LAND STEWARDSHIP PROJECT (U.S.):

The Land Stewardship Project was begun in 1982 by Ron Kroese and Victor Ray with initial grants from the Youth Project and the Joyce Foundation. Its first office was established in Saint Paul. It was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1983, and became a membership organization in 1994.

For many years the Metro (Headquarters) Office was based in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and eventually in South Minneapolis. For a time the head office was located at Stillwater, and at the Wilder Farm near Marine-on-St. Croix. Field offices were established at Lewiston and at Montevideo. At various times there were also remote offices in Faribault and in Cannon Falls.

The organization was presided over by an executive director and a board of directors. The board included farmers and at various times bankers, a lawyer, university professors, members of the clergy, and individuals from National Farmers Union, the Land Institute (Salina, Kansas), the Izaak Walton League, the Audubon Society, and the Community Design Center.

The Land Stewardship Project advocated for regenerative and sustainable agriculture, conservation of farmland, and holistic farming, and it worked to help beginning farmers get started in the farming business. The Project was concerned with soil health, water pollution emanating from feed lots and from waste lagoons, factory farms and big agribusiness, the humane treatment of farm animals, absentee landlord insurance companies' holding foreclosed farms and their lack of care of the land, with encroaching urban sprawl, and the preservation of the family farm. There was especially in the early years a religious and spiritual angle, with the active participation of Roman Catholic and Lutheran clergy and congregations.

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Materials include annual reports, board minutes and files, correspondence, newsletters, reports and publications, snapshot photographs, audiocassettes and videocassettes, and newspaper clippings and clippings scrapbooks. There are records documenting the organization's policy work.

Board files and certain other administrative records are in the Metro (Headquarters) Office Files record series.

Background information about the Land Stewardship Project, including staff and board member lists and a list of acronyms frequently used in the records, are in the Administrative and Corporate Records section of the Metro (Headquarters) Office Files record series.

The collection is perhaps most valuable for its documentation of the problems of individual family farms and farmers in the face of economic difficulties, the threat of big agribusiness, its advocacy of holistic, sustainable, and environmentally-conscious farming methods, and its promotion of the family farm.

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These documents are organized into the following sections:

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Access Restrictions:

This collection is located off site in Remote Storage. Advance arrangements are required in order to view its contents. Please consult the reference staff for more information.

Board and Executive Committee minutes and correspondence for the Land Stewardship Project and Land Stewardship Action Fund are restricted until 2046 unless permission is granted from the Executive Director of the Land Stewardship Project.

Preferred Citation:

[Indicate the cited item and/or series here]. Land Stewardship Project (U.S.) Organizational Records. Minnesota Historical Society.

See the Chicago Manual of Style for additional examples.

Accession Information:

Accession number: 17,856

Processing Information:

Processed by David B. Peterson, April 2023

Collection materials arrived at the Minnesota Historical Society in eight groups, most of them the files of individual staff members. That grouping was left intact at cataloging, resulting in eight record series. There is some overlap in files between the series.

Catalog ID number: 9989836540204294

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This collection is indexed under the following headings in the catalog of the Minnesota Historical Society. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons or places should search the catalog using these headings.

Topics:

Agriculture--Religious aspects--Catholic Church.

Agriculture--Religious aspects--Lutheran Church.

Agricultural conservation.

Cattle.

Cities and towns--Growth.

Environmental policy.

Environmental protection.

Factory farms.

Family farms.

Farm manure.

Farmers--Iowa.

Farmers--Minnesota.

Farmers--South Dakota.

Farmers--Wisconsin.

Feedlots.

Insurance companies--Investments.

Livestock.

Nonprofit organizations.

Organic farming.

Pork.

Poultry.

Soil conservation.

Sustainable agriculture.

Water--Pollution.

Persons:

Arner, Audrey, author.

Bacigalupo, Amy, author.

Boody, George, author.

Jackson, Dana L., author.

Kroese, Ron, author.

Schultz, Mark, author

Organizations:

Farm Aid (Fund raising enterprise).

Places:

Cannon River (Minn.)

Chippewa River (Minn.)

Chippewa River Watershed (Minn.)

Lewiston (Minn.)

Montevideo (Minn.)

Wilder Forest (Washington County, Minn.)

Document Types:

Audiocassettes.

Color slides.

Compact discs.

DVDs.

Floppy disks.

Photographs.

Scripts (documents).

Videocassettes.

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