Transcript
Speaker: Even if you're running a very successful farming operation, it's impossible to finance land purchases because there's a lot of money from outside of farming flowing into farmland and it has ah quadrupled the prices of land in the past fifteen twenty years. And there's no connection anymore between land price and what the value is that you can get out of the land from fruit production.
Speaker: And that's when this whole journey started for me and I started working for the Kulturaland Cooperative because I thought that this is maybe one of the most important things that I can be working on in my life.
Speaker: We often talk about how the food system is broken, but what would it look like to build one that is better? This mini-series from Agrarian Futures reimagines a food system rooted in cooperative principles.
Speaker: What if we didn't live in a winner-takes-all economy, but one where cooperatively-owned enterprises worked in partnership with each other across the food supply chain? Through deep dives into examples on the ground, we'll chart a path from our present moment to a better food future.
Speaker: Last episode, we talked with Charlotte Hollands, who at 21 sold 50 pound shares to 8,000 people in her community to buy her father's organic farm from their landlord and turn it into England's first community owned farm.
Speaker: Since then, the UK has seen over 20 farms successfully follow their model. This week, we go to Germany and to a cooperative that has been doing the same thing at scale for over a decade.
Speaker: Kultureland raises money from everyday people who want to do something good with their savings and can participate for as little as 500 euros. With that capital, Kultureland is then able to buy farms, take them off the speculative market, and grant the farmer a lifetime secure lease.
Speaker: In return, the farmer commits to farming organically and keeping the farm open to the community through farm trails, potlucks, volunteer days. Today, CultureLand holds 53 partner farms owned by almost 4,000 cooperative investors.
Speaker: In this episode, we talk to Thomas Klempt, who spent eight years as CultureLand's commercial director and was instrumental to its growth. We discuss land financialization in Germany, why a cooperative, and finally touch on his new work, starting an incubator farm network to train the next generation of farmers.
Speaker: Thomas, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's exciting to be next to such great names that you've already had in your show, some some people that have really inspired me along my way. Yeah, well, we're super excited to be talking to you today also and about the work of Culture Land and more. To get us started, in our previous episode, we talked to Charlotte, who's a farmer in the UK, little bit about the land context there.
Speaker: And I was wondering if you could tell us and tell the listener a little bit, what does the current farmland context in Germany look like with respect to farmers accessing land, the price of land, all that kind of stuff?
Speaker: I think the situation is really difficult for people to access land. Anyone, especially if you're a new entrant, but even if you're an established farm, even if you're running a very successful farming operation, which most farms are unfortunately not, but even if you are making decent money, it's impossible to finance land purchases with that because there's a lot of money from outside of farming flowing into farmland and it it has ah quadrupled the prices of land in the past fifteen twenty years and there's no connection anymore between land price and what the value is that you can get out of the land from fruit production. Unfortunately, unless you are able to mobilize money from people who who pool it together and through the Kulturland Cooperative buy land and make that available very affordably, it's it's basically impossible for farmers to to buy land and access land.
Speaker: kind of the story in most countries across the world, including, of course, the U.S. In the U.S. context, to a certain extent, it's due to da increasing financialization that's happened since since the early 2000s, probably in ah in a more major way.
Speaker: In Germany, you mentioned lots of like outside capital coming into farmland. Who is buying this land? It really started around the time of the financial crisis, 2008, when interest rates became really low and investors were looking to park their money somewhere safely. Farmland, which was before maybe not as attractive because ah the return on capital is not great in terms of the rent.
Speaker: As the interest rates were going down across the board, land became more attractive because the lease you get is at least a stable income. And even if it's ah just 1% on the purchase price or 2%, that's not so bad compared to what you were getting. And so just became a lot more attractive in those low interest years that followed until the corona pandemic. In that time, the land prices have risen by more than 300%.
Speaker: Wow. Yeah, that's ah that's a lot. Someone outside of the farming space might ask if farmers can rent that land, you know, what's the problem? But could you talk a little bit about what happens to farmers when they no longer have the ability to buy the land and they have to rent it?
