Vermont Land Trust - Vermont Life Magazine article, Summer 2002

Excerpt from Vermont Life, Summer 2002,
written by Chris Granstrom, Photographed by Mario Morgado.

aking a living as a farmer in Vermont has never been easy. Getting started in the business is even harder. You need not only a vast array of skills and boundless energy, somehow you also need to come up with the money to buy a farm – a lot of money, up front, to get yourself into a business where the profits tend to be meager.

Banks are where the money is, of course, but bankers are not prone to romantic notions about the prospects of the family farmer. To make matters worse, plenty of nonfarmers are interested in buying farms too – people who likely have more money to spend than those who spent their youths learning agriculture. So the price of farms gets nudged up beyond a point that makes any kind of business sense.

But aspiring farmers in Vermont have friends, too. Chief among them are the land trusts – the Vermont Land Trust (VLT), as well as other, smaller land trusts around the state – which have waded into Vermont’s farming communities with big financial resources and have opened the door to farm ownership for many new farmers. What the land trusts do is straightforward: They buy the “development rights” to a farm, which knocks the price down so that a young farmer can convince a banker that it’s a business prospect that can fly. Or at least moo.

In Vermont, the land trust movement is only a few decades old. The whole thing depends on the notion of the ownership of land as the ownership of a bundle of rights. This concept is not new. Mineral rights have long been separated from land and sold. Now, development rights are being treated as a discrete and salable asset of land ownership. An owner can sell, or give away, the development rights and continue to use the land for all other purposes; the only change is that there is now a restriction on the deed that prevents the development of the land. It’s a bold concept and, not surprisingly, it gets complicated in the details. It has its critics, even among people who have participated. But for now it appears to be having an enormous positive impact on the landscape.