New Farmers Q&A: Part 2 of 2

posted by brooklynfoodconference, on June 15, 2009

A continuation of the discussion portion of the New Farmers workshop.  Topics in this half: how to get land, slaughterhouses,  young women in farming, minorities in farming, school food and how Obama’s election has changed things. ["Whoops, I missed Part 1"]

Q: I just met the economic development head of Columbia County. His top priority is to bring more agriculture into the area than ever before, and he’s looking for funding. It’s a good thing. The problem is that the farmer stops farming and then wants to sell the land. The planning commission doesn’t care about farming so they turn it over and it becomes building sites. Columbia County is losing hundreds and hundreds of acres.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: Thankfully, that’s slowed down a little bit.

Q: Oh, yes, because of the market now, yeah.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: All the land trusts are broke. The people who are doing that sort of facilitation are broke. One more point on this landowner thing because I think this is going to be one of the major challenges for getting sovereignty for people who are doing real work in a country that believes in patriotism and believes in farming independence. There’s all this stuff happening in the suburbs of Atlanta. The developments are doing farms now, instead of golf courses. There is a huge burst of interest in edible landscaping. There are people doing land on leisure farms. I’m renting land from one leisure farmer and one active farmer. Leisure is a little vista-oriented, and the rigors of real land management kind of make them allergic at some times. There’s a lot of training that has to happen.

So we have to figure out in this country how to structure those relationships. People shouldn’t have to go into a land situation so desperate for dirt that that they’re left broke and without tenure. That’s yet unsolved. It’s something to keep at the back of your mind. You can learn a lot leasing. You can certainly lease for your whole professional life, but keep in the back of your mind to assert your rights in that lease. Really negotiate and be open and up front with the people you’re renting from. If you can find a retiring farmer who’s interested to work through the partnership and work through a succession plan and openly share. Maybe you buy them out and help them with their retirement or mesh it in such a way that you’re not put in a position ten years down the road where (and this has happened to so many farmers) you’re kicked off your land.

Michael Grady Robertson: I’ll just add two things.

• There are a lot of aging farmers up in Sullivan County and other places, who don’t want to see their land go to developers. There aren’t enough farmers right now to take over their land, and they’re pretty frustrated by it.
• If you’re not totally secure about your business model, what you’ll be doing, how you’ll be using their land, and what infrastructure you need to build, it’s difficult for a landowner to have confidence in you. Look at things from their side and understand that the more solid business planning you come to them with, the better they’ll feel about you leasing their land for the long term, and the better relationship you’ll have. These are complicated relationships.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: There are really great workbooks on this topic from the New England Small Farm Institute.

Q: I’m thinking about the Draconian infrastructure for slaughterhouses, and KayCee talked about the well-wishing supporters who don’t really understand the details of farming. But the people who do understand have a system that isn’t really welcoming to newcomers. There’s not much infrastructure to slaughter your animals. Have you had support within the community as a new farmer? Do people try to fit you in and give you support or do they resent you?

KayCee Wimbish: You mean from the slaughterhouse industry?

Q: I’m just thinking of that as a system that’s in place that is completely terrible but people have to live with it.

KayCee Wimbish: The custom butchers right around us have no interest in making space for us. They’re like, “We’re busy. We don’t need any more business.”

Q: Even though you’re the future of their craft?

KayCee Wimbish: Yeah. I don’t know. They don’t really care. They just want the business. The custom guy we went to was totally easy to work with. He’s like, “I need three days advance warning.” I’m like, “Okay, great.” We also went to the USDA slaughterhouse, and they were very nice and very helpful, but I don’t think they took any particular interest in us because we were young. It was the first time we’d taken lambs to a USDA slaughterhouse, and it was very different from the custom butcher. He was nice, but he wasn’t like, “Hey, keep bringing your business here. We need more people like you!”

The most cooperation I found was from other young farmers. This season we’re renting/borrowing a mobile chicken-processing unit from a farmer friend in Massachusetts. He was amazing to work with. I was trying to give him the dates that I wanted. He was like, “You have your plan figured out. I don’t know what I’m doing yet. You get the days first. I’ll work around you.”

