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| About
the Good Humus Land Preservation Project |
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| Summary Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is the practice of producing high-quality foods using organic or biodynamic farming methods. This kind of farming entails a high degree of participation by consumers, resulting in a strong consumer-farmer relationship. Nancy Warner and her family have participated in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) for nineteen years. She was instrumental in the planning and fund-raising for the Live Power CSA Land Trust, which has grown to include several organic and biodynamic farms in northern California. In addition to a wide range of high-quality vegetables, today she gets most of her butter, eggs, fruits, grains, and cut flowers through CSA farms, and considers the farmers who grow this food her friends—and occasional collaborators, since she has also photographed the farmers and their farms over the years. Good Humus Produce is one of the CSA farms that supplies Nancy and her family with vegetables, fruit, and flowers. It is a 20-acre certified organic farm in a little valley called the Hungry Hollow in Yolo County, Northern California. Jeff and Annie Main have farmed this rich and diverse land for 30 years. Jeff and Annie recently embarked on the Good Humus Land Preservation Project, which will allow them to preserve their land as an organic farm and keep it affordable for farmers in the future. The rest of this page describes this project in more detail. To help with the farmer's fundarising efforts, Nancy has created a series of digital prints of photographs taken at Good Humus farm, available as notecards or matted fine-art inkjet prints. Click here for more information about donating to the Good Humus Land Preservation Project in exchange for prints. For information and images about Nancy's other photography project related to farmers and farming, see Nebraska. Background When Annie and Jeff Main starting farming here years ago, there were only a few other organic farms and land was affordable for new farmers like them. Today there are many more organic farms, but their future, including that of Good Humus Produce, is fraught with uncertainty. Real estate values continue to increase because of the attraction of the area for affluent non-farmers seeking rural homes. When the current farmers sell their properties, new farmers will not be able to afford the prices that the land can now command from non-farmers. Soon, perhaps in another generation, most of the prime farmland in the area will no longer be farmed—unless something changes. One way to ensure that Good Humus and other farms will remain affordable for future generations of farmers is to establish legal restrictions requiring their continued use for sustainable, production agriculture. The basic idea is to remove the land from the market for non-farmers seeking a rural residence and ensure that a farm's market value will always be equal to its agricultural value only. With help from Gloria and Stephen Decater, who used this approach successfully for Live Power Community Farm, Annie and Jeff, have embarked on an ambitious project to place the non agricultural value of their property in a 501(c) (3) land trust ownership. Like Stephen and Gloria, they are working on the project with Equity Trust, the nonprofit organization that now permanently owns the non-agricultural value of Live Power Community Farm. The Good Humus Land Preservation Project will use the legal framework of an agricultural easement to place all non-agricultural uses and value of the farm permanently under the stewardship of Equity Trust. To accomplish this goal, a legal document called an "easement" will be permanently attached to the ownership of the farmland This document will:
The goals of this effort are:
Annie and Jeff, the current owners, will sell the easement to Equity Trust for the appraised non-agricultural value of their property. This allows members and friends, the community that benefits from Jeff and Annie's agricultural products and their approach to farming, to make tax deductible donations to Equity Trust so that Equity Trust will have the funds to buy the easement on Good Humus property. To accomplish this goal, they need to raise $300,000, which is the difference between the unrestricted "fair market value" of the farm and its restricted "agricultural value," currently around $100,000. Gloria
and Steven Decater have been helping Annie and Jeff understand the process
and what's involved. Agricultural easements are an innovative approach
to stemming the ongoing loss of agricultural land to other uses. In the summer of 2005, 150 members of the Good Humus community joined Annie and Jeff in their apricot orchard for a fabulous five-course dinner, arranged and served with the help of Slow Food Yolo, to launch their fundraising effort. It was a great start: they raised $36,000. But there's still a long way to go. In 2005 close to 500 children and adults visited Good Humus for class visits, workdays, and the annual Peach Harvest party. Annie and Jeff have been working with Davis Crunch Lunch, Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), and Davis Educational Foundation to sponsor one-day second grade class visits from local schools. Environmental Traveling Companions in San Francisco arranges a three-day stay each year at Good Humus for inner city teens during their 20-day watershed trip. The Good Humus CSA membership is up to 100 families in the Sacramento area and 70 in San Francisco and the Bay Area--the most food they have ever delivered via CSA. If Annie and Jeff can succeed at permanently conserving their land by placing a shared equity easement on it, they hope that other farmers in the area will be inspired to pursue a similar path. What Next? Annie and Jeff have nurtured their land for 30 years. Because of this work and because of the patient, sustainable, organic methods they have used, the farm has grown more diverse and productive from year to year, a process they would like to see continue into the future. They have come to realize that using the land well means not only taking care of it today, but caring for what happens to it after they're gone—which means doing everything in their power to protect it for future generations of farmers. But they can't do it alone. Community-supported agriculture is a group effort. It means participating in diverse, interconnected networks of urban and rural people who are trying to steer our planet in a different direction. Every little bit counts: every child who gets to experience organic farming up close, every square foot of land preserved for the future, every small donation. To help Annie and Jeff achieve the ambitious goals of the Good Humus Land Preservation Project, Nancy Warner has been working with Annie on a series of photographs of Good Humus farm. Some of these photos, in the form of inkjet cards and matted inkjet prints, are now available as a bonus when you make a donation. If you make a donation of at least $60, you'll also receive either six of Nancy Warner's inkjet prints of the farm in the form of note cards with envelopes, or a matted inkjet print to hang on the wall. To learn more about Good Humus Farm, visit their web site at www.goodhumus.com or contact the farmers directly: Good Humus
Produce The Good Humus agricultural easement will be held in trust by: Equity
Trust, Inc. |
