URBANDALE, Iowa — Recently there has been a dust up in our personal lives that has bled over into our work with SILT, and we wanted to let you know we’re here to answer your questions and ask for your understanding.
Four years ago, we naively tried to give a young farmer named Grant Schultz access to land in Johnson County. We invited Grant to find a parcel we could purchase. We would then sell it to him within 5 years for the same price we paid.
We believed in his dream of a multi-species, rotationally-grazed orchard with no GMOs or synthetic inputs. We believed he would grow annual crops and work a day job in the short term to make his dream come true. We believed he was a bright, hardworking young farmer with experience and a business plan. But we didn’t research him or this project well enough, and we ended up in more debt than he or we could handle and a relationship in shambles.
We are paying the price of tuition, but we are putting the lessons we’ve learned to good use. First and foremost, we learned that no organization in the state or the country would permanently protect that dream of nature-friendly food farming. That is how we eventually came to be a part of the incredible group that founded the Sustainable Iowa Land Trust.
But we’ve learned much more:
- Invest in professionals: Always run agreements by a qualified attorney and CPA.
- Trust but Verify: Vet farmers for what they promise, but also their history, reputation and philosophy.
- Start Slow: Require a trial period you can live with.
- Ask for Help: Trust the collective wisdom of a group or community.
- Start Small: Never take on more than you can afford to risk.
- Good Faith is Exactly That – Faith: See also: #1 on this list.
We tried to insulate SILT from this personal mess, but Grant’s supporters continue to link the two publicly. We came to realize that you are our community, one that we, the other 23 founders and many more people continue to build, and it was our responsibility to be completely transparent with you and to place our trust in you.
Thursday night, despite a flurry of international online attention instigated by Grant, the Johnson County Board of Supervisors, whose members adamantly support the local food movement, put an end to his latest scheme to convert, against our wishes, half of our 143 acres into 36 cabins, fishing docks and ponds. Grant claims that he needed this development to secure the financing he would use to pay us in full by Dec. 31, 2017. Or as a neighbor said before the hearing, “You realize if you win, you lose, right?”
If we end up with this farm, we hope good people will step forward to:
1) Protect, nurture and identify the many fruit trees and bushes on the farm,
2) Develop a viable business with the infrastructure now there,
3) Join us in figuring out how to reduce the rent for young or disadvantaged sustainable food farmers, or alternately, purchase the farm from us outright at a fair price and do the same.
Thank you for reading. Please share widely and contact us with any questions, thoughts or ideas. We hope by the very act of writing to you so publicly that we’ve proven the kind of people we strive to be every day.
Sincerely,
Suzan and Paul
suzan@silt.org or epd2@psu.edu
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