Legal Considerations for Expanding your Farm Business

Date:

Thursday, November 11, 2021

Time: 

6:00pm – 7:30pm

Location:

Virtual Online Session  

Cost:

Free

Related Program(s):

LINK TO:  November 11, 2021 Workshop Recording

Stable access to land is key for the growth of any farm business. At the foundation of that resiliency is clear communication, solid commitments, and good paperwork. No matter who you are or your background, you have the ability to build resilience for yourself. In this session, we explored key tools to build communication, commitments, and paperwork that meet your goals.

Presenters:

Sarah Vaile joined the Farm Commons team in 2018, serving as Staff Attorney for Core Resilience. Sarah has been a licensed attorney in Oregon since 2007 and has gained experience practicing law in a diversity of areas including estate planning and administration, business law, family law, land use and criminal defense. Sarah’s real passion, however, is food and farming, and she now shares her legal expertise and experience to help cultivate legal resilience for sustainable farmers nationwide. A graduate of the Pace University School of Law and the University of Indiana, she lives in southern Oregon with her husband and two sons.

Mary Lovell Egan is the Regional Program Coordinator for the Legal Food Hub. Mary was most recently employed at Harvard Business School as a project coordinator. She has spent most of her public health career at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital as a database manager and community health worker. Mary also brings great experience as a crops team member and food entrepreneur. She worked at Drumlin Farm and started her own dried fruit business, aptly named Cut&Dried. She is ecstatic to be in a position where she can support individuals who are taking on these challenges themselves.  In her free time Mary enjoys trail running, rock climbing, backpacking, cooking, and baking.

LINK TO: Fact Sheet

Additional resources:
Pace Law School – Food and Beverage legal clinics; they also have a Farm to School Legal Toolkit for farmers in NY on their website.
FLAG (Farmers Legal Action Group) – a nonprofit law center that provides legal services and support to family farmers; they have a lot of resources on their website and have informative guides to disaster assistance services
Agricultural Mediation Programs –the USDA makes grants to state entities to support agricultural mediation services and there are agricultural mediation service available in each state.  Here is a link to a USDA fact sheet from 2018 that lists the various state programs.