Teaser image credit: Darby’s farm. Author supplied.
Sometimes in high summer when I am weeding around young crops, dodging pollinators, and listening to sweet birdsongs under the big blue sky, I am overwhelmed by the miracle of it all. My farm is situated on 20 acres in northern Vermont and is home to a brilliantly blended ecosystem that harmoniously supports a multitude of life every year. When I take even a second to look at the humming world around me, I am struck by it. It is so complex. It is so alive. It accomplishes all of this mostly without my help and yet welcomes me to co-create with it should I have the courage to start seeds, rear livestock, and ride the chaotic wave of the season. Every year, we add a layer of permanence of some kind. We firm in a roadway; the orchard grows by a few inches; we finish a building; we stabilize a high tunnel; new bulbs, saplings, and rhizomes are planted; and resident plants are divided, propagated, and spread.
We make these choices and additions every year because we want this place to be beautiful and productive for us, but there’s something else. We don’t have any children, and it’s hard to know what could happen to this property in the future. So why did we plant baby sugar maple trees? We’ve come to recognize this unspoken part of us that is diligently planning ahead. Something within our souls is telling us that we must make arrangements for the future of the land that exists beyond our death. We continue to build on the biological systems and farm infrastructure in hopes that what remains here when we leave this realm is something that can be taken care of by, and take care of, someone new.
I feel that this sort of thinking is common for those who work or walk the land. There is an intrinsic thread that connects all of nature, and those who can find their way to that truth do so through opening themselves to the inherent timelessness of the natural world. Without human wars and extractive industries, the Earth would flutter through seasons endlessly, creating pathways for nutrients, wildlife, and water that would be cyclic and everlasting. The natural world itself embodies the wisdom and forethought of the ancestors, and should we hope to change our relationship with this living entity we call home, it is time that we think and act like ancestors too.
As the human population of the planet continues to surge and the global, capitalistic rule of nature and society catastrophically multiplies our impacts, it has never been more essential to heal the wound that has severed us from being a part of the harmonious world and fixed us into a destructive state of parasitism. To return to this place of living equilibrium, there must be a transformation. We must release ourselves from the short-term, self-serving impulse of materialism and embrace the long-term, collaborative mindset of timeless regeneration.
A National Crisis
Private property in the United States is older than the Constitution and was an essential building block for the establishment of the free market and development of our modern capitalist economy. Private property allowed settlers and their descendants the opportunity to accumulate resources and wealth and maintain autonomy and economic independence. This concept was a freeing one for settlers, as they and their ancestors had traveled to escape the tyranny of kings and queens, but it wasn’t without injustice. Even as those who made their way to America found a foothold and developed industries and goods that benefitted society, the new laws of the land were written in a language not known to the native population, recorded in courthouses they were not welcome in, erasing diverse Indigenous customs and disregarding the natural laws that guided them. Indigenous populations were not considered a part of the new society and were tricked, murdered, and had their land stolen, to be “owned” by the incoming colonizers. From approximately 1619 to 1867, African men, women, and children were considered private property, a very chilling example of how the concept of ownership holds benefits for the owners exclusively, at the expense of sacred life.
As the free market has evolved over the last 250 years, the “American Dream” has been at the helm of countless atrocities against humanity and nature. It has been the basis for the free society that the United States has created and mostly maintained, while simultaneously contributing directly to systemic racism, sexism, global environmental degradation, and an ever-growing gap between the rich and the poor. This has played out in countless ways across society but is especially apparent in 2025 when focusing specifically on the speculative real estate market that has developed as a result of the private ownership of the land. Deep-seated, structural environmental injustice has made it so that those with the least are currently the most impacted by the growing symptoms of climate collapse.
In today’s world, farmland is in crisis. Large corporate interests, both related to agriculture and other industries, that have had years to extract profits and resources from land and people, currently own roughly 60 percent of land in the United States. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates owns over 260,000 acres of farmland, making him the largest farmland owner in the country. From 2017 to 2022, the United States lost approximately 142,000 farms due to development, corporate land grabs, the consolidation of small farms into larger ones, and the retirement of elder farmers without successors. Farmland, the most essential resource for human survival and a thriving society, when seen as material property, becomes incredibly vulnerable to being destroyed, lost, or snatched up by those who would keep it as an asset in hopes of growing their portfolio and their power.
