Tumbledown just this week learned about land trusts (see Land Trust Alliance, an umbrella organization). Tumbledown's interest is agricultural land trusts, the kind that work to save groups of farms on the edges of development. Maybe Tumbledown has been asleep, or maybe just ignorant, or maybe too much oriented east of the Mississippi (most of the existing trusts seem to be a western, even Californian phenomenon), but this seems to be a way of preserving the quickly passing culture of small farm communities. An individual with the hankering to become a farmer, would be well advised to do it where a community is actively seeking to preserve the way of life--donating to preserve land from development for farming--than to tempt fate by playing the Lone Ranger.
The first ag land trust, as self reported on their web site, was the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), established in 1980. (The crest of a recent farming financial crisis in which many small farms were sold or lost.) According to the MALT web site, the trust acquires voluntary "agricultural conservation easements" on farmland, "encourages public policies that support and enhance agriculture," and has "so far permanently protected 38,000 acres of land on 57 family farms and ranches." 57 family farms and ranches sounds to Tumbledown like a small, but vital, agricultural community, the kind of community that is absolutely necessary to support the individual family entering farming for the first time, the kind of community that hardly exists anywhere any more.
A little closer to home, the American Farmland Trust and Farmland Information Center report that "more than 100,000 acres of Indiana farmland is converted to non-farm uses" every year. Tumbledown has publicly mourned this loss before. But AFT also reports that "Evelyn Parker Chambers and Mary F. Parker have donated an agricultural conservation easement on the Parker Farm, located in Sand Creek Township [Bartholomew County, Indiana], to the Sycamore Land Trust. So, even in Indiana, momentum may be building for this movement.
For Tumbledown, hope springs eternal. Perhaps even now the seed for many small farms is being planted.
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