'They just need land': young farmers struggle to find affordable acreage

[Jilly_in_VA]

Olivia Cleveland misses her farm – the chickens, the donkeys, the smell of the dirt and the way the wind would blow at three o’clock in the afternoon. For almost three years, Cleveland, 30, lived on a farm in north-east Alabama, owned by her then husband. She spent her days doing hard physical labor, cultivating land she deeply cared for, but she owned none of it on paper. So when Cleveland and her husband divorced in 2021, she lost everything.

Since then, Cleveland has spent the last two years rebuilding and working towards buying her own farm in her home state of Tennessee.

But Cleveland, now the south-east organizing manager at the nonprofit National Young Farmers Coalition, still can’t afford the average price of farmland in Tennessee, which has increased by 10% in the last year. Fifteen, 10 or even five years ago, Cleveland says, she could have afforded land. “But in 2023, it is very difficult to find that,” she says.

In April, Cleveland finally found a small cottage and an acre of land where she plans to grow her own food.

Across the country, the cost of farmland is the highest it has been since the 1970s. From 2021 to 2022 alone, value per acre increased by 12.4% and it now costs on average $3,800 an acre, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). In some states it’s even higher: last year farmland in California averaged $12,000 an acre. These record-high prices are making it nearly impossible for young and emerging farmers to break into the industry. With the current generation of farm owners nearing retirement age and over 40% of the country’s farmland – that’s about 400m acres (162m hectares) – expected to change hands in the next decade, there are thousands of young farmers ready to take over. But with limited financial resources and farmland prices continuing to rise, many can’t access land to grow food.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/22/young-farmers-farm-land-cost

USDA policy toward small farmers needs to be changed. Now.

[leftstreet]

1. We need a new Homestead Act

And a Rent Act, a Healthcare Act, a Guaranteed Income Act....

The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead. In all, more than 160 million acres (650 thousand km2; 250 thousand sq mi) of public land, or nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States, was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River.

An extension of the homestead principle in law, the Homestead Acts were an expression of the Free Soil policy of Northerners who wanted individual farmers to own and operate their own farms, as opposed to Southern slave owners who wanted to buy up large tracts of land and use slave labor, thereby shutting out free white farmers.

The first of the acts, the Homestead Act of 1862, opened up millions of acres. Any adult who had never taken up arms against the federal government of the United States could apply. Women and immigrants who had applied for citizenship were eligible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts

[hunter]

2. Agriculture is the second most environmentally destructive things humans do...

... second only to extracting and burning fossil fuels.

We really ought to minimize agriculture whenever possible, and not encourage "rural lifestyles" which have the double environmental slam of farming and commuting longer distances for shopping and/or work.

In other words, we shouldn't romanticize farming. It's already a horror show with things like industrial scale meat, dairy, and egg production, or worse, "biofuel production."

It's quite possible to be a farmer in an urban environment. In a better world urban land use policies would accommodate this kind of farming.

We need to turn our cities into attractive affordable places where car ownership is unnecessary and people can be farmers or gardeners as they are so inclined.