New Farmers Q&A, Part 1 of 2

posted by brooklynfoodconference, on June 15, 2009

What kind of young person picks farming for a profession in a world ruled by mega ag…and why?  In this workshop, we met four young farmers: Severine von Tscharner Fleming, Sara Franklin, Michael Grady Robertson and KayCee Wimbish.  They spoke frankly of the hardships—long hours, hard labor, money and legal obstacles when you’re bucking the trend towards farms that are bigger than the world has ever seen. KayCee wanted to quit “about 17,000 times” last year, but all four still have their hands in the soil. In fact, the room was bursting with passion, vision, hope and a real spirit of cooperation—and not just from the panelists. The transcript is long so I’ve broken it into two parts. Here’s Part 1. (Bios are at the bottom.)

KayCee Wimbish and her farming partner Owen O’Connor. Photo by Tracy Potter-Fins.

KayCee Wimbish: If anyone’s looking for apprenticeships, one resource is NOFA New York, which stands for Northeast Organic Farming Association. They have annual conferences every January/February in Saratoga Springs. All the farmers from New York State turn out there. There are also homesteaders and gardeners. There are presentations—a lot of them are very technical—where they present the specific practices they use. If you’re looking for an internship or apprenticeship, you can connect with the farmers, realize that they’re cool and that you want to go spend a summer or their season with them. I encourage you to use that resource.

Sara Franklin: There’s NOFA for other students as well. There are regional conferences every August in Western Massachusetts, either in Amherst or Northampton. That’s a good networking start. It’s a super casual conference. People go camp, and it’s always a raucous chaotic good time.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: Oh, I need to insert something. On our Web site (thegreenhorns.net ), there’s a downloadable PDF called The Greenhorns Guide for Beginning Farmers. It’s 40 pages and has links to ATTRA [National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service], which is the umbrella. We also have a lot of last-minute apprenticeships on the blog [the irresistible fleet of bicycles] and links to a whole bunch of other apprenticeship sources.

Michael Grady Robertson: I can vouch for it. I read it.

Sara Franklin: Another practical insert, in terms of getting your start, if you’re thinking you want to do a full season, Massachusetts is a great place right now because there’s state-sponsored health insurance so you can get free health care. That was a real concern for me. If you farm full-time, you’re likely to be living below the poverty line by quite a bit. Massachusetts is super progressive in that right now. Who knows how long it will last, but right now it’s a huge, huge benefit for farming in Massachusetts.

Q: Farming sounds super satisfying, but how much could you expect to make?

Sara Franklin: Owning your own farm and working for someone else are two different ballgames. So are the start-up years, which I can’t speak about. I’ve only worked for someone else, and there are two systems: farms that pay monthly stipends and farms that pay by the hour. Obviously they will be different. If you’re working hourly, you’ll rarely work only a 40-hour week. I was making minimum wage and was paid by the hour.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: But some people who want to make money grow fancy sprouts for fancy restaurants and gross $50,000 in a year. There are all these case studies of people who do that. It just depends what your focus is. If it’s a skill set you’re working on or a lifestyle, you have the benefit of planting the rose bush under which you walk, both figuratively or literally. We all have limitations as to what we can grab and what we can engineer our lives with, but essentially you can design your own ritual. Do you like feeding animals and schlepping water around, which is what KayCee does a lot of? Or do you like stooping, snipping herbs and dealing with fussy chefs? You have to figure out where on that spectrum you want to be.

Michael Grady Robertson: I went through a CRAFT [Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training] farmer-training apprenticeship. Farmers are always really willing to share their knowledge and also their business plan, how much money they actually make. If you’re really curious and you see farmers out there doing things you want to do, they will openly share what their challenges are, what their expenses are. Most of the farmers put their kids through school and take family vacations. Maybe they’ll have to do something for the winter, but there are lots of different models. In general, people discover early on that on a small scale you make small profits. The more you scale up, the more land you have, the more profits you’ll make. It takes a little bit of time. I couldn’t tell you how much people make, but they will tell you.

Sara Franklin: I made $5.75 an hour and no health care, but I got room and board.

KayCee Wimbish: Also, if you’re vegetable farming, you’d be amazed at how much money you save when you’re growing most, if not all, of your own food. Especially if you move out of the city. Last season, when the food crisis hit and prices went through the roof, we were like, “What are you talking about?” We were untouched virtually because we were growing everything we ate. So your cost of living goes down too.

Q: Some of you are university educated? I was reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He talks a little about how in rural America, if you were raised on a farm and go to university, then you move to a city and become an accountant. Can you speak a little about university education and farming? Is there a movement in universities to get people back to the farm?

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: I have a lot to say on that topic.

Michael Grady Robertson: I went to school. I studied something totally unrelated.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: People who want to get into farming should study meteorology because there’s a niche market for farmer-oriented weather reporting. It does not exist yet. That’s one thing.

