‘They just need land’: young farmers struggle to find affordable acreage

theguardian.com:

O livia Cleveland misses her farm – the chickens, the donkeys, the smell of the dirt and the way the wind would blow at three o’clock in the afternoon. For almost three years, Cleveland, 30, lived on a farm in north-east Alabama, owned by her then husband. She spent her days doing hard physical labor, cultivating land she deeply cared for, but she owned none of it on paper. So when Cleveland and her husband divorced in 2021, she lost everything.

Since then, Cleveland has spent the last two years rebuilding and working towards buying her own farm in her home state of Tennessee.

But Cleveland, now the south-east organizing manager at the nonprofit National Young Farmers Coalition, still can’t afford the average price of farmland in Tennessee, which has increased by 10% in the last year. Fifteen, 10 or even five years ago, Cleveland says, she could have afforded land. “But in 2023, it is very difficult to find that,” she says.

In April, Cleveland finally found a small cottage and an acre of land where she plans to grow her own food.

Across the country, the cost of farmland is the highest it has been since the 1970s. From 2021 to 2022 alone, value per acre increased by 12.4% and it now costs on average $3,800 an acre, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). In some states it’s even higher: last year farmland in California averaged $12,000 an acre. These record-high prices are making it nearly impossible for young and emerging farmers to break into the industry. With the current generation of farm owners nearing retirement age and over 40% of the country’s farmland – that’s about 400m acres (162m hectares) – expected to change hands in the next decade, there are thousands of young farmers ready to take