Check out this SF Chronicle article by our partner Adam Calo, a PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley. He worked with FarmLink and others to develop The Farmland Monitoring Project. Currently, he is abroad on a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct a similar project in Turkey.
For farmers, this land is often someone else’s
Unfortunately, this vision barely exists.
The real problem here is to assume small-scale and beginning farmers are owners of the land they farm. In fact, they are most likely renters, often commuting long distances from their residences to their farm plots, paying rent, and carrying out a farm business under the shadow of their landlord. The owner is ultimately the one who shapes the form of agriculture while farmers, as tenants, operate with reduced autonomy. Despite this reality, a collective faith in the dream of individual farmer-owners blinds efforts to improve the food system.
The beginning farmer movement would benefit from the sense of urgency within the policy campaigns represented by fair housing advocates.
At a 19-acre farm in Hollister (San Benito County), a farm family of Roberto Gonzalez, Paula Rojas and son Eddie Diaz spent five years transforming an unused piece of land into an established organic operation, selling to markets throughout the Bay Area. Rojas works the farmer’s markets alongside her other day job, and Diaz, a college student, does a bit of everything, from farm management with Gonzalez to working the Thursday market. He often says he wants to continue work as an organic farmer.
But now, the landowner wants to sell, and it’s uncertain if they will be able to acquire the financing to purchase the farm outright. Doing so might bring on an overwhelming debt, but leaving in search of new farmland means abandoning the improvements to the land. For Gonzalez, this dynamic of being a tenant farmer played out in his decision to take out a loan to install a well on their rental property. He explains:
“Right now we are surviving because we put in our own well, that cost us $20,000. And that’s one of those things where you can’t take it with you when you leave. I think, maybe we have three more years here, but I don’t know if we will recover that investment.”
The experience of Gonzalez’s business, Golden Rule Organics, is more representative of the new farmer movement. A movement that must also contend with the complexities and challenges of tenant farming in landscape of increasingly stingy rental markets.
For prospective farmers in California, it is a renter’s world. Some 41 percent of the state’s farmland is rented out, and remaining an owner of these lands is incredibly valuable. California farmland owners surveyed in 2012 received $1.9 billion in rent payments. Consequently, these ag lands are not likely to change hands. Agricultural landlords overwhelmingly plan to place their parcels permanently into family of individual trusts, rather than electing to sell land at auction or other forms of public markets (79 percent of respondents).
Farmers who lease face a unique set of challenges that contradict the ideals of small-scale agricultural revitalization. Tensions between the owner’s and the farmer’s vision of production arise, and the landlords’ power to assert their authority is dominant. The plots of land that new tenant farmers can gain access to are often on regions of lesser quality, on sloping terrain, in semi-residential areas, and with poor access to water. All of these landlord-tenant dynamics occur within a national landscape of racially skewed farmland-ownership demographics. Nationally, 98 percent of farmland is owned by individuals identifying as white, extending the domains of potential tenant discrimination into the agricultural case.
To put this issue in other terms, if a farmer is on a month-to-month lease, they simply are not incentivized to take action for the long term, like make habitat improvements, or even plant a tree. Think of a tenant in a dilapidated downtown apartment under constant threat of eviction. What incentive would they have to say, repair cracks in the foundation?
By upholding an antiquated Jeffersonian ideal of yeoman farming, only certain types of farmers will benefit from the current status quo of efforts that facilitate land transfer to young farmers. Ignoring the structural issues of tenant farming is a failure of equitable reform, and it’s worth asking precisely who gets to be a successful new farmer in our agricultural system.
In San Francisco, where a housing crisis threatens vulnerable tenants’ access to shelter, there is a shared outrage that a basic social right is out of reach. So what do activists do? They lobby for the construction of new subsidized units; they urge reform of private-property policies that allow for owners to legally evict tenants with little cause; they challenge short-term housing models that favor private-property owners with ballot measures; they create institutional support for the increased enforcement of existing housing laws like rent control. Finally, they challenge developers in the city that only seek to build units for the uber-wealthy.
For tenant farmers, the opposite is true. A plethora of small-farm training workshops, incubators, training organizations, and federal funding mechanisms provide technical assistance for farmers in the hope that new competencies will bring agricultural success. In a renter’s world, this simply is not enough. It would be like offering a tenant with a broken heater a course on appliance maintenance instead of challenging the landlord to uphold their rental contract and make the repair.
A dialogue on equitable agriculture leases, profit sharing of capital improvements, incentives for long-term agricultural decisions, and the public oversight of more agricultural lands, would represent a sea change in the approach to addressing challenges for small farmers. The federal Department of Agriculture has recently made novel commitments to strengthening programs for small-scale farmers in comparison to a history of commodity agriculture policy supports. Addressing the vulnerable position of tenant farmers should certainly be a part of these reforms. Supporting small-scale farmers, and all the work consumers hope for them to accomplish means rethinking renter’s rights in an agricultural context.
Farming mostly happens on private lands, but it is still an intrinsically public act. We all have a stake in who gets to make the decisions on the land that shape our food system. The next time you are at a farmers’ market, instead of asking your favorite vendor about their tomatoes, try asking them about their lease.
