Three Californias—American Farmland Trust Food for Thought

I attended American Farmland Trust’s Food for Thought virtual event yesterday, hosted by Brooks Lamb—AFT’s Special Advisor for Strategic Communications and author of Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place. The hour-long conversation centered on one of the most consequential and underreported issues in American agriculture: who will own farmland when today’s farmers are gone, and what happens if nobody plans for it.

The Work

Lamb leads AFT’s Land Transfer Navigators program, a nationwide effort funded by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service that places trained “navigators” inside farming communities to help aging farmers and aspiring ones find each other. Navigators like Anna Sekine in the Midwest and David Anderson in Idaho work one-on-one with retiring farmers—walking through planning workbooks, connecting families to attorneys and lenders, facilitating workshops, and linking beginning farmers to land trusts and conservation tools they didn’t know existed. The work is unglamorous and slow. It is also urgent.

Why It Matters

Here is the number that stopped me cold: 300 million acres of American farmland will change hands in the next 20 years. That is roughly three times the size of California. Three Californias of fields, pastures, and soil that took millennia to form—and most of the people who own it do not have a succession plan.

Without one, the pressures at the moment of transfer are enormous. Private equity firms, real estate developers, and data center operators are ready to pay above agricultural value. Heirs who didn’t grow up farming face a straightforward choice. And once that land becomes a warehouse or a subdivision, it will never be a farm again.

What struck me most in Lamb’s conversation was how human this crisis is beneath the numbers. Farming is not just a livelihood—it is an identity. Lamb described his own grandfather, who sold the family farm after a handshake deal with two businessmen who drove up unannounced. The money helped the family. But his grandfather spiraled into depression and alcoholism afterward. He had lost the place that told him who he was. That story is not unusual. Mental and physical health challenges run quietly through farming communities, often tied to the stress of uncertain futures, family conflict over land, and the grief of losing a farm that was never supposed to leave.

The navigators exist because thoughtful planning—started early, done with support—can change the outcome. At a recent workshop in southern Indiana, a mother heard her adult son describe, for the first time, how much the family farm meant to him. She had assumed he wasn’t interested. She had never asked. That conversation is now happening. The land is still there.

Support This Work

American Farmland Trust leads the Land Transfer Navigators program in partnership with dozens of organizations across the country.

→ Learn more and connect with a navigator

→ Read Brooks Lamb’s book: Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place (Yale University Press)

→ Read his New York Times guest essay: Why the Kids Won’t Farm