Thanks to our donors we’ve reached 84% of our goal!

Q&A with Sage & Nathan

What does the sale of land only mean for you and your family?
The issues we face as a farm and business are not unique to us. By going through this process and saying yes to a different approach to land ownership and land stewardship we hope to show how community ownership of land encourages and can be one essential element in a thriving local healthy food system. Talking with our farming and food peers we are all feeling squeezed between living our values of being good stewards of the land and the unforgiving realities of the market. By putting our land in trust with LCLT we take some pressure off our farm and bakery and open up more possibilities for community partnerships and feeding folks on this island with good healthy food.

Is Barn Owl Bakery still financially viable without the land debt?
Yes. The Bakery has been able to sustain us and this land and we’ve balanced our lives as bakers, farmers, parents and business owners. That said, we experience an inherent conflict between the costs of land ownership and livelihoods based on growing and making food that seeks to care for the land. The pressures that land ownership and debt put on our family farm and bakery makes it vulnerable in the long term to major unexpected costs. The business works well but covering a large mortgage for acres of land asks a lot of the month-to-month ups and downs of an island food business and when things go wrong – somebody gets sick, or a big piece of equipment breaks – there isn’t much of a cushion to keep the business going through a rough patch. We are not alone in this. Most farms and small family sustainable food businesses face the same issues.  The high costs of land on Lopez and the interest on the loan we used to purchase and remodel Grayling in 2019 makes our fixed costs high. By reducing those fixed costs we are able to strengthen Barn Owl Bakery’s commitment to making and growing local food for the long term.

How did this partnership come about?
The initial loan we used to buy the land and buildings here at Grayling needs to be transferred from our original lender in early 2024.  As we began thinking through what that might look like we realized we needed to talk with someone who understood the challenges of small farms and food businesses and land ownership. So we approached Sandy in 2023 to discuss the situation and found our conversation to be immensely helpful. We expressed our hope that we could find a path forward that not only transferred the loan, but also deepened our relationships with our community, building longer-term stability for our farm and bakery.  From that conversation came the idea of LCLT purchasing the land-only and for us to lease the land through the 99-year ground lease.

Why partner with LCLT?
We didn’t know what answer we were expecting to find talking with Sandy, but as we continued the conversation with LCLT to put our land in trust, we realized that this was an opportunity not only to solve our immediate goal of loan refinancing, but also was a way for us to live into our values around alternative economies and models of land ownership. We are excited to serve as an example for other food businesses to think outside the box of traditional ownership models to ease the burdensome relationship of high property costs and tight profit margins. If we had transferred our loan to a traditional bank, we would have put our business and family’s financial future in the hands of an unstable financial system.  By putting the land in trust, in the hands of the community, we not only create stability for ourselves but ensure that the land is used in service to the Lopez food system.