Growing pains: The next generation of farmers struggles to fit on preserved farmland

In 2023, Roger Short sold the farm that had been in his family for nearly eight decades to an unusual buyer: the nearby port authority.

He and his wife, Sandy, had raised their six children and 600 dairy cows on the 253-acre property in Port Townsend, Washington. When they sold the cows in 2003 to focus on producing beef and topsoil, he said he mourned the animals’ loss for the next two years.

Short, 82, is first to admit the land is “a difficult place to farm.” As he grew older and lost his eyesight, he worried about finding a buyer for it. But he was resolved on one thing — that his farm should stay a farm. So in 2016, he secured what’s known as a conservation easement, a type of legal agreement that required his property, some of which floods or lacks irrigation, to remain a farm forever.

That posed some challenges, said Eron Berg, executive director of the Port of Port Townsend. If the easement “hadn’t been there, this farm could have been sold in six 40-acre parcels,” he said, and “younger, newer farmers might have been able to afford to do something.” Instead, the port bought the property for $1.4 million so it could lease portions to local growers.

The predicament is mirrored across the country as the next generation of farmers confronts a growing inventory of protected farmland that doesn’t always suit their needs or budgets. That’s leaving many acres underutilized at a time when the U.S. is steadily losing farmland and the agriculture industry keeps consolidating into ever fewer, larger farms.

“Think about it as forcing people to use rotary phones,” Bruce Sherrick, director of the TIAA Center for Farmland Research at the University of Illinois, said of conservation easements. “They don’t fit through time very well.”

The nation’s estimated 7.9 million preserved acres are a tiny fraction of the 880 million acres of U.S. farmland, but they remain a valuable entry point for younger and small-scale growers. When a landowner places an easement on a farm, they sell their rights to develop it, ideally letting another farmer acquire it for less.

This practice remains popular. The number of easements within state programs, which comprise nearly half the nation’s protected acreage, has grown by about 20% over the last five years, according to the American Farmland Trust. Many older farmers, like Short, have embraced preservation partly to support their retirements. But there’s often an emotional pull too.

“We had one farmer that said, ‘I’ve been working on this farm for over 30 years. The last thing I want is houses on it when I’m 6 feet under the ground,’” said Leigh Ann Hammerbacher, director of land protection and stewardship at the Triangle Land Conservancy in Durham, North Carolina.

Conservation easements belong to a patchwork of state and local policies, land trusts and landowner agreements dating to the environmental movement of the 1970s. The federal government has overseen a related grant program since 1996. But while these efforts have protected countless farms from development, they haven’t halted the decadeslong trend favoring large, industrial producers that experts say are critical to stocking supermarkets with affordable groceries.

“We romanticize the idea of small, individually held farms with three cows, a chicken and a tractor, but commercially meaningful farm scale — where you’re going to get efficient, cheap food — is a much larger scale than that,” Sherrick said. “It’s less and less likely that individuals can own the entire unit.”

Still, many small farmers say they aren’t interested in producing as much food as they can as cheaply as possible, or competing with juggernaut growers that do. And some find that easements make small-scale farming harder.

Jeff Benton uses only a fraction of his 20-acre Orange Circle Farm, whose previous owners placed the Berwick, Maine, property under an easement when they sold it to him in 2017. For Benton, crop diversity, sustainable practices and his organic certification matter more than expanding. Since 2011, the U.S. has nearly doubled its tally of organic farms, which tend to be a third the size of their conventional row-crop counterparts.

Benton, 41, said his farm is one of two remaining on a road that once boasted seven, and he believes there’d be more if his land could be subdivided, which the easement forbids.

“If I am at capacity of how I want to function as a vegetable farm, it doesn’t make sense for me to scale up what I’m doing,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other farms who would come here.”

Benton said he understands farmers who use easements to fend off developers. At less than an hour’s drive from Portland, Berwick has become popular among commuters from coastal Maine, an in-demand area facing a housing crunch. But he sees that option as “responding to the problems of today with a solution that worked 60 years ago.”

