Acquiring Your Farm (AYF) is a free online tutorial for aspiring, new, and beginning farmers—and others—preparing to access farmland. This tutorial is designed to provide a thorough introduction to the complex issues of farmland access and tenure.
Lessons
This tutorial is organized into main topics and contains lessons to help improve your land access readiness.
- Farmland Tenure Basics—Discover how farmland is acquired and held, U.S. trends, and land tenure principles
- Financial Assessments—Determine financial parameters, implications of leasing vs. ownership, special situations, and conservation easements.
- Owning Farmland—Explore the pros, cons, and implications of owning farmland, home ownership as it relates to farm ownership, and purchase process.
- Finding Farmland—Learn how to plan and conduct a farm search, assess farm properties, and adjust your business plan to your land base.
- Leasing Farmland—Consider the pros and cons of leasing farmland, types of leases, how to draft a lease, determining rent, plus landlords and tenant relations.
- Communication & Negotiation—Acquire the keys to successful communication, improve your communication style, and negotiation skills.
- Community Partners—Locate community partners who can help you gain access to farmland, and how to work with them
Resources
This tutorial contains resources throughout that will help you answer some of the most critical questions facing all farmers seeking to access farmland:
- Is leasing or purchasing farmland (or a combination) the best option for me?
- What’s the best farm property for my situation?
- How do I finance my farm acquisition?
- How do I effectively work with landowners, landlords and other folks in the community?
Using this tutorial, you will gain new knowledge, learn how to apply it, and be better prepared to make sound land acquisition choices. Simple worksheets are provided to help you assess your situation and to systematically develop a well thought-out action for acquiring your plan for your farm acquisition.
Register now
Acquiring Your Farm tutorial is free and available to anyone. Simply register below to access the tutorial.
IMPORTANT: To complete the registration process and your initial log in, you will need to click on the link in an email that you’ll receive from [email protected]. Don’t forget to search your spam folder for this email
Acknowledgements
We are aware that the content of this course is missing important historical and present-day context-setting information; specifically, we are aware the section on “tenure history and trends” should address the history and legacy of settler-colonialism and slavery and currently does not. Course content is currently under revision and will be updated as soon as possible.
Special thanks to the farmers, farm seekers, and community partners who provided input and “pilot tested” early prototypes, and the hundreds of users who have used and provided feedback on this tutorial. The following organizations generously granted permission to reproduce or adapt their materials: University of Vermont’s FarmLASTS project; New England Small Farm Institute, A Legal Guide to the Business of Farming in Vermont; and Farm Credit East.
The first version of Acquiring Your Farm was supported in part by grants from the Northeast Center for Risk Management Education (NECRME) under Award Number 2010-49200-22787 and by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SARE) under Award Number CNE10-082. NECRME and SARE are parts of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Acquiring Your Farm 2.0 has been supported in part by grants from The Cedar Tree Foundation, The John Merck Fund and Farm Aid.
