Field Notes offer personal reflections paired with purpose, giving readers a snapshot of on-the-ground experiences. In this piece, SAFSF Membership Manager Holly Hanes shares about her time in Chicago with The Conservation Fund (SAFSF Member) and Carbon Yield for the Measuring Resilient Southland Farms Fund Field Day. Read on for her reflections on how farms are vital climate infrastructure.
This summer I spent a day walking farmland on the edge of Chicago as part of the Measuring Resilient Southland Farms Fund Field Day, hosted by The Conservation Fund (TCF) and Carbon Yield. I came away with a highly unorganized collection of notes on my phone and a much sharper answer to the question: what does it actually take to build a just and sustainable food system, one acre at a time?
Here’s what I saw, and why I think every funder working on food, land, or climate should be paying attention to this model.
The problem is bigger than any singular grant can solve.
To give you a flavor of the gravity of the situation: communities nationwide are losing 40 acres of farmland every hour. Every hour! Chicago, the country’s third-largest metropolitan area, has already developed 77% of its remaining farmland. Meanwhile, 59% of young and beginning farmers say they can’t access affordable land. Put those together, and you get a hard truth: we can fund all the farmer training and market-access programs we want, but without a real strategy for land, we’re preparing a generation of farmers for a system that has no place for them to farm.
That’s the gap TCF’s Farms Fund was built to close.
A revolving fund, not a one-time grant
Through a Buy–Support–Protect–Sell model, TCF acquires at-risk farmland before it’s lost to development, supports the farm businesses that will work it, protects it permanently for agricultural use, and then sells it to the farmers on a patient, affordable path to ownership. As that capital is repaid, it revolves back into the fund to secure the next property. It’s not philanthropy spent once; it’s capital designed to keep working.
A “patient pathway to ownership” is my favorite part of this model. Not a lease, or a grant, but a pathway that positions farmers to leverage public dollars to ownership. TCF and partners reframe “farmer support” from an end goal of access to an end goal of equity.
The model started in Atlanta, Georgia, when funders visited Chicago a decade ago to learn about local food systems. That visit sparked a million-dollar investment that became the seed of the Farms Fund — which has since grown into a nationally recognized, scalable model, with Chicago’s full buildout expected over the next two years. Funder field days, like the one I attended and the ones SAFSF hosts throughout the year and at our Forum, aren’t just site visits; they’re where movements like this can actually start.
What it looks like on the ground
Z-Farm in Chicago Heights: TCF purchased 30 acres — five greenhouses, a roadside sales center, a pole barn, a farmhouse — on behalf of Urban Growers Collective, a Black- and women-led organization that has spent more than 23 years building community-based food systems on Chicago’s South Side. The infrastructure now lets Urban Growers Collective consolidate its livestock operations and expand its apiary and vegetable production with direct, on-site sales.
Stuenkel Legacy Farm in Matteson: TCF secured 74 acres with ten outbuildings and two homes, on behalf of Kakadoodle Farm, a women-owned pastured egg operation. That land is letting Kakadoodle scale two additional producers on-site and grow its flock from 300 to 1,000 chickens. One of the farmers put it simply: “Farmers are the change makers in a new food system.”
I also saw the Reichert Farm, secured on behalf of Fresher Together in Sauk Village, and heard about Just Roots’ It Takes a Village Farm. While the latter is not a Farms Fund acquisition, it is part of the same regional fabric of community-rooted agriculture TCF is working to protect.
Why funders should think of this as infrastructure:
Diversified farms on the urban fringe function as climate infrastructure for their regions, and that is something TCF and Carbon Yield know all too well. Through their research, they’ve discovered how these farms shorten the distance between food production and urban consumers, transition extractive land into regenerative use, and connect farmers to aggregators, schools, workplaces, and healthcare institutions. When farms are seen as necessary infrastructure, as vital as the water system or a transit line, food security, climate resilience, and economic development run through the same acre of soil.
The Chicago numbers to date make the case:
- 7 farms
- 343 acres
- 10 farm owners — 50% women, 80% BIPOC
- $6.5 million in land value secured
- $500,000 invested directly in on-farm infrastructure
Chicago has a pipeline of $9.8 million in additional at-risk properties sitting behind a single limiting factor: flexible, readily available acquisition capital to move fast enough to secure them before they’re lost.
My takeaway: I chat with funders each week who are asking how to move beyond one-off grants toward capital that compounds—and this is one of the clearest examples I’ve encountered of what that looks like in food and farmland. A revolving fund that puts farmers on a real path to ownership, backed by data that treats farms as regional climate infrastructure, built out of a funder field day a decade ago that could have just as easily been a nice site visit and nothing more.
That’s the real lesson for those of us in philanthropy: sometimes the most catalytic thing we can do is show up, walk the land, an ask how our capital could activate true systems change.
If you’re a funder thinking about the unlock produced by flexible, early capital, I’d welcome the conversation and encourage participation in SAFSF’s Integrated Capital Community of Practice. Curious about protecting farmland and farmer ownership? TCF’s Farms Fund model is worth a much closer look.