February 26th, 2025
By Teresa O'Connor
Chelsea Gazillo Supports California Policy for Agriculture and Food
American Farmland Trust is delighted to announce that Chelsea Gazillo has been appointed as the new Senior California Policy Manager. In this role, she will conduct research, provide education to stakeholders, develop policy, advocate to the California State Legislature, and manage outreach efforts. Chelsea brings extensive policy knowledge to the Golden State, after serving for seven years in New England, most recently as Senior New England Policy Manager and Director of AFT’s Working Lands Alliance.
A Family Tradition
Chelsea says her love of local and fresh agricultural products was passed down to her by ancestors on both sides of the family.
“My maternal grandfather was a dairy farmer,” she remembers. “By the time I arrived, he was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations but lived across the street from the family farm. When I was 10 years old, my mom’s family held a public auction at the farm to sell the dairy. That was the first time I understood how hard it is to lose everything they and previous generations had worked so hard to build to ensure they and their children had a viable livelihood.”
Her paternal grandfather was a first-generation Italian American, who bought a house in Agawam, MA after serving in the U.S. Army during World War 2.
“Around the same time, my mom’s family sold their farm, my Grandpa Gazillo saw his neighbor, a corn farmer, sell a large parcel of prime and important farmland to a developer,” says Chelsea. “It was the 1990’s and housing development in the Springfield metro area was rampant.”
When Chelsea interviewed for her first role at AFT as the Connecticut Working Lands Alliance Director, she recalled these childhood moments. She thought about the government policies that had incentivized development and encouraged smaller struggling dairy farmers to sell right after the Farm Crisis of the 1980s.
“I was only 10 years old at the time,” she says, “but I quickly understood what the farm meant for my local community. In my undergraduate and graduate studies, I learned more about climate change and the need to support farmers in making regenerative agricultural investments. But what keeps me inspired to stay in this work are my lived experiences and the farmers I get to work with daily.”
When Policy Shines
Chelsea sees policy advocacy and policy reforms as ways to provide long-term, meaningful changes to producers. These changes include establishing state level grant programs that assist producers who want to protect their land and implement more soil health practices through both technical and financial assistance.
They also include advocating for tax credits that incentivize more land transfers from senior farmers looking to retire to new, beginning, and historically marginalized producers, among many other policy changes.
“State policy has always excited me because we can be innovative and nimble,” explains Chelsea. “We can advocate, monitor, and evaluate the successes of policy concepts so they can be replicated in other states or at the federal level. There is so much power at the state and local level to advance meaningful changes for farmers. I have worked at AFT for seven years and in that short time, I have seen AFT make some extremely meaningful changes at the state level, which have made agriculture more resilient for producers across the country.”
Regional Differences and Similarities
Chelsea sees the issues facing New England and California agriculture as surprisingly similar in many ways.
“The quantity and diversity of California’s agriculture is much vaster than in New England, of course,” she says. “Yet both regions have some of the most expensive farmland in the country.”
According to the USDA NASS Land Values Survey, Rhode Island has the most expensive farm real estate in the nation, with Massachusetts and Connecticut in tie for the third most expensive farm real estate. “What surprised me was that California is in fourth place with the average price of a farm real estate acre priced at $13,400 an acre,” adds Chelsea.
The 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture revealed that the average farmer in California is now almost 60 years old, which is slightly higher than the average age of producers in the country at 58 years old. “The need for policies that protect farmland and promote farmland access opportunities in both New England and California is ever apparent as the nation faces a generational shift in farming,” she says.
Both regions have experienced severe weather-related events that have made it harder to be a farmer in New England and California, from frost and flooding in the East to wildfires in the West. However, both regions are also leading the way in advancing disaster relief programs that support farmers, while also assisting producers who want to transition towards regenerative agricultural practices that increase their climate resiliency.
The similarities don’t stop there. “The two coastal regions share a thriving aquaculture industry and have a plethora of small and mid-sized diversified vegetable operations,” says Chelsea. “Labor issues are more prevalent in California but there is a shortage of farm workers across the nation.”
Looking Ahead
Many states, including in New England, look to California for ideas on how to protect agriculture. Chelsea is eager to get to work in the Golden State and explore creative ways to pass policies that support farmers on the ground. These include implementing Prop 4 that passed on November’s 2024 California ballot, establishing a statewide definition for agrivoltaics, and working to secure more funding for the state’s agricultural and ranchland protection programs including the Sustainable Agricultural Lands Program (SALC) and California Farmland Conservancy Program.
“I’m looking forward to working in coalitions and building partnerships with a wide variety of organizations and farmers to support these key priorities,” Chelsea adds.
“I want to share what I have learned in New England with California producers, service providers, fellow advocates, communities, land trusts, government officials and legislators as I fully transition into my new role. Learning, listening to their needs, and creating consensus on how we can work collaboratively to make agriculture thrive in California will be pivotal to our success.”
If you ever want to have coffee or set up a short virtual meeting to learn more about Chelsea and her background, or share more about your perspectives and work, please reach out at cgazillo@farmland.org
A few ways that AFT’s policy work helps other organizations:
- AFT has a long history of working on state policy to improve State Purchase of Agriculture Conservation Easement Programs or PACE programs. Staff across the organization have a track record of working at every level of land protection from “completing deals” to writing reports that analyze how much farmland we have protected and how much more we will need to protect if we want to promote Better Built Cities, as outlined within AFT’s Farms Under Threat 2040 report.
- AFT’s Farmland Information Center and national teams regularly release informed research that can aid states in advancing a sweep of food system policies. Many research efforts are done in collaboration with universities. This was the case with AFT’s Land Access Policy Incentive Research project, where we partnered with Indiana University and Portland State University to analysis the effectiveness of land access policy incentives like beginning farmer tax credits.
- AFT has state policy managers across the country, who collectively work on similar bills and issue areas. This gives them a unique opportunity to learn from one another and provides a space where they can workshop potential advocacy campaigns together. They also share tips on how to bring together unlikely allies to advance common goals. An example is affordable housing and farmland protection sectors to advance Smart Growth policies.
Learn more about AFT’s California Policy priorities.