odds might not be in favor of Ian and Kristina, or Chuck and John, or any of the farmers or farm advocates we’ve talked about across these last nine episodes, their odds of success, of making a durable change, are also not zero. They have a chance to succeed, and for the motivated, a chance goes a long way. And when it comes to motivation, history suggests that there’s really nothing quite as motivating, as inspiring, as… land.

I think it’s easy to focus on all the terrible things land has inspired us to do. And it’s true. Across the history of this continent, land has inspired us to lie, cheat, and steal. To wage war and spread disease. To murder and imprison, and to work ourselves and one another to madness and death. The hunger for land continues to tear communities and families apart– motivating us to do unspeakable things. We’ve been forced to learn that many of us are willing to do almost anything to have land, and to keep it.

But sometimes, land inspires us to do good too.

After all, it inspired our ancestors to cross oceans and mountains, to fight against genocide and survive, to go back to the land over and over again, even when it meant confronting our greatest fears, our personal and collective failings, and our own guilt. It’s inspired intensely democratic political action and activism, and to see past racism. It’s inspired us to fight wars, then to turn our swords into ploughshares. It inspired us to see the world, and our place in it, in a fundamentally new way, and then to become champions of the land itself. Today, it still inspires us. To take risks. To be creative. To work together. And to give it our all.

Over and over again, we’ve sacrificed everything. Anything for land, for space, for home. In the end, the land is as much a part of our culture, and our families, as any person ever was. There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for it.

It brings me back, time and time again, to what James Skeet, that Navajo Nation farmer, said all those months ago.

James Skeet: And the land has become us, and we become the land. We no longer own it. The land owns us.

SM: In light of everything we’ve done for land, this feels more true than ever. And maybe the distinction seems pedantic, but I think it matters.

It matters because if land belongs to us then it can be lost, like any other possession. But if we belong to land, then we become the things that are lost. We wander, we yearn, we grieve, we seek. We feel the thread that binds us to land and many of us don’t know what it is. We don’t know what is calling us home, or why, but we feel it still. And the bond between ourselves and the land remains– still capable of inspiring each of us as it has inspired so many who have come before.

As long as that bond remains, there’s hope for us, I think. After all, land is the only thing that lasts, so even if it takes us another decade, or century, or millenia to figure out how to live with ourselves, as long as there’s still somewhere to stand, to plant a seed, to be rooted here on Earth, we humans have a chance to try again.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

Before we sign off for the very last time, I did talk through information from a number of sources today and a few experts. So if you wanna dig into any of that yourself, check out the show notes or our website for link. While you’re there, make sure you head over to ambrook.com, slash offrange to stay up on the latest reporting from the off range team on agriculture, land, and environmental issues like the ones we talk about here on the show.

After you subscribe to the podcast, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter and follow Offrange on social for news about upcoming projects and stories, and we can’t wait to hear what you think genuinely. If you liked this podcast, if you like what we’re doing, let us know. In the comments on whatever app you’re listening to, and please, please, please share it with someone you think would love it.

It would go a long way. The only thing that lasts is now an Offrange production. This podcast was written, produced, and mixed by me, Sarah Mock. Thank you to our long-suffering editor, Jesse Hirsch, for letting me be my whole crazy self who had so many wild ideas, many of which were not at all accessible to a lay audience, but who helped me get there and create a beautiful podcast that I’m so, so proud of.

And of course Ali Aas and other members of the design team who created such beautiful art for our logo and for each of our episodes. Truly this was a beautiful podcast, not just because of me, but because of the whole team. Thanks also for technical support by Dan Schlosser and general support by Mackenzie Burnett and the whole team at Ambrook.

I could not have asked for a better home for this podcast than Offrange. A final note: Offrange, the media outlet that produced this podcast is a hundred percent editorially independent from Ambrook, the fintech company that funds it.