Interviewed:  January 26, 2023

Kerry Leigh, Former Executive Director
(Kerry was interviewed before she retired)

Management Policy: The Natural Land Institute (NLI) looks to manage its land with conservation in mind. For some time its policy was not to buy or accept donations of farmland to maintain as farmland. Then, as a result of a number of factors, it launched its Working Lands program as it saw an opportunity to accomplish two things at once with the ownership and stewardship of donated farmland. The primary opportunity was to generate revenue for the ongoing land stewardship of natural habitat on properties NLI owns. Finding grant funding for that ongoing, perpetually-needed work is notoriously difficult to find from private and public funding sources. The other opportunity that NLI saw was improving the health and conservation value of the farmland properties themselves.

NLI is beginning to see farming in a new light in terms of its conservation benefits.

“We also have come to understand a lot of other benefits of nature-based management on farms – soil health, corridors, buffers to preserves,” says Kerry Leigh. “We’re in the middle of putting together our strategic conservation plan and that has a big agricultural component in it in terms of the concept of the high quality nodes (preserves with restored or pristine habitat) and then the corridors and the buffers around them. So agriculture is going to play a big part there. As we look at farmers, we also see that they really need to protect the soils to enhance the soil’s productivity. That’s all connected with climate change and all the work that we do with climate change. Biodiversity now has moved on from the old conservation paradigm of just protecting isolated fragments to creating complexes. These complexes need to include agriculture.”

Leasing Structure and Conservation Practices: NLI has three lease addenda, downloaded from Illinois FarmDoc that are attached to all leases and include information on water, pollinators, and soil health. Each addendum has a series of farming practice options that can be carried out to reduce the impact of conventional farming practices. NLI doesn’t require a farmer to do all of those practice options but there is the expectation they will do at least some. When the farmer agrees to do some of those practices for an upcoming year, the existing lease structure does not need to change. 

Recently, leases have been extended from one year to three years. This has had the positive effect of making revenues easier to project and allowing farmers more stability in their planning efforts. Further, the longer three-year lease term gives both NLI and the farmer a bit more of a runway to implement new conservation practices. Conservation practices, through the addenda, are integrated into leases and can be modified each year without changing the lease itself. The practice options include restrictions on tilling, cover cropping, and chemical prohibitions. 

When deciding on base pricing for the leases, NLI staff look at market rates for farmland in the area and at soil productivity index numbers for the particular parcel in question. NLI then charges a reduced lease price to the farmers to defray the costs of implementing conservation practices. They will keep the lease prices below market rate until these practices are fully implemented. 

NLI has also changed the leases so that the farmer only pays for the land they actually farm for crops. Other land that surrounds the farmed fields, including where edge-of-field practices are applied, are not leased to the farmer. This means that farmers are not plowing right up to the edge of streams.

“We always leave open the possibility for all of our farms to be converted to habitat in the future,” says Leigh, “if we decide to do that.” 

Recently, with funding from the Grand Victoria Foundation, NLI paid a consultant to create a whole farm plan for the Foss Farm. NLI has consequently shared the plan with the tenant-farmer, and they have had follow-up conversations about it. NLI and the farmer-tenant intend to carry out some of the suggestions in coming years, including the creation of more pollinator habitat, the use of uncoated seeds, and even perennial crops. 

NLI has a small acreage that a beginning farmer could use to grow herbs and flowers. In cooperation with Angelic Organics Learning Center, which has a program for beginning farmers, NLI showed several beginning farmers the property, but the conclusion was that those farmers actually needed more acreage and needed a location closer to Rockford, which is the main market for locally produced produce. 

Farmer Relationships: NLI prioritizes conservation in all it does. It recognizes, however, that it cannot manage all of the land it owns in an effective manner. It is important then to not only work with farmer-tenants but to encourage and empower them to engage in practices that contribute to conservation. To achieve this, NLI meets regularly with its tenant-farmers to build relationships and to check in on how the farmers have been doing with the conservation practices.  

“I start out by asking questions and listening,” says Leigh. “How are you doing? How’s your family.” Leigh will ask about any health problems and work challenges, all with the point of creating a real relationship. The first time she met one of the farmers, she brought with the consultant NLI uses, and they all sat in the farmer’s kitchen. When the whole family brought in lunch for them, Leigh asked the whole family to join them and share the lunch together. Leigh does not NLI to just set out what was going to be done by the farmer without having a relationship with them. 

Kerry Leigh says, “I say (during the annual meetings with the farmers), “Let’s go over what you’re already doing (from the addenda lists of conservation practice options).” And then I say, “Okay, now what are one or two things out of this that you can do next year?” Then, after that year, I’ll say, “Okay, how did that go? How about we add another thing?” So it’s not like dropping a ton of new stuff on them all at once. So they’re pretty open to doing those things.” 

Leigh has noticed that the younger tenant-farmer is more likely to proactively suggest new conservation ideas to try than the older tenant-farmer.