The other thing is that industrial ag has a major crisis of attrition now. The guiding paradigm of rural America is: Farming is archaic. Now we have modern farming techniques and we don’t need people on the land. Farmers get bought out by their neighbors. Farm size is going up and up and up. Schools are closing. Churches are closing. Down towns are empty. Butcher shops are closing. The infrastructure is becoming a relic in rural America. That’s a huge tragedy that’s been going on in America for 30 years. It’s a structural-political-farm-bill-Monsanto problem. We need to change that.

At the same time, some kids who grew up on farms are going back. It’s not necessarily the majority of the cases, but there are many, many, many instances of it. There are even kids who are influencing their parents (as you’ll see in my film) to change their farming practices to remain competitive. People doing commodity farming are losing money right now. They’re buying their chemicals with off-farm income because their wife works as a nurse or a teacher. There’s a wonderful guy, Ken Meter, in Minnesota at the Crossroads Resource Center who shows that county by county farmers are losing money every year and sending it out to chemical companies. They’re also supporting their local economies with the dollars they spend, but they’re exporting a lot of food, money, soil and pollutants down the river. So the systems are in a pretty bad state.

However, there’s opportunity there as well. There are empty butcher shops. There are empty towns. There’s plenty of empty land—if we can just figure out how to get tax incentives to those big landowners, many of whom are women and non-farming landowners. We could help them make relationships with people who want to farm, who want to do local food security, who want to start small and grow at the right pace with their sweat equity. That’s the angle. Or kids who grew up on farms and want to get extension help from paid government employees how to retool the operation, rediversify and make more holistic again the farm operation of their parents. Those are things I’m hopeful and really happy about. But it’s not the majority. Future Farmers of America is no longer Future Farmers of America. It’s called FFA and they promote lawn care as a career. Go on their Web site. There’s a great video [FFA Today video in right column of FFA home page].

Michael Grady Robertson: I think it’s an interesting question. I had a good time in college. I read some Dostoevsky and smoked some cigarettes. None of it prepared me for being a farmer. You have to be a little bit of everything. Sometimes you’re a mechanic or a carpenter, a natural scientist or a midwife. Most of your learning is through your hands. I know there are college programs that have farms on them, but I wasn’t involved in any of those.

Sara Franklin: I think students are accosting universities right now. Severine and I went to Terra Madre this past fall. It’s an international gathering of peasants and farm-solidarity folk. For the first time, there was a student delegation from the US. Students are adamant that this needs to be part of university education in this country. The knowledge that’s being taught in universities has very little practical application, and there’s a mass frustration among youth about not learning anything that they can do for themselves, an actual skill that can produce something. There was a really great article last week in the New York Times [The End is Near! (Yay!) ] that used the term “the great reskilling” about a community in Idaho that’s making themselves self sufficient. People are interested in having skill again, but the universities are way behind. When I told my advisors I was starting to farm, they were like, “You’re what? You’re throwing away all this money. Are you crazy? How is this connected to public health?”

I was like, “How is this connected to public health?” You can’t see past these little blinders you’ve got on.

It’s coming from a youthful energy. It’s coming from people who have had an experience and awakening and a growing awareness of “Oh my gosh, we can do something with our minds and our hands together.” They’re the ones who are making the changes for the most part. There are exceptions.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: I need to insert some gravity. I spent my career at Berkeley fighting the whole time. I organized 72 speakers on sustainable agriculture in two years and had $12 per session. I went begging to the deans of all the departments. It was horrible. Meanwhile, $500 million came to do biofuels research by a private company, British Petroleum. Twenty-seven million dollars from Novartis built a lemming factory on my campus to study biotech bullshit enzymatic blinkers. They’re brainwashing these kids as soon as they come in the door. As much as the surge and the pulse and the native aspiration of people to touch soil is strong and true and going on, there are some major big companies putting major big money into these land grant schools to turn out biotech lemmings. We need to simultaneously hold and cherish the goodness but also be very aware of that dark force and exert ourselves politically to change the funding structures to these schools. Virginia Tech was serving local salads and eggs from Polyface Farms on their dining service, but agribusiness companies threatened to remove their research funding if the school didn’t take the goddamn free-range eggs out of their dining hall [Tempest in an Egg Cup?].

Q: I’m a high school senior, so I recently did a college search. The one thing I knew was that I wanted to study sustainable agriculture. My guidance counselors thought I was completely crazy, but I grew up in the Park Slope Food Coop so food is a real passion of mine. I had a really hard time finding a school that teaches sustainable agriculture. I’ll be going to Cornell, which has a lot of money going into sustainable agriculture right now. But not every kid growing up in a rural farm town can go to a place like Cornell. Most of the ag schools (and there are a fair number across the country) are teaching outdated methods where farmers are spraying chemical fertilizers over everything and you have one guy working 500 acres with just a biplane.

