How one of humanity’s oldest ideas about land could help farmers who can’t afford to buy in
When people hear that I helped start a nonprofit that holds farmland “in common,” they often seem to imagine a novel experiment in shared ownership. The truth is almost the opposite. Holding land in common is one of the oldest arrangements we humans have with each other. For most of history, in most places, land was not a commodity you bought and sold so much as a shared inheritance you belonged to and were responsible for. Pastures, forests, fishing grounds, and water were managed by the communities that depended on them, according to rules those communities made themselves.
What feels new is the idea that private, individual ownership is the only serious, legal, or ideal way to hold land. That idea is actually quite recent, and it came at a cost. The English enclosure movement fenced off common lands over several centuries and pushed rural people off the ground their families had worked for generations. Versions of that story — enclosure, dispossession, and the conversion of living landscapes into tradable assets — run through the history of the United States, including the continent- and ocean-spanning theft of land and the broken promises made to freed people after emancipation.
So what do we actually mean by “the commons”?
When I talk about a commons, I don’t mean land that nobody owns and anybody can use. That’s a free-for-all, and it tends to end badly. A real commons has structure and integrates accountability mechanisms by design. In the framework many of my colleagues and I rely on, three core elements have to be present:
1. De-commodification. The land is taken out of the speculative market and held for specific, agreed-upon uses, so its price can’t keep climbing out of reach.
2. Equity and democratic governance. The land is organized by, and accountable to, the community that depends on it — through a participatory structure, not a distant owner.
3. Secure tenure. The people who steward and farm the land have long-term security in their relationship to it, so they can plant trees, build soil, and put down roots.
The political scientist Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for showing that communities around the world have managed shared resources successfully for centuries — as long as they follow a handful of common-sense design principles: clear boundaries about who belongs, rules that fit local conditions, participatory decision-making, real monitoring, graduated and fair consequences, accessible conflict resolution, and the recognized right to organize. Commons don’t run on good will alone. They run on accountability. That research is the backbone of a lot of what I do.
The long lineage of the commons (in a short space)
The nonprofit I helped start, Agrarian Trust, obviously didn’t invent “the commons” or even add anything particularly innovative to its core features; the commons is as ancient as our distant ancestors and as recent as the many communities around the world where people still live and work communally.
We simply joined a long line of people trying to free land from real estate speculation and financial plunder in modern times. There’s Henry George, who argued more than a century ago that land’s value belongs to the community that creates it. There’s Vinoba Bhave, who walked across India asking landowners to gift land to the poor. There’s Terre de Liens in France, placing farmland into a national trust. And there’s the history of the community land trust (CLT) model and its growth over several decades.
That last one matters most for understanding our work. The first community land trust in the United States, New Communities Inc., was founded in 1969 near Albany, Georgia, by Black farmers and civil rights organizers — among them Charles and Shirley Sherrod — who wanted land that couldn’t be taken from them by a hostile bank or county government. The community land trust model they helped create separates the ownership of land from the use of it: a nonprofit holds the land in trust for the long term, while residents or farmers hold secure, affordable, long-term leases. While there are many other financial implications to be considered, today that model houses families in cities across the country.
The question my colleagues and I asked was: what would it look like to rely on the community land trust model in our own work of conserving farmland in perpetuity and transitioning it into the hands of next-generation farmers and stewards?
A newcomer enters the chat…
Agrarian Trust is, by the standards of this lineage, a newcomer. The organization grew out of a series of gatherings of farmers, conservationists, lawyers, and historians that began in 2013–2014, and it became a standalone nonprofit in 2015. I was the organization’s first hired employee, and I later served as Co-Executive Director and then Executive Director. I came in with a background of working directly with farmers on transitioning to sustainable and organic business models and managing large grants, including state and federal awards, and worked alongside a team with deep real estate and community-development expertise.
Agrarian Trust’s particular focus was (and is) farmland. Our particular tool for holding land was what we dubbed the Agrarian Commons — a network of local landholding entities, each governed by a majority-local board, that hold farmland and convey long-term (often 99-year) leases to next-generation farmers. The national nonprofit raises capital, helps secure land, and provides legal and technical support; the local commons makes the decisions about who farms and how the land is stewarded. We prioritized working with community- and conservation-minded farmers with limited resources and opportunities to own or access farmland.
But a national organization has its limitations, too. For example, when a nonprofit becomes dependent on large federal grants and outside philanthropy, it is bound to struggle if those grants are cancelled or priorities change, as they have dramatically just in the last year. Ultimately, whether the commons model can sustain itself depends on the commitment and resilience of communities where it is embraced.
What we built (and what we learned)
By the close of our first impact-reporting period (2020–2022), the Agrarian Commons network held seven farms across six states — more than 415 acres, representing over $7.2 million in real estate, retired from the speculative market and placed into secure, community-centered tenure. Roughly three-quarters of the long-term leases went to what U.S. Department of Agriculture defined at the time as “historically disadvantaged groups” and farmers with limited resources; about a third of commons board members identified as people of color, and two-thirds as women, trans, or non-binary. Nearly 2,500 people from 48 states and seven countries chipped in to make our early projects happen. Our work was featured by Reuters, NPR, PBS, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera, among others.
I want to be honest about the rest of the story, too. This work moves in fits and starts. Deals stall. Grants are cut short or rescinded altogether. Legal structures turn out to be more constraining than we hoped. Partnerships between very different kinds of organizations require patience, humility, and a willingness to be changed by each other. Some projects don’t accomplish everything we set out to do. And yet even the “unfinished” projects spark relationships and understanding that outlast any single grant. The commons, it turns out, is as much a practice as it is a legal form.
That’s the part that I find hopeful. We are not starting from scratch. We are picking up a very old thread — land held in common, for the good of the community and the land itself — and weaving it into the present. If sometimes we prick our fingers, that’s to be expected; if we manage to make something beautiful, it’s because we were willing to take that risk.
Sources
• Agrarian Trust — projects, resources, and the Agrarian Commons model.
• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990), on the design principles for managing shared resources.
• New Communities Inc. (founded 1969, Georgia), widely recognized as the first community land trust in the U.S.
• Agrarian Trust, Our First Impact Report 2020–2022, for the figures cited above.