As president of Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) I travel across our region nearly every day visiting people and places in the 20 counties that we serve. Over the 16 years that I have worked at SMIF, I have watched farming practices change and adapt. As someone who comes from a farming family, I know what it is like to feel rooted to the land, and how heartbreaking it is to see productive land used for anything but farming.
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Tim Penny: Program offers a path to save the family farm
Many of the farmers I know in southern Minnesota work on the same land their parents, grandparents or even great-grandparents farmed. Because of this, the farm is more than a parcel of land to grow crops or raise animals – it is a living piece of family history.
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Tim Penny | ×
Tim Penny
Many of the farmers I know in southern Minnesota work on the same land their parents, grandparents or even great-grandparents farmed. Because of this, the farm is more than a parcel of land to grow crops or raise animals – it is a living piece of family history. At the same time, we are faced with the reality that the average farmer is close to retirement age, and that not everyone has an heir to transfer the land to when the time comes. Fortunately, Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) has a program that can help farmers safeguard the legacy of their land while simultaneously giving back to their c