Good Food and Ground Rent

 How a land value tax could root a food security based economy

There is a quiet contradiction at the heart of most discussions about sustainable and relocalized food. Advocates speak passionately about shortening supply chains, restoring small farms, rebuilding market gardens on the urban fringe, and reconnecting communities with the land that feeds them. Yet the economics of land itself — its cost, its ownership, its speculation — are rarely interrogated with equal passion. This is a serious omission, because the price of land is one of the most powerful forces shaping what gets grown, where, by whom, and for whom. A national Land Value Tax (LVT) — or what we might more plainly call a National Ground Rent — would strike directly at this neglected root, and in doing so, would transform the economic landscape for relocalized, sustainable, secure food production.

The unsustainable food system is based on a core land rights problem. To understand why LVT matters for food, we first need to understand how the current land tenure system undermines sustainable agriculture. Land in most countries is treated as a financial asset first and a productive resource second. Its value rises not through any effort of the owner, but through population growth, infrastructure investment, and community development — all of which are socially created. Landowners harvest this appreciation as private profit, a phenomenon Henry George called the "unearned increment." The consequence for farmers is devastating: agricultural land near population centres, precisely where market gardens and community-supported farms would be most economically viable, is perpetually priced for development rather than cultivation. Young farmers cannot afford to buy land. Tenant farmers pay rents that consume a large share of their margin. The farms that do survive are pressured toward high-throughput, low-labour, chemically intensive systems — the only way to generate enough revenue per acre to service debt or justify high rents.

This is not a marginal problem. It is structural. The financialization of land funnels productive agricultural acres into an investment market that has nothing to do with feeding people.

A Land Value Tax is a levy on the unimproved value of land — the value the site would hold if cleared of all buildings and improvements. Crucially, it taxes the location and the bare earth, not what the owner has built or grown upon it. This distinction is everything. Unlike a tax on income or on productive activity, LVT cannot be passed on to tenants through higher rents, because the supply of land locations is fixed. It cannot be avoided by leaving land idle — indeed, it actively penalizes idleness, since the tax falls regardless of whether the land is used. And it does not discourage investment in the land itself, since improvements are untaxed.

The revenue raised — which could be substantial, since land values in developed economies represent an enormous share of total wealth — could be used to reduce or replace taxes on income, labour, and enterprise, creating an economy that rewards productive work rather than passive ownership.

The benefits for relocalized and sustainable food production flow from several interconnected mechanisms: Affordable access to land, the end of the ‘hold and wait’ strategy’, lower rents and better tenancies, urban and peri-urban food production, and rewarding land stewardship rather than speculation.

The most immediate effect of a well-designed LVT is a structural reduction in land prices. When the future stream of unearned land value gains is captured by the public rather than the private owner, the speculative premium evaporates. Land returns to something close to its productive value. For farmers, this is transformative. The capital cost of establishing a small holding, market garden, or community farm falls dramatically. The barrier that currently excludes a generation of would-be farmers is dismantled. New entrants, cooperatives, community land trusts, and small enterprises can afford to put down roots.

Currently, some of the most agriculturally promising land — particularly peri-urban green belt land and brownfield-adjacent pasture — is held speculatively, its owners waiting for planning permission or development pressure to crystallize into a windfall. LVT changes the calculus entirely. An annual charge on the site's value makes idleness costly. The owner who grows nothing pays the same as the owner who farms productively. The pressure to either farm the land or sell it to someone who will is constant and automatic. More land flows into active, productive use.

Even where owner-occupation is not possible, LVT reshapes rental markets. Because the tax falls on the landowner and cannot meaningfully be shifted, competitive land rents net of tax are lower. Farmers who lease land retain a greater share of their productive output. This materially improves the viability of low-input, labour-intensive farming systems — precisely the kind that characterize sustainable and relocalized production — which currently struggle to compete with industrialized operations that rely on cheap credit and economies of scale to survive under high rent conditions.

One of the most exciting frontiers for food relocalization is urban and peri-urban agriculture: allotments, market gardens, urban orchards, rooftop growing, and farm parks on the edges of cities. These uses are perpetually squeezed by the enormous land value premium of urban locations. Under LVT, urban land that is currently underused — whether derelict, underbuilt, or simply banked — faces holding costs that make productive use attractive. The competitive pressure that currently excludes food production from the urban fringe is reduced. Cities become more permeable to growing.

Sustainable farming typically involves long-term investment in soil health, biodiversity, water retention, and landscape resilience. These investments build productive value over years and decades, but they do not necessarily command a premium in conventional land markets. Under LVT, the farmer who has genuinely improved the productive capacity of the land through good husbandry is not punished — improvements are untaxed. What is taxed is the location value, which reflects social goods the farmer did not create. The system, in other words, rewards the farmer for farming and reserves the gains from social value for the community.

Ultimately we need to think of Land as a national asset, not a private vault of wealth. One way to frame the entire approach might be to simply change the title from Land Value Tax to National Ground Rent. This gets at the concept far more deeply. Land is not produced by anyone. Its value arises from nature, from community, from public infrastructure, and from the accumulated history of civilization. In a deep sense, the whole community is the silent landlord of all land. The National Ground Rent framing makes this explicit: those who occupy and use land owe a rent to the nation for the exclusive privilege of doing so. What they do on that land — farm it, build on it, cultivate it — is entirely their own.

For the food system, this framing is clarifying. It means that the farmer who tends the earth, who builds soil, who feeds a community, owes society only for the location and the natural resource of the land itself — not for her labour, not for her investment, not for her skill. The speculator who banks land and waits for others to create its value owes a great deal. The system, reoriented around this principle, naturally allies itself with productive and careful land use. Sustainable farming, almost by definition, is the kind of relationship with land that National Ground Rent is designed to encourage.

The relocalization of food is not simply a logistical challenge or a consumer preference — it is an economic and political project that requires rethinking who owns the land, on what terms, and at what cost. A Land Value Tax, conceived as a National Ground Rent, is one of the most powerful and theoretically coherent instruments available for restructuring those terms in favour of productive, sustainable, community-oriented agriculture. It would lower the entry cost for new farmers, end the speculative hoarding of agricultural land, reduce the rents that drain small farm viability, and make urban growing economically conceivable. It would, in short, help ensure that the ground beneath our feet is in the service of feeding us — rather than enriching those who merely happen to own it.