As U.S. Farmers Get Older, a Catskills Land Trust Rethinks Access for Beginning Farmers

DELANCEY, NY – It’s shoulder season in the Catskills – the stretch between late winter and summer when farmers are planning, seeding, and getting the ground ready for harvest. Sea Matías looks out into a field of winter-aged hay on the edge of the Delaware River’s west branch where their farm, Serra Vida Farm, sits on.

“‘Serra’ being an Arawakan word for ‘an exchange’ and ‘Vida’ is ‘life,’ so an exchange of life, reciprocity, and action [and] named after my abuela Maria and the work that she did in her life,” said Matías on naming their farm.

Matías is gearing up for their farm’s next growing season this year, where they grow Carribean-based crops like gandule beans, collard greens, and culantro herbs. They started the farm to grow food for mutual aid efforts, schools, and food pantries in the Bronx, Delaware, and Schoharie counties.

But like many beginning farmers starting out, Matías had trouble finding affordable, long-term land to grow their food at scale. That’s when they heard about a 287-acre community land trust called West Branch Commons.

Established by the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, West Branch Commons is a community land trust for queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color farmers. Rhiannon Wright, land access program manager with the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, says the project provides long-term leases to up to eight beginning farms.

“It takes the need for those farmers to buy land out of the equation [and] allows them to focus more on their energy on actually doing the farming and less on the huge capital investment that it often takes to get going,” said Wright.

More than one in three U.S. farmers is over the age of 65, while the high costs of farmland remain the biggest barrier for young and beginning farmers to get started. As many farmers get older, Wright says West Branch Commons could offer a model for transferring farmland equitably and building a path forward for the next generation of farmers.

As retiring farmers age, beginning farmers seek affordable land

The project began with Tom Hutson, a fourth-generation dairy farmer who’s been farming his entire life. “The years went by fast. I can’t tell you how fast my life has gone. [Farming] was never really work, work. It was always a recreation right along with being work,” said Hutson, 77.

Before he knew it, Hutson said it was time to retire. He wanted his farm River Haven Farm to stay in farming, but he didn’t have any family or children to transfer it to. Hutson decided to sell it in 2023 to the American Farmland Trust (AFT) – whom the Catskills Agrarian Alliance eventually plans to purchase the land from.

Molly Johnston-Heck, AFT’s regional Farmland for a New Generation senior manager, says New York’s farmland is especially threatened by overdevelopment, all while many aging farmers don’t have a succession plan or retirement funds.

“Most farmers are not going to have a 401(k) unless they have an off-farm job, and so their wealth is tied up in the land and they need to be able to get cash out of that land in order to retire,” said Johnston-Heck.

Meanwhile, beginning farmers face different challenges, says Alex Morency, AFT’s Farmland for a New Generation New York associate. Finding affordable farmland – and the right financing to buy it – remains the biggest hurdle. Then there’s whether the land has the infrastructure farmers need to succeed.

“It might not be the soils or the things that can support having a good farm business or a viable farm business long-term,” said Morency. AFT has built several tools to match beginning and aging farmers for partnerships, like a farmland finder website and a network of regional providers. They’ve seen over 230 matches across 11,000 acres of New York farmland to date.

For West Branch Commons, Wright says the project is well on its way to buying the property from the American Farmland Trust. The team has raised more than 60 percent of its $950,000 fundraising goal, but it hasn’t been easy. There are limited federal funding opportunities for buying farmland, and private donors are tightening their budgets amid federal budget cuts, Wright says.

Still, Wright and the team are hopeful. They say building a shared community land trust is a slow process that requires time and shared values. Matías of Serra Vida Farm says watching West Branch Commons evolve is like watching a seed grow.

“It’s like we’re planting the seed now to provide security – not just for us, not just for me as a pilot farmer and the future of pilot farmers – but for the next generations to keep the land in perpetuity, to protect the watershed, to create ecological diversity, and basically restore a lot of the watershed that has been succumbing to speculative market.”

Image: Team members and farmers of West Branch Commons, a project of the Catskills Agrarian Alliance in Delancey, New York (Photo Credit: West Branch Commons)