i have always had a dream of saving forests by logging them to generate money to buy more land but i am thinking of a new great farm conservation idea. someday buy a farm and hire a farmer to work the land and after he works it he gets to keep the land for free after he generates the max profits over a certain period of time. once this land is paid off and preserved with conservation easements and no gmo restrictions on it the revenue goes into buying more land to do the same thing with. so eventually you got a say 50 farmers working 5000 acres so that is one farmer working 100 acres. plus money from the timber sales from the farms forests. all the farmers get a legal agreement that they get to keep the land after a certain many year deadline. all this in the name of saving the countryside. some fields corm while others soy beans and also cattle and many other stuff. anyone think farmers would work for such a thing? the more farms that have a restriction to only allow organic farming the safer the farmer will be from their neighbour farmers gmo cross pollination. and the farmers will have a say in some of the conservation easement drafting as well. any other ideas on this?

Sounds cool, but why use this system to encourage an adherence to conventional monocrop farming? You mention fields of corn, soy, etc. Seems all the better to me to offer this opportunity to PDC holders with some good designs and field work under their belts, but no money. Let them make of a go of it instead. Then you've conserved and improved the agricultural land, plus created an example for other farmers in the area of a different way of doing things that can be both more reliable and more economical.

I do like the general idea. Where are you thinking your funds would come from? Your own pocket? Donors? I'm a little fuzzy on how the money used to buy the land would be repaid. A portion of the new farmer's profits each year? It seems like kind of a tough thing to get rolling unless you can bankroll it yourself.

'Organic' does not necessarily mean good for the land. Geoff Lawton did a video recently on the na side of organic farming which is worth a watch.

I have some concerns with this process - is your farm manager an employee? Are they leasing the land? What happens if they are no good at their job? Your whole process is dependant on these people making profits to keep the ball rolling - one bad apple could shit the whole thing down unless you have very deep pockets.

In fifty years time who controls the land and what is to stop it being converted back to conventional agriculture?

That said there have been people in some parts of the world doing almost what you describe - buying degraded land, overhauling it using permaculture principals to increase its fertility and value, then leave raging that to expand. Savoury style grazing systems have fantastic potential to do this in some parts of the world (Australia?)