There are some really small niche schools like College of the Atlantic that focus on sustainable ag. Yale has a big sustainability program [Yale Sustainable Food Project | Hey Mom I Want to Farm] but they don’t teach agriculture. I called the head of their environmental program [Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies]. She said “This is not the place if you want to study something like this. We don’t have the resources because there aren’t enough people interested in it.” People don’t see agriculture as a white-collar job. They don’t connect food to well being and to health and to life in general.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: If you want to start a group to do this and make this your job, we can help you.

Michael Grady Robertson: Farming is a craft. I would listen to farmers rather than college professors if I really wanted to run my own farm. I would save the…I wouldn’t get a college degree.

Q: Kaycee, could you talk a little more about starting your own farming operation? You said you had $10,000 saved. Did you also take out a loan? Are you profitable in your second year?

KayCee Wimbish: The first year we had the $10,000 and we did not take any additional loans. We made some poor decisions about how to spend that money. Our biggest downfall was buying way-too-expensive sheep.

We just slowly went through the process. We incorporated as a business with the State of New York and got our employee identification number. We had a vision of what we wanted and thought we could do. We thought we’d raise eight different kinds of animals. We basically spent the winter going to a lot of conferences and visiting a lot of farms, and realized, “Okay, we’re not going to raise pigs, we’re not going to raise ducks, we’re not going to raise geese, and we’re not going to raise goats.” It helped us streamline our vision. Then we bought animals and started setting prices. Setting prices was our biggest downfall. We sold out of absolutely everything pretty instantly, and we way way way under priced ourselves. That was why we [long pause] slightly less than broke even. We learned a lot in the first year.

Because I was also a teacher, I have no doubt that you should get as much experience as you can. First I was the assistant teacher and then all of a sudden I was the teacher. I was in charge. There are all these things you can never know and never anticipate. I feel in so many ways farming is the same way. You can get all this experience and it’s great and you have this stuff to draw on. You have experiences and you have people and you can rely on them and go to them for information. But then when you’re in charge, you’re just in charge. There’s no book anymore.

Yeah, we’ve made a lot of mistakes. I wanted to quit about 17,000 times throughout the year. I really wanted to quit. I really hated life for a while. But we made it through a season and were then able to spend the winter with so much more clarity. We could then make a business plan based on our actual experiences, on what we were physically able to do, and on what our markets could support. And we were also guided by our philosophical ideas we wanted to be true to.

Yes, for Year Two we had to get loans. We’ve been able to get them from friends and family. We haven’t yet had to use an institution. This year we plan to make money. We just have to sell the goods.

Q: Does anyone need lamb in this room maybe?

KayCee Wimbish: Lambs, chickens we got it all. You can pick it up at the Brooklyn Kitchen right here in Brooklyn!

Q: Where else can you get your things here?

KayCee Wimbish: Just Brooklyn Kitchen, unless you’re a member of the Hearty Roots East Williamsburg CSA.

Q: So you’re primarily a CSA farmer right now?

KayCee Wimbish: Ummmmmm, mix and match. It’s all direct to consumer. Most of the pickups are at the farm. There were lot of people in New York City who were like, “How can we get your meat? We’re not in a CSA.” So the Brooklyn Kitchen is serving as a drop-off point. Everything has to be preordered.

Q: So you only want to sell direct to consumer for now?

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: There are also some laws.

KayCee Wimbish: We slaughter the chickens ourselves, which is fully legal but we cannot sell to restaurants or to establishments that will resell. Everything we sell has to be direct to the consumer. It’s the same with our lambs, which for the most part are butchered at a custom butcher—we cannot sell to restaurants or places that resell. We have to sell direct to consumer. You own the lamb, and we take it to the butcher for you. We did use the USDA slaughterhouse for the first time and it was a really good experience. It’s just hard to get dates in the fall season when everyone else wants to be butchering their animals.

Q: Did you find a slaughterhouse in New Jersey? Or did you find one in New York?

KayCee Wimbish: In New York. Both the custom and USDA slaughterhouses were in New York.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: Again, laws are not structured for small-scale producers. Laws are not structured for new entrants. Laws are structured for mega ag. In New York State, there are a lot of wealthy landowners with beef cattle who were successful in getting more money towards slaughterhouses in the Farm Bill last year. There are institutions like American Farmland Trust and Glynwood Center, etc. who are lobbying and organized around the needs of those people who have asserted themselves politically. Sorry to beat this horse dead, but that’s something that still needs a lot of work.

Q: You mentioned that renting land is more financially feasible than buying it in the Hudson Valley. Could you talk about that experience and why you came to that conclusion?

KayCee Wimbish: Land where we are is $50,000 an acre. There’s no way I could ever afford that and there’s no way I could run a profitable farm with that kind of…

Q: That kind of mortgage or that kind of taxes.

