By Hannah Swartos, Salish Current
On a hot Friday in the middle of August, Elizabeth Bragg maintains a cheery composure, despite the circumstances of the day. That morning, she and her fellow worker-owners at the co-operatively run Long Hearing Farm in Rockport arrived to find that a herd of elk had laid waste to a full crop of salad greens.
“We’re trying to figure out how to proceed,” Bragg says, looking out over the rest of her farm. “In the meantime, we’re weeding carrots.”
Wildlife difficulties aside, Bragg is grateful to be farming in this pocket of the Skagit Valley. For years, owning her own farm here was “a pie-in-the-sky kind of dream.” She had plenty of farmwork experience and enthusiasm but, like many beginning farmers, was intimidated by the region’s expensive and competitive land market.
In 2019, however, Bragg’s dreams were fast-tracked to reality, thanks to a lucky connection with a former employer.
A unique land match
Before starting Long Hearing Farm with friends Kelly Skillingstead and Reed Rankin, Bragg worked for Anne Schwartz on the same land where Long Hearing now operates.
Schwartz ran Blue Heron Farm on the property through a decades-long lease agreement and was well-known throughout the local farming community for her ability to cultivate community and grow incredible produce in the isolated upper Skagit Valley.
Several years ago, Schwartz announced to her staff that she was scaling back. She and her longtime landlord were looking for someone to carry on the lease that Schwartz had been a part of since 1979, and Schwartz hoped one of her employees might take up the mantle. Bragg took the chance, and in 2019 the majority of Schwartz’s lease and sales base transferred to the new Long Hearing Farm.
Six years on, Bragg still marvels at her luck. She farms on good land next to the Skagit River and enjoys a secure lease, a good relationship with a generous landlord and the continued mentorship of Schwartz.
Long Hearing Farm shares the property with several other tenants, and communication and trust is essential to managing the multiple interests attached to the place but, Bragg acknowledged, “it’s hard to imagine a better situation.”
Small farmland, big demand
Bragg knows, perhaps better than most, the draw toward land ownership that many farmers feel. In addition to being a small farmer herself, she also works as a regional land transfer specialist for American Farmland Trust, a national organization that offers land conservation and access services as well as educational and financial support for farmers of all sizes.
She sees many new farmers struggle to achieve this goal. In Skagit’s ever-desirable but diminishing market of small farmland, Bragg knows that she and other land-access advocates must help create alternative opportunities like the one enjoyed by Long Hearing Farm.
“There’s a lot of support for farmers here,” said Sarah Stoner, the program coordinator for the Skagit Farmland Legacy Program, a tax-funded initiative that helps farmland owners place their property into conservation easements, thereby extinguishing future development potential on the land.
Still, she feels that smaller and beginning farmers need additional and more nuanced forms of support when it comes to land access.
From her perspective, one of the biggest hurdles for small farmers looking to buy land is the prevalence of nonfarmers in an increasingly competitive and expensive real estate market.
“These smaller parcels are more appealing to a larger population of buyers,” she said, many of whom might be high-earning households that are prepared to price out local farmers and take farmland out of production.
To illustrate this concern, Stoner pointed to a national study authored in part by an American Farmland Trust staff member, which found that during the pandemic, home-buying preferences shifted away from highly-populated urban areas and toward rural settings, “exerting development pressure in areas at high risk of development and farmland loss.”
The Skagit Valley was not immune to this trend, Stoner said, and she is concerned about its implications. Skagit County’s most recent agricultural census reported a 22% decrease in the number of small farms — farms between 1 and 49 acres — between 2017 and 2022.
Skagit’s ‘wicked problem’
“I learned this new phrase from someone recently,” said Bragg, “This is a ‘wicked problem’.”
The “wickedness” of land access, she explained, comes from a maelstrom of factors including competitive demand for Skagit farmland, unstable and nonlucrative income for many beginning farmers, and the vulnerability of farmers who are too often caught in hastily made lease agreements with little longevity assurance.
“Almost every small-scale farmer I know has insecure access to land,” Bragg continued, and many of them “have been burned by handshake agreements throughout their tenant history.”
“Wicked problems,” she argued, call for creative solutions. Long-term leases like that of Long Hearing Farm, for example, with clear terms and solid relationships, or lease-to-own schemes, may provide more secure options for small farmers.
Stoner pointed to Viva Farms, a local nonprofit which provides low-cost leases and access to farm infrastructure and training, as a great example of accessible land opportunity for beginning farmers. She hopes more nonoperating farmland owners might look to Viva as an example, to think about how they might support a larger number of small farmers.
“For the full system to thrive, people have to be willing to do something creative and risky with their land,” she said.
If land ownership is a true goal for new farmers, collective or co-operative partnerships can also provide an alternative to the financial burden that frequently accompanies land ownership.
“There’s really good data to show that farmers will be more successful in that hard first five years if they don’t have a mortgage,” Bragg said, “Maybe we can build a different approach.”
Collaboration and community
In Stoner’s office, a stack of flyers reminds farmers that when it comes to the difficult and often emotional issues of preserving and accessing farmland, there are still support systems available.
On the back of each flyer is Stoner’s contact information as well as Bragg’s: the two collaborate frequently to assist farmers and landowners in the valley. The collaboration is both natural and necessary, Stoner said, as no one agency can offer a full-service approach to such a variable set of challenges.
Stoner is optimistic about the Skagit agricultural community’s ability to encourage farms of all sizes. She shares that the Farmland Legacy Program recently launched community surveys to gauge interest in more focused support toward the particular needs of small farmers. The responses from farmers and nonfarmers alike have been enthusiastic and generous.
“We have all the ingredients for a really amazing and varied agricultural community, we just need people to come together to bake the pie,” she said, “I don’t want to be too starry-eyed about Skagit, but this is the magic that people talk about. There is a lot of opportunity for diversity and there is a lot of cooperation.”
Republished with permission. Read the original article.