Land Available: Farmland for Regenerative Agriculture Project
We are a small group of regenerative agriculture and permaculture activists, land owners, and community organizers offering a small farm in Franklin County, Massachusetts as a base for regenerative agriculture projects. The farm is on the bank of the Connecticut River and has over ten acres of fertile, class A soils, seven of which have been in organic annuals production for almost 20 years and are currently fallow. There are farm buildings, other infrastructure and some equipment.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please contact us with questions, to arrange farm tours and for preliminary discussions. We envision project selection and development as a multi-stakeholder conversation and we encourage you to become involved and get in touch with us as early as possible, at any stage in your project planning.
Our goals and purposes are intentionally general to encourage innovation and imagination. We are seeking proposals that
- Center around the development of an economically viable, working regenerative agriculture farm
- Involve some form of community education about regenerative agriculture, for example
- principles and concepts
- achieving short and long term viability
- environmental and community sustainability
- responses to climate trends and diminishing resources
- production and use of permaculture crops
- Seek to improve social and economic equity, for example
- developing a collaborative, commons-based approach to land use
- creating job opportunities in marginalized communities
- fostering resilience, health and wellness in low income communities
- addressing food system shortcomings
In the abstract, our conception of “regenerative” includes:
- Co-creative relationships between people, land, plants and animals on the farm
- Co-creative relationships between the farm and the wider community
- Social impacts as important as biological impacts
- Holding long term, whole system health at higher priority than short term yields
- Means as important as ends
- Mostly-closed systems: minimizing inputs, minimizing internal resource losses, minimizing resources for delivering outputs
We invite you to develop exciting concrete examples of these concepts. We encourage the submission of multi-stakeholder collaborative projects or projects with collaborative aspirations. We will evaluate project ideas and proposals based on the following criteria:
- Integration of regenerative agriculture principles
- Social and community impacts
- Start-up feasibility
- Short and long term viability
In outlining your plan and vision, please address the following questions:
- Who will benefit from your project and what form will those benefits take?
- How will your project promote social justice?
- Will your project have impacts on economically marginalized communities? If so, please explain.
- What resources are you bringing to the project?
- What resources will you be seeking to acquire through community support and collaboration?
The land owners will negotiate with project(s) selected by the team to establish affordable, permanent or semi-permanent tenure through long term leases or ownership.
Send inquiries and proposals to: regenagproj@gmail.com
In solidarity,
Jonathan Bates, Ferdene Chin-Yee, Cynthia Marie Espinosa, Kyra Kristof, Scott Reed, Will Szal
Jonathan Bates, Ferdene Chin-Yee, Cynthia Marie Espinosa, Kyra Kristof, Scott Reed, Will Szal