Short-Term Thinking with Long-Term Effects
As farms have been sold off and consolidated, and urban and suburban centers have grown, much of the population of the United States has retained a limited connection to ancestral lands or the art of land stewardship, and the separation grows with each generation. The homes that people now occupy, secured through mortgages and rent payments, are managed within the same speculative real estate market that governs the ownership and sale of farmland, and a housing crisis is quickly emerging alongside the farmland crisis. Real estate is a rapidly inflating, finite resource and is becoming more difficult to attain and hold onto. Thousands of acres of farmland are currently being managed through short-term leases that are signed for a year at a time, and much of the production on these landscapes is for the commodity markets. Young people who are interested in farming are buying raw land to start their operations because they can’t afford the modern-day price tag of working farms. Farmers who have dedicated their lives to developing the unique growing systems that are special to place and regenerative within the landscape are forced to sell their land to the highest bidder to retire, and oftentimes their life’s work vanishes at that moment.
The small, specialized farms that grow diverse crops, raise regionally adapted livestock, and bring food security to their rural communities and urban neighborhoods are especially vulnerable within the current land ownership construct. When we reduce land to private material possession, we deny the land’s greater context. A piece of land stewarded with intention can not only remain in a state of continuous production, but it also generates ecological and social benefits that spread. When a farming system like that is allowed to evolve and grow in place for generations, it can become so deeply woven into the environment and community that it can begin to have the everlasting quality found in thriving, undisturbed ecologies. Preserving these farms is our greatest hope for an uncertain future, and to do so, we must change our mindset. Our current model is too short-sighted, and we must invest in ideas that honor the long view.
Relationships in Deep Time
When it comes to new models for managing our modern relationship with the living world and its resources, sometimes our most grounded concepts are borrowed instead of created. There have been and still exist today many cultures that have taken deep time into consideration when it comes to their plans, their governance, and their responsibility for the well-being of future generations and the Earth.
Across the world, diverse cultures have held time not as a straight line but as a deep, living field of connection. In Australian Aboriginal traditions, the concept of Dreaming is an ever-present layer of reality where ancestral beings shaped the land and continue to speak through it. The Haudenosaunee teach that every decision must serve the seventh generation yet to come, binding the present to a long arc of responsibility. For the Māori, whakapapa genealogy ties people to mountains, rivers, and ancestors in a vast web of time and kinship. Hindu cosmology maps time in sweeping cycles called yugas, where human life unfolds within an immense cosmic rhythm. In the Andes, Quechua and Aymara peoples honor pacha, a space-time concept where past, present, and future interlace through ritual and relationship. Though distinct in expression, each of these traditional cultures reveals a shared understanding: time is not just measured, but inhabited and extended far beyond the individual life.
These ideologies bring the land and people back into the greater context. They may feel like beautifully idealistic, poetic takes on the great unfolding of life, but as a guiding north star, these concepts allow human communities to have a more measured relationship with the land and encourage more accountability within their practices for the future that will be left for their children.
Cultivating Continuity
As I grow older with my piece of land, I have watched how things have built up and progressed but also fallen away. When you wake up day after day on the same hill, you begin to realize how ephemeral it all is, even my own carved-in patterns across the landscape. I recently had the opportunity to think about this more deeply with Alex Tanke of Dispersion Farms, a 43-acre perennial tree crop farm located in the Driftless region of Wisconsin. Alex is a young man with a passion for perennial tree culture. He maintains a subsistence garden and orchard, runs a nursery, has an extensive tree breeding and grafting operation, and has also planted trees for production. Alex is primarily focused on researching and cultivating American persimmon, hickory hybrids, and honey locust trees. It was a chance sequence of events that would put Alex in the unique position to buy the land he grows on, and he is currently working with The Farmers Land Trust to remove his acreage from the speculative real estate market and place it into community-centered, nonprofit ownership through the establishment of the Carya Farmland Commons.
