![]() ![]() Interest rates are low, the state aggressively controls inflation, and policies like quantitative easing prop up asset markets without growing the real economy. These policies served insurance and finance as well, and the combined “FIRE” sector has dominated U.S. Bush’s “ownership society.”Īgainst programs like public housing, these administrations put forward the “market-based solutions” of their day, using government to subsidize certain real estate markets. They tell a story of our post-industrial asset economy, remade through the politics of homeownership, from Nixon’s Fair Housing to George W. Scholars like Keeyanga Yamahtta Taylor and Samuel Stein have charted this development in the U.S. 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. Asset prices everywhere have been increasing, and this is by design. What retirement portfolios, housing, and farms all share is their status as assets, as tradeable storehouses of future value. It’s hard to imagine, let alone plan, a family, a retirement, or a career when you’re caught in this catch-22. It takes large plots and more stable land to make a higher income, and a higher income to secure more land. The rest of us rely on small, crowded markets-luxury restaurants, community supported agriculture (CSAs), and farmers’ markets. The commodity market-by far the largest portion of the food system-is built for this kind of farmer. Food prices, crop subsidies, and tax policy are all geared toward wealthy farmers earning on-paper losses, leveraging their agricultural wealth into nearly passive income and avoiding taxes. 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. We’re also saddled with increasing debt-to-income ratios, largely from student debt, and our cost of living has increased steadily over our lifetimes. Otherwise, they’ll need to sell it at market rate in order to afford a condo, medical care, and hopefully pass on an inheritance.īut few millennials have the income or inherited wealth to afford a market-rate farm, and millennial farmers even less so. If family, an apprentice, or a management company is able to keep the farm’s assets running profitably, a farmer can retire on the farm. ![]() Like most homeowners, these farmers have often spent their whole careers investing in their land, in the hope that its value increases over time. Where I live in Washington State, a medium-sized farm, including housing, typically sells for $500,000 to $1 million. 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. 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. This isn’t a story about individual nonprofits failing their missions. Yet policies promoting “market access” haven’t overcome the inequalities baked into the market. Success stories are real, but skew toward the low-hanging fruit of whiter, wealthier, and better-inherited farmers. 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. But they’ve been tasked with solving massive, world-economy-sized problems without the right kind or amount of resources. This is not to say that programs working to support new farmers aren’t necessary. It’s a structural problem that can’t be solved one farm at a time it requires structural solutions. Farmland will likely continue to go fallow or get bought up by developers and large farms looking to grow larger. Everything, from my education to my land lease, has come from nonprofits tasked with solving the farm succession crisis. As a product of this system, I have bad news: It’s not enough. 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. These institutions have made my own farm possible. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spend millions trying to remedy this problem by training new farmers, offering them grants and loans, and connecting them to land purchase or rental opportunities. 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. Every year, well-funded NGOs, private philanthropists, and the U.S. These are, for the most part, “conventional” farms-large estates that supply the global commodity market, intensifying their production with chemical fertilizers and concentrated animal feedlots.
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