Page 11 - Farm and Food Policy Strategies for 2040 Series

The land trusts oversee and manage the easements but rely heavily on public funding and money
from conservation and other public-spirited entities to acquire the easements, says AFT’s
Dempsey. “If they did not have public funding available . . . they wouldn’t be able to buy

easements from agricultural landowners,” she explained.

Women, as well, are making headway in farmland ownership as in other parts of the
American economy.

Women have long owned and controlled a big slice of America’s farm and ranch lands. Ag
census data on female land ownership has been lacking for past decades, but the 2014 ERS
survey says 37% of non-operator landlords are women, and they own 46% of the roughly 283
million total rented acres, or about 130 million acres.

The 2017 Iowa survey, meanwhile, found that women own 55% of leased farmland, up
from 52% just five years earlier, but they also own 47% of all farmland in the state. In fact,
women over 80 years old owned 13% of the farmland in 2017, the survey found.

Typically, woman have inherited their land from parents or
have owned farms jointly with husbands and, because they
most often outlive their husbands, end up with a larger share
of the land than men among retirees.

Jennifer Filipiak directs AFT’s Women for the Land program Jennifer Filipiak, American
Farmland Trust
and says “no one really knows . . . there’s just not a lot of
data” about farmland ownership by elderly women. She holds
meetings in the Midwest with women farmers and says, “most
of the women who come in have inherited their farmland.” In
the Midwest, she says, “there’s really a strong value around
keeping the land in the family . . . since it’s been in the family

so long.”

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