A Legal Innovation That Lets Communities Own Their Farmland

How The Farmers Land Trust is seeding a new kind of commons

Most community ownership models have a controller. One nonprofit holds the land, sets the terms, manages the leases. The community benefits, but the structure still concentrates power at the top.

The Farmland Commons model works differently — and the difference lives in a little-used corner of IRS code.

The Architecture

The 501(c)(25) is a nonprofit land-holding designation that has existed since 1986, used mostly in medical and religious contexts. Ian McSweeney and The Farmers Land Trust have adapted it for something it was never specifically designed for: letting multiple nonprofits and community organizations hold farmland as equal owners. That’s similar to what the growing network of Diversified Community Investment Funds did to enable average people to invest in local businesses; found a new use for a legal structure that results in a shift in the system.

That equal ownership isn’t a detail. It’s the whole point.

Under this structure, a Black-led food justice organization, an Indigenous land stewardship group, a community health nonprofit, and a regional land trust can all be co-owners of the same farmland commons — with equal standing, equal power, and no single entity in control. As Ian explained in a recent conversation:

“We’re focused on this collaborative network building approach of this 501(c)(25), which allows multiple nonprofits to be equal power and land holding… sharing the ownership and power and control of land with Indigenous and Black-led organizations. That really is very important to our ethos and also the work we’re trying to do.”

The land is held collectively. Individual farmers can then access it through long-term leases and build family-owned farm businesses drawing on that shared foundation. The commons provides the land security; the families build the enterprise. It is, in effect, a backbone — holding what no individual farmer could afford to hold alone, while the farmers who work it retain the autonomy, the business, and the intergenerational wealth that comes from stable land tenure.

McSweeney describes the goal as interconnected local hubs, each holding four to twelve farms in a food shed area, each one its own community-governed entity, linked to others across the country through shared documents and values:

“If we create these in at least one in every state around the country, it begins to build that more localized audience and the contextualized unique examples, one to the next… each one is its own little hub, only scaling to four to twelve properties, but connected to others.”

The Farmers Land Trust handles the transactional complexity — legal templates, real estate, attorney support, navigating state law — and then steps back. And all the legal templates are free to download from their website. Anyone can start a farmland commons without ever calling them.

Tennessee: The Model Running Without Them

In Tennessee, a coalition of organizations focused on Black and brown food access and land justice decided to do exactly that. They found the templates, understood the structure, and are creating a farmland commons of their own — with several land donations already lined up — without The Farmers Land Trust as an owning partner. The land trust is in a support role only, available for guidance, not holding a seat at the table.

Kristina Villa, co-director at The Farmers Land Trust, described the significance:

“Here are these other organizations taking it on themselves… using this model as an act of reparations. And that example shows a great point of scalability, because here are these other organizations taking it themselves.”

That’s the proof of concept. The 501(c)(25) structure is designed to be adopted, not licensed. A diverse community of organizations — including farmers of color who have historically been locked out of land ownership entirely — can use it to collectively secure land, distribute power, and create the stable foundation from which individual farming families can actually build wealth.

Villa’s own story makes the stakes concrete. She grew up focused on food security in Atlanta, eventually managed one of the largest farms in Tennessee for eight years, and had every skill and credential a farmer could need. She still couldn’t afford land. The barrier wasn’t knowledge or work ethic. As she put it:

“I really learned a lot about how to grow food, yes, how to build soil, yes, but also how to build community and network to support a farm business… I could not afford farmland. That was a huge slap in the face… All of a sudden I was like, no, it’s actually about land. Because if people can’t afford land, then they cannot grow their own food. The root cause of food security and food access is actually land.”

The farmland commons is a structural answer to a structural problem.

What’s Replicable

The Farmers Land Trust has now worked across 19 states since 2020, with seven farmland commons in development and three completed farm gift transactions. They are one year old as a nonprofit. The legal templates are free. The support is available.

There is no farmland commons yet in North Carolina. The opportunity is open — for the right coalition of organizations willing to hold land together, distribute power equally, and build a commons that individual farming families can draw on for generations.

It’s The Farmers Land Trust: thefarmerslandtrust.org. All legal templates for creating a farmland commons are available for free download.