One of the most inspiring movements in modern agriculture today is a growing trend of young farmers coming on the scene. And just in time. With the average age of today’s conventional farmer approaching 60, this next generation is arriving without a moment to spare.
The new generation of farmers are ambitious, eco-conscience, and driven to change the way food is grown and how we eat.
While the “young farmer” movement as it is commonly described is replete with plenty of twenty-somethings, they’re not the only newbies to trade in their white collars for a well-worn pair of Carhartts. Collectively many of this next generation is defined more by their ideals than their age.
In our interviews with many new farmers and farmers in training, they share a vision for a better tomorrow that starts with food. And it’s how that food is grown, nurtured and distributed that drives much of what’s behind the why of their calling. Many have left behind cush corporate jobs as accountants, engineers, lawyers and even doctors to pursue a richer life–with far less monetary compensation.
But it’s not about the money.
The days are long and the work is hard. But ask any of these farmers-with-a-calling and they’d never trade if for a desk job. That’s typically what they left to do this.
To be sure, inherent in farming is hard work and long days. And with smaller, organic farms, in some ways the work is even harder, foregoing chemical cocktails to battle weeds or abolish pests, new generation farmers are using non-chemical methods such as manual weeding, physical barriers to fight pest, and compost and manure to fertilize their crops.
The fruits of the labor. This is the young farmer who so eloquently summed up her assessment about the work she does. “At the end of the day, there’s just nothing wrong with it”.
As one farmer we interviewed described what she loved about her work replied; “you’re up early, in the peacefulness of the morning, you’re surrounded by nature all day, growing clean food, feeding families healthy food, keeping it close to home, and never using chemicals or pesticides, and we know we’ve made that available to people and families that might likely not have that opportunity available any other way. At the end of the day, it’s really hard to see anything wrong with that”.
So true. It’s how farming used to be way back when. Thankfully there’s a growing movement back to that. God bless the new generation of farmer.
For more information on modern farming, the farms and farmers we featured in this episode, check out the links below.
GROW! movie – a documentary about the new young farmer
National Young Farmers’ Coalition
New York Times: In New Food Culture, a Young Generation of Farmers Emerges
Crop Rotation in the home garden; an article on the basics
Crop Rotation in the home garden; this very good article from Mother Earth News provides the basics and beyond
Joe’s Blog Post: Young Farmers; Real-Life Superheroes
Our episode where we embedded at an organic farm school for a week, and documented our experience.
Our episode of Four Young Farmer and a Bus (not your typical farmer a fun story and one of our most popular shows)
Brooklyn Grange: Our episode on the largest rooftop farm in the country, founded and farmed by young farmers.
Nathan’s Recipe: Braised Leeks with Pan Seared Tilapia
About Joe Lamp'l
Joe Lamp'l is the Host and Executive Producer of the award winning PBS television series Growing A Greener World. Off camera, Joe dedicates his time to promoting sustainability through his popular books, blog, podcast series, and nationally syndicated newspaper columns. Follow Joe on Twitter
Great questions Gary. I have to agree with you a lot. What difference is it making? I am a young avid gardener, 29. It is my goal in the next 3 years (I started this goal 2 years ago as a 5 year goal) to grow all of my own produce. I only live on .89 acre in a geographical oddity of a Suburb of Dayton. I am terrified by the amount of chemicals pour on our soil by big agriculture, and worse, our neighbors lawns.
All my research all my planning everything says the local foods movement is taking off. But they have been saying this since the 70s. What proof is there that there really is a change in the American palate. Has McDonald’s really lost any ground in the last 4 decades?
I started growing my own food for flavor and cost. I would love to go get farmer’s market fruits and veggies but working to keep a roof over my head doesn’t allow me to always get there within the limited hours or distant locations of working farms. Not to mention the often high cost of the “designer” products sold at farmer’s markets. I can’t blame them for charging premium prices they have a superior product but in order to get the same quality at a price I can live with I started growing my own.
