Case Study: Agrarian Trust
Location: USA
Investment type: Philanthropic and land donations
Agrarian Trust’s mission is to support land access for the next generation of farmers. They are a single national land trust with multiple local community land commons across the United States.
An Agrarian Commons is:
- A nonprofit landholding entity
- Governed locally, with all decisions made by a board that includes representatives of Agrarian Trust, and local partners and stakeholders.
- Dedicated to the preservation of farming, farmland, and localised food systems.
The first Agrarian Commons was created in 2020, and currently, there are 12 Agrarian Commons in varying stages of development across the USA. The place-based model has been created to enable community sovereignty and governance of natural resources, and challenge corporate and large-scale agriculture land-ownership models.
The national organisation, Agrarian Trust, works with communities interested in developing an Agrarian Commons to identify appropriate land and secure philanthropic donations to purchase that land. The Agrarian Trust prioritises land and communities that have experienced extraction and exploitation. The trust also supports communities to develop a Commons governance structure, made up of local community members.
The land title is transferred to the Agrarian Commons, who then work to convey affordable and equitable leases for the purpose of regenerative farming to enhance local food access, ecological sustainability, and community benefit.
The model has been designed so each Commons can grow no larger than a maximum of twelve farms, to ensure operations and structures can remain at human scale.
Each Commons is supported by financial, legal and farming advisors in the design and ongoing operations. Measures have been put in place to ensure ongoing financial viability including:
- No loans are used to acquire land, only philanthropic and land donations.
- Commons land is limited to raising debt to 20% of land value.
- The revenue and cost sharing model of Commons is structured so that as more farms enter, the overall budget from collective leases grows and is reinvested into farms and administrative costs.
The model has an express focus on BIPOC communities who have been dispossessed or marginalised from farmland access. The Trust has worked with communities to 'design in' structures to ensure farmers can maintain and build equity through ground leases which enable 'built equity' — farmers can't own the land as it is a community resource, but they retain ownership of buildings and infrastructure they construct and invest in on the land.
Leases are for renewable 99-year terms (or the maximum amount required depending on state law) at affordable rates.
This case study is an extract from Regenerating Investment in Food and Farming: A Roadmap.