An Interview with Kulturland’s Thomas Kliemt
Our current farmland and housing crises in the United States stems from myriad contributing factors, but one of the overarching influences originates from our legal and social concept of property ownership.
North America was a much different place before the 17th century, when the earliest iterations of the U.S. government began colonizing the landscape and committing genocide against the native populations. As settlers began taking over parcels of stolen land, the establishment of a new, dominating foreign power and civil structure began to develop.
As the government strengthened in the early 20th century, increased regulations on public and personal resources and systems led to firmer governance and a more complex and legal understanding of citizen’s rights. During this time, the concept of private property ownership became a staple of what it means to live in the United States.
Here at The Farmers Land Trust (TFLT), we feel it is important to acknowledge the sordid history of land ownership in North America because it built the system we have today. It is unlikely that the colonizers who came to the abundant continent could have ever imagined the consequences of their conquests, and the difficulties to be faced by all future generations as a result of land theft, private property, and capitalism.
As we face the many challenges associated with how our government and dominant culture has dictated our collective relationship to land, it is important to remember that there is always the possibility for change.
Uncommon Ground
As we at TFLT work to secure more community-held land in the United States, we are fortunate to have many examples in other countries where organizations have built organizational frameworks, navigated difficult legal hurdles, and secured community-held farmland in perpetuity. One such organization is Kulturland in Germany.
Kulturland has done an incredible job navigating the many challenges associated with taking privately owned land and preserving it in community for the purpose of regenerative farming. To understand how this has worked, what challenges are left to tackle, and what the future holds for farmland in Germany, I spoke to Thomas Kliemt, the commercial manager at Kulturland.
We opened our conversation by discussing one key cultural difference between the United States and Germany—the concept of cooperatively owned property.
Thomas: Our experience is, of course, very specific to our cultural context. I think in the U.S. you probably have many people who are open to community approaches to owning property, but it is much more deeply ingrained in our culture here. Cooperative-owned housing and housing that is owned by the municipality has been a part of our culture since the start of the industrial revolution in Germany. That makes community-held property not that foreign of a concept to the average citizen.
A Needed Shift in Perspective
Thomas acknowledged that private property is an ingrained part of society in Germany, in his mindset, in his youth, and today. It took a life-changing experience on a farm for him to fully realize the potential of community-held land.
Thomas: This journey has been very personal for me. I grew up with a very neoliberal economic mindset. My childhood home was owned privately by my parents. And while we knew of community-owned housing and knew people who lived there, I grew up believing that only people who could not afford private property would live there. Thus community-owned things were not something I viewed as aspirational.
Later on in my education, the concept of community-land was mostly portrayed as a historical relic that was bound to lead to suboptimal outcomes—the so-called “tragedy of the commons.” Luckily I had a very deep crisis, questioning the prospects of my career, so I took some time off. I worked on a farm which left a big impression on me. I decided to do vocational training to become a farmer. Here in Germany and in Switzerland, becoming a farmer is a quite serious education. You can participate in a two- or even four-year program for this, and I chose the four-year program.
My vision was to buy a farm and become a farmer on my own property. That dream was very quickly dashed by the economic realities of it. I had to realize that buying a farm; if you’re going to take out a loan, then the interest alone is higher than what you will earn farming. It just doesn’t add up. In that process, I became very desperate. Luckily, a friend of mine, who was a farmer on a community-owned farm, invited me to join his farm. That was my first practical experience of community ownership. And it was an incredibly positive experience.
I had to realize that buying a farm; if you’re going to take out a loan, then the interest alone is higher than what you will earn farming. It just doesn’t add up.
Even though I had mentioned to you that our culture is familiar with community-owned housing and that is an everyday reality here, I grew up in a home that was privately owned by my parents. We knew of community-owned housing and knew people who lived there, but that was viewed as “poor peoples” housing. It was a perception people held that community-owned things were not aspirational.
Different Thoughts on Ownership
Thomas’s experience on the community-owned farm opened up his world view. The community model is very different from the feudal systems of property ownership imposed on the German population between the ninth and 19th centuries. Just as we are experiencing here in the United States, it can take a long time for a society to unpack that many years of one vision for land stewardship.
