January 30th, 2025
By Maya Rappaport
AFT New England Team’s 2024 Impacts – Growing Deeper Roots to Back Farmers and Farmland Supporters
New England’s farmers face many complex and compounding threats: some of the most expensive farmland in the country, intense pressure to develop farmland, and increasingly unpredictable weather.
American Farmland Trust’s New England Regional Program seeks to respond to these threats and others by offering resources, programs, and advocacy to keep farmers on the land, promote sound farming practices, and protect farmland.
Our team serves farmers, landowners, and allied service providers and advocates across the six New England states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
With a diverse staff of farmers, scientists, and advocates, we help New England’s agricultural community address risks and innovate with new farming approaches. We support farmers in adopting conservation practices grounded in farmer experiences and peer-reviewed science. We work directly with farmers and landowners, providing technical assistance, financial support, education, regional research collaborations, and holistic farmer-centered learning opportunities.
Our team works to increase the pace of farmland protection and access, helping to optimize the use of public funding for farmland protection. We advocate for policies that help secure New England’s agricultural future, building alliances around empirically grounded, effective, and future-looking policies while campaigning for systemic change.
We are pleased to share these impacts from this past year*!
New England Team’s 2024 Impacts
- We supported and/or trained over 5,000 farmers, ranchers, and landowners through AFT New England programs.
- The New England Policy team’s efforts helped secure $30 million in funding to support farmland protection, climate resilient agriculture and disaster relief, farmland access, and agricultural vitality during the 2023-2024 legislative session.
- We provided or facilitated over $5 million in financial assistance to farmers and landowners across the region.
- Our Conservation Implementation Specialists and Planners assisted 282 farmers in five states, covering 18,229 acres and facilitating almost $4 million in National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) contracts to farmers while providing direct technical support.
- Our four state Regional Conservation Planning Project, focused on regenerative livestock operations in the Connecticut River Watershed, reached a two-year milestone of providing on-the-ground assistance to 110 farms (on 10,000 acres) in four states and awarding over $1.6 million farmer grants to 221 producers.
- We engaged 146 farmers in deep-diving peer learning cohorts while expanding this work into five states, creating community spaces where farmers deepen their knowledge and build strategic plans for their operations’ soil health.
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- 37 farms participated in Soil Health Management Planning cohorts in Massachusetts and Connecticut to co-learn about soil health and write their own Soil Health Management Plans.
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- 14 farms participated in Farmer-Led Innovation cohorts in Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut to explore new strategies to reduce tillage on organic vegetable farms.
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- 88 farmers and farm advisors attended No More Normal climate conversations to share strategies and resources for climate adaptation and resilience.
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- 7 farms participated in a close-knit Dairy Business Innovation Cohort in Vermont where they trialed innovative grazing and forage planting strategies together and co-learned about holistic farm viability and stewardship planning.
- Our New England program staff grew from 21 to 34.
- Our program budget grew by almost 60%, from $3.4 million in Fiscal Year ‘23 to $5.4 million Fiscal Year ‘24.
*Fiscal Year 2024 (10/1/23 – 9/30/24)
Click here to view the 2024 AFT New England Impact Report