There are plenty of established farmers who are also incredibly supportive. The person we bought sheep from let us come give vaccinations to her sheep, trim hooves, and taught us all the things we needed to know to take care of the sheep. Then she gave us discounted prices on the sheep because she was like, “You gave us labor.” She’s been incredibly helpful. Other farmers have been super helpful. I’ll email someone with a question and get instant response. That is the most supportive element I’ve found—other farm people.

Q: I just learned about land trusts as a way to get land, but I’m hearing some negativity here.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: It’s really mixed. Land trusts work in some places really well because they protect the vistas and viewsheds of wealthy people. There are a lot of viewsheds that have been mown once a year, beautifully mown. That land could be an incubator for a farmer. But the land trust community is latching on. I keep emailing them trying to get a panel on one of their confabs—they have these confabs—to show these case studies. There’s wonderful work happening in Drumlin, Massachusetts, which is like totally amazing for land trusts. There’s a lot of potential. Again, the vagaries of our economic climate do then disproportionately affect the institutions of the super wealthy. Land trusts are slightly that, so they go broke just like any other institution that’s supported by philanthropy. Yeah, land trusts are land and it’s already saved. And it’s usually in places where there are plenty of people who care about it, know about it and are literate. Institutions of caring and institutions of local food. Amazing opportunities exist there.

KayCee Wimbish: It depends too on the town, the local government and how they’re interacting with the land trusts. We’re in the town of Red Hook, and the land trust is trying to buy up land. The town government wants that land to be used as farms. They’re trying to do a collaborative effort where farmers could lease the land. It’s very complicated. I don’t really understand it all, but the land trust and the town are working together to make it affordable. Because the land trust just has to buy the land at the value so they’re spending a ton of money. So for a farmer to pay off the mortgage, you’re still paying huge amounts of money. The town is trying to support the farm, so the town will pay part of it. It’s highly dependent on the local government.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: It’s a really good case study for how a town can gather together to get food security for themselves and to have a place for education and access to respite and access to butterflies for children. But it’s small. I think the larger narratives are about municipal land, educational land, transportation-authority-owned land, public parks—those are other institutionally managed properties that are also potentially available, especially if we as a nation make this a priority. My work is branding and marketing the young farmers as icons of protagonism in our food system and I think the support we can get will help get us get policies that will make this all more possible. There’s so much. Land is a tiny, slightly rarified part of the puzzle. But rarified is where you’ve got to start. If you want to use a well-made shovel from Holland, then you’re probably going to be selling vegetables to people who may have traveled to Holland. That’s a reality of our food system right now. Customers who are rich are customers you can earn money off in the beginning.

Michael Grady Robertson: Each land trusts works differently. Most of them are not actively looking to buy land in order to have someone come farm it. If you see a piece of land that someone’s looking to sell and it happens to be in an area that one of these conservation agencies might have an interest in preserving and conserving that land, then they can step in oftentimes and help. But the economic realities this close to the city are tough. Putting land into a conservation easement won’t significantly improve or reduce the costs so it will become affordable for you to work as a farmer.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: My friend Kendra in California just did a study that shows that land trusts make the price go up because it makes it a more pleasant area to live. So again luxury estates, what I call “the attorney gentry,” who are buying my vegetables, come in and then it’s not active farms. It’s not real. It’s fake. It’s beautiful but it’s fake, so we have to figure out how to make it real.

Michael Grady Robertson: There are a lot of markets out there outside the Hudson Valley. This land is extremely expensive compared with the rest of the country.

Sara Franklin: Even within the northeast. It‘s about as expensive as it gets.

Q: Would you say there are a lot of women in farming?

KayCee Wimbish: Yes. Tremendous. Definitely.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: We need men. If men want to come to my farm next weekend, I’ll fry some steaks.

Sara Franklin: The majority of young farmers are women right now.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: The fastest-growing demographic in agriculture in Vermont is women under 25.

Q: In terms of farm managers, if farmers wrote a book where they have to tell you what crops are earning, do you think people are not getting ripped off because it’s an open book where you get—I guess it’s called the Farmers National—where you get a report of how… [Farmers National Company offers professional farm management services.]