KayCee Wimbish: Absolutely no way, but that wasn’t going to stop us. We were in the fortunate position (I didn’t mention this before) of my having worked on another farm in the same community for two years. I had gotten to know the people in agriculture. My farm partner is also from the county where we’re farming so he also knows a lot of people. Those contacts were invaluable. Having that community of people who already knew us and who knew the farm we were affiliated with, that was a big advantage. We knew this landowner had land because we were working on the farm that was farming on that same land. We had another friend whose family owns a bunch of land and was trying to get people to farm on it. So we had some options. Then we got a lease on 17 additional acres that we found through Severine.

She tries to recruit landowners who are looking for young farmers. We met with this guy, and we got a lease. I would say it’s more challenging with animals. It’s very bucolic for people to think about sheep grazing on their fields. But once you say, “Okay, we’ll need electricity and water to slaughter the chickens, and we’ll need a place to compost the chickens.”

People are instantly, like Ehhhhhhh! [sound like a buzzer], “We kept a horse here and there were a lot of flies. Will there be a lot of flies associated with this?”

And we’re like, “You know what? We’re just going to hay your land.”

Landowners who want people farming their land are well intentioned and supportive, but they just don’t have a clue. That puts the farmer in a tough place. The land trust in Columbia County does a lot of work with the landowners to educate them about what the farmers will need and the realities of it, which I feel is key, key, key, because the last thing I want is some landowner telling me in the middle of the season that I can’t do this or I can’t do that.

Continued in Part Two

Workshop Description: Passing the Hoe. Our new farmers share stories and descriptions. People all over the country, particularly young people, are increasingly interested in agriculture. This workshop offers new and aspiring farmers the opportunity to learn, discuss and network with experienced and established farmers.

Moderator: John Agostinho (Queens College)

Michael Grady Robertson has been the agricultural director at the 47-acre Queens County Farm Museum for a year. He grew up outside Kansas City, MO, studied philosophy at Boston University and has worked on farms in Texas, Spain and upstate New York. [New York Times story | Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction interview]

Severine von Tscharner Fleming is the director of the Greenhorn Project.

Sara Franklin is a former farmer intern on three farms and currently works for World Hunger Year. (Sara’s blog as an intern in 2008)

KayCee Wimbish and her farming partner Owen O’Connor hatched the idea of Awesome Farm in 2007 while weeding endless rows of garlic at Hearty Roots Community Farm. Awesome Farm is a small, pasture-based livestock farm committed to caring for the animals and the land. KayCee was born in Tulsa, OK.

Related Links

• Hudson Valley Farm Beginnings Program
  Developed by and taught by sustainable farmers and growers. 36 hours. Build on your current skills, complete a fully articulated business and strategic plan to grow and develop your farm enterprise. Tap into local and regional farming networks, learn how to procure farmland and credit and become part of an ongoing community of Northeast farmer-mentors. October-March. Contact rachel (at) hawthornevalleyfarm.org, 518-672-7500 X105
• NY Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA NY)
  Consumers, gardeners and farmers creating a sustainable regional food system that’s ecologically sound and economically viable. more
• Greenest Colleges in the US
  Some of the top initiatives include energy-monitoring orbs to eco frats and biodegradable flatware. more
• New England Small Farm Institute
  Small farm information, learning tools and program services. “Slowly but surely, we have worked to create a systematic approach to small farm development.”  more
• Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training (CRAFT)
  Farmer-training apprenticeship, the program that Michael Grady Robertson did. more
• Crossroads Resource Center
  Tools for community self determination from Minneapolis. Ken Meter video on Building a Local Food Economy | CRC home
  
• Fertile Ground USA
  Sara Franklin kept a blog of her internship at NoHo Town Farm. more
• the irresistible fleet of bicycles
  The Greenhorns blog by Severine. more
• Industrial Agriculture
  Way before the conference, several volunteers spent hours researching food issues.  Their excellent list of resources will take you right to some of the best stuff. The Industrial Ag section includes entries like Hidden Costs of Industrial Agriculture and Power Buyers, Power Sellers: How Supermarkets Impact Farmers, Workers and Consumers.
• Little House Farm blog
  From Holly in the Hudson Valley. Little House Farm Blog | More food blogs from BFC research team
• Terra Madre
  Brings together supporters of “sustainable agriculture, fishing, and breeding with the goal of preserving taste and biodiversity.” Online workshops, a newsletter and an annual conference that Sara and Severine attended.  more

Other BFC Speeches
Keynotes: Redmond | Patel | Prof. Louie | Lappé |
Food Sovereignty: D. Jackson | da Silva |
Food Rebellions: Patel | Steverson | Jean-Baptiste |
Young Farmers: Rooftop Farmers | Franklin | Fleming | Q&A 1 | Q&A 2