Speaker: Yeah, there's a lot of issues with renting land. And first and foremost, the issue is that you don't have long-term planning. You can't plan for generations. If you do any kind of agroforestry or you plant hedges or invest in building up soil fertility, those are things that you're doing for the future and are going to bring you returns also in terms of the yield from the land over a period of decades. But Leases are usually only signed for maybe five years, usually maximum of 12 years. And then the the land is ah on the market again, so to say. And then it's whoever can pay the highest price who gets it. And then whatever you invested in increasing your soil fertility or whatever yeah hedges and trees and whatever you planted there is just going to be passed on to the the next person who pays the the higher lease price.
Speaker: So basically you're just looking to extract from the land what you can while you have the land, which is a very negative vicious cycle. Which gets us CultureLand. And I'll have you explain a little bit, you know, what CultureLand does. that You spent eight years as commercial director of CultureLand, helping farmers decommodify land and get access to long-term access to land.
Speaker: What brought you into that space of all the things you could be you could be doing? How did you come into working on this specific issue? Well, let me start with the book Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin, who you you had on the show 20 years ago. so I'm now 38.
Speaker: thirty eight And so almost 20 years ago, I read that book while I was at university and was having a kind of crisis of purpose, so to say. i was studying economics at the time. And I then decided I want to do something with farming. This is, it just felt like this is something real that has impact. And I did an apprenticeship on an organic farm and that changed the trajectory of my life. And and it started with that book. And from then I started to really understand many things that had no idea about growing up in the city.
Speaker: And the first thing I really understood was soil fertility and and how as I was working on this farm where I was doing my apprenticeship, there was these tractors with these big tanks of manure bringing out the manure on the fields. And it was like this really disgusting slurry, this spugnant smell, you know. and And it was this time of the year where the entire a landscape was just being sprayed with the manure and I just thought that it just does not seem right like what's what's going on you know and i did then I started to to research and and I became convinced that this is not the way to go and ah we should do things differently maybe we should we should compost the manure instead of bringing out to this rotten slurry And so I went down this avenue and from there, is the question of land ownership became something really ah central to to my focus because the question of of why why are farmers practicing farming in a way that is not sustainable for the land? And and here another book, Montgomery, Erosing of Civilization played a big role for me.
Speaker: I realized that we're we're basically down this this path. We're destroying our soils and we're kind of caught in a vicious cycle and we we need to find a way to get out of it, to preserve the land and to steward the land. And and how are we going to do that? And what are the things that...
Speaker: are contributing to the land being abused the way it is. And ownership has a lot to do with that. And the short-term economic pressure that is behind that in terms of having to extract value from the land and and extracting fertility and and that leads to destruction of the land.
Speaker: And so here this entire philosophy of land stewardship became something essential to me and After I did a five-year vocational training, I ah went to work on a friend's farm. And that farm was the first farm that bought land with the Kutuland Cooperative.
Speaker: So I was just ah right at the beginning. And i grew up with a very kind of neoliberal economics model in my mind. i studied economics. and I very much believed this narrative that private ownership of everything is the best way to go and collective ownership, not a good way to deal with resources because it's inefficient and so on. And and commons, it's it's a relic of the past, was overcome and for the glory of neoliberal economics that we live in now. And and then living on this farm,
Speaker: just completely contradicted um everything that I had in my mind in in that the farm was completely collectively owned. The land was collectively owned, the buildings were collectively owned in a different structure, and even the animals and the the tractors, everything on the farm was collectively owned.
Speaker: And it was thriving. There were so many people there, a lively commune. And I was struck by that. it it wasn't one of those farms where it's just like a family kind of in their little and they' little silo, you know, just doing their thing and maybe feeling lonely. It was just a really lively community farm. that was producing a lot of food on on that land while at the same time stewarding the land.
Speaker: And that's when this whole journey started for me and I started working for the Kultural and Cooperative because I thought that this is maybe one of the most important things that I can be working on in my life.
Speaker: Yeah, I also studied economics, neoliberal economics. And i remember one of the first things that you learn is, like in Economics 101, is the tragedy of the commons. And like, it's this like hypothetical scenario of this like village in the UK. And it's in everyone's best interest to overgraze.
