Land in Common
Land justice is at the heart of food justice. By: Jessie Saffeir and the Land in Common Team
To grow food, we need land. For most of us, however, secure land access is determined by access to wealth. Communities directly harmed by colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism face the greatest barriers to secure land access. In Maine, Wabanaki tribes hold a mere 1% of their homeland, while other BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of color) own only a fraction of a percent of the land. Meanwhile, four families and corporations own 17% of the entire state. This extreme inequality in land ownership is responsible for many environmental and economic crises, and it presents enormous barriers to people seeking to grow food for themselves and their communities. But what if there were other ways of relating to land?
Land in Common is one of the many organizations in Maine advancing land justice. Our work is focused on transforming our systems of holding land. As a community land trust, we move land from private ownership into cooperative, community holdership – permanently protecting the land and ensuring it will always be affordable for people to live, grow and gather food, connect to community, play, care for the land, and make their livelihoods. We work to make land accessible to those who have been excluded from it, and to advance land return to Wabanaki communities.
Wild Mountain Cooperative
Presente! Farm, courtesy of Flor Cron
We currently hold farm and forest land in Androscoggin County, which supports a multi-family affordable housing community (Wild Mountain Cooperative), two cooperative farm businesses (Wild Mountain Nursery and Celebration Tree Farm & Wellness Center), and a Latinx-led farm (Presente! Farm) that grows free food for community distribution. We also hold over 200 acres of ecologically sensitive areas, including forest, wetlands, and waterfront.
For landless people, growing food usually means being on someone else’s land – through renting or other informal land sharing agreements – precarious positions where you don’t know when you’ll need to leave, and where ultimately, the landowners have more decision making power than you do. As anyone who has grown food knows firsthand, it takes time to build up soil health, build infrastructure, and get to know the land. Secure tenure is essential.
Community land trusts like Land in Common give growers, farmers, and land stewards similar security to land ownership, but at a fraction of the cost, and without reproducing the colonial practice of treating land as something to be bought and sold for profit. People living or working on the land hold a sliding-scale “99-year lease” on the land, and own their own buildings. This lease arrangement is radically different from that of traditional tenant (leasehold) farming: community land trusts function like cooperatives, where the people farming and stewarding the land participate in decision making and organizational leadership.
In the next year, Land in Common is scaling up our work to redistribute land tenure to people and organizations from communities who have been excluded from land ownership due to white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism. With the strong leadership of a multiracial community of activists, organizers, and changemakers dedicated to advancing land justice across the state, we’re working to build a model of land-holding that creates land security for BIPOC communities and advances land return to Wabanaki tribes. We are honored to work alongside many powerful groups and organizations who are transforming how we hold and care for land, including Bomazeen Land Trust, Presente! Maine, The Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship, Firstlight Learning Journey, Journey ONEderland, Embodied Equity, and Racial Equity & Justice.
We invite you to join us! We will be sharing exciting updates soon about how you and your community can support land redistribution to BIPOC communities in Maine. If you’d like to learn more and get involved, you can sign up for our mailing list on our website.