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Creating an Agricultural Easement for our Farm
Our Path- Uniting our family farm with local communities in a partnership committed to land stewardship Our Family Farm-A little about us and our reasons for creating the Easement. The Community Equity Trust-Some information about the organization that we are working with. Your Part In Our Farm-How you can help us achieve our goals of Farm Preservation. Our Agricultural Easement -An explanation of our agricultural easement.
The What, When, Where, Why and How Questions-The most frequently asked questions
In an era where family farmers in California and across the nation are struggling to hold on to their farms, Good Humus has decided to venture on a path that we believe can be a model for other farms in California and beyond. This path unites family with their local communities in a partnership committed to stewardship of agriculture lands in accordance with sustainable and environmentally sound practices. The way in which the community and our farm will commit to each other is by putting a shared Equity agricultural easement on our farm. To establish such a easement, a publicly funded land trust purchases the nonagricultural value of our property. Legally binding restrictions are then placed on the farm's deed which ensures that the land will be kept in active farming use, will be farmed with environmentally responsible methods, and will be valued solely on the basis of its agricultural value in the establishment of any future resale price. In this way we take our land out of the world of land speculation and place it in the world of environmentally responsible food production, while also reducing and stabilizing the land's value so that future farmers can afford to purchase and work this land. To safeguard our agriculture land base it is crucial to have community involvement. this work cannot be done by farmers alone. You can help us in the process by contributing your skills and/or finances to our effort to create an easement. Once we place the easement on our farm a public land trust will hold and oversee these easement rights for the benefit of the community. In this way, a community contributor can insure that they and their children will play a part in maintaining the family farm community that so many people in the U.S. have grown up with as a foundation of our country. Good humus is a 20-acre diversified farm that supports three families and produces mixed fruits and vegetables, herbs, flowers and value-added agricultural products year-round. We are committed to develop intensively rather that extensively and to market locally or regionally rather that nationally or internationally. For the past 27 years, we at Good Humus have been selling organically grown food to a highly supportive group of people at the Davis Food Coop, the Davis Farmer's Market and the Sacramento Natural Food Coop. For the last 10 years, we have been providing food for consumers in Davis, Woodland, Sacramento and now, San Francisco through our Community Supported Agriculture weekly subscription box program. During these same 10 years, we have been increasingly involved with local school district's lunch programs and farm-to-school visits. Several summer programs emphasizing regional environmental awareness for urban school students have been held on our farm. At this time our primary motivation for establishing an easement of the farm is to stabilize the work we have already accomplished and to provide an opportunity for farmers of the future. Even with experience and desire to farm, the farmers we have trained at Good Humus have been unable to afford or obtain access to secure land in our area. They and other young farmers are unable to achieve a viable living, or provide for their families. After several years of farming, we have realized that it often takes more than a lifetime to develop a mature, viable farm. Through luck, help, and hard work, we have started on the road to this goal, but much remains to be done. Contact: Good Humus, 12255 Co. Rd. 84A Capay CA 95607 Good Humus is fortunate to work with Equity Trust, a non-profit community land trust in Turner Falls, Mass. Their Trust is one of only a handful of organization in the United States that have experience in developing, establishing and then managing agricultural easements that work on creating legal documents which includes options for farms to be continued in farming, the farms use sustainable practices, and that the farm are affordable to the next generation of farmers.
Equity Trust Inc (ETI) is a 501[c][3] nonprofit corporation, committed to promoting equity in the world by changing the way people think about and hold property. ETI provides a forum for exploring the balance of public and private interests in property, land tenure counseling and financing for community supported agriculture, and develops and supports alternative models and tools of land tenure. The Equity Trust Fund, a program of ETI, evolved to support our mission through: providing financing to community development and conservation projects with emphasis on demonstrating alternative land tenure models; offering a vehicle for the divestment and/or socially responsible investment of personal and institutional wealth; stimulating reflection on the origin of value and the social mortgage on property and wealth; and generating revenue to support the organization, either directly or indirectly. These resources finance projects with priority given to those in greatest need. Contact: Equity Trust, P.O. Box 746, Turner Falls, Mass. 01376, phone: 413-863-9038 or at www.equitytrust.org
We are asking our community to be a part of organizing and finance the establishment of an easement on our land. This easement will ensure that this farm will be held in perpetuity for farming and food production for our community for generations to come. We feel that the responsibility of land ownership and guaranteed local food production needs to be shared with our surrounding food community and not solely on the farmers. The benefits to the community is:
We are in the process of a Farm Preservation Campaign and trying to raise $300,000 to purchase our Agricultural Land Easement. We are eager to connect with individuals and organizations that have an interest in our work Here are several ways you can help:
The What, When, Where, Why and How Questions What are we Doing?
We are creating a new form of an Easement, a legal document that will sell some
of the rights of ownership to a Public Land Trust. Our goal is to find a way to
maintain a vibrant local economy by creating a way for communities to partner
with farm land, farms, and farm families so that this local infrastructure that
we have spend our lives building can be continued, thus creating a food security
for communities and a land security for farmers.
Our easement is to ensure that:
What is an Easement and how is ours Different?
We have chosen to hit the save button stabilizing our work through the use of
easement by adding additional restrictions to our legal title of ownership to
the 20 acres of GHP.
How Does the Easement work?
The easement is a legal document held and enforced by a public land trust. They have only one purpose, and that is to hold and enforce the easements for the public. They have no ability to change the easement. The Easement takes an entire body of ownership rights that we have as owners and separates them into
Why Create an Agriculture Easement? Why should you care?
Your
food supply is at risk, and there is a diminished ability for local food to be
produced because we are losing agricultural land to other uses. The farmer
and the community will share the farm equity and stewardship. Easement deed
restrictions legally limit the land's uses to sustainable farming only & and
thus the valuation will be decreased making it affordable to future farmers. The
difference between the restricted "agriculture value" and the unrestricted
"fair market value" is the "non-agricultural land value". The trust purchases
this non-agricultural value in the form an easement, and so removes it from the
speculative market forever. Do the Numbers
We have started a Farm Preservation Campaign
to raise the funds for Equity Trust to purchase the Easement from us.
The
difference between the two is the non-agricultural land value of $300,000 that
is what we are selling to Equity Trust and what our campaign is trying to cover. Where
does the money go?
Who will Hold our Legal Document? We are
fortunate to work with Equity Trust Inc is a 501[c][3] nonprofit
corporation and community land trust in Turner Falls, Maine (www.equitytrust.org).
They are committed to promoting equity in the world by changing the way people
think about and hold property. They provide a forum for exploring the balance of
public and private interests in property, land tenure counseling and financing
for community supported agriculture, and develop and support alternative models
and tools of land tenure. Equity
Trust has already done this type of easement with Steven and Gloria Decator of
Live Power Farm in Covelo. They put their land into this type of model in 1995
and have been our mentors and guides in this process. The Marin Agricultural
Land Trust (MALT)
has included a
requirement for active farming in one of its recent easements. This is the
first and so far only time they have included such language.
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