Speaker: And so all the resources get depleted. And I think we know now that that is not even... a story that like bears out in actual historical records it was like It's hypothetical that even necessarily true it's such a funny hypothetical because it it presumes that people don't talk to each other right exactly It's like, in in what world is that going to play out? And Elinor Ostrom, I mean, she was the first woman to win the economics no and Nobel Prize the year after the the global financial crisis, 2009, right? Which there was this moment of, oh, no, we fucked up. We need to look for a kind of alternative ah thinking in economics. And she won the Nobel Prize.
Speaker: for her work that she did in the early 90s. this was already all out there. We just didn't hear about it in our Econ 101 course. Right, exactly. And for listeners that don't know Eleanor Ostrom, her work was really looking at different communities across the world that were managing resources in common, usually with like kind of participatory methods and And that, in fact, they manage their resources quite well, better, in fact, than their peer group of kind of privatized land management. And so that if you have, if it is grassroots and it is decentralized and there are participatory mechanisms that are created and enforced by the community that's part of it, you can very effectively manage common resources through some sort of collective ownership model.
Speaker: Tell me if that's how you would understand it. Absolutely. And and ah ah her groundbreaking work is to look at these different commons, these different resources from water management and land and forestry and so on, and in completely different cultures and crystallize eight commonalities that all of them had that she said were integral to successfully manage them. so there's there's a lot of examples of failed community resources, right?
Speaker: But what she, with what her pioneering work is is to look at what what are the commonalities amongst the ones that were successful and sustained over maybe more than 100 So there's a lot to be learned there. And after her work in the early ninety s a lot more work was done. So there is recipes out there on how to do these things. You know, we're we're not starting from scratch.
Speaker: Which gets us to culture land. Could you start by telling us a little bit about the history of the organization itself and then also kind of maybe how it's grown and evolved since you joining CULTUR.
Speaker: Yeah, so the backdrop of the organization is this movement of deprivatization of land in the 1970s, where this became a big movement, I would say, especially amongst biodynamic farms.
Speaker: So that's something that I would say is integral to the biodynamic farming philosophy, that that land should not be treated as as a commodity. A lot of these biodynamic farms, for listeners who are not familiar with biodynamic farming,
Speaker: It is the first philosophy of organic farming, I would say, that was postulated in 1924 by Rudolf Steiner, who is also the founding father of Waldorf schools. And these biodynamic farms that were doing that from a very deep conviction, they wanted their work to sustain over generations and for the land to be preserved. And the intention was really to take the land out of private ownership. And so they were looking at at different models how to do that and some of them started associations, non-profit associations, non-profit limited corporations, cooperatives and all over Germany something like two to three hundred of these structures emerged where then people also donated money so that land could be purchased and some land owners donated their money their land into into those structures.
Speaker: And then fast forward one generation later in the early 2000s when these these this founding generation of the 1970s was getting to retirement age or just had to step out of their roles from these organizations that they founded, there was a vacuum of people who were willing to step into all of these many, many little landholding entities. You still have to do the yearly accounting and and and all of the ah regulatory things that comes with having a legal entity.
Speaker: And there was just no money to pay any of this work because the idea was to hold land in perpetuity and for the farm to have the land available cheaply and not to cause big expenses. So Running these organizations was all done on a volunteer basis. And then one after another, these organizations were having trouble finding people who were willing to and able to, because you also have to have a lot of knowledge of legal stuff and accounting and so on, to step into these roles.
Speaker: And then the big question was, what's the way forward? Where does this go and how can we make this more sustainable? And this is where one pioneering farmer, Thomas Schmid, and the banker, founder of the Triodos Bank Germany, Alexander Schwedeler, the Triodos Bank It's a Dutch bank that is also based on Rudolf Steiner's philosophy, so it's all connected. They were brainstorming for a number of years and then some wonderful people came together, people who had a lot of experience in trust, a lawyer, somebody who was very experienced in land stewardship.
Speaker: ah former director of the Demeter Germany organization. and And they together, they said, well, let's let's start something new. Let's start an organization that works all over Germany and can take this burden from these individual little projects and hold the land for them so that they don't have to take care of all of this themselves. And then they spent quite some time to think about what the right structure would be. Titus Bana did the pioneering work there after he already did his PhD on commons.