Growing your own is one of the few was to know where your food comes from. To know it wasn’t sprayed with chemicals. I also know that it was picked by me and not a migrant worker or worse a child migrant laborer. That is right the US government allows children as young as 12 to work 8 hours a day 40 hours a week in the hot sun, just to bring you a hand picked tomato. The truth is children younger than 12 are working all over the country, but US labor laws often do not apply to agriculture. I know this was originally thought of to help farmers who needed help from the kids to get food to market but that is not what is happening today. I didn’t think my garden efforts were anything more than bringing quality ingredients at a discount price to my table but now I realize this might be the only way to provide child labor free food to my family. I think kids can help in the garden but what people don’t know about today’s agriculture practices is heart breaking.
What I can say about the movement to local foods is start with yourself. Talk to the farmers at the farmer’s markets. Start growing your own food with any space you have a 4×4 space with a few tomatoes is a better start than no start. Salad greens in a window box is easy to pull off. We all could be doing our part to change the process. But if we are really going to change anything we have to start with the kids. Ad men learned this years ago. If you want to sell designer boxers to men you start by selling superman underwear to boys. We need to inform our children where food comes from and what we all can do to contribute.
I am still looking for a real butcher in my area selling real meat from real farms. Sooner or later though just like fresh vegetables if I can’t find the market I will just have to do it myself.
I can’t even convince my own family members to give up lawn treatments or to trouble themselves with growing just a few kitchen herbs. Fast food is just too easy and tastey. And as you pointed out it doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. The best we can do is teach our children and change ourselves. Many people talk about change but few actually live it. Many of my female co-workers complain about their weight(whether they should or not) but few of them do anything about it. They ask me how I stay skinny but few really want to hear about my work in the garden and even fewer of them want to take the time to turn Swiss chard into a delectable dish. They turn their noses up at the fresh mulberries from my yard, but love my biscuits and mulberry jam(everything is better when you add sugar). I love sharing my garden treats, but I can’t help be frustrated by the office vegetarian who doesn’t want my free bags full of fresh mulberries to make her own jam she just wants the jam. Well of course she just wants the jam, you think free fruit would be enough but they want free labor too. It is sad that I am the garden guru in our office when we live in a farming community and I am the youngest person in the office. This nation was started by farmers. Yet the last 250 years we have done everything we can to reduce the percentage of farmers we have. Our founding father’s understood the importance of gardening and many started their own orchards and gardens but we have lost the love and admiration for the true founders of this nation, the farmers, the small farmers, the homesteaders pioneering different plants and practices to create a self sufficient life. We have traded it in for the American dream. We have traded in 40 acres for 4,000 sq ft homes we don’t use, jobs creating things no one needs to buy horribly fattening food with imaginary money. We work more than ever to produce less real material goods than ever. I hope to give a better tradition than that to my children. I hope the movement grows I hope people change and notice but until then I will be growing my own to make the biggest difference I can.
So well said Jay. Thank you for your accurate and insightful reply! Please keep up the good work and best of luck to you. You sooo get it!
Thanks, Jay, for your response. I haven’t been back to this site for several months and was quite glad to see that someone shared their thoughts. I agree with much of what you wrote, especially about the so-called American dream and your comments concerning the founding fathers of our nation. In fact, I’d take that a step further to include the spiritual decline in our nation and make the observation that the further the nation moves away from God, the less interested the people will be in the way of life you have described and the more they will pursue the lure of fast money and fame, from which no one will ever find satisfaction. I believe that God describes it in His Word as “vanity and vexation of soul.”
Specific to my original comments on organic farming and the bulk of the nation’s food supply, I’ve recently read one of Eliot Coleman’s books and some of the references he sights in them concerning soil and the farm that will never “wear out.” All of it is very interesting, and I get the impression, as much as one can from reading the written thoughts of another, that if I ever met Mr. Coleman, I’d like him. I especially enjoyed his observations about the design flaws in the larger wheel hoe, because they indicate that he is a very thoughtful man and one who is speaking from experience and not just giving his opinion or academic perspective.
