Martin Richards, executive director of Kentucky’s Community Farm Alliance since 2010, will step down at the end of the year, according to a release from the Berea-based organization, which has launched a search for his successor.

Kentucky farmers founded CFA in 1985 to support small family farms during an American farm crisis that resulted in record foreclosures.

Richards has been a CFA member since 1995, served as its board president in 1998, and during the 2000 General Assembly lobbied for House Bill 611, the historic law that created the Agricultural Development Fund and has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars from the tobacco master settlement into Kentucky agriculture.?

Under Richards’ leadership CFA has attracted more than $12 million in federal, state and and private philanthropic funding to support its mission, according to the release. The organization has launched or collaborated on direct farm marketing initiatives, efforts to leverage local food for better health and access to nutrition and to build local economies, and programs for beginning farmers and those in disadvantaged communities, including Farmers Market Support Program, Kentucky Double Dollars, Fresh RX for Moms, The Patchwork Initiative ?and CFA’s Farm to Table Program.