Speaker: He basically did a second PhD analyzing the entire landscape of land stewardship and also looking across the border, especially to France, where they already had different models going.
Speaker: And he came up with this idea of the Kulturaland Cooperative. So CultureLand kind of came out of this movement to kind of deprivatize land in Germany and also out of a lot of like individual initiatives to do this, sort of kind of aggregating and organizing.
Speaker: A farmer with like ah a community around them, maybe a farmer that's selling directly like a CSA type model that has like a lot of active supporters is facing land loss. They reach out to you guys. You help them basically.
Speaker: launch a campaign to have their supporters and then also broader supporters of the cultural land cooperative basically buy a share that allows them to raise the money to buy the land and put it into this cooperative structure, which then secures that land in perpetuity for the farmer.
Speaker: On the investor side, it's also super interesting because your structure is allowing them to basically take a little bit of money that they would otherwise just have in a savings account or have invested. and in Germany, there's less of the stock market, but in commercial corporations, you and invest it into a farm, you know, either in their community or in Germany at large, you know, is helping secure this land for and an organic farmer and provide healthy food.
Speaker: Is that correct? i mean Absolutely. So thank you for ah summarizing that so well. I think makes it very interesting for us just private people to engage with something like this because they can make their money available and the average sum is 5,000 euros, which is not little, but it's You know, I mean, depending on where you come from, the largest amount of money that somebody made available was a million.
Speaker: And more than half of the members, they only put in 500 to 1,000 euros, right? So most people have very small amounts of money in there. So it's really mobilizing a lot of people. It's 4,000 members at this point that secured land for some 50 farms and about close to 1,000 hectares.
Speaker: Okay, so that's not you know changing a bit a bigger landscape yet, but it is ah picking up in momentum. And in every year, more money is being raised, even though the investment itself in terms of financial return is not attractive. So the the money that you put in, you can take that out after a number of years, but you will not get a financial return. Your return is that you enter into a relationship with the farm on a different level as as a supporter of the farm. And maybe the farm will invite all their supporters once a year or in whatever way engage with them. And that's ah something that nurtures this relationship.
Speaker: But you will not benefit from it by receiving a return in terms of money or or even food. Like some some people who invest, they think, well, can I get a basket of food now every year?
Speaker: Well, for the farm, that's also money, you know, so they can't, they really can't afford that. So it's really a gesture. I would bring in this mental image that played a big role in the founding years of the Kirtulian Cooperative of a bridge from lending money to donation money.
Speaker: The experience before Kulturland was that a lot of people might support something like this ideologically, but they're not willing to donate money completely. Like they don't know if maybe at some point in the future they they might need the money again. So this way of buying shares in the cooperative is in a way a hedge. So you're making the money available and if you need it in the future, you could get it back.
Speaker: But a lot of the members actually don't want it back because after 10 years, they say, look, that's fine. Actually, I don't need that money. And in a survey done by university, some 20% of the members said when they die, they will put it in their will that this money should not go to their heirs, but rather should stay in the cooperative.
Speaker: I think that's what interested me so much in in your model in the first place was the fact that it it isn't a pure donation. Not that, I mean, donations are needed and necessary and in many ways, but a cooperative system needs a supportive financial system that enables money to flow where it needs to flow. And I think that in a, you know, so obviously very small way when compared to the whole financial system, which is trillions of dollars, CultureLand is enabling People to place some of their capital into this good cause and not get a return, but still be able to get their money back down the line if they need it. You've moved on from cultural land to working on incubator farms.
Speaker: And I've read somewhere that in Germany, fewer than 2% of farms pass on to anyone outside of the family. And you yourself wanted to become a farmer, but were not from a farming background. Could you talk a little bit about your incubator project and how that's trying to solve that problem?
Speaker: In Germany, less than 2% of farms are being passed on outside the family. So it's either the children want to do it or the farm dies. That's basically the story, right? And in France, the story is different. In France, more than 50% of farms get passed on outside the family.
