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JUST SOME THOUGHTS FROM OTHER QUARTERS -
SANDY


The New Marketeers
Why growing and selling food locally is a hot second career

By Ben Brown

June 2006


Ron Poitras, 62, retired early after a 30-year career in energy conservation 
and
land-use planning. Now he's raising chickens and growing organic fruits, 
flowers
and other produce to sell to restaurants and at a farmers' market not far from
Acadia National Park in Maine. 

"If the summer goes by and I don't have my fingers in the dirt," says 
Poitras, "I
just don't feel right."

Three years ago, Norm McCoy, 50, left his career as a systems engineer and
enrolled in a new MBA program in sustainable agriculture at Iowa State 
University
in Ames. Last year he became the program's first graduate and returned to his
family's 40-acre organic farm near Des Moines. 

"One of my goals when I started," says McCoy, "was to take our farm and make 
it
an example" of how to take advantage of a small but growing trend toward 
healthy,
locally grown food.

In an age of industrial agriculture on a global scale, the business of growing
and selling food locally seems an unlikely second career. But a confluence of
market forces and social trends is luring boomers anxious to connect with the
soil later in life.

"This is the generation that read Rachel Carson [Silent Spring, 1962] and 
began
looking for alternatives to pesticides," says Elaine Marie Lipson, author of 
The
Organic Foods Sourcebook (McGraw-Hill Contemporary Books). "They wanted to 
change
the world, and they did. They're economically powerful, and they're 
interested in
having healthy, energetic lives. And they always will be."

Celebrity chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and other
professional foodies tapped into the trend in the 1970s and helped accelerate 
it.
They hooked a segment of boomers on the taste and health advantages of
fresh-from-the-farm food over products packaged and then shipped across
continents before they reach supermarket aisles.

Demand spurred supply, creating opportunities for new approaches to old ideas
about community agriculture. Instead of having to ramp up production to 
achieve
economies of scale to compete in a global commodities market, even relatively
small-scale farmers can make a go of it by thinking local.

That's reflected by an uptick in small farms-10 to 49 acres-according to the
federal government's latest Census of Agriculture. And among farmers in their
jobs four years or less, 27 percent are age 55 or older.

Meanwhile, from 1994, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture began keeping 
track
of farmers' markets, through 2004, their number has more than doubled, from 
1,755
to 3,706. Since 2000 alone, the number of markets has grown by 29 percent. 

Something similar is happening with food-buying clubs called CSAs, for
Community-Supported Agriculture, in which farmers contract directly with
consumers for shares of their season's crops. More than 1,000 farms in the 
nation
offer CSA-style contracts, according to Local Harvest, a monitoring 
organization
in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Farmers' markets and CSAs have both become so mainstream that the federal
government incorporates them into nutrition programs for older low-income
Americans.

As food-conscious boomers age and become even more concerned about healthy
eating, and as concerns about environmental responsibility and food security
increasingly influence shopping decisions, Americans are likely to deepen 
their
relationships with local farmers. In a 2004 Roper poll for a national organic
farmers' cooperative, 85 percent of a national sample of Americans said they
"trust smaller-scale family farms to produce safe, nutritious food." And 69
percent said these kinds of farms "are more likely than large-scale industrial
farms to use techniques that won't harm the environment."

For communities with farmable land, there's an economic development incentive 
in
local food. In 2004 farmers' markets in Iowa generated some $31.5 million in
sales and indirectly supported 146 jobs, reports the Leopold Center for
Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State, where Norm McCoy got his MBA.

In Burlington, Vt., which has achieved a 10-year goal of producing 10 percent 
of
its food locally, former Mayor Peter Clavelle says, "The result is we're 
eating
fresher food, most of it organically grown, and we're helping our economy. 
When
we started this, we had no one farming in Burlington. Now we have something 
like
50 local farms."

Why is this new kind of farming made to order for retirees?

For those eager to put their hands in the dirt, it helps to have the resources
workers accumulate over time, including financial reserves. To start his
Bainbridge Islands Vineyards & Winery across Puget Sound from Seattle, Gerard
Bentryn, 66, cashed in part of his U.S. Park Service pension. 

He was able to repay his retirement nest egg. But Bentryn, who is proud that 
he
also grows the grapes that go into his wines and that he's part of a 
community of
local food producers, says profit is not his main motivation.

"If you can see where your food comes from," he says, "you can live in 
beauty. I
decided to live in beauty rather than to make a lot of money."

You hear that a lot from second-career farmers. The agriculture-related
opportunities aren't limited to working the soil. And as new networks evolve,
there will be demand for business types-like Iowa State's new MBAs-and
specialists in everything from used-tractor sales to teaching.

In New Mexico, Le Adams, 56, draws on her own 15 years working in small-scale
agriculture to teach schoolchildren about farms and farmers in their region. 
Some
of the motivation for running a small farm, Adams says, "is wrapped around
working in the natural environment, being in control, making our own 
decisions,
then being able to hold up something tangible and say, 'Look what I made.' 

"Maybe one of the reasons older folks are choosing farming is that it 
provides a
spiritual connection that we don't get in a fast-paced American society." 

Spiritual reward may be the bottom line for many boomers who demand from their
second career a sense of fulfillment that they didn't always get from their
first. 

Ben Brown is a freelance writer living in Franklin, N.C. 

Ben Brown
224 Cedar Hills Drive
Franklin, NC 28734
benbro AT earthlink.net
(828) 508-5002 (mobile)

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