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: Are you talking about as a customer?

Q: I don’t know. I have a friend of a friend who has a farm and has a farm manager to work the farm, that kind of thing. Whatever profit a person is getting, I guess that is the profit. I’m wondering what foul play could occur?

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: There are so many different arrangements. There are people who are hired by a nonprofit to farm to make food for educational programming, day camp, whatever. There are people who manage the land of private estates, who are hired to sell to the vegetable markets or give to the rich landowner. There are people who have land managers who are tenant farmers who pay rent on the land. There’s sharecropping. You name it, it’s happening.

Q: You could have a fifty-fifty type deal. I’m wondering what kind of deals, fair or not.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: You notice how transparent we’re all being? It’s because we’re working in this world if you do it everyone can see it because it’s on a field. Everyone can see how expensive your tractor is, how shitty your erosion is.  It’s very open unlike many other fields. Definitely landscaping has a lot more skeezy potential. Also people who work with plants are not like number-manipulator people. They’re photosynthesis people.

Q: Whatever report they get, that’s a public…

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: If they’re skeezy, fire them.

Michael Grady Robertson: Nonprofits have to state their earnings, but I don’t think a family farmer is obligated to disclose that information. But farmers work under a different model. It’s like the open-source movement in software as opposed to something like IBM that owns all the stuff. There’s a shared-value system about this stuff that small farmers have. The idea is to pass on the knowledge you have.

Q: What percentage of young people who go into farming are from minorities?

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: Not as many as we would like. And one of the major works I’m trying to…I keep answering all the questions. You talk.

Sara Franklin: A lot of my work at World Hunger Year is with minority farmer groups. Most are urban but there are also some rural minority farmers. It’s a growing movement, but it’s still really small. That’s ironic, given that statistically a lot of the agricultural knowledge that is in this country right now is carried by minority folk. A tremendous number of people in the community gardening movement are people of color or recent immigrants. Some people don’t consider community gardeners farmers, but they’re certainly growers and a lot of community food-security efforts particularly in urban areas are supported by folks who are doing intensive community gardening or urban agriculture.

A lot of nonprofits are working really hard to increase those numbers:

• The National Immigrant Farming Initiative here in New York.
• The Council of the Environment of New York City.
• The New Entry Sustainable Farming Project up in Massachusetts.

Minorities are there, but if you think about who has money in this country, it’s not minorities, for the most part. It’s hard to get start-up capital, unless you start farming through a nonprofit, which is certainly one avenue. It’s really hard if you don’t have cash to get going.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: And social mobility.

Q: And the history of ag policy in this country intended to get people of color off the land.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: In the Black Belt which is one of the richest, beautiful-est, most amazing farming districts in the country in Mississippi, it’s 93% African American, and 3% of the land is owned by African Americans. We have had structural racism of our land for the whole history of our country. There’s also an aversion within the African American community to agricultural work, because they were slaves and they were sharecroppers and they were kicked off their land. The whole thing was very bad news.

At the same time there are positive stories, especially in places like Michigan, where the economy is really depressed and there’s no pressure for development. There are tightly knit communities of migrant laborers who were working in asparagus, in cherries, in specialty crops—nice lucrative crops. As the small family farms dissolved, those immigrant networks supported people within their communities to start new businesses. They used their connections to know where the land was.

Just like in some mountain ranges there are amazing flowers that grow, in some configurations of economics, geographics and social networks, you see a flowering of these new demographics in agriculture. Young farmers are similar to the farm workers’ movement. We’re going out into new territory we don’t understand and have to rely on our social networks. We have to pioneer, figure it out and ninja and wiggle it lose. But we need to have super solidarity with the Mexican people who are growing all the food in this country. We’re not going to win this without them. Certainly you are super correct that our rhetoric and political change that we work towards needs to link arms with them and make it possible for them to farm. We will not succeed to feed America unless we do.

Q: Who are your allies institutionally or politically or a national level? Is there any institution or political support or on some sort of national level support for young farmers? Do you feel you have allies?