Alex has seen firsthand what can happen to the invaluable work of an elder who has aged out of everyday farm management. Alex explained, “I was inspired to work with The Farmers Land Trust because of John Hershey’s story. The loss of his work to development is the classic example of why we need more tree breeders to protect their work by putting their land into land trust ownership. I’ve had too many panic moments where I’ve realized that we need to collect germplasm fast because it is going to be lost.” Tree farmers are specifically clued into deep time as their crops are harvested from beings that can take years, even decades, to reach maturity. Some of the projects Alex will undertake in his lifetime will be gifts that will serve future generations more than anyone in his current life.
With the establishment of the Carya Farmland Commons, Alex intends to see that his years of research and development will be preserved in perpetuity. Through the Farmland Commons model offered by The Farmers Land Trust, the land will be de-commodified through nonprofit status, protecting the land from ever being sold as real estate. The Farmland Commons model anchors land governance and operations within the local community by using limited-scope 501(c)(25) nonprofit land-holding entities. These nonprofits own the land and manage its administration, while farmers lease it at an affordable rate. This structure ensures long-term stability, with oversight from entities like the IRS and state attorney general, helping to protect the land and uphold the Commons’ mission across generations, even as organizations evolve. Wise beyond his years, Alex knows how important it is to preserve food production, natural ecosystems, and regenerative farms, and just how vulnerable they are on the open market. By taking this step, he is ensuring that his contributions and the contributions of all his great mentors and teachers carry forward.
Along with his interest and formative experiences working in perennial culture, Alex also had a life event that uniquely shaped his views on time. One of the chance circumstances that made him a landowner was the untimely passing of his father. Inspired in many ways by his father, a lifelong gardener, Alex explained that his father’s gifts continue to influence his life even today. “The role my dad plays in my life after his death is different from the role he played while he was alive. In the world, we have children, teens, young adults, working adults, working elders, elders who can no longer work, and the dying. Each role is different and important and offers a different set of teachings to us all. Beyond that we have the dead, and I realize now that they have a strong voice and continue to contribute to every future generation.”
Thinking Outside the Clock
To move away from short-sighted, material culture toward a society woven into true land stewardship, we must begin to reimagine our role not as owners or extractors, but as ancestors in training—temporary tenders of a continuity far greater than ourselves. The important work and long-range vision of young farmers like Alex Tanke and initiatives like the Farmland Commons model offered by The Farmers Land Trust show that this shift in mindset is not only possible, but is already taking root in our world. If we can learn to see land not as an asset, but as a living inheritance, one we are always shaping through every act of care or neglect, then we may begin to build a future that can realign our human communities with the timelessness of a thriving ecology. When we begin to act with deep time in mind, perhaps future generations will remember us not for what we took, but for what we tended, protected, and passed on.
As I walk along my awakened piece of land and acknowledge my transient time here, I give thanks to the ancestors, to the cultures around the world who still carry the truth of infinity in their traditions, and to all who fight today to preserve our wild spaces and protect the farmers and land stewards who keep us connected to the source of all life. The hands that plant today may never see the harvest, but the future depends on them, nonetheless.
Darby Weaver is a farmer and writer, growing biodynamic food and cannabis on her small farm in Wolcott, Vermont. She attended Sterling College in Craftsbury, Vermont where she received a degree in Sustainable Agriculture. She has been growing crops and raising livestock with her husband Elliot Smith for 16 years. As a writer for The Farmers Land Trust, Darby is passionate about using storytelling to uplift the work of communities reconnecting to the nourishment offered by regeneratively stewarded landscapes. Seeing nature as our ultimate teacher, Darby believes in transformation, and knows that the Farmland Commons model has the power to revolutionize modern land tenure and ownership. She sees this work as essential and recognizes that it can only be achieved through a de-colonized, community-centered approach that values the living spirit of the land and protects the rights of the people who share it.