Finding Sustainability In "Generation Organic"

From the 2011 Young Farmers Conference; Maggie Starbard, NPR

Many thanks to the folks who have shared news of this report by Dan Charles broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday: "Who Are The Farmers of 'Generation Organic':"

For decades, as young people have been leaving farms behind, the average age of the American farmer has been rising. The last time the government counted farmers, in 2002, the average farmer was 55-years-old.

But there's a new surge of youthful vigor into American agriculture — at least in the corner of it devoted to organic, local food. Thousands of young people who've never farmed before are trying it out.

Mr. Charles's piece proceeds to tell the story of The Young Farmers Conference, hosted by the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, New York. Located 25 miles north of Manhattan, the Center is a fully-operational farm that works to train farmers and design public outreach programs that communicate the benefits of "healthy, seasonal and sustainable food." In particular, the Center is charged with a mission to bring this message to children, that next generation of consumers and potential farmers. 

Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. Film by Local Projects from Stone Barns Center on Vimeo.

The Center fosters some extraordinary rural - urban connections, and, as exemplified by their introduction to the Young Farmers Conference, they also focus in detail on that other aspect of farming - the fact that farming is a business. The Center is also raising a new generation of rural entrepreneurs. 

All of these facets of the mission revolve around what Dan Barber, of the well-known Blue Hill restaurant and farm, shares in the video above: that "you need to be inspired by a place, and have that place become a part of that experience."

This is echoed in the voices of those emerging farmers who participated in the 2010 conference:

Voices from the 2010 Young Farmers Conference from Stone Barns Center on Vimeo.

More than most media produced about "generation organic," or whatever one wishes to call this movement, this video gives me great hope. As a child of the Farm Crisis, I lament the extent to which the sustainable agriculture movement is portrayed in a pastoral, romantic light -- a kind of soft-filtering of Wendell Berry's hard truths.

We are not having a serious discussion about the "sustainability" of this movement (culturally, economically) until we've brought the mass of new urban-born farmers into discussion with those farmers and communities rooted in their rural place, until we have "conventional" and "organic" farmers sitting down at a table together. Too often the urban/university-driven dynamic to this movement can seem to slight, or outright condemn, those farmers who have lived for decades on the land. That attitude is the least sustainable element of the movement.

Yet, when we hear this diverse group of young farmers explain their motivations, we can't help but be heartened. As we look forward to 2012, I hope to bring more news of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and The Young Farmers Conference.

Farmville Files: Pastoral Romance

 

Longtime readers will remember a time on the site over a year ago when we posted a number of articles under the "Farmville Files" moniker. At the time, we thought of the series as a way to utilize the popularity of the Facebook application as a way to talk about what the online game had to say about pop culture's representations of rural people and agricultural work. 

As this morning's article on The Farmer-Veteran Coalition suggests, there's much more work to be done on this front -- especially in linking agriculture to culture and to the arts. While there are many excellent sites related to sustainability and local food systems, we'd like to add our own perspective to these issues through a revitalized "Farmville Files" series of articles and contextual links. 

To those ends, I'd like to share "Pastoral Romance" by Brent Cunningham; it's a provocative essay originally published in the Food issue of Lapham's Quarterly this summer. This piece focuses on two self-confessed urban foodies' sojourn in Huntington, West Virginia and their efforts to eat (and promote) local, sustainable agriculture. 

If this sounds like a scenario you've heard a thousand times before, give Mr. Cunningham's essay a read. He covers the "'bourgeois nostalgia' [that] pervades the food-reform movement," and a number of other issues that can make some elements of the organic food phenomenon a thorny subject. There may be, after all, some unsettling philosophical connections between the attraction of Farmville and those irresistible tables of produce at an urban farmers market. 

Here's the opening paragraphs of Brent Cunningham's "Pastoral Romance:"

Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse.

Phoebe Patton Randolph, Betty Jo’s thirty-two-year-old granddaughter, has a dream of returning to the farm, which has been in the family since 1863 and is an hour’s drive from her home in the suburbs of Huntington, a city of nearly fifty thousand people along the Ohio River. Phoebe is an architect and a mother of one (soon to be two) boys, who is deeply involved in efforts to revitalize Huntington, a moribund Rust Belt community unsure of what can replace the defunct factories that drove its economy for a hundred years. She grew up with stories of life on the farm as she watched the empty farmhouse sag into disrepair.

Recently, over lunch in Betty Jo’s cozy house in a quiet Huntington neighborhood, I listened to them talk about the farm, and I eventually asked Betty Jo what she thought of her granddaughter’s notion of returning to the land. Betty Jo smiled, but was blunt: “Leave it. There’s nothing romantic about it."

Farmville Files: Living The Dirty Life

photograph by Deborah Feingold

One of the most fascinating narratives of this fall's season of new books is the long-awaited emergence of Mark Twain's unexpurgated autobiography; I've thought again of the Hannibal, Missouri native this morning, as I received suggestions to visit NPR's interview with Kristin Kimball, author of The Dirty Life.

Just under 150 years ago, Mr. Twain helped found the literary sub-genre we know call "travel writing," with his Innocents Abroad. Flashing forward to this season's publishing cycle, we have the chance to encounter Ms. Kimball and her own narrative of traveling upstate from the high-culture and high-couture world of New York City's East Village to interview an enterprising young farmer. The story she relates in The Dirty Life is one of unlikely matches, as the city girl falls in love with the organic farmer and, in the process, discovers the poetry and vitality of agrarian life. 

Of course, these "back to the land" narratives, coupled with books on urban-hipsters and their rural arts, now offer a kind of romance and escape just as commercially viable as Mr. Twain's genre of travel writing (indeed, Ms. Kimball began as a travel writer). If you're reading this from a computer screen somewhere in rural America, or if you number among our country's rural diaspora, your reaction to this recent trend may fall somewhere on a sliding scale between hopeful optimism and downright cynicism.

The difference here, with Ms. Kimball's book, seems to be her honesty and her sense of perspective--how the back-breaking, never-ending work of running a 500 acre CSA is also profoundly satisfying and life-affirming. 

NPR's interview with Ms. Kimball, and an audio-slide of Essex Farms, can be found here.