Evolving Land Trust Practices Through the Ancient Commons Land Clinic Audio Archives

This piece is co-authored by the founders of The Farmers Land Trust, Kristina Villa and Ian McSweeney. Kristina narrates for us.
Kristina Villa 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.
Ian McSweeney’s life’s work is centered on the human connection to land and each other, framed through the understanding that food is a universal point of connection and agriculture is one of the greatest polluters of land and water, and a primary activity that separates people from the land. Ian has been a social worker focused on developing and operationalizing outdoor experience-based education, a real estate broker and consultant focused on prioritizing conservation, agriculture, and community within land development, and a director of a private foundation focused on assisting landowners and farmers through customized approaches to farmland ownership, conservation, management, and stewardship.

Our relationship to land is based on our cultural context. Land can represent seemingly opposite concepts simultaneously: unchecked power and community justice, reparative equity and wealth hoarding to name a few. Many experience and witness our disconnection from the land and from each other through the global and local impacts of colonization and privatization. These realities are magnified by historic and present day land injustice and are even more felt by those who grow food and cultivate land through experiences of significant financial, market, climate, and stress factors. 
Our cultures and societal structures are built upon belief systems that are created by the stories we are told. Land ownership, access and tenure, equity, and connection are unjust, and the truth of this is beginning to be understood by a greater percent of the population. The narrative of pioneering homesteaders acquiring land as the fabric of our national manifest destiny necessarily crumbles as we acknowledge that many of us live on stolen land. We need stories and models that strive toward land justice and reconciling our relationship with land. 
As it relates to our farmlands, new and beginning farmers identify land access as a primary barrier to farm viability, while existing and retiring farmers must destroy what they have built over a lifetime or more by selling their farms for development and speculation, simply to afford to retire. On average, 37 mid-size farms close permanently every single day in this country given these barriers and others. The successful transition of agrarian land and businesses is what will sustain agriculture, culture, and community resilience. 
Farms are on the decline while farm sizes are on the rise. This is indicative of things like Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and large scale monocultures. The landowners see farming operations solely as a financial investment rather than community one. 
Land trust and nonprofit land ownership structures have had a profound impact on defining and structuring ownership, access and tenure, and connection; however, by and large, they have not addressed land justice and equity on the scale needed. At The Farmers Land Trust,