American Farmland Trust

The American Farmland Trust (AFT) is an organization that was founded in 1980 to protect farmland and ranch land in the United States, promote environmentally sound farming practices and keep farmers on the land.

AFT is staffed by farmers, policy experts, researchers and scientists, and governed by a board of directors. Headquarters are in Washington, D.C., with satellite offices in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Washington state. AFT also runs the Farmland Information Center in Northampton, Massachusetts and the Center for Agriculture in the Environment in Dekalb, Illinois.

AFT’s mission is to protect farmland, promote sound farming practices and keep farmers on the land.

Farmers and ranchers founded AFT in 1980, partly in response to the 1979 report of the National Agricultural Lands Study, titled Where Have the Farm Lands Gone? The organization has worked to pass state laws and local ordinances intended to enable the preservation of farmland.

Since AFT’s founding in 1980 by a group of farmers and citizens concerned about the rapid loss of farmland to development, the organization has helped save millions of acres of farmland from development and led the way for establishing sound environmental practices on millions more.

AFT divides its programmatic work into three separate campaigns: Farmland Protection, Agriculture and Environment and Keeping Farmers on the Land.

To protect farmland from development on the local level, AFT creates public and private conservation easement programs that keep farmland forever farmland. The programs are designed to enable farmers and ranchers to resist constant pressure to sell land for development by compensating them for giving up their development rights.

AFT also works at a federal level to preserve farmland through programs like the federal Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program (FPPA)—which provides matching funds to states, communities and organizations for protecting their farm and ranch land—and other policies that provide incentives to landowners who steward and conserve their land.

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