Remember all the COVID-related shortages we faced five years ago? I bet you remember toilet paper; it made for the best jokes. But you may have forgotten the big hiccups that occurred in the supply of something more significant than pulp-based hygiene products: Food.
“The supply chains were screwed up; people in other places couldn’t find what they needed,” recalled Francine Miller, a faculty member of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Why did she say “other places”?
“My local food co-op had a lot of stuff. We had so many farms I didn’t have to worry about feeding myself or my family during COVID,” she said.
That, in a nutshell, is a big reason to support local food. If there are farms around then we can still eat even if everything goes kablooey.
The NH Food and Agriculture Strategic Plan has a goal of getting the New England region to produce 30% of its own food by 2030. That’s a stretch – New Hampshire only produces 3% of its food right now and the rest of the region isn’t much better – but if it’s at all possible we will need a lot more working farms.
Which leads to a bedrock problem: Land is too expensive here.
“Buying land as an individual or typical nuclear family increasingly is impossible … especially for newer farmers, for farmers of color or who have been marginalized in some way, and farmers who are under-capitalized, don’t come from inter-generational wealth,” said Miller.
The Strategic Plan is aware of this problem, of course. Among its 142 recommendations – 142! Good grief! – a number concern ways to create more farms. I wanted to know more about one titled “Explore opportunities to enable land to be used by farmers without requiring ownership,” and was directed to Miller, an attorney who has been looking into this issue for a while.
The obvious solution is for a private owner to lease land to a farmer. This is common but not perfect because the lure of development is always lurking around.
“They don’t have the high debt burden of a mortgage but it doesn’t provide security, which is the other thing that farmers need. They spend all this time and money building soil health, creating the space you need … and then the land owner decides ‘I don’t want to do this any more’ and you’re out,” said Miller.
Also common are agricultural easements, in which the owner gets a one-time payment in return for limiting future uses of the land to farming.
“American Farmlands Trust uses easements as a way to reduce the price of land. The Vermont Land Trust has done this a ton,” Miller said. “VLT buys land, puts an easement on it to reduce the price, then sells it to a farmer.”
The national Agrarian Trust helps non-profit community groups purchase a piece of land – “maybe with trust help, through fund-raising locally or from philanthropy” – then issue long-term leases to farmers.
Easement can have drawbacks, depending on how they’re drawn up and what is allowed under local laws. They may only apply to the current owner, for example, and they can restrict other options such as ground-leases.
A ground lease is sort of the way mobile home parks work. The land-owner continues to own the land but the farmer owns everything above it. This lets them build equity by building barns and other structures.
“This is how community land trusts – CLTs – operate. We’re collecting examples of this but it’s few and far between,” Miller said. Part of the issue are state laws about property ownership. “No state prohibits this – some might make it easier – but it’s not always obvious.”
Government can help, too. “Minnesota and other states have enacted some kind of beginning-farmer tax credit –if you sell land to a beginning farmer you can get a tax credit on appreciated value of the land.”
None of these possibilities are slam-dunks and all of them require a lot of work to create and maintain. Which leads to the unspoken requirement underlying them all: We have to think that local farms are important.
Let’s be honest; most of us regard farms as charming decorations to the New Hampshire Way of Life but not central to it. We are sad when they disappear but we won’t do much to help them stay around aside from buying a couple of things at the farmers market.
Perhaps the most important thing the Food and Agriculture Strategic Plan can do is to make us realize the importance of keeping farms around – not as entertainment but as a vital part of society. Their value will only increase as the climate gets wilder and chips away at the global industry of wholesale agriculture that has created the supermarket cornucopia we take for granted.
Remember Miller’s experience during those COVID shortages. There was a lesson to be learned there. We should learn it.
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