Farmland access and land rights

Farmland matching programs unite farmers looking for stable, long-term access to land, and landowners who have farmland sitting idle, or who wish to donate their land to leave a legacy for future farmers.

Take action

• In the US, connect with one of these five groups working to help new farmers access land.
• Find an existing land access and farmland matching program. In the US, check out Agrarian Trust's Resources List, the National Young Farmers Coalition's Land Access resources, and the Find Farmland and Farm Link tools from American Farmland Trust. In Canada, see the Young Agrarians' Finding Farmland & Land Access Tools. In the UK, support the Landworkers' Alliance New Entrants campaign, and in Europe, connect with Access to Land’s Member Organizations and read its handbook, Europe's New Farmers: Innovative Ways to Enter Farming and Access Land.
• Elsewhere, contact a local land access organization, land-matching program, university agricultural extension, La Via Campesina chapter, or your local government to find programs near you.
• To find farmland owned by a community land trust, see Finding Farmland: A Farmer’s Guide to Working with Land Trusts, by the National Young Farmers Coalition (US).
• Set up a new land access program In Europe with Access to Land's handbook A guide for setting up a land initiative and developing a land strategy.
• Develop a farmer-landowner partnership with guidance from Fresh Start Land Enterprise's Land Partnerships Handbook.
• Consider donating land to a land access organization or community land trust. In the UK, donate land to the Ecological Land Cooperative which will protect it "for ecological agriculture in perpetuity." In the US, if you own farmland, consider gifting it to the Agrarian Commons program of Agrarian Trust, or connect with the American Farmland Trust's national Farm Legacy initiative, which "works to ensure that land remains in farming as it transitions to the next generation, while improving access to land for new farmers."
• Work with your local government and nonprofits to provide farmers with leased land. This is the model employed by the nonprofit Intervale Center, which owns, leases, and manages 350 acres near the city of Burlington, Vermont in the US, and subleases land to ten or more independently owned farms.

Get inspired

• The Young Agrarians land-matching program in British Columbia, Canada, has made 109 matches so far, representing almost 6,000 acres of land.
• Terre de Liens in France is "a civic organization which promotes land preservation and facilitates access to farmland for organic and peasant farmers in France" and has so far connected 320 farmers with land.
• Agrarian Trust in the US has stewarded numerous successful land transfers for aspiring farmers through its Agrarian Commons program, including in Maine, West Virginia, and New Hampshire.
• The American Farmland Trust's Farm Legacy Stories of Success document numerous cases of retiring farmers transferring their farms to the trust to keep it in farming and save it from development.

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Securing affordable farmland is critical if we are to rebuild our local food economies – and it is one of its biggest challenges around the world. As the US National Young Farmers Coalition writes, "Finding secure access to land is the number one barrier preventing a generation of growers from entering the field. Land is also at the root of racial equity, food sovereignty, economic prosperity, public health, and the climate crisis."

Take action

• Browse the guides and resources in Agrarian Trust's Resources List (US), National Young Farmers Coalition's Land Link Directory (US), Young Agrarians' Finding Farmland & Land Access Tools (Canada), and Access to Land’s Member Organizations (Europe). These include land access guides, lists of farm linking and incubation programs, financing information, courses and lease templates.
• Elsewhere, contact a local land access organization, land-matching program, university agricultural extension, La Via Campesina chapter, or your local government to find programs near you.
• Work with local governments to secure land for community food enterprises with Shared Assets' guide Access to Land: Working with Local Authorities (UK).
• Work with your local government and non-profits to provide farmers with leased land. This is the model employed by the nonprofit Intervale Center, which owns, leases, and manages 350 acres near the city of Burlington, Vermont in the US, and subleases land to ten or more independently owned farms.

Get inspired

• Agrarian Trust in the US permanently protects affordable farmland through a variety of innovative commons-based approaches.
• California FarmLink in California, US partners with landowners to purchase farms or transition them to the next generation.
• Equity Trust in New England, US transfers land ownership to a nonprofit entity and leases land to farmers at below-market rates, while farmers own their own buildings and infrastructure.

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Placing land in a community or conservation land trust, agrarian commons, or community-managed farm is a good way to preserve farmland, open space, and community control over land for generations to come.

