Subject: [Homestead] Young people becoming farmers
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2008 05:37:42 -0700
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:
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.