Speaker: So what's going on there? how and what What are they doing different? How are they managing farm successions successfully outside the family? And so we looked at that and one major piece of the puzzle there are these incubator farms. In France, they're called espacetistes agricoles. And now there's a few hundred of them all over France. There's some 80 that we call them permanent incubator farms where people come and they can test out Being a farmer, they get a piece of land, they get access to infrastructure, they get mentoring and coaching, and then they have three years time to start their own farming operations and to farm the land to to sell the harvest and so on. And they actually get supported with a basic income of about a thousand euros per month.
Speaker: And in this time, they learn what it means to be a farmer for real, like not as an apprentice working for somebody as an employee, but actually to run your own farming operations. And within this Espaces d'Agricol system in France, they also support transitions of farms outside the family.
Speaker: Over a period of two to three years, if if somebody is interested in taking over a farm, they will guide that process. for two to three years and the person that comes to a farm will get mentoring and coaching, will get some minimal income that is guaranteed and so on. And this way, 75% of people that enter this program end up running their own farming business at the end of it. So this was a huge inspiration for us and we wrote a proposal that we want to implement this in Germany as well. And we were very lucky in the end to get money from the research ministry and the agricultural ministry.
Speaker: And we're just at the beginning of setting this up. This is our first year. And at the end of 2028, we want to have a nationwide organization in place that can carry this into the future.
Speaker: We're starting this project with nine farms. And yeah, we're off to a good start. And so this in many ways is a bridge from like someone might go through an apprentice program.
Speaker: They might even be work as an employee on a farm for a few years figure out if they like farming. And then this would kind of be the next step, which is like, you know, you you love this this profession.
Speaker: now Let's see if you can like learn how to like be a business owner, run the farm on your own and like learn some of the more like commercial sides of it as well before you take the major leap into committing to a land base and being a ah commercial grower.
Speaker: and That's exactly it. And I think a mental image would be that this is the on-ramp to the highway of running your own farm. So after you finish your apprenticeship, you you basically learned a lot about, in Germany, we do vocational trainings. I think in in the US, that's not very usual.
Speaker: In Germany, if you want to become a farmer, then you usually do a three-year vocational training where you usually go on three different farms and you learn different farming practices and you learn how to work with different farming machines and work the land and to grow with different crops.
Speaker: But you usually learn very little about actually running a farming business. And that's something that you really can only learn hands on. Right. And so this this incubator farm program is kind of a light version of what it means to be an independent farmer or running running your own farming organization or operation business.
Speaker: So you you get a feeling for it and and you learn all of the different aspects from the subsidy aspect but to the accounting, to the marketing and and so on.
Speaker: Yeah, I love the image of the on-ramp to the highway. Because in the U.S., you definitely have a number of kind of programs that introduce people to regenerative agriculture in various ways, whether it be biodynamics, organic, ranching. through There's an organization called the Kavir Coalition.
Speaker: But you see people that complete that training, and then what's next? You can go work as a farmhand on ah on a farm or a ranch for a few years, maybe, and and learn some more. And then it's like, what's next? And there's no really obvious path forward. Like, first of all, you can't access land. You couldn't ever, ever afford it.
Speaker: Nor have you had any, obviously, like training, like managing a business in that way. So this is kind of the complementary piece to the puzzle to Kulturland. Kulturland can make land available and Kulturland is looking for people who are willing and able to step up to take over a farm. And we were looking for that and we we failed several times.
Speaker: And this is the way to incubate all of these people that are willing and able to then take over these farms that ah exist. I mean, farming is, is is it's it's a tough business to to enter into. that's That's a sad reality, right? so even even if you're doing the best, and I bet anyone who succeeds at joining farming, not having inherited the farm, like if if if you are, if you manage to enter farming and make that as a financial success, you would have been a millionaire in any other area.
Speaker: Right. I mean, you have to be so, so smart and dedicated and hardworking basically just to get by. And then, yeah, it's it's just so beautiful to to see that there's people willing to do that and and and be the stewards to the land that, yeah, I think we we wish there was more of, you know.
