A Socially Conscious Way to Invest in Farmland: An Interview with Dr. Jason Bradford about Farmland LP
Kalpa, Big Picture Agriculture
The following post is an interview with Dr. Jason Bradford, who answers questions about his business, Farmland LP, which is an investment vehicle that allows its investors to own farmland which is farmed using organic and sustainable practices.
Kalpa: Please start by giving us a small background on Farmland LP. What is it, what are its goals, and who might be interested in investing in it?
Jason: We are an investment fund that buys conventional farmland and converts it to certified organic, sustainably managed farmland. Historically, farmland has been an excellent, inflation-hedged investment. Our firm, Farmland LP, adds value to farmland by converting it to organic farmland and managing it ongoing. Our goal is to play a role in the transformation of the food system while benefiting the environment, people, and our investors.
Potential investors include any accredited individual investors (an SEC requirement) and institutions such as pension funds, university and charity endowments. They are often interested in holding tangible, inflation protected, cash flowing assets, and farmland meets those criteria. Also, since we are an environmentally and socially responsible management company, we attract those interested in making sure their money is doing good work…
It was co-created with my business partner, Craig Wichner. I had the basic agroecological model in my head and was looking for a way to make it happen……
(9 November 2010)
Mushroom Abundance
Ish Shalom, PUB
Oh boy, how exciting life in the forest is this beautiful time of year. While the first rains of the season are still new and exciting, the long shadows of low angled sunshine, the breeze blowing bountiful big yellow leaves of maple… The occasional pair of spiraling maple seeds falling still catches me in melancholy, reminding me of childhood and helicopters. How difficult it is to not spend all day outside, gleefully enjoying this special time of year.
Food in the forest abounds, as this might be our most abundant time of year in our coastal climate here. A massive convergence of foods between fishing, hunting, foraging and an overlapping harvesting of summertime garden veggies with oncoming root vegetables and still ripening colorful fruits – apples, raspberries huckleberries, indoor ripening pears, winter squash and more. There is so much to eat and process, it can get overwhelming sometimes…
Under the wooded canopies of our gorgeous coastal forest, amidst the green ferns and colorful leaves I find some of the tasty treasures of the forest – the world of mushrooms. This time of year, it seems, in just about every patch of forest, mushrooms are popping up. Shaggy manes, with their funny habit of popping out of gravel roads, delight us even as we’re driving between one patch of forest and another.
This year I have been introduced to a wonderful new friend of the forest – the Lobster mushroom.
Previously unfamiliar to me, this mushroom has made an abundant appearance in our forest here in Walker Creek Valley. I don’t really get all that excited about collecting mushrooms until I find a quantity of them that requires a basket (short of one I just feel either silly or cold using the shirt off my back to safely transport my bounty). In the past few weeks, time after time I’ve collected bundles (shirtfulls, usually) of these delicious delights, each time more exciting than the last, as I keep finding more and more ways to cook them. I make a pretty distinct differentiation between wild foods that are by the book “Edible”, and foods that I personally find DELICIOUS. Edible wild foods that are “edible” are novel things to know about, perhaps for desperate times of scarcity or boredom, whereas delicious wild foods are just plain foolish to not know about.
Lobster mushrooms are now firmly planted in my list of delicious food to look out for this time of year. Interestingly, their color varies from a pale yellow to a dark red lobster-like color, which tends to resemble the colors of fallen autumn leaves. I don’t know exactly how, but I feel as though I have developed an intuitive connection with this new friend. Multiple times now, I have seen a glimpse of color across the forest, perhaps a hundred feet away. I joyfully skip over there, trying to stay focused on that spec of color, hopping over branches, ducking under brush. I get over there to find an old torn piece of orange flagging tape, or a maple leaf. In disappointment, with a slight sigh, my head drops down only to notice a beautiful specimen of Lobster mushroom right in front of me! That has got to be the closest thing to a mushroom speaking to me that I have ever experienced. Interestingly, my most bountiful harvest yet was on public land, at Coquille Falls on Coquille’s south fork. Highly recommended – waterfalls, exercise and dinner – the perfect day out.
Other delicious mushrooms to look for this time of year are chanterelles, honey mushrooms, hedgehogs, porcinis, (these are impossible to miss, see photo), parasols and of course shiitakes if you have made or bought some shiitake logs. If you don’t have a field guide I recommend David Aurora’s “All That the Rain Promises and More”, as well as his more detailed “Mushrooms Demystified”. The Audubon Field Guide to Mushrooms of North America is next-best. However, I don’t recommend identifying mushrooms solely by book – always find someone experienced who can help you get a definite ID before eating anything!
(7 November 2010)
Growing Food Starts and Ends with The People
Booka Alon, Civil Eats
When I stand at the gates of our 2.2 acre local urban community farm, I get asked a lot of questions. The number one inquiry: What will you do with the food you grow? The simple answer: We plan to share it with the people who planted it. We’ve had the honor to participate in one of the nation’s most progressive urban agriculture projects–a shining example of what happens when neighborhoods unite, governments experiment, and food justice proponents say, “Let’s try it.”
Hayes Valley Farm is the product of an unlikely presence of valuable, viable, underutilized space in the heart of San Francisco. Neglected and filled with trash after the Loma Prieta Earthquake, the site was dotted with needles, blankets, shoes, bottles, and personal artifacts left behind–plus eight inches of invasive ivy. On January 24th, 2010 we were handed the keys and the opportunity to inspire a community to grow their own food and feed themselves. We had one thought in mind: dig in.
We didn’t know exactly how things would progress but now we’re standing at the edge of possibility, and I can tell you that we’ve dug in and are in sync with a need our neighbors and students share.We are permaculture-trained designers demonstrating that bacterial-dominant soil yields better broccoli, and we’re illustrating how planting techniques, such as broadcasting legumes, can add nitrogen to your soil. But there’s a reciprocal and ongoing energy cycle here, and it’s obvious that community members teach us as much as we’re teaching them.
…With your help, next year we’ll strive to keep our gates open every day, offer more classes, more volunteer opportunities, and more resources for the community. Our event on 10-10-10 this year showed us people were hungry to plant seeds. We had 1,000 people pass through our gates on one day–in trucks and with bucket in hand–excited to pick up valuable compost, mulch, manure, sand, and trees for the The Kitchen Garden Challenge event-based resource sharing opportunity we held together with Kitchen GardenSF.
(10 November 2010)
If you’re in the SF area, or if you just want to support a wonderfully deserving local food project, please go to this link and help them out. -KS
