Editor’s note: This story is part of an ongoing “Sowing Change” series about urban farming.
In the produce industry, long-term planning is impossible without a secure footing. For urban farmers, particularly those from historically marginalized communities, that footing is often legally precarious.
Francine Miller, senior staff attorney and adjunct professor with the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School, is working to dismantle these barriers through the expansion of the Farmland Access Legal Toolkit.
By focusing on the legal mechanics of land tenure, Miller aims to ensure that growers have the stability needed to transition from temporary occupants to commercial stewards of the land.
When Generational Transfers Get Complicated
One of the most pervasive, yet overlooked legal hurdles in agricultural law is heirs’ property, a situation Miller explains as when land is passed down through generations without a formal will or probate process. This lack of administrative oversight leaves families with land but no clear legal claim to it.
Miller says of the staggering impact this has had on land retention: “Farmers have lost a ton of acres — hundreds of thousands of acres of land — due to title to the property not being transferred when the ancestor dies, and so the heirs then own land without clear title.”
Without a clean deed, a farm business effectively hits a ceiling. These growers are often ineligible for federal programs or traditional bank loans, preventing them from investing in the infrastructure required for high-volume commercial production.
“The heirs hold the land without clear title, and it really limits the possibilities of what they can do to generate wealth and use that land in more productive ways for farming,” Miller says.
This legal instability feeds into a broader crisis for the next generation of American growers. According to Miller, legal and physical access to soil remains the primary bottleneck for the industry’s growth.
“The National Young Farmers Coalition has said that land access is the No. 1 barrier to beginning farmers farming,” she says.
Land Aid for Growers
To bridge this gap, Miller highlights the importance of federal and organizational support that provides the liquid capital necessary to pull land out of the speculative market and put it into the hands of growers.
“Those kinds of grant programs that give organizations working with new and beginning farmers access to capital to purchase land are really important,” she says.
Beyond internal title issues, local farmers are increasingly competing with institutional investors who see farmland solely as a high-yield asset. Miller argues that this commercial pressure drives up prices and pushes marginalized growers further away from secure tenure.
“The National Family Farm Coalition has done tremendous amounts of work on the issue of land grabs by corporate actors who are buying land for investment purposes, which is the exact opposite of what land should be used for,” she says.
Ultimately, Miller suggests that for the urban produce sector to truly thrive, the industry must rethink the legal and cultural status of the land itself, moving away from a pure commodity model toward a more relational approach.
“Land is not a commodity,” she says. “The Indigenous communities would say it’s ‘kin.’”
