Show Notes
If we're serious about building a better food system, we have to start with land.
Across the world, land is getting more and more expensive. In the United States, farmland values have nearly doubled since 2011. What we're witnessing is an unprecedented land rush — one that's driving prices to levels simply unattainable by farmers and ranchers and the people we're actually asking to grow our food. As land is sold to development, we are losing an estimated 2000 acres of farmland every single day.
But the bigger story is what's coming. More than 40% of American farmland is owned by people over the age of 65. What this means is that roughly 370 million acres, an area larger than Texas and California combined, is expected to change hands over the next twenty years. Who ends up owning it will shape our food system for decades.
This mini-series is about what a food system built on cooperative principles could actually look like. In a world where land is becoming a speculative asset owned by distant investors, what would it look like to take land back - to hold it in common, to make sure the people actually farming it can afford to be there?
We need alternatives. And one of the clearest working answers I've come across is Fordhall Community Farm. It's an almost unbelievable underdog tale that has a lot to teach us about the future of land access in our food system.
More about Charlotte and Fordhall Community Farm [https://www.fordhallfarm.com/]:
After having fought hard to save their family home from development, Charlotte settled into her dream job managing the FCLI as their General Manager.
Charlotte is passionate about communities connecting with nature, our landscape and the nutritious food it provides. Her work guiding the Fordhall Community Land Initiative as the General Manager, supports this journey for us all. In-line with the FCLI's commitment to inspire others, Charlotte offers consultancy to other land-based community groups across the country who want to learn from Fordhall and follow in our footsteps.
With this in mind, Charlotte and Ben published a book in 2007, The Fight for Fordhall Farm, which charts their lives at Fordhall from childhood to community-ownership. The book was sold in bookstores across the country and there was even a musical based on it, which toured Shropshire in 2008.
Charlotte is also one of the Community Leaders driving forward the campaign for a Community Power Act.
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Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O'Doherty.
More from Agrarian Futures
This week we go to Germany to learn about a cooperative called Kulturland who has been working on solving the farming land access problem for over a decade. Kulturland raises money from everyday people and uses that capital to buy farms, take them off the speculative market, and provides farmers with a secure lease. In return, the farmer commits to farming organically and keeping the farm open to the community.
We often talk about how the food system is broken, but what would it look like to build one that is better?
Hi everyone - Emma here. We're deep in prep for our new miniseries on Agrarian Futures where we will be exploring the potential for a better food system rooted in cooperative principles.
Our guest today Will Potter's new book, Little Red Barns [https://www.willpotter.com/littleredbarns], started as a tale about censorship in journalism around industrial agriculture, but became something much bigger: a 10 year investigation look at how factory farming, an ages old mythos of family farms, and the rise of authoritarian politics have all worked in tandem to produce social, economic, and ecological disaster.
Enjoy Part 2 of Emma and Austin's reflections on 2.5 years of Agrarian Futures. In this episode, they highlight the commonalities they see in the big success stories of the regenerative movement, including cooperative economics, finding the right niche in the food system, learning to tell your story, and much much more.