In addition, when NLI brings on farmers as tenants, NLI provides a consultant for the first couple of years at no cost to the farmers to teach them how to do things related to conservation practices (e.g., cover crops). 

“The biggest thing for me when I’m juggling things (around leasing),” says Leigh, “is the interconnectedness of everything. Rather than looking at things in isolation, I have to look at all the implications and how everything connects, not just for what I want but also for what works for the farmer. I don’t want to be struggling with unintended consequences or with a myopic view of practices.”

On Farm Monitoring and Conservation: While NLI is more concerned than ever with soil health, soil testing (especially testing for soil health metrics) is expensive. Consequently, NLI has a general philosophy of putting practices in place for a few years before measuring their soil health impacts and only repeating soil testing every five to seven years. NLI also works with farmers to do other practices that will be helpful for habitat. One farmer, for example, put in a prairie strip on a section of a parcel that had not been productive for him. NLI’s tenant farmers are also putting in Conservation Reserve Program plantings along the waterways as well.

Leigh has also heard from her tenant-farmers that they have both begun to use cover crops on other properties they farm.

Leigh relies on NLI’s Working Lands Committee (which has several farmers as members) to partner with her thinking through ways to continue to improve conservation on their farmland. Unfortunately, the COVID years made it hard for the committee to meet, and it is just now getting back into meeting. 

“We are currently exploring continuing rotational grazing on a 400-acre piece that we own,” says Leigh, “because we already have rotational grazing on some areas of it by a neighboring farmer with his cows.” 

Agricultural Conservation Easements: Recognizing the importance of farmland to conservation and that NLI cannot acquire huge amounts of farmland, NLI has begun acquiring agricultural conservation easements through easement purchases made possible through two Regional Conservation Partnership Project (RCPP)-funded initiatives that generate USDA funding for some of the easement purchase cost. NLI is committed to continuing to acquire more of these easements. 

One of the conditions necessary to qualify for the USDA funding support is that the easement must include a bare minimum of protection for ongoing agricultural use of the property. NLI usually uses language that goes beyond that bare minimum. On many of the larger farms on which NLI purchases agricultural easements on, there are also woodlands. Farmers who own such properties often want to log those woodlands from time to time to generate income. The standard agricultural easement permits logging if it is done according to a forestry plan, but there has been no policy on what the forestry plan’s minimum requirements must be. Consequently, NLI is in the process of developing a forestry policy that will detail what NLI will accept under the conservation easements and what they will not accept. “NLI is working on what that policy would be,” says Kerry Leigh, “to protect that habitat while also permitting farmers to use the woodland as part of the revenue stream for the farm. Farmers see their woodlands as a moneymaker.” 

In addition, they are planning to modify the standard agricultural easement language so that if grazing is done it will be protective of soil health (like rotational grazing) and not allow grazing of pasture down to the ground.

Wider Conversations and Impacts: Leigh (who has since retired as Executive Director of NLI) would very much like for NLI to grow its engagement with agriculture. As an example of what might be possible, Leigh shared that NLI hosted a spaghetti dinner, a hybrid event that was both virtual and in-person for farmers in the Rockton area in January 2022. “We had a lot of people attending to find out more about conservation practices and conservation agricultural easements,” says Leigh. “So I think there’s, a really good shift in the agricultural community’s thinking at the moment, in some places, perhaps more than others.”

Organization Capacity and Use of Farm Revenue Streams: NLI has launched an endowment for land stewardship with a goal of eventually reaching $2 million in principal. One of the benefits of the endowment would be to enable NLI to use revenue from its farm properties to do work on its farm properties. “I would like to use farm income,” says Leigh, “to just work on the farms.” Examples of the expenses that can be required to maintain farms include the stream bank maintenance and emergency repair work on a bridge that NLI had to carry out on one of their properties recently after a big flood. Leigh has even thought that perhaps ag-related investing in regenerative farming enterprises and other related vehicles (like Iroquois Valley REIT) might be an option for NLI to also generate stewardship revenue in a way that is consistent with NLI values. As context, 90 percent of NLI’s endowment and other investments had, in the past, been in traditional investment channels. Leigh was able to move the organization to shift its investments into green options instead.  

Exploring Perennial Rye: One approach that NLI is considering in terms of advancing soil health and avoiding issues like neonicotinoid-treated seed is shifting over to perennial crops, specifically perennial rye grass. Kerry is working on this possibility with Steve Apfelbaum of Applied Ecological Institute. Apfelbaum has already set up a business focused on developing healthy food products from perennial ryegrass and has a partnership established with Whole Foods as well for one such product. To meet the expected demand and production requirements, Steve needs to secure 10,000 acres of perennial ryegrass production. 

Kerry sees the perennial rye approach as also being a better alternative to organic grains or vegetable production, because those farming systems typically require a great deal of tilling and cultivation, which disturb the soil biome. Leigh has already begun having conversations with NLI’s tenant-farmers about this possibility and what their needs would be during a potential transition to ryegrass. She believes it offers them a way of growing a croup with far less weed management issues and with replanting only being needed every seven years.