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Websites fashioned like online marketplaces match aspiring farmers with land owners who want to pass their property to someone who will be a good steward of their work. It’s part of a growing trend.
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JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Farmers are increasingly posting in online marketplaces or taking out personal ads to find buyers for their land. Programs in several states help farmers do this when they don’t have a relative or friend to pass the farm on to. Sophia Saliby of member station WKAR reports.
SOPHIA SALIBY, BYLINE: For most of his adult life, Thomas Lodge has been involved in agriculture, studying botany, creating a mushroom wholesale business and building an organic farm outside of Detroit. A few years ago, he wanted to focus on his mushroom business full time but didn’t want to completely give up the farm.
THOMAS LODGE: I kind of built up the brand and was in some markets and got the organic certification. So I was really looking for somebody that kind of shared the same vision as me.
SALIBY: So he made a post on an online platform in Michigan called MIFarmLink, which connects landowners with farm-seekers and found Simon Yevzelman. He and his wife wanted to launch new livelihoods in agriculture and were excited about finding Lodge’s property.
SIMON YEVZELMAN: It’s one in a billion that a turnkey farm was available 30 minutes from our door in Dearborn Heights.
SALIBY: This is the second year the Yevzelmans have grown vegetables, flowers, mushrooms and herbs to sell to customers on the land that they lease from Lodge.
YEVZELMAN: This bed is green onion and lettuce that are just coming in. We’ve got carrot, two more beds of radish. Got some snap peas.
SALIBY: MIFarmLink program manager Jill Dohner says the way Lodge and the Yevzelmans found each other is becoming more common.
JILL DOHNER: Historically speaking, farmers used to just give their land to their sons or their daughters, and they would take over the operation. That’s not happening anymore.
SALIBY: She says that issue is exacerbated as more of the country’s farmers get older. And she says for many of them, the land they own is like a piece of them, which makes passing it on, especially to someone new, a tough personal process.
DOHNER: Most farmers want that land to go to a deserved farmer, somebody who can actually, you know, take it and do good for the land.
SALIBY: MIFarmLink aims to make that initial introduction easier. Yevzelman says the concept is easy to grasp.
YEVZELMAN: It’s great. It’s just like any other online marketplace where people can share, you know, supply and demand.
SALIBY: On the website, people share what they’re looking for, whether it’s land for sale or lease or a mentorship. And then they inject a little personality into their posts, like this one – small-town gardening girl looking to expand her farm. Or there’s another about a family of grow-getters who are looking to farm around and find out. The concept behind these programs, what’s known as land or farm linking, goes back several decades. Shemariah Blum-Evitts is the executive director for Land For Good, which manages a farm-linking program in New England. It launched more than a decade ago.
SHEMARIAH BLUM-EVITTS: We’re not growing any more land. So maintaining what we have available and making sure it continues to be there for future generations is going to be really key.
SALIBY: There are currently several dozen farm linking programs active in more than 30 states. After operating in several individual counties in Michigan, MIFarmLink is going statewide this month, with more than 300 farm-seekers already signed up. One of them is Maureen Maccomb, who wants to farm for the first time.
MAUREEN MACCOMB: I kind of feel like farming has been, like, this well-kept secret, like, kind of passed down from generations, and if you’re not in it, it’s really hard to figure out how to break in it.
SALIBY: Her dream property for her family – several acres where they can grow produce and flowers and maybe raise some goats and chickens. Maccomb says she’s in the early stages of connecting with a farmer that will hopefully get her closer to that dream.
For NPR News, I’m Sophia Saliby in East Lansing.
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