We spend a lot of time designing documents that outline the terms under which farmers can get onto land affordably and build equity that they can take with them when they move on. It requires thinking about property in ways that the parties involved – landholder and land user – may not have had the opportunity to practice before, and the learning process can be an invigorating experience. But these are meant to be long-term arrangements that don’t need to be revisited often – so what happens when the land user changes?
Well, we can help with that, too. In 2025, we provided both technical assistance and a loan to enable STEELBOW FARM, an organic vegetable farm, to acquire the farm infrastructure and leasehold at the former Thompson-Finch Farm, one of the signature farm protection projects accomplished in our Hudson Valley Farm Affordability Fund work in the 2010’s. We worked with Columbia Land Conservancy (CLC), the landholder, to navigate the transfer of assets from one farmer/leaseholder to another, including the existing u-pick and CSA operations. Our loan financed Steelbow Farm’s purchase of those assets, validating CLC’s adoption of the ground lease farm protection model.
Jason Gold, one of the partners in Steelbow Farm, explained the meaning of the name and philosophized about its aptness for this model of land stewardship: “Steelbow is an antiquated Scottish term for a contract between a tenant farmer and the landowner. Not quite a lease itself, but more to do with the quality of the property and other assets being borrowed, and the farmer’s responsibility to return them in the same quality. We chose this when we began our farm because we were beginning on leased land, and of course we liked the sound of it. Now it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy as it seems we will farm on leased land for the remainder of our farming careers… But maybe not a bad prophecy, as we couldn’t have seen the Thompson-Finch Farm opportunity when we chose the name.”
The project was a learning experience for us as well. We are often asked, when promoting shared-equity ownership for affordable working farms, how easy or difficult farm transfers have been. It’s a challenging question, because we haven’t had much experience to point to. When your program is designed to support long-term tenure, it can take some time before you experience a transition. Although it’s been nearly three decades that we’ve been helping establish this ownership model for farms (where a land trust or other nonprofit owns the land, and the farmer owns the infrastructure and has a long-term, often 99-year, lease to the land), most of the original farmers who accessed farmland in this way are still farming under the original lease. So working with CLC and the retiring and incoming farmers through this transition was a great opportunity to test the model in practice, see its challenges and benefits from different perspectives, and appreciate again how alternative land ownership can facilitate land access.