‘They just need land’: young farmers struggle to find affordable acreage

A new generation explores alternative models and hopes for new legislation to counter record-high land prices

Olivia Cleveland misses her farm – the chickens, the donkeys, the smell of the dirt and the way the wind would blow at three o’clock in the afternoon. For almost three years, Cleveland, 30, lived on a farm in north-east Alabama, owned by her then husband. She spent her days doing hard physical labor, cultivating land she deeply cared for, but she owned none of it on paper. So when Cleveland and her husband divorced in 2021, she lost everything.

Since then, Cleveland has spent the last two years rebuilding and working towards buying her own farm in her home state of Tennessee.