Introducing American Farmland Trust’s New York Farmland Access Fund
If you ask any new or aspiring farmer today, you will likely find that their top challenges to getting started in farming include access to affordable land and capital.
We see this in surveys and reports, and we hear it directly from farmers who reach out through American Farmland Trust’s Farmland for a New Generation New York program. At the same time, it is becoming less common for farms to be passed down to the next generation within families – and that’s a big deal when one-third of our state’s farmers are 65 and older.
Following the Covid-19 pandemic, these challenges have become even more pronounced. Farmland prices have skyrocketed, putting it further out of reach for most farmers, and especially for farmers of color, LGBTQIA+ folks, women, and others who have faced historic and ongoing discrimination or marginalization or have been affected by a lack of generational wealth and access to land, cost-sharing programs, technical assistance, and other support.
As more people leave cities and buy farms at inflated prices, the amount of available farmland – especially near urban markets – is shrinking.
A Long Legacy of Protecting Farmland and Keeping Farmers on the Land
American Farmland Trust is meeting this challenge with an innovative approach: Buy-Protect-Sell-plus (BPS+). This process allows organizations like AFT to purchase at-risk farmland, protect the land with a conservation easement, and then sell it back to farmers at a reduced price thanks to the easement restrictions and other affordability mechanisms.
When land doubles as a retirement plan for a senior farmer, having an intermediary like AFT to step in and hold the property while the new or next generation prepares to buy is critically important. This creates a bridge — keeping farmland from being sold to the highest bidder, who is often not a farmer.
That’s why AFT created the New York Farmland Access Fund: to holistically address these access and affordability challenges in New York. The fund follows the BPS+ framework, with an added layer of technical assistance to support beginning and underserved farmers with establishing successful farm businesses and implementing regenerative agricultural practices that benefit all of us.
The “plus” in BPS+ indicates innovation beyond traditional Buy-Protect-Sell models, ensuring that once farmers gain access to land, they have the support to stay on it. That includes working with farmers to encourage regenerative practices on protected land – practices that have demonstrated economic and environmental benefits.
BPS+ not only creates land access opportunities for the next generation but also ensures good agricultural stewardship on farms and support for farmers to thrive on their new land.
It’s a complicated process, but one that our team is uniquely positioned to support. AFT is one of the oldest continuously operating land trusts in the country and is the only U.S. agricultural land trust working at a nation-wide scale. AFT has a 40-year history and proven track record of directly protecting farmland, advocating for strong support for conservation at the federal, state, and local levels, and building capacity for land trusts, public agencies, and others to help protect over 8 million acres of agricultural land across the nation.