However, nearly all of the marketing plan of the small organic farm, as he describes it, focuses upon the salad market. That may be somewhat of an over simplification, but at least that is where the money is. As I mentioned before, this appears to be a real problem to overcome if the organic market and small farmers are to produce the majority of the nations food again. Bread has been called the staff of life, and the real staples of wheat, rice, and other grains appear to be far less common and not readily available in the organic market. I understand that the money is in a nutty flavored arugula or some other niche product to sell to the restaurant market, and that the small farmer has to earn a living. Nonetheless, it would appear that growing for the niche market isn’t ever going to result in a large-scale change in the way the nation’s food is produced. I also suspect that much of the know how needed to accomplish some of these goals through the accumulated efforts of many small farmers has been lost and will need to be recovered, and, likely, the hard way.
Please don’t misunderstand me, because I’m all for what you wrote and, in fact, we are going to participate in one of the local farmers’ markets this season in our area and will be getting our earliest seedlings ready this weekend. But we, too, plan to sell mostly salad vegetables. We can’t grow wheat or rice on our small plot of land, which is smaller than yours. We’re going to try to maximize the production by going vertical but, overall, we’re just growing more salad. By the way, I’m not including myself in the category of small farmer; we just want to participate, learn, and see how effectively we can grow on our small space. At this point, soil and seeds appear to the most critical areas of knowledge–replenishing the soil nutrients and maintaining a wide variety or seeds.
Perhaps, my perspective is a little mistaken and I will see things differently this coming season. Nevertheless, the primary point of my earlier comments was to ask what we can collectively do on a larger scale. Have you ever noticed that the nuts and freaks in this country always seem to unite together to make a big fuss and get on the news, and the people who really just want a quite peaceable life and who care about what is truly important in life, never seem to stick together on anything? We might give a nod in agreement but when it comes to getting involved and doing something, we just never come together.
In my limited knowledge of all these matters, getting people to grow a few salad vegetables and fruit at home doesn’t appear to be nearly enough. I like the cooperative idea and I found a local organic farmer who runs one near our area, but I don’t think he grows any grains or real staple foods. I might be using the wrong terms here, but when I refer to staples I mean foods that stick to your ribs and provide the nourishment needed for real labor. Salads and condiments are great, but without a piece of bread, there’s just too little to fuel a day’s work. And not all of us our on a low-calorie diet.
I’d still like to know what we can do that would make the quickest impact on the largest scale. What is truly holding back the small farmers today? Is it a matter of scale in that one needs many many acres to produce grains and other staples, or can it be done successfully on a small scale if many farmers get together to do so? Do we need to make food production an issue in state and federal elections, and does the annual farm bill put the small farmer at a disadvantage? Those are the kinds of things to which I was referring. I wasn’t attempting to criticize the efforts of the small farmer but rather to ask what their biggest obstacles are. If all our food was once produced by small farmers, why not again?
Whether or not there are enough people who genuinely care enough to bring that kind of change about, I don’t know; but I suspect that there are some out there who could formulate a real plan to accomplish that task.
Best wishes with the remaining years of your five-year plan, and many more five-year plans to come.
I slept on this and there’s one more point that keeps nagging me that I want to make carefully and kindly, but also emphatically. Although I’d like the way of life you have been referring to and enjoy growing food and the outdoors, we ought not to look down on those who don’t nor upon those who purchase their food already prepared. The lady who wants your jam but not your fruit to make her own is an economic opportunity for us not a problem. We ought not to make small farming something akin to a hippy way of life. McDonald’s isn’t our enemy, they’re an opportunity. Those burger buns could be made with organic flour, the burgers and cheese from grass-fed organic beef, and the breakfast sandwiches from pasture-raised organic chicken eggs.
On one hand we say the farmers are the backbone of the nation because each agricultural worker feeds something like 150 people, freeing up others to pursue industries that help prosper the nation. Somebody needs to study medicine and how to build a fighter jet to protect our nation. According to Eliot Coleman, even without pesticides and employing what he has termed a plant-positive approach rather than a pest-negative approach, each farm worker ought to still be able to feed over 100 people. You can’t then say on the other hand that those who don’t want to farm are all lazy and living wrong. They are our market to support the way of life we desire. What’s the goal here? To promote a farming life style that we feel everyone should be living, or a way of providing healthy food that we think everyone should be eating. Mine is the latter.
