In 2025, we cemented the informal collaboration that we had recently forged with the Persimmon Collective Fund in two ways: by entering into a partnership agreement to provide low-cost bridge loans to BIPOC farmers for land acquisition, and by jointly implementing a financing tool that can be used to keep land affordable and under the stewardship of BIPOC farmers through successive property transfers.
Acquisition Bridge Loans
The bridge loan partnership came about from a desire to be able to quickly take land off the market while a more complex acquisition funding package could be assembled, based on lessons learned from earlier borrower referrals that Persimmon made, including for Ternawtheri Family Farm. In addition to the relationship-centered technical support Persimmon Collective offers to BIPOC farmers in the Southeastern U.S., they also help them access funding (and, sometimes, connect them with us for long-term financing). But it can take time for a fundraising campaign to bear fruit or for grants to come through, and those sources don’t mesh well with an anxious seller or a hot market for a desirable piece of land. How can we make it easier?
A bridge loan – a temporary loan that is intended to be repaid or replaced within a relatively limited time – serves the purpose. However, we don’t want to unnecessarily increase the cost of land access resulting from the interest and fees that would accrue even under a brief bridge loan in conventional circumstances. So Persimmon brokered a $1 million zero-interest investment into the Equity Trust Fund by the #NoRegrets Initiative (via ImpactAssets), an integrated philanthropy/investment group focusing on agriculture and ecosystem stewardship, which we will use to make zero-interest loans to farmers identified by Persimmon Collective over the next few years.
If it is determined that a long-term loan should be part of the permanent acquisition financing for any of these projects, we may be asked to convert our initial bridge loan into a term mortgage loan, following our standard process and using pooled funds from the individual and institutional lenders that make up the Equity Trust Fund. Regardless, we are glad to play a role in making land affordable for people who have historically encountered race-based to land access.
The first recipient of a loan under this partnership is Water’s Edge Farmstead, a producer of regionally adapted seeds in North Carolina. They were followed in 2026 by Little Farm and Tierra Negra Farm.
Shared-Appreciation Loans
In some cases, the parties involved may want to ensure that future users of the property being acquired are able to get onto it at an affordable price. In the shared-equity model that Equity Trust promotes, that would typically mean ownership of the land by a local nonprofit like a community land trust, with the farm infrastructure owned by the farmer, dividing the overall purchase price between them.
When there isn’t a local partner, an alternative option that we have developed is a non-amortizing shared appreciation second loan paired with a first option to purchase in the event the land is ever put back on the market. The loan reduces the upfront and ongoing cost of acquisition because the landowner makes payments only on the first mortgage, which covers only part of the purchase price. No payments are required on the second – and interest does not accrue – until the land is resold, at which point the holder of the second mortgage and option (Persimmon Collective or another land stewardship organization they may later choose) can step in to enable another mission-aligned buyer the chance to acquire the land with the help of the same affordability-promoting second loan, if not, Persimmon Collective will receive a share of the new sale price that they can use to support another project. The first recipients of this kind of loan are Tierra Fértil Cooperative and Ternawtheri Family Farm.