By Lela Nargi
August at any farmstand offers a vision of abundance: stacks of peaches and melons, tables strewn with misshapen heirloom tomatoes, oceans of okra and shell peas and summer squashes — locally grown, meant to be locally eaten. What a visitor likely takes for granted is the inevitability of this scenario, his ability to return to load up on nutritious produce week after week until the snows come.
In reality, farming is a tenuous business, especially for those just starting out and/or determined to raise food for communities of people rather than commodity crops for livestock or biofuel. In 2025 alone, 15,000 farms and ranches across the U.S. went out of business or consolidated with larger operations, with small farms making up the bulk of the closures; 2.5 million acres of farmland were lost overall, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). This wasn’t an isolated series of incidents or an anomalous year. We’ve been losing farmland at a rapid clip for decades.
More recently, there’s been another hurdle to farmers getting into or staying in business: the uptick in farmland purchases by corporate interests — institutional investors, pension funds, private equity firms. Especially since the financial crisis of 2008, they’ve “increasingly seen farmland as a stable and appreciable asset to invest in, and it has created this frenzy for buying up farmland,” says Austin Bryniarski, government relations coordinator with the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC). “They can pay top dollar for some of the best quality land in ways that then drive up prices across the entire farmland market.”
Click here to see more...