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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

In the cliches of the day, we may be entering a perfect food storm for  
real change or perhaps, in my wildest dreams, a fast-food bubble. When  
the front page of the New York Times features a story about young  
people becoming organic farmers, cheese makers and chocolatiers, you  
suspect something may be up. Sounds like more than a fad. This is a  
two-page article. Here is enough for you to decide if you want to read  
it all at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/fashion/16farmer.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

Leaving Behind the Trucker Hat

By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: March 16, 2008
THEIR Carhartts are no longer ironic. Now they have real dirt on them.

Until three years ago, Benjamin Shute was living in Williamsburg,  
where he kept Brooklyn Lager in his refrigerator and played darts in a  
league.

Raised on the Upper East Side by a father who is a foundation  
executive and a mother who writes about criminal justice, Mr. Shute  
graduated from Amherst and worked for an antihunger charity. But  
something nagged at him. To learn about food production, he had  
volunteered at a farm in Massachusetts. He liked the dirt, the work  
and the coaxing of land long fallow into producing eggplant and garlic.

He tried growing strawberries on his roof in Brooklyn, but it didn’t  
scratch his growing itch.

And so last week, Mr. Shute could be found here, elbow-deep in wet  
compost two hours north of New York City, filling greenhouse trays for  
onion seeds. Along with a partner, Miriam Latzer, he runs Hearty  
Roots, a 25-acre organic farm.

“I never thought I wanted to farm,” Mr. Shute said. “But it feels like  
an honest living.”

His partner, Ms. Latzer (the two are not a couple) is 33 and a former  
urban planner. Her parents, a professor and a librarian, “think its  
crazy that I’m a farmer,” she said. “They wonder what planet I came  
from.”

This one. Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in  
stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms (see the E.  
coli spinach outbreaks), the perils of relying on petroleum to deliver  
food over long distances (see global warming) and the beauty of  
greenmarkets (see the four-times-weekly locavore cornucopia in Union  
Square), some young urbanites are starting to put their muscles where  
their pro-environment, antiglobalization mouths are. They are creating  
small-scale farms near urban areas hungry for quality produce and  
willing to pay a premium.

“Young farmers are an emerging social movement,” said Severine von  
Tscharner Fleming, 26, who is making a documentary called “The  
Greenhorns” about the trend.

While this is hardly the first time that idealistic young people  
wanted to get back to the garden, the current crop have advantages  
over their forebears from the 1960s and 70s, many of whom, inspired by  
the Whole Earth Catalog or Wendell Berry’s books about agrarian  
values, headed to the country, only to find it impossible to make a  
living.

But the growing market for organic and locally grown produce is making  
it possible for well-run small farms to thrive, said Ken Meter, 58,  
who studies the economics of food as an analyst at the Crossroads  
Resource Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for local food initiatives  
that is based in Minnesota.

“A lot of people in our 20s went to the land and wanted to farm and  
had a lot of enthusiasm, but not many resources,” he said. “It has  
only been the last five years where the payment from working your  
fingers to the bone and supplying urban markets with high-quality  
produce has been enough where you could imagine making a living.”

Whether young, first-generation farmers constitute a flood or trickle  
is difficult to say. But many long-time observers of small farms say  
they have noticed an increase in recent years among college graduates  
who want to farm, even if they intern at established farms or rent  
tiny parcels.

“We’ve had a big spike in the last decade and especially in the last  
few years of people who are new to farming applying to sell at  
Greenmarket,” said Gabrielle Langholtz, manager of special projects  
for the Manhattan-based Greenmarket, which runs 46 farmers’ markets  
around the city. “Maybe they went to liberal arts schools and read  
Michael Pollan,” she said, referring to the author of “The Omnivore’s  
Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” (Penguin Press HC, 2006),  
“and shopped at farmers markets and said, ‘I’m going to buy a farm  
upstate and sell to Greenmarket.’ ” The typical size of farms that  
sell at Greenmarket is 50 to 100 acres, she said.

Nationally, there were 8,493 certified organic farms in 2005, using  
just over 4 million acres of land, more than double the acreage in  
2000, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. (The  
federal government introduced a uniform standard for organic  
certification in 2002.) New York had more than twice as many certified  
organic farms, 735, in 2007 as it did in 2004, according to the state  
Department of Agriculture and Markets. The agency estimates there are  
three to five times that many organic farms in New York which, like  
Hearty Roots, choose not to spend the $500 to $1,000 it costs to  
become certified.

Continued at 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/fashion/16farmer.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp