Investment money pouring into farmland markets is shrinking the land-acquisition prospects for small farmers. The hefty price tag for good farmland is one of the biggest challenges facing beginning farmers and farmers of color. Savi Horne, executive director of the North Carolina Association of Black lawyers Land Loss Prevention Project, said since the start of the pandemic there has been more pressure for financial institutions and investors to acquire land, driving up costs and complicating the struggle for racial equity in agriculture. .
By Caroline Tracey for Civil Eats.Broadcast version by Deborah Van Fleet for Missouri News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration Jack Southworth’s ranch sits at 4,600 feet in elevation outside Seneca, Oregon, near the Strawberry and Blue mountain ranges. Like many ranchers, his cattle graze private, deeded land in the winter and leased National Forest land in the summer, including a high mountain plateau filled with bluebunch wheatgrass and Idaho fescue and surrounded by Ponderosa Pine forest. Since the valley is “good at collecting cold air,” as Southworth put it, it has a short growing season, and if cattle stay too long in any given place, they will eat the grass down to bare ground, creating conditions for soil erosion. .