Thomas: When I went to live on my friend’s farm, they had implemented the most community-oriented ownership concept I had ever seen, even to this day. The land is owned by Kulturland, the buildings are owned by a limited liability company that is funded by peer-to-peer loans, (which was about 100 people who offered loans to buy the buildings,) and all of the working materials such as the tools, tractors, and farm animals, are community funded through donations and owned by an association that runs the farm.
That makes three different ownership structures for the farm. Each entity makes perfect sense for what they have ownership over. This really opened my horizon to the idea of community ownership in many different areas of my life. It brought me back to rethink what I had learned about economics, and I started to do research about commons models. I got to know Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work and began following other academic work that has been done regarding commons. I got to know about projects here in Germany doing this work. The scales fell off my eyes. I came to realize that private property is not the best form of structuring ownership.
Before this, I never questioned it. Of course, private property, it’s an ideal, something to strive for. Before, we lived in feudal times and we had our feudal lords and everyone else was a vassal. They had to work on the land and give their share to the feudal lords and along came private property and it seemingly transformed everything. It gave us “freedom,” at least this is the story we are being told. The reality is so different. Most modern-day farmers do not own the land that they farm. They lease it and it is being leased at the highest possible price. We live in a neo-feudal society in many ways. After my experience on this farm, I was able to realize that certain things should not be private property, especially land.
Land is something that we all need to live. It doesn’t make sense to have land as private property, but it is a challenge changing the way things are. It requires a good governance structure. I had to have this lived experience of being on that farm and seeing how it works. I don’t think anything theoretical would have impacted my thinking as deeply.
Challenging the Law
Changing the way things are is no easy task. Beyond the ideological shift that folks have to embrace, there are many barriers that stem from how we’ve developed our legal systems. Thomas noted that in Germany, the legal battles have been some of the hardest fought for Kulturland.
Thomas: One challenge that we face at Kulturland with the implementation of community-held land that is specific to Germany is our legal framework. Germany’s laws around property are not designed to permanently take land “off the market.”
Certain things should not be private property, especially land.
Our legal system is designed for private property that is owned by individuals or companies that can then do with it as they wish. In fact, there is a ruling by the highest court in Germany that when writing a contract where you will make something immutable, or unchangeable in the future, is unconstitutional. This is due to the idea that by doing so, you are robbing the future owners of the property of the right to deal with it as they wish. With those restrictions in place, we designed a lot of barriers so that the land can’t be sold again and will be made available to organic, community-centered farms. For that purpose, we have to create a fairly complicated and intricate legal framework where we found a subsidiary company with the farms that we buy land for. The subsidiary becomes the owner of the land, and we each have veto rights over changing the statutes of that legal entity.
There are also laws in Germany that have been put in place to protect ownership of land from being sold to external investors. This law is supposed to protect farmers by protecting land from being sold to corporate interests. When crafting this law, no one thought of a legal entity that would want to buy land for good. Not as a speculative investor, but as an organization that wants to buy land to protect it from exploitation and remove it from the commercial market.
As an organization, we must continuously go and fight legal battles to buy land. Now, a few states are amending their laws to make it more difficult for investors to buy land, but on the other hand, recognizing that there are organizations like Kulturland that want to buy land for good. Navigating these legal issues costs us a lot of resources. We had to hire a full-time lawyer to fight out these legal battles for us. We are working within a legal framework that never envisioned an organization like ours. Through this work, we have accumulated what is probably the most extensive legal know-how in this area.
Farmland Transitions
Kulturland fights these legal battles to preserve farmland for farmers who hope to nourish their local communities and ecology. Just as in the United States, farmers are unable to afford the rising costs of land in Germany. Kulturland serves as a steward of land and community by putting farmers onto farmland and supporting these farms through crowdfunding from the local families attached to the farm. As they’ve developed, they’ve fine-tuned their methods, and the experience garnered has helped them identify collaborations destined for success.
We can only work with farms that are able to mobilize a community.
Thomas: The usual case at Kulturland is that land is being offered to a farm or to a group of people who want to start a farm. The land has been offered to them to buy, but they are unable to buy it because land prices are far too high. The farmers reach out to Kulturland to get help to purchase the land. Kulturland investigates the circumstances. If it seems like a good fit, we let them know that we would be happy to buy land with them. The farmers are then tasked with finding enough people to pledge to contribute one-third of the land price once the purchase has gone through.