“Conversations are starting to happen about how to actually keep [farmland] in production, as opposed to just keeping it undeveloped,” he said.

Many easements remain with the farmers who obtained them — for now. In North Carolina, Hammerbacher said just 10 of the 180 easements her conservancy holds have been passed on or sold, but she’s bracing for that number to swell. Up to a third of the nation’s farmland is expected to change hands in the next two decades, according to the AFT. The share of farmers age 65 or older rose by 12% from 2017 to 2022, U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows.

“We’ve worked with the original landowners on crafting the easement to meet their needs,” Hammerbacher said. “The challenges come in working with the next generation.”

Some advocates say easements remain an important tool to protect small farms and help younger farmers gain a foothold, even if those growers are among the least efficient producers in the industry.

“We need to have a diversity of farm production types and value small-to-midsize operations that produce food for their communities,” said Krisztián Varsa, who oversees easement purchases at the Conservation Fund, a national environmental group. He worries about large farms bundling up preserved land to get bigger on the cheap, while smaller ones with less capital and trickier business models struggle.

Land trusts say they’ve done their best to anticipate younger farmers’ needs. The 2014 federal farm bill provided the first opportunity for subdivision, within limits, but only after millions of preserved acres had already prohibited that. Many farmers are still crafting easements that preclude subdivision, said Carrie Lindig, the easement program division director for the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

“I still hear about a number of folks who don’t want it,” she said.

Other farmers struggle with size restrictions when they do want to expand.

Ben Shields, 45, owns In Good Heart Farm in Pittsboro, North Carolina, where an easement prevents him from growing crops on the roughly 15 acres that are forested. A friend let him use a workable parcel down the road, and this year Shields partnered with another local farmer to grow a wider range of fruits and vegetables.

He said the easement was part of the property’s appeal, and he’s grateful to the previous owner for making the farm affordable. She’d originally asked $365,000 but wound up selling to him for about $190,000 in 2016. But the size limitations have frustrated Shields continuously.

“A lot of thought has to be put into the way these things are structured for the transfer of the land to another generation,” he said.

Nevertheless, land trusts say they’re inundated with requests for preserved farmland. Jess Laggis, who leads conservation at the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, a land trust in Asheville, North Carolina, said her queue is five years long. Most of the farmers she works with are older, and some have died before the preservation process finishes.

“We try to be as liberal as possible in imagining what the future of agriculture looks like, because we acknowledge we don’t know,” Laggis said.

In Washington state, Short said it’s been a tough few months since leaving his farm. He moved into a new house and feels good about his retirement funds, but he misses the land. Whenever they can, he and Sandy visit the three younger farmers working on it now.

“I can talk with them and guide them, see how they’re doing,” he said.

One of them is Martin Frederickson, 46, who raises cattle on an adjacent farm. He now leases 75 acres of the Short property to give his animals more space to roam. Frederickson said he wanted a long-term arrangement that allowed him to nurture the land and feels the port authority’s ownership provides that. But buying the whole place was never financially viable.

A lot of farmland “is valued above its productive capacity, even with a conservation easement,” Frederickson said.

Crystie Kisler, 54, who grows organic grains that can withstand a rapidly warming climate on her own 150-acre farm nearby, leases 17 acres from the port. She agreed easements can be helpful for small farmers but said, “It’s not like a magic bean that you plant, and then everything’s OK.”

The port authority is comfortable remaining a landlord, even though the farm isn’t profitable and might not be for another two years, Berg said. He’s still content with the acquisition, which he said pre-empted deep-pocketed buyers who “could satisfy the requirements of the easement by owning it and keeping it farmable by just having a couple of horses run around.”

There are no plans to sell.

“We’re not hoping to send soybeans around the country,” Berg said. “We’re hoping to feed ourselves, and maybe some folks around the region.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com