Giving Compass' Take:

• The Legal Food Hub matches small farms and food entrepreneurs with pro bono legal services to keep them from falling to unaffordable legal bills. 

• What other early services can crush small farms? How can philanthropy help farm and food enterprises grow in spite of slim margins? 

• Find out why some lawyers in rural areas are offering 'unbundled' services.

Ryan Voiland did something truly amazing this spring. He planted blueberries.

True—you basically dig a hole and plop the plant in. But it takes years for them to produce berries. “You can’t plant a long-term crop like fruit if you’re not going to be there long-term,” Voiland says, standing at the edge of a 10-acre field now dotted with about four-and-a-half acres of tiny blueberry bushes.

But now he expects to be. Thanks to a first-of-its-kind service called the Legal Food Hub, there’s a better chance that Voiland’s Red Fire Farm, with some 200 acres of cropland and two farm stores in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, will be around to sell those blueberries.

The Legal Food Hub, now operating in four New England states, is a clearing house, and essentially a matchmaking service, that provides free legal assistance to qualifying farmers, food entrepreneurs, and organizations that support them. In doing that, it clears away some of the problems that typically trip up small farmers and food businesses that operate on microscopic margins in circumstances that may hinge more on uncontrollable factors like weather than on having an air-tight business plan.

Farmers in New England in particular, where farms are small and land is expensive, face extraordinary pressure from non-agricultural land developers dangling big paydays. Often farmers are one bill—legal or otherwise—away from losing it all.

In Voiland’s case the legal assistance was for complex land acquisitions that included state purchase of development rights, land trusts, bridge loans, delays, a balky seller, and a whole lot of i’s to dot and t’s to cross—made more complicated by financial setbacks due to a drought in 2016.

Read the full article about Legal Food Hub by Jan Ellen Spiegel at The New Food Economy.