Gaining Ground in Maine

Gaining Ground in Maine

Summary

The goal of Gaining Ground in Maine is to encourage and improve the practices of agricultural land preservation. We will introduce a model of preservation that will permanently protect whole farms – the soils, the infrastructure and their affordability for farmers. We have surveyed 100 community supported agriculture (CSA) farmers on their land tenure issues, provided five workshops to 125 farmers and 8 land trusts, and have helped develop leases for Crystal Spring Farm in Brunswick and Broadturn Farm in Scarborough. We have done initial consultations with Coastal Mountains Land Trust in Camden, Great Works Land Trust in Berwick and H.O.M.E. in Orland.

Objectives/Performance Targets

We are reaching out to farmers to provide education related to alternative forms of land tenure that can increase access to farms and make them affordable. Our goal is to help draft protection plans (legal documents and financing) for three to six farms in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of these protection models.

In addition, we hope to increase the understanding of land trusts for the need to do more than just purchase the development rights of farms if their real goal is to protect farms. In a growing number of communities purchasing the development rights does not bring the value of the farm down enough so that a farmer can afford to purchase and farm it.

Accomplishments/Milestones

Workshops: We have managed to draw interesting groups of people, three of the five were a mixture of both farmers and land trusts that lead to some interesting networking. The farmers ranged from apprentices to farmers nearing retirement. All of the land trusts who participated were already doing some level of farm preservation. One unexpected result of one workshop was the exposure of some farmers resentment for ‘land trust farms” claiming that they created unfair competition to the already struggling frmers in their areas.

Direct technical assistance: We have been working with Broadturn Farm and Scarborough Land Trust and Crystal Spring Farm and Brunswick Topsham Land Trust to develop a mechanism to allow the farmers to gain equity from their work on these farms owned by the land trusts. We have drafted 99-year leases for both of these projects and are in the process of negotiating the terms between the farmers and the land trusts. It has been consistently easy to work with the farmers and remains problematic to get the land trusts, who are mostly staffed by volunteer boards, to focus.

The most consistent lesson learned is that it takes a lot of time and commitment to put a project together, both on the part of the farmers and the land trust, but that taking that time up front creates a self-sustaining project that works over the long haul.

Impacts and Contributions/Outcomes

It is my hope that once we have a couple of projects completed here in Maine that the seeds that we have sown in our outreach efforts will pay off. In our conversations with people, it seems clear that there is a growing understanding of the problem of access to land for farmers and a desire to implement a model that addresses the issues. But there is a frustration with the amount of work needed to protect one farm and a fear that there is nowhere to find the financial resources to do this work on the scale that is needed. The general public wants public dollars spent on farm preservation to keep the farms actively farmed and so they are very excited to have the work include the protection of the land’s affordability to farmers. It is slow work to prove that this is possible but I believe that this will bear fruit in the near future.

Collaborators: