The land surface of the United States covers 2.3 billion acres. Sixty percent (1.4 billion acres) is privately owned, 29 percent is owned by the Fed-eral Government, 9 percent is owned by State and local governments, and 2 percent is in Tribal reservations. Virtually all cropland is privately owned, as is over half of grassland pasture and range and forestland. Federal, State, and local government holdings consist primarily of forestland, rangeland, and other land.
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Farming on Public Land
1962 US postage stamp commemorating the Homestead Act
There was a time in our history when the government gave away land to whomsoever would farm it. According to the Homestead Act of 1862, if you were 21 or the head of a household and could put down $18, you could claim 160 acres in the West. You had to settle on it and farm it for 5 years, however, before you got final title. The act was not officially repealed until 1976 (ten years later in Alaska), by which time approximately 10% of the country had been given to farmers.
That act, and the political consensus behind it, were based on the belief that a free people, working their own small farms, were fundamental to a free country. Many Americans still feel that way.
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Public Land for Farming
by Kathy Ruhf, Land For Good
Access to land is a top challenge for both new and established farmers. Government can play several important roles to address this challenge. One of these roles is as landlord: making public land available for farming.
Farmland is often expensive, tied up by established farms, marginal, or located in more remote areas with less access to markets and farm support services. More and more good land is being converted to non-farming uses. At the same time, more people want to start farming or scale up their operations. Citizens and public officials are engaged in “food systems” as never before. Towns seek to be “farm friendly.” Increasingly, governments recognize the multiple values of farming, including economic development, ecosystem management, community quality of life, and food security.
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Growing on City Land in the State’s Poorest City
Lawrence, Massachusetts, called “The City of the Damned” in a 2012 Boston Magazine feature, has seen some hard times. According to 2014 data the national median number of violent crimes per 1000 residents is 3.8 and the Massachusetts rate is 3.9. Lawrence comes in at 11.1. It is also the state’s poorest city (per capita income less than $17,000 per year), has the highest unemployment rate (over twice the state as a whole) and has been poorly led — it’s last mayor was investigated by state and federal officials for corruption (an aide was convicted and received 18 months) while a state-appointed overseer managed the city’s finances.
But it wasn’t always so. Sitting on both sides of the Merrimack River at a point where a series of natural falls of 5 feet or so were not sufficient to drive water powered equipment, the future city of Lawrence occupied a site containing enough drop, if engineered, to support a massive output of power. The wealth-producing potential of water power had been amply demonstrated a generation earlier in Massachusetts, first at Waltham by Francis Lowell and then at Lowell itself, only 11 miles upstream from this new site. The call went out for investors and in 1845 Abbot and Amos Lawrence raised a million dollars, created Boston Associates, and purchased seven square miles of land on either side of the Merrimack River.
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Raising Goats in Andover
Two of Lucy’s does work on the rampant Sumac infesting the Andover Conservation Area
The town of Andover, Massachusetts, a half an hour due north of Boston and home of the Phillips Academy, is generally considered one of the state’s classier places to live. It ranks 36th out of the 351 municipalities in the state when rated by its per capita income, which is $52,275. For some resident’s however, it has a fatal flaw.
“They don’t seem to want farms here,” says Lucy McKain. “Lexington and Concord are more forward thinking that way.”
Lucy has a small goat dairy at her home on High Plains Road in Andover and has had to put considerable effort into first getting the right to raise goats there, then to finding enough land to give them a healthy space to browse. She finally has worked out an arrangement to lease a couple of nearby acres of town conservation land, however, and feels her goats are slowly warming the hearts of town residents to the idea of living near livestock.
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Incubating Farmers at Urban Edge
It is not surprising, to anyone who reflects on the matter, that the Ocean State should have the most expensive land prices in the country. Averaging $13,800 per acre, Rhode Island is comfortably ahead of New Jersey’s $13,000 average price.
Much of the state is either on or within sight of the ocean, driving up prices. Urbanization is also strong there. It shares with only one state, again New Jersey, the distinction of having more than 1000 residents per square mile. And only New Jersey and the District of Columbia equal its percentage of area in metropolitan districts — 100%.
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First Root Farm: Growing on National Park Land
Minuteman Statue on the green in Lexington, Massachusetts
If you were raised as I was, to the bedtime sounds of galloping anapestic feet as Paul Revere rode to alert the countryside about the redcoats, or to Emerson waxing eloquent at North Bridge on the shot heard round the world, you also might undertake a visit to Concord and Lexington’s Minuteman National Park with a somewhat reverent mien.
It turns out, of course, that on closer inspection it is just another park (although sitting on some pretty good farmland!) I visited it on the trail of Laura Sackton, proprietor of First Root Farm, which occupies four and a half acres of that park’s farmland.
Laura, who grew up in Lexington, worked at Lands Sake Farm in Weston throughout high school and decided it was the life for her.
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Minuteman Park: On Farming
Some of the farm land is a little wet at times
Nancy Nelson, superintendant of Minuteman National Historical Park, was kind enough to spend some of her time educating me about the Park Service and farming.
“Farming operations are going on all over the country in national parks”, she explains. “The benefit to the park is we get to keep a historic landscape. At the Minuteman Park we see the landscape as it was in 1775. We don’t grow the same crops now as they did then — it is not like Old Sturbridge Village — but we do keep the landscape open with agriculture. It is a lot easier for visitors to imagine how events unfolded that fateful April day if the fields are still there. And what better way to keep them open than with farmers?”
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South Street Farm
Farming on Municipal Land in the Most Densely Populated City in New England:
Green Team waters the crops at the farm
Boynton Yards is a largely industrial neighborhood tucked away between the Fitchburg Railroad tracks and the Somerville/Cambridge border in Somerville, Massachusetts — a city of 80,000 people crammed into four square miles of space. According to a history by Union Square Neighbors, a local neighborhood association:
“Much of the neighborhood was originally part of the Miller’s River, a winding tidal stream that once extended inland to Union Square. The Miller’s River was used as an open water sewer and dumping ground for local industry. In 1874, Somerville decided to fill in the polluted river by removing the top of nearby Prospect Hill to use as filler. Over time, residential streets were laid to the east of Prospect Street and near the border with Cambridge. The central part of the area, however, was occupied by railroad sidings and surrounded by industrial buildings, including several meatpacking facilities. Consistent with the growth of the automobile industry in the 20th century, many businesses opened to serve auto-related uses including repair shops and parts dealers, some of which continue to operate today.
In the early 1980s, the City approved an urban revitalization plan for Boynton Yards resulting in the demolition of buildings, remediation of industrial wastes, construction of three light-industry buildings, and construction of South Street to support truck traffic…In 2012, Somerville passed a new revitalization plan that included an updated vision for Boynton Yards as a transit-oriented mixed-use district. Today, Boynton Yards is a neighborhood on the cusp of transition, due in part to its strategic location near the future Union Square Green Line MBTA station.”
