Land, Culture, Farming, and Movements in 2025

To work in agriculture in the current economic and social context can look and feel foolish. The average cost of farmland in the U.S. has doubled since 2009. The cost of housing has increased 47% just since 2020. You’d be lucky to find a small house for half a million dollars in many parts of the country. Maybe we’ve been able to raise our prices a bit, but how can they match this?

The fact is agricultural land is under intense pressure not only from development, but from a speculation-fueled, finance-driven real estate market. The fact is there is a relentless race-to-the-bottom push to move many kinds of agricultural production to places with the lowest possible labor costs. The fact is that overall farm policy favors very large producers of a small number of commodity crops, leaving small farms and specialty crops behind. The fact is most farmers in the U.S. rely on off-farm income – and it’s a requirement if you want a loan.

Despite this – We know that farming is what we’re supposed to be doing. We know that getting our food from halfway around the world isn’t going to last. We know that people can’t eat or drink money, or data. We know the strength and depth of the connection we have with plants, animals, and soil. We know how important it is to keep alive what we can of the vast and brilliant agricultural knowledge that buzzes around our heads as we work in the sun. We know that the inventors of the microchip and the iPhone have nothing on the inventors of corn, squash, and cabbage.

 We do what we can to make things work. We learn what the trendy crops are at market and we grow those. We get good at social media marketing and spreadsheets. We piece together land to rent and farm on when we don’t own any and aren’t on track to. We work more than we should, and then more than that because the irrigation stopped working or frost is coming early. We find other work. We find and revive ways of doing things that were almost lost. We seek, adapt, and invent new machines and methods and appropriate technologies. We grow beautiful and outstanding food that inspires the enthusiasm, engagement and support of many around us. We create movements together that help sustain us – sustainable agriculture, back to the land, organic, local, farmers markets, organic and regional seed movements, CSAs, Farm Aid, non-GMO, Via Campesina (the global peasants’ movement). Together we’ve done a lot to counter the narratives about farmers and farming being boring and stupid.

And for a lot of farmers and farming families all that hasn’t been enough. For a lot of potential new farmers, all that won’t be enough.

In much of Latin America, the concept of Land Reform has been near the top of people’s thoughts and understandings for a long time – the idea that land ownership should not be concentrated in the hands of a few while the people working the land own nothing. In Brazil it’s written into the constitution. In practice there is a lot of foot dragging, but there is also a movement (the Landless Movement) of over a million people organizing to claim vacant land for small farmers, with many successes. The Mexican revolution of 1918 was largely fought around the demand of peasant farmers for access to land (many of these farmers had been kicked off their land by previous government policies). The resulting Ejido system was a massive undertaking and was successful in awarding use rights for small farmers to about half of Mexico’s land area. Positive change is possible, and we would do well to ponder and learn from this history.

Neoliberal trade policies, however, have undone many of those gains. NAFTA (enacted in 1994 and renamed USMCA in 2018) challenged the Ejido arrangement in two ways – by opening up collectively owned land to the real estate market, and by flooding the market with subsidized corn from the U.S. As a result, up to two million Mexican farmers and farm workers have lost their livelihood, dramatically increasing rural poverty and causing a migration crisis, while actually increasing the cost of food for Mexican consumers. And just recently, in another instance of corporate greed construed as science and progress, a USMCA trade panel ruled that Mexico’s recent attempts to prohibit GMO corn in tortillas are not allowed. Never mind that Mexico is the birthplace of corn, and that corn is the primary staple food there.

Meanwhile, producers of many crops in the U.S. are under intense pressure from imports produced in countries that have cheaper labor markets, in much the same way that manufacturing jobs have been under pressure from outsourcing. This increasingly includes imported certified organic crops.

None of this is the fault of farmers or workers in other countries, who are also struggling to stay on the land. The problem is that we’re being played against each other.

In the U.S. since 1960 we’ve lost 1.8 million farms. Since 1982 we’ve lost 140 million acres of farmland. In the last 100 years, one million Black families have lost their farms. The situation has been grim for a long time. But part of what I want to emphasize here is that it’s getting worse even faster now. Just between 2017 and 2022 we lost 141,000 farms and 20 million acres of farmland. The cost of housing has risen 47% since 2020, and according to Fortune magazine, large-scale investors had a major role in driving up prices. It’s been even worse for farmland, where prices have on average more than doubled since 2009 (of course in some places it’s gone up much more than that).

Pressure from development and the housing market is partly to blame. But starting around 2009, speculative investment in farmland (in its own right) by large investment funds has been a major driver of increasing land prices. These investments are monopolistic because the funds are so big that they can meet their goals of increasing prices just by entering the market. We’re left in a situation where the value of farmland is increasingly not tied to what can be produced on the land or even to its housing development potential – it’s tied to what large investors think it could be worth in the future.

What we’re dealing with in this country, at this time, is the unchecked ascendancy and dominance not just of corporations, but of finance and tech monopolies. The impacts are broad and immense, with the effects trickling into every area of economic activity. The mechanisms of finance are so complex that few people understand them. However, the current results are strikingly clear: the enrichment of an investor class and the impoverishment and dispossession of working people. Similarly, much of the tech industry is more about reorganizing social and economic interactions to benefit a few billionaires than it is about creating anything beneficial for the rest of us. Meanwhile they offer us surveillance, addiction, and distraction, and still have the gall to claim that they’re here to help.

I don’t want this. I’m pretty sure most of us don’t want this. As a society and culture, we must strive for relationship with land, and relationships with each other, whose purpose is not to make money and hold wealth for rich people. The land sustains us, and we are part of it. It is our job to assert this, to demand this, and to create this. We must respect and defend its natural and agricultural ecosystems, as well as its human cultural ecosystems.

So what are we going to do about it? I believe that our strength is in the movements we’ve built and will continue to build; the connections, mutual support, and real economies we have with each other; and the clarity we dare to create together. In writing this essay I hope I can add a little to what we understand to be the scope of the tasks we are taking on. The sustainable agriculture movement has unique potential in that it unites people in common passion for having real and right relationship with land – across cultural, religious and political backgrounds. We have mutual respect across lines that divide the rest of society because we’re grounded in real work and real love of the land, the plants, the animals, and our communities.

We can also look elsewhere in the world for inspiration and ideas. Let’s study and learn from India’s huge and successful farmer protests, Brazil’s Landless Movement, the Zapatistas in Southern Mexico (who formed as a response to NAFTA), La Via Campesina globally, and many others.

The problems we face are long in the making and may not be corrected quickly. As we struggle for a better future, let’s also celebrate the successes we’ve had in creating ongoing movements, culture, and know-how that will continue to flourish and bear fruit for many years to come.

This essay by Edmund Frost is part of a longer letter in the 2025 Common Wealth Seed Growers Seed Catalog. Find more info about the Common Wealth Seed Growers here.

Browse our Local Futures blog here.

Top photo by Edmund Frost, other photos by Carly Gayle.