Professor Jessica Shoemaker’s article, Trading Acres, has been accepted by the Yale Law Journal. The article is co-authored by former Nebraska Law professor James Tierney.
The abstract is below:
Farms are places where people live their lives, sustain their families, and produce food and fiber for the wider community. And now, farms are assets swept up into global financial channels—converting before our eyes from repositories of the best of our agrarian ideals into paper playthings for the very rich. This asset-classification of farmland echoes patterns of financialization occurring across other elements of our daily lives, including housing, and compounds wider crises of concentration and industrialization in agriculture. But as an active land grab unfolds across rural America, farmland’s recent capture by absentee investors is particularly concerning. Farmland’s conversion to asset class threatens rural livelihoods, agriculture and food system resilience, and economic and spatial justice.
In this article, we argue that Wall Street’s arrival at rural America’s gate is not merely a market trend but rather the product of deep social choices governing the accumulation of investor wealth: property, corporate, and securities law. We explore the ways in which these deep structures of our legal system—from the primacy of market logics to a range of biases that skew our spatial, temporal, and social relations—constitute the conditions for this profound transformation in the way farmland, as a basic and essential rural resource, is being integrated into the modern capital economy. Together, business and property law create the conditions for land concentration, rural depopulation, environmental degradation, and labor exploitation.
Today’s rural land grab is meeting little resistance. But historically, investor-owned farmland was seen as a deep and politically-motivating threat to rural life. We situate past reform attempts to rein in financialized farmland and conclude that many attempts failed because modest doctrinal interventions result in playing shell games with finance—with financial actors exploiting definitional challenges, opportunities for evasion, and other positional advantages. We explore these systemic obstacles to change but conclude that possibilities do exist to more meaningfully address the harms of financialized farmland-ownership. These changes will require a wider movement toward legal and policy frameworks that more robustly constitute systems of democratic land governance, rural community resilience, and sustainable food production. We end with possible interventions toward building this more equitable and sustainable future, with an emphasis on democratizing rural land relations in movement work that values the deeply rooted knowledge and experience of the people who live in and care about the countryside.
