This growing season has been particularly hard for farmers across the state. This summer’s frequent storms led to saturated soils and flooding in the Connecticut River Valley and central Massachusetts in mid-July. Subsequent floods during the following days added to the existing damage. What used to be once in a generation flooding is now a […]
read more…The Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and the Environment (EEA) has released the state’s Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2025 and 2030. The Plan is focused on greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission reduction, including includes CO² sequestration, while the 2022 Massachusetts Climate Change Assessment focuses on identifying the most urgent issues and update to the […]
read more…Please join us at a Listening Session to provide input for the development of the MA Farmland Action Plan. The purpose of the MA Farmland Action plan is to develop state level goals and recommendations for increasing farmland protection, farmland access, food security, and the long-term economic and environmental viability of farms across all regions […]
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Decades of farmland conversion has resulted in a patchwork of noncontiguous farmland and former farmland parcels that are less than five acres in size. Over this time farming in Massachusetts has changed dramatically, underscoring significant shifts in farming technology and know-how, in opportunities for and interest in direct-to-consumer sales, and in our food system overall. […]
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Access to farmland was one of the key issues brought forward in the Plan. In 2020 farmers, land organizations, municipal agencies, and farm support organizations identified access to and protection of farmland as the most important issue facing both established and beginning farmers. Some 45.5% or 409,000 acres of farmland in MA has been lost […]
read more…For Massachusetts farmers to feed the Commonwealth, land must be available and affordable. There are a number of laws, programs, regulations, and an executive order seeking to maintain our agricultural land base, but they do not coordinate, or do not coordinate well with each other, leading to , reduced effectiveness, economic and administrative inefficiency, and […]
read more…The Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs’ (EEA) Resilient Land Initiative (RLI) is an effort to solicit input from Massachusetts nonprofit organizations, municipalities, state agencies, landowners, and residents to draft and implement a new Statewide Land Conservation Initiative. The initiative has released a draft summary of the findings and recommendations. The document recognizes the importance […]
read more…New solar siting regulations support the Massachusetts Local Food Action Plan’s recommendations to protect farmland from conversion to solar use, but threaten to reduce sustainability for farms by limiting the amount of land that farmers may use to generate revenue from solar projects. The updates to the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) Program (225 CMR […]
read more…Lack of access to affordable land is routinely cited by aspiring and established farmers alike as a primary challenge to entry and expansion. Since the 1940’s farmland has been steadily converted to other uses and regrown into New England forest, creating a patchwork of separate small parcels of farmland and former farmland. Many of these […]
read more…Massachusetts’ Agricultural Preservation Restriction (APR) Program is one of the oldest state farmland protection programs in the country. Enacted in 1977, the program targets the most productive soils and purchases perpetual easements that assure the land will be available for farming for generations to come. Since the program’s inception, provisions have been added that work […]
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