Get started

• Download the many tools in the Community Land Trust Toolkit provided by the Schumacher Center for New Economics (US). The materials include legal documents used to set up existing land trusts that preserve land for farming, affordable housing, and green building.
• For a deep dive into the theory and practice of creating a community land trust, download Starting a Community Land Trust: Organizational and Operational Choices by the Democracy Collaborative (US). Although first published in 2007, it is still an excellent and thorough guide.
• The Center for Agriculture & Food Systems (US) created this Guide to Creating an Agrarian Commons, a model of land stewardship and access that allows for community ownership of farmland.
• Check out this Beginning Farmers' Guide to Conservation Easements and support the Protecting Farmland program of the American Farmland Trust (US).
• The Community Land Trust Handbook by the National CLT Network provides step-by-step instructions for setting up a community land trust in the UK.
• For those in Europe hoping to set up a land trust, use this guide from Access to Land, a network of European NGOs: Agroecological Farming: A guide for setting up a land initiative and developing a land strategy.
• Organize a campaign to persuade your local government to allocate funds for land trusts. This Campaign Toolkit from the Trust for Public Land can help you get started.
• If you own land, consider donating it to a land access organization or community land trust. In the UK, donate land to the Ecological Land Cooperative which will protect it "for ecological agriculture in perpetuity." If you own farmland in the US, consider gifting it to the Agrarian Commons program of Agrarian Trust.

Get inspired

• The Little Jubba Central Maine Agrarian Commons makes 104 acres of permanent farmland available to 210 Somali Bantu refugee farmers. Read their story in this article: 'We're trying to re-create the lives we had': the Somali migrants who became Maine farmers.
• The 52 land-owning families in a village in Maharashtra, India, have donated all of their agricultural land to the gram sabha (village council). The step was taken to reverse the harmful effects of private ownership of land in agriculture-dependent communities. Read more in this article, Mendha Lekha residents gift all their farms to Gram Sabha.
• In an effort to create more land-based livelihoods in West Virginia as the coal economy withers, a consortium of local government, farmers, and the Agrarian Trust has acquired 82 acres of farmland that will be leased permanently to a non-profit community farm and a farm cooperative. Read more in this article, 'Commons' effort seeks to keep U.S. farmland affordable: indefinitely.
• The nonprofit Intervale Center owns, leases, and manages 350 acres near the city of Burlington, Vermont, and subleases land to ten or more independently owned farms.
• The Montgomery County, Maryland agricultural reserve, adjacent to Washington DC, has protected 30% of the district as agricultural land even under heavy development pressure through a Transfer of Development Rights program. 

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Although systemic economic forces make it difficult for anyone in the US to survive as a farmer  –  and even harder to acquire enough land to start a farm  –  institutional racism and other forms of discrimination have made it all but impossible for people of color. Land-based reparations give land ownership and access to people whose ancestors were enslaved or persecuted, and who continue to experience institutional racism and discrimination today. This approach empowers these farmers to grow the food their communities need. It also enables privileged landowners of means – and others who may be inclined to help – to actively heal wounds that have been inflicted over many generations.

Get started

• Read Soul Fire Farm's Take Action page for a comprehensive guide to supporting reparations work.
• Look through their Reparations Map for Black-Indigenous Farmers, matching those with resources, including land and money, with numerous specific projects and needs of farmers of color, mostly in North America.  
• Check out Resource Generation's Land Reparations and Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit, intended for people with access to land to support land repatriation to Indigenous people. 
• In the US, donate to the National Black Food & Justice Alliance.
• Learn about the Schumacher Center for New Economics' proposal for a Black Commons.

Get inspired

• The Sogorea Te' Land Trust in California created the Shuumi Land Tax, inviting residents of the San Francisco Bay Area to contribute an annual gift that supports the return of indigenous lands to indigenous people.
• The Black Land and Liberation Movement in the US coordinated Reparations Summer: A Land-Based Movement for Black Liberation, to build a movement for land-based reparations and explore how the indigenous sovereignty and Black self-determination movements can work together.
• A Reparations Map for Farmers of Color May Help Right Historical Wrongs, by Andrea King Collier, shares the story of how, "In an effort to address centuries of systemic racism, a new online tool seeks to connect Black, brown, and Indigenous farmers with land and resources."
• In How to Give Land Back, Aaron Fernando describes the work of Dishgamu Humboldt, an indigenous-led community land trust working to return land to the Wiyot tribe in Northern California in the US.

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For centuries, conquest, colonialism and even development have undermined self-reliant economies and extracted their resources for use not by local communities, but for the murky supply chains of the global economic system. Today, that is happening in much of the world through the process of land grabbing. Land grabbing refers to land acquisitions, mostly in the Global South, by corporations, pension funds, governments, and wealthy individuals. The acquired land is used for food and biofuels production for export, or simply for speculation. Land grabbing removes peasant and indigenous communities from their sources of sustenance, in turn generating poverty, hunger and environmental destruction. In fact, research reveals that as many as 550 million people in Asia, Africa, and Oceania could be fed from land that has been taken over in land grabs. Further, Oxfam reports that "more than 60 percent of crops grown on land bought by foreign investors in developing countries are intended for export, instead of for feeding local communities."

