Since her husband’s death in 1983, she’d rented the family farm at Netherhill, Sask., to her granddaughter. But her young relative decided to move out of the province and could no longer manage it. Allergies prevented Stirling’s son from taking over the farm.

So Stirling went to a seminar on land trusts at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, Sask. That led her to a decision to sell the land in December 1999 to Genesis Land Conservancy at a reduced price.

“If I couldn’t set up a trust for my family, I wanted to sell it to Genesis,” she said.

She has since donated some of the sale money back to Genesis. “Their dreams are the same as mine,” she said. One day she hopes the conservancy will build a solar house on the property.

Duane Guina, manager of Earthcare Connections in Humboldt, which oversees the Genesis program, said his group’s aim is to offer alternatives in agriculture that work toward sustainability. Guina said Genesis hopes to ensure land will be managed well for futuregenerations.

Genesis places land it gets into a trust for perpetuity and plans that its land will never again be bought or sold, but leased. A tenant could sign a lifetime lease that could be passed to the next generation.

Genesis, a registered charity, reviews applications for farmland and assesses the applicants on need, although farming knowledge is an important consideration.

A board of directors reviews the applications. If accepted, the applicant is matched with a farm. The conservancy acquires farms through outright girts, by purchase or a combination of the two.

All leases are on a cash basis that in some cases may be less than the market rate.

“As soon as you move away from the model of only what the market will bear, the economic concern, then you have to take into account some of these other factors: what’s it worth socially to keep people in that community, environmentally to encourage them to farm in this manner (sustainably) and to develop these alternative? So chances are it will be in most cases less than market rent.”

With the current economic picture – cost of land, interest, input costs – it’s almost impossible for someone to start farming, said Guina.

“Yet we know that there’s a social cost to losing these people from rural communities and we also know that there are growing environmental concerns in terms of the way we’re using resources in general, not just in agriculture but in the world.”

Earthcare Connections manages the land conservancy and provides funding for the staff. Earthcare itself is funded by memberships, donations and by the Roman Catholic, Ukrainian Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and United churches.

The Genesis Land Conservancy was incorporated in 1996 but was run by volunteers until two years ago. Guina said so far there are four tenants on 922 acres.

“We’re probably further along than we thought we would be at this stage. We recognize that this is a huge undertaking, that it’s not easy to create alternatives for people and we are facing a lot of the same constraints as the farmers are themselves, so it will take time.”