Of course, we need more small farmers, but not isolated farmers; and I don’t think we just leave it to them alone to make that kind of change without support. The accumulated sum of production across 1000 small farmers, all farming 5 acres, won’t be as productive in the non-salad areas as a 5000-acre farm or a collection of 50 100-acre farms. You can’t graze one or two cows on several separate small plots and have the equivalent of a herd, and still farm produce. Imagine if everyone tried that in a housing plan, even with just chickens. I think it would be quite non hygenic. Even with chickens, you’d have to cram them in a bunch of little chicken coops and that wouldn’t be free-range or pasture-raised. To clarify, just imagine what a community would do if food production as it is today was interrupted due to disaster, war, whatever, and the grocery stores were empty. Would we tell everyone to farm their backyards? No. We’d need a plan to identify all the good land resources and to work collectively to grow various crops on different plots and to graze livestock in available pastures. It’s a big effort to provide all the nourishment for a people. An organic niche-market farm will not be able to feed the people.
It’s like the old Green Reader book that advocated “backyard industry”. Can each household build a refrigerator in their own backyard or garage? Of course not. There are economies of scale and methods that a factory can employ to both provide a better and cheaper product and do so in a safer manner for the environment. Some ideas I read about organic farming are similar to this old concept.
There needs to be a financial mechanism through which individuals can participate in organic farming on a fuller scale that can produce all the food we need. The cooperative is good, but it’s limited to participating with one farmer who probably is growing salad since it’s the most profitable now. But how do we get new farms of adequate scale to grow grains and raise grass-fed livestock, etcetera, and have it in the control of those who are focused on quality over a fast profit? Every thing always comes back to the heart of man rather than some system that is employed. I don’t have the answer, but it would appear the problem is that those who would like to do so don’t have the finances to do so; and I’m not sure that 10 farmers who would have farmed 5 acres each could collectively farm 50 acres, under some business arrangement to collectively own one larger plot, and make a profit outside of those niche markets. A question is whether or not an organic farm can compete in the broad market, like the wheat market and other grains. There is a farm nearby that grows varieties of organic wheat but I don’t think they sell the grain, but instead sell bread. To compete they have to sell the final product rather than the grain, and sell it as a special niche again. Is there a viable model to sell the wheat or flour and to feed the average citizen who can’t afford to pay two to three times the cost for a loaf of bread or bag of flour?
Real change is a large-scale problem that might not be possible without the majority of the people being willing to make food production a priority on a national level and supporting growth in organic farms. Those are the hard questions that need answered if food production is going to change overall. Thus far, all I have really seen are examples of how the organic farmer can try to survive in the current market through changing their business model, so to speak; but not how to survive in the same market as industrial farms and produce the same foods but grown organically.
So, I’m not confident that it can be done in the large scale. If you and I want to grow all our own food, then perhaps we need to find others with the same desire who can agree to pool funds to purchase lands on which we can, in effect, collectively run our own large farms with the primary goal of feeding ourselves rather than supplying some market. Ignore the market and grow the food we need. But who has the funds to start that off, today, or the time to work the farm. After it’s going, if successful, it would offset our food bill; but it would be costly in the beginning. Or maybe that type of farm could feed the participants and generate some additional income to pay for itself. I don’t know. God told Adam after the Fall that he’d eat bread by the sweat of his brow. It’s hard work no matter how you look at it.
Hello. I recently watched a number of your episodes about the new generation of farmers, the movement among younger generations to promote organic farming and backyard and community gardens, and the episode about Polyface farm. It is all very positive and encouraging, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to make a significant difference. Could you speak a little to the challenges of moving from centralized industrial agriculture to food production that is local, diversified, and organic? Will this new generation of farmers be enough to change national food production? What more needs to be done? I realize that these are big questions, but it seems that this is how the consumer and so-called average citizen wants their food produced; but we don’t seem to be getting there and I doubt many of us understand why.
