We’re in the middle of what people in the agriculture world call a farm succession crisis.
Meanwhile, the kinds of farms many of us pin our dreams on—sustainable, local, worker-owned, owned by people of color, and small to medium scale—are all struggling to continue.
I’m a 29-year-old, first-generation farmer, and I am trying to make a living growing vegetables on one acre of rented land.
As a result, beginning farmers across the country find themselves at a thousand different dead ends—unable to live without working three jobs, expand our markets, buy land, hire consistently, or pay off our student loans.
Rather, it’s a story about land, housing, labor, and retirement, and how the pursuit of rising asset prices has remade the global economy over the past 50 years.
Our elders are retiring and rely on either a land sale or family willing to take over the farm to secure their comfort in retirement.
A few can purchase farms by exiting high-income professions or by using inheritances; the rest of us rent small plots of land, making it a challenge to earn any real money.
It takes large plots and more stable land to make a higher income, and a higher income to secure more land.
policymakers since at least the 1940s are increasingly tied to policies that promote the growth and interests of real estate and finance, and that means keeping asset prices rising.
Ordinary people are promised middle class comfort only through inclusion into debt and asset ownership, whether it’s housing, retirement accounts, student loans, or pyramid schemes.
In her example, African American homeowners who had long been subject to segregation were convinced to take on mortgages by banks now backed by Department of Housing and Urban Development cash.
As sociologist Lisa Adkins writes: “Measures that bring property ownership in reach for some simultaneously work to push prices up further and to put them out of reach for aspiring homeowners.” Each new round of inclusion into homeownership has pushed the price of housing higher, locking out future homeowners.
Pension funds like TIAA, cannabis industry speculators, and aspiring demiurge Bill Gates have all gotten in on agricultural land markets, with profoundly negative consequences for smallholder farmers and Indigenous communities around the planet.
These investors are well-equipped to evade accountability through tax avoidance and regulator shopping, and as absentee owners they tend to be cavalier about deforestation, land theft, and environmental degradation happening on their watch.
Then after each real estate bubble bursts—whether it’s based on house flipping, hemp farming, vacation rentals, or anything else—land prices stay high, beyond more people’s reach.
What would a new structure look like? To start, it would mean setting aside “market access,” “opportunity,” and “market inclusion” as ways of solving social problems. These concepts have meant that we measure progress in dollar terms, equating a few people’s growing nest eggs with the security of all.
The market-based approaches that built the asset economy won’t bring racial equity or workers’ rights, let alone meet visionary calls for reparations and land back.
Investors are not only transforming farmland into a financial asset; carbon credit trading, water futures, crop securities, and a whole host of similar asset classes have become more important in the last 20 years.
Carbon credit trading is an excellent example; leaving carbon capture to high finance has resulted in programs without oversight, without accounting for negative impacts, and without decreasing the CO2 in the atmosphere.
This allows public investment in the kinds of innovation small-scale farms need—local supply chains, renewable energy, and agroecological practices—rather than investor-driven “innovations” that fuel market concentration, like lab meat, energy intensive “smart agriculture,” and genetic patenting.
We’re in a moment when the balance of power between the government and the financial industry is unclear and being rewritten.
As it stands, trade policies are built to benefit the people highest up in the value chain—the FIRE sector, biotechnology companies, and transnational agribusinesses and food processors like Cargill.
There’s another kind between raw commodity suppliers and buyers, and between buyers and sellers of labor, that describes how much market value goes to either side.
Parity sets a floor for commodity prices, using regulation and government support to get farmers fair prices that reflect their expenses.
Agricultural commodity dumping and predatory investment in soy, cattle, and palm oil plantations undermine smallholders everywhere and drive down prices for everyone.
Perhaps most importantly, we need policy that cuts right to the heart of our problems. Land, processing infrastructure, and purchasing power need to be bought outright and given directly to the people who need them.
Likewise, if we want local processors to bring good jobs and healthier food to our communities, build the infrastructure without waiting for private investment.
We’re not struggling alone; we’re tied to movements that stretch far beyond the small world of sustainable agriculture—whether it’s for urban housing justice or for the return of Indigenous land and sovereignty.
If we don’t want the farms of the future to belong entirely to the ultrarich, we need to.