Greetings!  

Winters, the town of 7,000 where Terra Firma is located, is an honest-to-goodness small town.  There's still only one traffic light, people greet you by name on the street, and you can still leave your doors unlocked at night.  Yet we're close enough to the Bay Area and Sacramento that many people are openminded and tolerant as well as down to earth.
In many other ways, though, Winters is a pseudo-aristocratic society, as small towns traditionally have been.  Over time, a few key families have established themselves as the economic royalty, providing the majority of jobs and owning most of the land both in town and in the surrounding countryside.  This is the natural result of successful businesses and families "investing locally", growing and succeeding over time in a small community.
For the most part, any business succeeding in a community is a good thing.  But in a small town, this dominance can be frustrating, like when a business uses their land in a thriving commercial district for employee parking while space for restaurants, offices and other new businesses is limited.  To an ambitious newcomer, it can seem almost impossible to start a new enterprise -- whether it's a business or a community organization.

The availability of good farmland and facilities is similarly limited here, as it is in many rural areas.  Agriculture usually can't compete with residential real estate economically, nor can it coexist very well.  So zoning laws in rural areas keep parcels large and hard to divide.  Farms tend to be multi-generational ventures, and successful ones expand over time.  The end result is that extended families end up owning hundreds if not thousands of acres of land, as well as harvesting equipment, processing facilities, trucking companies, etc.  Non-farming landowners often rent their land to these farmers, and many smaller farmers sell their crops to them.
    New farms face daunting obstacles to getting land tenure and securing financing.  And the ones that do manage to build a successful business find it difficult to expand in this environment.  You can't force someone to sell you a piece of land just because you want to buy it, or rent you a building just because you need it for expansion -- even if it might be a more lucrative use than its current one.  

  When Terra Firma was getting established in the 1990s, most farmers in the area were suffering as part of a widespread recession in agriculture.  This worked to our benefit, as the market for organic produce at the time was growing.  In recent years, agriculture in
general has returned to profitability, and the competition for land has become intense in our area. 

This is the environment confronting the small renaissance in organic and sustainable farming going on right now among young people facing otherwise bleak employment prospects in other industries.  come back to the land.  They need all the help they can get in fighting an uphill battle to become successful small farmers.  And agriculture needs them in the long term, to take the place of large percentage of farmers currently approaching retirement.
Well designed government programs exist to support small farms and help level the playing field that is so heavily tilted against them, although they have never been well funded.  Unfortunately, the recently released budget cuts from the Obama administration will gut many of those programs completely -- including many that support and encourage organic farming -- without touching the enormous subsidies going towards the largest farmers. It appears that in preparing for a bloody fight with Congress over the budget, the President has made organic and sustainable agriculture a sacrificial peace offering -- again.

   .               Thanks,
                 Pablito