For example, I’m forty-five years old now and live where I grew up. When I was a child, there were several small farms in the area that sold produce in their own stands at the edge of their property. After they retired and passed, the land was sold to one large developer here who builds homes that no one from this area can afford. The average cost of a home among those who were born here is about $150,000. The starting price of one of these new homes is $400,000 and they have about a quarter acre of property covered with burnt grass. Over the past twenty years, we’ve had a large movement of people into our area and loss of nearly all the farm land. We are about thirty miles outside of the city; and it appears that a lot of the people who buy these homes are some type of business professionals who move around a lot and don’t really care or have a stake in the land at all. I can’t recall seeing a garden in any of these neighborhoods. I don’t think many even mow their own lawns, apart from spraying weed killer everywhere, because we’ve also experienced a large increase in lawn-mowing and landscaping businesses.
I provide this description not to criticize the people who purchased these homes. They didn’t cause the problem; the farmland was sold before they arrived. I provide it because I want to point out two things that are upsetting about the “organic movement,” for lack of a better term.
After losing a generation of local farmers and their land, and moving in a large population of people who generally appear to not care much about farming or gardening, we now have farmers’ markets everywhere. But the produce isn’t grown here any longer. It’s brought in by people who want to make money. I know someone who buys eggs from a farmer for $2 a dozen and sells them at the market for $5. He doesn’t raise chickens; he just buys and sells. Consumers don’t know who grew the produce or if it is really organic. I believe there are a couple real farmers that come to the markets from some distance away; but, in general, it appears to be a money-making scheme for non-farmers. In my area, it doesn’t seem to be helping the working farmer much; nor is it changing anyone’s attitude about where they buy their food. It’s more of a designer product for which people will pay a premium.
Also, one can’t survive off of the produce that is sold at these markets. One could make a nice salad, and have some sweet corn, and maybe even some potatoes. And you can buy Amish jam and donuts, whatever that really means. But apart from that there aren’t many calories available or sources of carbohydrates and protein. One can’t find organic wheat flour to bake bread, or cornmeal, legumes, rice, etcetera. There is a man down the road who raises angus cattle and sells meat as all natural, I think. But he sprays his corn fields with glyphosate and, I assume, must be planting a genetically modified form of corn that he feeds to the cattle. Even though it is local, it doesn’t appear to be all that healthy or safe. Something similar may be taking place with those $5 eggs also. Just because they’re brown doesn’t mean that they are pasture-raised and organic.
I’m all for organic farming and supporting the small, local farmer or even the big local farmer if organic. And I like farmers’ markets. I just wonder how much of an impact the organic movement is really having at this time on national food production and whether or not it isn’t being taken off-track by greed. Although very good and important, these efforts of teaching people about backyard gardens and planting on rooftops and empty urban lots doesn’t seem to be enough to change food production on a national level. I don’t mean to imply that we shouldn’t do those things but that we may need to do more and to take a more direct approach.
I wonder whether, apart from the increase in the farmers’ markets, there is any real evidence that food production has shifted at all away from industrial agriculture to local, organic farms? Are we growing more varieties of corn, wheat, and other produce now? Are there more small farms geographically dispersed though out the nation than ten years ago? Are the industrial farms feeling the effects of any of this?
I realize that there are farms and dairies that are doing things right, and I don’t mean to be overly pessimistic. But I wonder where are we, where do we need to get to, what do we need to do, and what is stopping us? Paying $5 for a $2 dozen of eggs at the farmer’s market isn’t helping change food production in the nation.
It seems to me that with the GMOs and persistent herbicides, the industrial farms are moving right along without concern about what the people want. I read that they tried to stop the requirement of labeling the food as GMO. The government isn’t doing anything about it, or at least not much, even though food production is a matter of national security—perhaps, the most fundamental of all.
I am very happy that there is a young generation that wants to farm organically and that puts that way of life above monetary gain. Apart from buying their produce, what else do we need to do to really make a difference, so that this new generation can produce the majority of the nations food and not have to rely on small markets to sell their produce, or market it akin to a designer product?
Thank you for considering my question.