Sara Franklin: I think there’s a real shift happening right now with the new administration. It’s different from just lip service right now. The new undersecretary of markets, Kathleen Merrigan is…

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: She’s us.

Sara Franklin: She is a farmer. She’s been teaching in agriculture. She’s been working in government. She has all these pieces pulled together and gets it. She’s not going to sit around and talk.

Sara Franklin: There are people in the know in politics right now. On local and state levels now. Forget about national. So much of this happens grassroots. There are City Council members in New York who are serious about getting more urban agriculture. There are politicians upstate who are very serious about reinvesting in sustainable agriculture. There’s a real change happening definitely, but it’s still a struggle.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: It’s going to take us, all of us. Also, school food is another area that we intersect with. The CDC is totally obesity focused. There is so so much money from the powers that be for that. I go to all these conferences and talk to all these people who talk to all these people who know about things. They say, “You want an angle? Your angle is kids and nutrition, because this country can’t afford to have one in three kids with obesity or diabetes.” According to statistics, one in three white kids, one in two of children of minority Hispanic or African American will have type 3 diabetes or obesity in their life. It’s like how the hell can we ever do anything if every other person is sick?

Q: [Name of project she works for is unintelligible] When I first started, we said, “We’re going to teach your kids composting. We’ll have farms and grow vegetables.” We had a fairly warm response then, but right now it’s hot. Parents come in with their trunks filled with compost, and they’re like, “Help me do this. I want to be part of it.” So when you’re talking about what government agencies and larger groups are working in your favor as advocates, it sounds good. But what really made a difference for us was the minute the Obamas planted a vegetable garden. It sounds really simple and silly, but that’s what got all the parents I work with really jazzed up. I’ve noticed a huge change in five years. And five years is not a long time to be involved in this.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: Yeah, seed sales are up 35%.

Q: Is there room for middle-aged people to become new farmers?

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: Go for it. You have capital. I chose to work on young farmers because I am a young farmer and because there’s something about the boldness of youth where you’re learning to hitch yourself to the biggest thing you can find and be like fully present in your body and activism and soul song. And I also want to live in an America where you can get out of college and then farm, and you don’t have to work for the man for 10 years or 15 years or 50 years. Because mostly the new entrants in ag are retirees right now. All the Cornell programming is ex-IBM people who want to raise chanterelles or goat cheese. That’s really who’s coming in through those institutions. But yes, of course, you’re welcome. Was that your question?

Q: Yes, because I know when you’re young it’s really exciting.  I was just wondering if people in their late thirties or forties can do this sort of thing and not be at a disadvantage because it’s incredibly hard work or there’s a different community to help you out.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming: I’ve heard a lot of people talk on that exact frame. You get more used to your creature comforts. You may have kids. There are different infrastructural…You can’t go live in a teepee necessarily or you need to be near a public school. But at the same time you might have much better marketing skills. You may have better networks. You may already know how to balance your books.

Michael Grady Robertson: I think it depends on the kind of farming you want to do. I don’t want to grow vegetables any more because it’s backbreaking. But some of these guys who do pasture-raised beef, they just ride around on a truck all day and change the fences. That’s not a bad way to get into farming. [Laughter] Yeah, I’m going to buy a biodiesel truck. It’s farming still, you know?

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
  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. Developed and taught by sustainable farmers. October-March. Contact rachel (at) hawthornevalleyfarm.org, 518-672-7500 X105 (Web site in progress)
• 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
• The National Immigrant Farming Initiative
  “NIFI strengthens the capacity of immigrants to farm successfully and to advance sustainable farming and food systems.” more
• The Council of the Environment of New York City
  “The New Farmer Development Project  identifies, educates, and supports immigrants with agricultural experience to become local producers and establish small farms in the region.”  more
• The New Entry Sustainable Farming Project
  From Tufts University in  Massachusetts. more
• 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 and compiling the best resources.  Their excellent list is on this site. The Industrial Ag section includes entries like Hidden Costs of Industrial Agriculture and Power Buyers, Power Sellers: How Supermarkets Impact Farmers, Workers and Consumers

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