A Skeptic's View of Philanthropic Farmland
To walk land with Lori Ann David requires your full attention. She is a walking encyclopedia, several lifetimes of experience rolled into one, and she talks a million miles a minute, moving between the many subjects that thirty years of farming on the West Coast have given her opinions about.
Aurora Farms, her polyculture, multi-species operation on San Juan Island, has become a cornerstone of the local food system. She sells beef, lamb, pork, chicken, eggs, vegetables, fruit, and flowers, and she hosts regular events like farm dinners and women's circles.
As property around her has grown more expensive, the local land trust and other forms of philanthropic support for agricultural land have taken root. While these efforts are well-intentioned, Lori Ann is skeptical.
Conservation land trusts have a long history of buying land or development rights in order to protect the natural or agricultural legacy of a property. The benefit to the landowner is financial coming in some form of a one time payment or tax deduction, and usually a lower assessed value on the encumbered acreage.
Most criticism of land trusts focuses on their well trodden use by wealthy landowners who treat them as an instrument for preventing development nearby. However Lori Ann worries about something else, something she sees as a looming societal disaster—the lack of viability for local farms.
"The more farming relies upon nonprofits and philanthropic models, the more we turn into a feudal state where young farmers lose the drive and incentives to make a farm run profitably," she says.
Farming to her is hard work that demands knowledge, work ethic, and ingenuity to turn a profit. She sells dozens of different agricultural products through a variety of channels, and it does not take long on the property to see how much is moving at once. Her argument is that eliminating the need for a farmer to strive also strips away the entrepreneurial ingenuity the work requires.
Her concern is real, but so is the math working against the next generation. Farmland and housing have both inflated sharply over the last ten to twenty years, with USDA figures putting the rise in cropland values at 96 percent between 2011 and 2025. In the 2022 National Young Farmer Survey, 59 percent of young farmers called finding affordable land to buy very or extremely challenging, up from 39 percent five years prior. The cost of land is the largest barrier to entry, which is precisely what has created the conditions where philanthropic support is needed.
More than creating healthy communities for people to live in, we see agrihoods as a needed model within the food system as a way to build profitable pathways for the next generation of farmers to supply residents with nutritious food grown locally. It may not be the decentralized, more laissez faire arrangement Lori Ann hopes for in small farm holdings, but her perspective still lands. Incentives have to be aligned so that farmers hold both land security and the entrepreneurial room to run a viable enterprise.