Hannah Breckbill is a Land Advocacy Fellow with the National Young Farmers Coalition and co-owns Humble Hands Harvest, a worker-owned cooperative farm in the Driftless region of Northeast Iowa. Her op-ed was first published in Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices in December 2022.
I started my own farm business, Humble Hands Harvest, on rented land when I was 25 years old, after several years of work on other vegetable farms. I was a queer, first generation farmer in Winneshiek County, Iowa. My goal was to grow good food for my community as my primary source of income, and ultimately to be farming alongside others. Back then, I had little to show a bank or even the Farm Service Agency that would make them believe that my farm dream was possible.
By my fourth year of farming, I was approaching burnout. I heard myself say, “I don’t think I’ll farm next year unless I have permanent land to farm on, and someone to farm with.” That realization catalyzed me to seek out opportunities. I asked a new farmworker in the community if she wanted to join as co-owner in my business. She said yes! Then I worked with a group that held 22 acres to slowly transition that land into my ownership.
I was able to build a farm by banding together with others, embracing unconventional opportunities, and relying on community members who believed in our vision and were willing to take a risk on us.
We also risked a lot ourselves, in terms of finances, time, and physical, intellectual, and emotional effort, all while building a worker-owned business not based on the typical hetero-nuclear family farm. We were privileged to have our hard work and creative solutions pay off, but not everyone who wants to farm has the same combination of luck, fallback resources, supportive community, and appetite for risk (or naïveté!) that we did.
Research from the USDA shows that the current generation of farmers is aging out of the profession—the average farmer in the U.S. is nearly 60 years old. Over the next twenty years of my life, nearly half of U.S. farmland is expected to change hands, and meanwhile young farmers are leaving agriculture because they cannot secure land.
The National Young Farmers Coalition finds affordable land the number one reason farmers are leaving agriculture. Land access is also the top challenge for current farmers, and the primary barrier preventing aspiring farmers from getting started. Secure access to land is an even greater barrier for farmers of color.
For generations, public policy has facilitated the dispossession of millions of acres from Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). Through policies such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Homestead Acts of the mid-1800s, the revocation of Field Order No. 15, and the Alien Land Laws of the early 1900s, among others, Congress has been responsible for facilitating land ownership and access for white Americans at the expense of communities of color.
As a result, white individuals (I’m one of them!) now account for 95 percent of all farmers, own 98 percent of farmland, and receive the vast majority of agriculture-related financial assistance. Public policy has also enabled farmland loss, depletion, and non-farmer ownership, shifting support away from farmers and towards corporate interests.
Policy has shaped the reality that we are in: the barriers that I had to struggle against and overcome in order to build my farm; the animal confinement operations that injure our air, soil, and water quality as well as our quality of life; the loss of perennial habitat across our state; and the loss of people from our rural communities.
But we live in a democracy, and ultimately, we the people must not take the current policies as a given. We have the right and the responsibility to craft policy that will shape a more equitable and resilient future, for our farmland and for our people. We need a 2023 Farm Bill that requires climate resilient practices and secures our farmland for the next generation.
With 99 other ranchers and farmers throughout the country, I joined the National Young Farmers Coalition’s Land Advocacy Fellowship with the belief that land access policy can be a solution for successive farming generations. The Coalition’s One Million Acres for the Future Campaign is calling on the U.S. Congress to make an historic investment of $2.5 billion in equitable access to land in the 2023 Farm Bill. This investment could make one million acres of land accessible to a new generation of farmers.
This is a pivotal moment to make historic investments in the individuals who will steward agricultural land and grow food for our communities into the future. We cannot expect that there will always be individuals who can afford to take the risks required to farm in the system as it is. Our nation must act now on the 2023 farm bill to secure affordable access to land for young farmers and farmers of color.