This Croatan View is cross-posted on Roanoke Cooperative’s Sustainable Forestry Land Retention Project’s website. Read their blog post here.

August 28, 2026 | written by James Smith

Currently, our food system faces a paradox: farmers are aging without clear succession plans, while young people who may be interested in farming or forestry do not have the financial means to purchase land. Meanwhile farmland near metropolitan areas is often targeted by developers who offer market rates per acre that are attractive to farmers who may have retirement plans embedded in their land value. 

At Croatan Institute, we help families and individuals access, manage, and retain land through an ecological lens. Our goal is to build soil health and generational wealth.

Croatan Institute is a nonprofit organization based in Durham, N.C., with a mission to build social equity and ecological resilience by leveraging finance to create pathways to a just economy. In North Carolina, we do this through a program called “Soil Wealth Areas.” Soil Wealth is a term of art coined by the Institute to describe the constellation of benefits that arise from improving soil health and community wealth. We recognize the interconnectedness between thriving communities and ecosystems, and seek to sustain both through our work.

Croatan Institute and many of our partners, including Roanoke Cooperative, work to address some of the barriers that potential or current land stewards face when figuring out how to manage land sustainably. Diverse partnerships such as these provide an array of services from multiple organizations that help land stewards with challenges related to conservation, heirs’ property, forest management, access to capital and other needs. Croatan Institute and Roanoke Cooperative have engaged with producers in North Carolina, each coordinating with each other and supporting producers with their different needs.

In Martin County, Roanoke Cooperative and Croatan Institute collaborated to help a landowner access forestry mulching services to prep their woodland for a hog-based silvopasture system, write a forest management plan, and access multiple conservation programs. We’re actively working to deepen this partnership to continue supporting land stewards in Roanoke Cooperative’s service region, and in Croatan Institute’s case, across North Carolina.

 At Croatan Institute, we primarily assist landowners with management concerns through our Soil Wealth Areas Program. Landowners today face a stewardship imperative that is more critical than ever. Working lands in North Carolina such as farms and forests have been rapidly displaced due to development pressures and rising land costs. With our technical assistance, producers can more confidently build business plans and implement land use practices that support the land and their enterprise.

Services of NC Soil Wealth Areas:  

Soil Wealth Areas are rooted in the idea that building soil health and increasing farm resilience can also improve community wealth. We have successfully helped producers across the state obtain equitable private capital to buy farmland, access government funding to support conservation practices on their farms, participate in major conservation initiatives, establish new farm enterprises, and implement enhanced land management strategies.  

To learn more about how we can assist you, reach out to Croatan Institute’s NC Soil Wealth Areas Team at soilwealth@croataninstitute.org