We can only work with farms that are able to mobilize a community. As an example, there are cases where there’s a farm that has an established, supportive community, but the people who farm the land are too shy to ask for support and raise money from the community. This inner hurdle doesn’t work. Raising money from the community is the easiest and most trustworthy way to gather funds for these farm projects.
Raising more than 100,000 euros comes with a lot of legal restrictions. One reason why Kulturland is so attractive is because we as an entity are highly regulated and thus very trustworthy. A small farm would have a hard time trying to set up a structure where they would be able to raise that kind of capital. I think we have done a good job with setting up our crowd investing platform. I think we’ve gathered a lot of experience in how to communicate our projects with the public.
I also think that our farm project managers have gotten very good at identifying farm project requests that will be fruitful. We have a team of four people who take in requests and help set up the crowdfunding campaigns. There are a lot of requests that come in from people who have their hearts in the right place, but maybe have too lofty ideals or aren’t prepared for the hard work that a life of farming will bring. From the first few interactions with people, you can get a sense for whether they truly understand what a brutally difficult life farming is and if they are going to be able to tough it out. You really have to love it to do it.
Supporting the Future with Incubator Farms
While most Kulturland projects originate with farmers seeking help in securing a particular piece of land, the organization also works with elder farmers who don’t have willing successors to take on their businesses.
Thomas: There are many farmers that haven’t made plans for succession, and they’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into their farms. Their children aren’t interested in taking it on, and this is understandable. They see how hard their parents have had to work and they have other opportunities. Then, there are other people who maybe would be willing to take over the farm, but when it comes down to it, to take over a 200- to 300-acre farm has a lot of inherent risk, and they get scared. There’s very little support stateside for coaching, business consultation, or financing to be able to take on a large farm.
This has spurred a new initiative at Kulturland to establish incubator farms in Germany. This concept is modeled off of the incubator farm model that was started in France 15 years ago. We hope that through these incubator farms we can get young people to get some experience and build up the confidence they need to manage their own farming operations. The incubation period is two to three years on a farm where they are being coached and given all the resources they need, including machinery, tools, etc. After the two- to three-year period, they are able to take over entire farms in need of successors.
A Small Light in the Darkness
At the end of our conversation, I sheepishly asked Thomas what made him hopeful. He admitted that he wasn’t feeling very hopeful, and I think that is something a lot of us can relate to as we grieve the collapse of our ecosystems and navigate the ever-growing hardships of our day-to-day lives. As he walked out the challenges that seem too big to face, he acknowledged that within these dark realities, his hope can be found on the small, regenerative farms operating on land secured and supported by their local communities.
Thomas: You’re asking me what makes me hopeful at maybe a bad time because overall, I am pretty disillusioned. We have had big protests in Germany this year and so many farms took to the streets because some of their subsidies were being cut and people in the general public were not very sympathetic toward the farmers. The idea of many people in Germany is that farmers are getting these big subsidies and they’re driving these big tractors and they’re millionaires because they own big equipment and large tracts of land. It’s just not the case. There are those examples, of course, especially for very large farming operations, but even if you do own the land, that’s not money in your pocket.
The income reality for the average farmer in Germany is so grim. There are so few young people who are willing to take this risk. If you look at vegetable farmers, the education for young vegetable farmers, in the last 10 to 15 years, has completely eroded. There are no more young people signing up for these educational programs because the prospects are so bad.
The only thing I am left to hang onto, is to see that there are these small farms out here, they exist, and they’re being supported by communities, people who are willing to invest significant amounts of money to help them buy land. Because of that dedication and support, these farms are going to survive. They are going to survive even if the society, the majority, doesn’t appreciate the value of farming.
Within these dark realities, his hope can be found on the small, regenerative farms operating on land secured and supported by their local communities.
Overall, in Germany, we live in a democratic system. When it comes down to it the people would rather have cheap food than good farming. Knowing this is the challenge we face, I am committed to keep working on this essential initiative that supports the success of these small, wonderful farms.
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