Take action

• Join and support these 15 organizations defending land rights and fighting against land grabs.
• Support the No Land, No Life campaign against land and resource grabbing, organized by Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific and the Asian Peasant Coalition.
• Many university endowments and retirement funds are invested in agribusiness ventures stemming from land grabs. Understand the issue by reading the articles Stopping Colleges’ Land Grabs: Farmers and Faculties Unite and Harvard's Billion Dollar Farmland Fiasco.
• Actively resist your university's complicity in land grabbing with Stop Land Grabs' Toolkit to Take Action to Stop Land Grabs at Colleges and Universities.
• Learn which pension funds contribute to land grabs by visiting the websites of GRAIN, National Family Farm Coalition, and Farm Land Grab, and to deforestation by visiting Deforestation Free Funds. Ask your labor union or professional association to pass a resolution against land grabbing by pension funds.
• Hold your pension or superannuation fund responsible for unethical investments; see the TIAA petition against land grabbing as an example.
   

  Get inspired

• Pesticide Action Network Asia-Pacific's No Land, No Life! campaign against land and resource grabbing in the Asia-Pacific region has, through coordinated actions, successfully stopped, delayed or exposed many land and resource grabs.
• Students at Vanderbilt University in the US ran a successful divestment campaign leading the university to withdraw millions of dollars from a company financing land grabs in Africa.
• At Harvard University in the US, the student group Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard is currently running a divestment campaign along with a coalition of NGOs to push the university to withdraw its investments in land grabs in Brazil.

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Many people have a lawn and would love to see food grown on it, but don't have the time or expertise. Other people are itching to get their hands in the soil, but don't have or can't afford their own land. Enter yard sharing programs – connecting these two groups and enabling more food gardens to flourish.

Take action

• If you have an unused lawn, invite neighbors without land to grow food on yours.
• If you don't have land, offer to create and maintain a garden in a neighbor's yard.
• Check out Shared Earth (US), an online platform that "connects people who have land, with people who want to garden or farm," as well as Farm My Yard (US) offering similar resources and ideas.
• Build a lawn-sharing system for your whole community using Utah Yard Share's toolkit Share a Yard as a model.

Get inspired

• Liberating Lawns in Toronto, Canada connects Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) young farmers with landowners.
• Farm it Forward in Sydney, Australia connects urban and suburban landowners with young people interested in farming. The landowner gets a weekly box of fresh produce, and the young gardeners gain valuable growing experience and a stipend. All excess produce is sold locally, and all funds are dedicated to continue employing young people to grow food.
• The nonprofit Fleet Farming, in Orlando, US converts the lawns of private homes into market gardens. Volunteers maintain the garden and share the harvest between homeowners and low-income farmers markets.
• The Back-Farms program in Salt Lake City, US "connects volunteer Garden Apprentices with senior citizens to build, cultivate, and maintain organic gardens in their backyards, providing a hands-on educational experience, connections, and fresh, local produce to all participants."

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Land reform is a global movement to reverse the growing inequality of land ownership that concentrates more and more land into fewer hands, depriving millions of people of the ability to secure livelihoods as small-scale farmers. Land reform efforts, such as those demanded by the international peasant’s movement, La Via Campesina, aim to equitably distribute land in all countries to enable and support small-scale peasant farmers.

Take action

• Explore the various toolkits to support land reform for agroecological farming and smallholders' livelihood security put together by the International Land Coalition, covering everything from diverse land tenure strategies, to indigenous peoples' and community land rights, to effective actions against land grabbing.
• Support the No Land, No Life! campaign of Pesticide Action Network Asia-Pacific, in solidarity with peasant struggles for land rights and against land grabbing and corporate land consolidation in the Asia-Pacific region.
• In Europe, get involved with the Access to Land network of grassroots organizations securing land for agroecological farming. See examples of good practices from across the continent, and find and join a member organization on their Members page.
• Join La Via Campesina, the international peasants' movement, and support campaigns in many countries pursuing equitable land reform for advancing food sovereignty.

Get inspired

• In his article, Food Sovereignty and Redistributive Land Reform, Peter Rosset chronicles many forms of land reform including "land reform from below" in which millions of landless peasant farmers have successfully occupied and reclaimed millions of hectares of land in various countries, and the many positive social and environmental outcomes of this reform.

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