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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

Large acreage, a million-dollar house and BMWs in the driveway for one  
family. Living in a renovated barn heated by and outside wood stove  
and raising goats for another couple. Keeping 500 pigs, 500 laying  
hens and 1,000 meat chickens is good for two more. Feeding the  
locavore market, working long hours, sometimes in the city to make  
sure the goats get premium feed, but having more time for family.  
These people are some of the new group of Americans turning their  
faces to a rural life. They take a bigger pile of cash to the country  
than the hippies of the fifties and sixties. Some still keep city jobs  
and can afford the gas to go back and forth. These are not your  
typical back-to-the-landers. But they are part of the what's-happening  
scene in today's rural communities.


At Midlife, Called to a New Field


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By RALPH GARDNER Jr.
Published: July 3, 2008

THE most important piece of farm equipment at Grazin’ Angus Acres is  
not the windmill that Dan Gibson, the farm’s founder, hopes will one  
day help him operate off the grid. Nor is it the “eggmobile,” home to  
more than 300 handsome, rust-colored pastured Buff Orpington hens,  
whose droppings enrich the grasses that the farm’s 200 head of Angus  
cattle graze on.

Instead, the one piece of equipment that the 450-acre farm in Ghent,  
N.Y., could not do without, in Mr. Gibson’s estimation, is Susan  
Gibson’s kitchen sink. It was at the center of family negotiations in  
2002, when Mr. Gibson wanted to give up his job as senior vice  
president of corporate affairs at Starwood Hotels and Resorts, along  
with his family’s upper middle class Westchester lifestyle, to become  
a farmer. His wife needed some persuading.

“She was standing there with a beautiful sunset behind her,” recalled  
Mr. Gibson, 49. “And she said, ‘If you put my sink right here and the  
house I’ve always wanted around it, I’ll be fine with this.’ ”

In recent years, as the local food movement has grown and farmers’  
markets have proliferated, a new breed of back-to-the-landers has  
emerged. Some, like their predecessors in the 1960s and ’70s, are  
earnest, college-educated young people, turning their backs on  
professional career paths in favor of a life of hardscrabble idealism.  
But many others, homesteaders in their 40s and 50s, have already  
enjoyed the perks of professional life, and may even have made a  
fortune, or at least a comfortable nest egg.

The rest of the story is at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/garden/03farmers.html?pagewanted=1&ref=style