Speaker: Absolutely. Farmers are some of the most inspiring people and most courageous and hardworking, like you said. So Culture Land is working on decommodifying land. You talked about the farm incubators as ah as a complement to also nurture and mentor up people to be able to take over, hopefully, some of the the farms that Culture Land is able to put into collective common ownership of You know, as we think about a cooperative food system more broadly, and also you mentioned earlier kind of the different pieces in the puzzles and and culture land being one answer to one part of it, and hopefully this incubator being another piece of it.
Speaker: What are some of the other pieces that you would love to see nurtured to be able to like have a fully more cooperative food system? I would say that the cooperative way is the only way forward if we want to preserve human farming.
Speaker: The way things are going, the progress of automization and autonomous farming robots and so on, We're headed to a future where very, very soon, within a generation, maximum, I don't think it's going to take two generations.
Speaker: Basically, from a commercial standpoint, all the farming could be and would be completely automated and there wouldn't be any humans left in the entire process. So if we want to maintain our, I would say spiritual connection to land, our ancestral connection to land, then we need communities around these farms to say that we want that. We need people to step up and say, look I want my food to be grown by humans who have deep, heartfelt connection to the land, to the animals, to the plants.
Speaker: and And that has value for me, right? and And the way to do that is not going to be by buying the right produce in the supermarket. I don't think that's going to be successful, maybe in very niche ways, but I think the successful way forward is community-supported agriculture, where you you actually have a direct connection to the farm and and you get at least some of your food. You're not going to get all of your food from from from that farm, right? That's that's not the the the goal that I'm aiming for.
Speaker: What I personally want is that these these farms exist, right? I mean, of course, I love the food I'm getting from from a farm like that. But more essentially, I want farms to continue to exist that do farming in a way that I can go there with my child and participate.
Speaker: And it's not an industrial operation where humans are excluded. I think there's a deep ah need of connection for humans. And I i think it's very valuable for schoolchildren as it's done in Waldorf schools. I think in grade six or seven, they're all sent out to spend three weeks on a farm. In Germany, at least, that's how it's done.
Speaker: And I've heard so many stories of people that grew up, did all sorts of different things in their lives, became engineers, programmers, bankers, whatever, where they referenced those three weeks in in grade six or seven as something that had a big impact on them. And and that impact was only possible because of because that farm was a place that was able to be inclusive for these children, right? And that kind of farm is not going to um exist if the only metric is output per hectare and and financial returns.
Speaker: That's a beautiful answer. And I think that also speaks to the, the like, agriculture part of it. It's not just a ah machine. And it's like the kind of foundation of culture and, in many ways, spirituality and kind of identity. And that if we lose that to automation, we kind of lose, you know, who we are in many ways.
Speaker: One final question that we like to ask all of our guests, and obviously I think you've probably alluded to a lot of this answer already, but as you look into the future, especially for, you know, food and agriculture, what gives you hope Well, what gives me hope?
Speaker: The farms that I work with, the passion of the people on those farms really touches me so, so deeply. And I know that they are dedicating their entire being to this. Their they or their entire being is connected to the land. And That there's so many people willing to step up and in whatever way, and it can be just by signing few shares and making a few thousand euros available, are making a little sacrifice financially to make it possible. I think that is a huge portion of the population that has a longing for this and being able to spend so much time with these people in my life. It's a beautiful thing for me to be able to do this in my life rather than something else.
Speaker: Well, Thomas, thank you so much for being with us today and really excited for your book on Culture Land to come out in a few years. You said 2028, but that will be super excited. And i think for anyone listening to this podcast, yeah, I urge you to check out Culture Land and also think about if you're a farmer, what you know what could a cooperative model look like in your context? And if you're A citizen or a consumer, you know, how can you in some ways or another are kind of participate in supporting farms in your community? And there's a, Cultural Land is very unique in its model and i I wish we had something the future.
Speaker: In the US, like it, we don't quite, but there's also many variants on this model that could be possible in whatever context you're in. And I think it's a very hopeful solution for for the future of ah kind of cooperative land ownership.
Speaker: Yeah, well, thank you so much for inviting me to this wonderful podcast that you created. Excited to keep listening to many more episodes. Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song.
Speaker: If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice. It's crucial for helping us reach more people. You can visit agrarianfuturespod.com to join our email list for a heads up on upcoming episodes and bonus content.
