We here at CFAC have been thinking a lot lately about innovative ways of financing the family farm. We got a lot of interest from many of you on Facebook a few months ago 
when we posted this link about a Kickstarter-esque project for small farms.
Now there’s a new article out on Civil Eats about the challenge of financing family farms and new ideas. Check it out here!
For more info on what people are doing other places, check out these projects, too:
The Carrot Project, in New England, has created a special fund to finance farm and food projects.
Working Farms Capital, in Illinois, is a venture capital project that allows people to invest in various farm projects that Working Farms manages.
Farmland LP, in California, takes conventional farmland and converts it into organic farmland at a profit for their investors.
Pretty intriguing models! Which do you think would work best here in Montana?
“Buy land. They ain’t making any more of the stuff.” —- Will Rogers
“What we do to the land, we do to ourselves.” —- Wendell Berry
… And I challenge CFAC to tallying how many local investors would earnestly invest in land for the local investment yields, IF CFAC created an entity under CFAC, or other, that offered similar opportunities as the examples provided ( Farmland LP and Working Farms Capital). The challenge…before the new year, I will pay CFAC my membership fee times the number of investors that CFAC discovers would offer a written statement of their likely investment, in such (statements of interest/investment by either small (4-20acres) and large ( greater than 20 acres), locally. Start the tally with one, beginning with me….” I am interested in co-investing (in model similar to those mentioned above ) in small tracts of land mosaicked within Missoula county, similar to the triplex and four acres available right now on tower street, which is directly across the street from a subdivision that CFAC did not support. I would be interested in merging efforts with the city to create some wild spaces and parks within the city limits with these tracts.”