Control of Farmland—City Style

By David Holtzman

I have thought a lot lately about the issue of land ownership for farmers, and the barriers they face to buying land so they can plan for growing their business and serving more food consumers.

This issue really matters on the edges of metropolitan areas, where farmers can find lucrative markets for their products and yet, with ever escalating land prices, face daunting odds in securing land to grow on or even to get started. Many farmers settle for a lease instead, which sometimes only lasts a couple years before the relationship between owner and farmer sours.

It's interesting to see that control of land for farming is an issue in urban agriculture, as well. At a recent farming conference in Richmond, Va., a board member of the Urban Agriculture Collective of Charlottesville [UACC] talked about a city-sponsored plan to redevelop her neighborhood, which would include relocating the farm she and her neighbors have worked on for seven years. 

Community gardens have fallen victim to a lack of land tenure before, notably in New York City where former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani took many neighborhood gardens back for redevelopment in the late 1990s. (Successive mayors have carried on the trend he started.) Many politicians (and their developer friends) see agriculture as merely a cute placeholder until the time is ripe for construction.

In Charlottesville's case, the area proposed for redevelopment was renewed once before, in the 1960s, during the height of Urban Renewal across the country. The new plan calls for mixed-income housing rather than affordable housing, which naturally has long-time residents worried that the fabric of their community will be destroyed. Their concerns were magnified when the city made what to them was a token effort to involve them in the public process. 

The interesting twist is the presence of the farm...