Igniting a Farmland Commons Movement with Kristina Villa

Today we are joined by Kristina Villa of the Farmers Land Trust who is confronting one of the most intractable challenges and deepest inequities within our food system today: Land access and tenure.

Kristina shares her remarkable journey that has culminated in launching her own organic farming business and founding an organization that enables emerging regenerative farmers to gain access to arable land that then can be held in community for generations rather than going back into a commodity market that favors traditional development.

In this episode, we cover:

- Kristina’s story and how her childhood reliance on food banks led her to organic farming and launching the Farmers Land Trust

- The importance of thinking about land transition to help aging farmers pass on their legacy

- Why we’re meant to farm in community

- Layering enterprises to get more people back on the land

- Crowd-sourcing land acquisition

- Addressing inequity in land access, ownership, and tenure through a farmland commons strategy

- How anyone can start their own community land trust

- Kristina’s advice for getting into farming from a non-farming background

- And much more...

More about Kristina and the Farmers Land Trust:

Kristina Villa is the Co-Executive Director of The Farmers Land Trust, and is a farmer, communicator, and community coordinator who believes that our connection to the soil is directly related to the health of our bodies, economy, and society. With over a decade of farming, communication, and fundraising experience, Kristina enjoys using her skill sets to share photos, stories, and information in engaging ways which help to inspire change in human habits and mindsets, causing the food system, climate, and overall well-being of the world to improve. Kristina has spent the last several years of her professional career saving farmland from development and securing it in nonprofit land holding structures that give farmers, stewards and ranchers long-term and affordable access and tenure to it. Most of her work in the land access space has focused on equitable land security for BIPOC growers, addressing the inequities and disparities in how land is owned and accessed in this country.

Find the Famers Land Trust on social media at: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Youtube

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song.