In agriculture, we talk a lot about land. But we don’t often dive deep into how agriculture and land ownership are intertwined in our present world. While traditions and legalities of land ownership vary from one region or country to another, for most of the world there are deep connections between the land and those who produce food on the land, and those connections are often formalized by institutions and societies in the form of ownership. 

For a large portion of the world, too, those who own the land are not the original stewards of the land. Among other implications, this lack of continuous stewardship suggests that the conversation around land ownership is nuanced and full of complexities. This is true in the United States and in many key agricultural production regions globally. This is also true on the land where my family farms in North Carolina, and in many ways, I’m just beginning to make space for that. 

We could not always "own" land. As Charles Eisenstein describes, western societies conceptualized and adopted the concept of land ownership. The land itself never conceded to this ownership or structure. Through Greek and Roman times, land ownership became more and more common and integral to society, but prior to those times, land was more like air or water that it was not possible to own. 

Pointing this out is not to say that land ownership isn’t currently a foundational underpinning of how agriculture functions in the 21st century, nor that it hasn’t provided, in some ways, legal protections that have incentivized certain land stewardship that likely would not have otherwise been in place within our overarching economic system. An example of this might be conservation of natural resources, especially over the long term. Land ownership has also, in many cases, likely kept land in a state of food production instead of in urban development. Land is also fundamental in the current practices in the U.S. of agricultural lending for working capital and capital investments. 

At the same time, there is a difference between the idea of land “belonging to us”, compared to this alternative: the idea of land as ours to tend well for a finite period, during which we’re entitled to the fruits of our labor on the land. Similarly, there’s a difference in accumulating as much land as possible to produce as much as possible, and in taking on the responsibility of bringing each place we’re stewarding into more fruitfulness and flourishing. 

This is also an invitation into a shifted understanding of land. Within that, land is a facilitator of allowing us to deepen in relationship with those near the land we steward, with those who are physically in our communities. Online spaces have opened the world to ideas and connections around the globe, and it seems that doesn’t have to be at the expense of having more in person communities connected to land too. 

Reflecting on land stewardship also raises some big questions. What would it look like to have fruitfulness and flourishing of the place’s interconnected web be the priority, the singular focus, on land that is growing food? What if we also consider how it would improve quality of life, resilience, and our own learnings and growth as humans? There’s an opportunity to think much bigger, when we consider the biggest imagination of the legacies of our short (relative to the age of the planet) window of time as stewards of land will be. What can the legacy of land stewardship in agriculture truly be?

Further Reading: Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics; Greek property; Roman property.