Farmers need land to do the job of growing, cultivating and selling agricultural products. A new web service launched Wednesday aims to connect them to landowners with space that can be utilized for that purpose.
Eric Hemphill is the metro farms and food systems program manager for Cultivate Kansas City, the farm advocacy nonprofit that created the platform, known as KC FarmLink. He describes the new website as part classified ad, part matching service, where farmers looking for a place to grow are connected with landowners willing to sell or rent.
Users seeking land, or those who have some to offer, are asked to create an account and profile on the website specifying their situation. Then the nonprofit’s staff plan to assess characteristics of each user to identify matches and participants can also message each other directly.
Created with grant funding provided by the federal agriculture department, KC FarmLink is open to landowners in nine counties around Kansas City: Jackson, Clay, Platte, Cass, and Johnson Counties in Missouri and Wyandotte, Miami, Leavenworth and Douglas Counties in Kansas.
Hemphill said the service is essential and urgent since competition for land around metro areas is strong and development is ongoing.
“We thought if we don't do it now, we're probably not going to be able to do it in five years, because that land will be gone,” he said.
If the site proves successful and in-demand, the organization could expand the platform to landowners in additional contiguous counties around the Kansas City metro area. The service is open to farmers from any location.
“We know that there's a lot of farmers that are farming outside of what we would probably call the KC metro,” he said. “However, they might utilize the KC metro for their sales.”
Hemphill said farmland near metro areas is some of “the most developable land” — and the next generation of farmers are competing with housing and commercial developments for land near markets.
The nonprofit designed the new website to help those land seekers find land owners interested in other options for their property.
“The reason that most of the folks that are coming to us with land are offering their land is because they want something good to be done with this land,” Hemphill said.
An era of farmland transition
The largest age demographic of farmers nationwide are those between 55 and 64 years old, according to the U.S. Agriculture Census. As they look towards retirement, up to 370 million acres of farmland could change hands in the next 20 years.
Since farmers often live and work in the same place, transitioning into retirement can be socially and financially challenging, said Claudia Kenny, agricultural land access and transfer senior specialist for American Farmland Trust, a national organization that works to preserve agricultural lands and the group behind the “No Farms, No Food” bumper stickers.
“There's an expression that says, ‘If you think it's hard getting into farming, try getting out,’” she said. “The land is often the farmer's only option for (a) retirement fund.”
Kenny is a first generation farmer who, in her role at American Farmland Trust, works to build a national network of farm advisers who aid in the land transition process. Anna Sekine is one such adviser helping farmers across the Midwest.
“If older farmers can't easily exit, then their land can't become available to entering farmers,” Sekine said. “That is a huge component of my work, getting them the resources and the connections.”
American Farmland Trust has been working in the topic of land linking, transfer and farm succession for decades. Sekine said she can spend years supporting each party through the process — helping one farmer retire, rent or sell, and another to get established.
“Farms used to be passed down, usually through grave, altar or cradle, and now more and more, it is that non-family successor,” Sekine said.
Sekine said across the country, prime farmland is at risk for housing or commercial development. Once land is repurposed for that type of use, it's unlikely it can revert to agriculture production again. An American Farmland Trust report shows that in Missouri, an estimated 568,200 acres of farmland could be repurposed in the coming years, Sekine said — an area about 12 times the size of the city of St. Louis.
Local services such as KC FarmLink aim to help farmers find long-term space to run their business. As it’s inconvenient, expensive and burdensome to move homes each year, the same is true for farms.
“When you leave your farm to go to the next lease situation — because the first one didn't work out well — you leave so much hard labor behind, you leave infrastructure behind and you're in startup mode again,” Kenny said.
Sekine and Kenny both stress the urgency of this moment, as farmers retire and increasing amounts of land could change ownership.
“All of our rural communities, our food security, our identities — so much is at stake when food is at stake,” Kenny said.
