The U.C. Santa Cruz Farm & Garden Apprenticeship changed my life. In the winter of 2005, I was burning the candle at both ends and burning myself out. I was working too hard, moving too fast, and my doctor had warned me that I was at risk of chronic fatigue. Then, that spring, I found myself living on an organic farm perched above the waters of Monterey Bay.  Before I moved to the farm, my to-do list as an environmental campaigner had been packed with conference calls, protest organizing, and press conferences. After arriving at the farm, my biggest priorities became keeping the onions free of weeds, thinning the young fruits on the apple trees, and waking up early to cook for 35 other aspiring farmers.

The switch blew my mind. As I worked in the fields and the orchards I could suddenly see the myriad interconnections that knit together a farming ecosystem; ecology went from an abstraction to a visceral reality. Perhaps more important, living with a few dozen other industrial society dissidents gave me a new appreciation for the ideals of solidarity and the practice of community. The time I spent at the UCSC Farm & Garden deepened my hope that farming, done right, could help heal a battered environment and perhaps even remedy some of the world’s injustices.

So I was horrified when I learned last month that, due in part to state and federal budget cutbacks, the Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture (as it’s formally called) may be forced to double its tuition—a move that would put this invaluable program beyond the reach of many people and set back efforts to educate a new generation of organic farmers.

Founded in 1967 by an eccentric British gardener named Alan Chadwick, the Farm & Garden Apprenticeship is the oldest organic farming education program in the United States. It is one of the few organic farming apprenticeships that combines in-the-fields, hand-on instruction with science-based classroom lectures and also one of the few that provides a certificate upon course completion. Demand for this unique curriculum far outstrips what the Apprenticeship can supply: For the 2011 season the apprenticeship received more than 150 applications for 36 openings.

The Apprenticeship is like a greenhouse for the organic farming movement, a place that (if you’ll excuse the extended metaphor) helps germinate crop after crop of passionate farmers and gardeners. Here in Northern California, the names at the farmers market stands and on the menus of farm-to-table restaurants are like a Who’s Who of Apprenticeship alumni: Dirty Girl Produce, Blue Heron Farm, Freewheelin Farm, Dinner Bell Farm, Pie Ranch, Blue House Farm, and the organic nursery Sunnyside Seedlings are all run by alums. And the ripple effect stretches far beyond California.

In New York City, alum Karen Washington is an instructor at the Farm School NYC. In Missoula, Montana, alum Josh Slotnick runs the innovative PEAS Farm, which combines a stellar CSA with agricultural education for University of Montana undergrads. Jones Valley Farm in Birmingham, Alabama is run by an Apprenticehip alum, as is Persephone Farm in Washington and Full Sun Farm outside of Ashville, North Carolina. For my part, I doubt that I would have the confidence to co-manage San Francisco’s three-acre Alemany Farm were it not for the instruction I received at the Farm & Garden.

Now, the austerity measures sweeping the country are jeopardizing the apprenticeship’s ability to continue its important work.

After a while, the budget battles and debt talks in Washington can come to seem like capital clownery. As a committed progressive, I understand that the debt crisis has been manufactured; the country isn’t “broke” so much as it’s been impoverished by a class of people who have resisted paying their fare share in taxes. Still, even a political junkie like me can start to zone out: The details dissolve into abstractions, and from there into absurdities. But with the announcement of the Farm & Garden tuition increase, I saw the government austerity measures threaten something I intimately care about. And now I’m pissed off.

What’s especially galling about the impending tuition increases is that the Farm & Garden Apprenticeship itself is fiscally solvent and has been for many years. It is suffering now because of how fiscal cutbacks have cascaded down from the federal government, the state government, and the broader University of California system to this one little (but highly effective) program.

The financial details of interlocking institutions are confusing, but here’s the story in brief: The Farm & Garden Apprenticeship is technically housed within the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS), a research group within UCSC that was founded in 1997. In the last year, the center has lost more than half of its state funding ($167,000), as well as a $335,000 annual U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. To make up for the shortfall, CASFS staff has had to dip into the Apprenticeship coffers. At the same time, the entire UC system is in belt-tightening mode and looking to reduce costs or increase revenues. Suddenly, the Farm & Garden Apprenticeship is being asked to pay more for some of the services it receives from the main UCSC campus.

The upshot? Tuition for the six-month program is expected to increase from $5,300 this year to $12,800 in 2013. Next summer, the tuition will technically be $8,500, though apprentices will pay $6,000 thanks to an anonymous donor who gave a special $100,000 gift to blunt the tuition increase. When I was an assistant instructor at the Farm & Garden in 2006, the tuition was $3,250. If the tuition does increase to $12,800, the admission price for this unique farming curriculum will have nearly quadrupled in just seven years.

And that, say longtime Apprenticeship staff, would be disastrous for efforts to educate a diverse group of farmers and gardeners. “Most of the people who go through this program are working adults, so typically they are not the highest wage earners out there,” said Christof Bernau, who has been an Apprenticeship instructor since 1999.

Bernau himself was an apprentice in 1994 and he worries that few people will be able to pay $12,000 for a six-month program that prepares one for a career in farming, hardly the most lucrative profession. “They come to gain more training, and go back out into a field or profession that by and large is not the highest paying,” he said. “They are giving up their jobs, and if they have a family they have to find a way to support their family while here.… It’s a leap and a commitment to come here.”

Big deal, I can hear the bean counters saying, why should the government be supporting farmer education in the first place?  Well, for starters, because the average age of the American farmer is 57-years-old, and the largest cohort of farmers are 65 and older. Within the next decade this country is going to experience a wave of farmer retirements. We desperately need new growers to fill their places, and the Farm & Garden Apprenticeship has a proven track record of giving people the skills they need to become successful organic farmers.

As Bernau points out, the impending tuition increase is yet another example of how government austerity measures fall hardest on an already struggling middle class. If tuition skyrockets to more than $12,000 a summer, the elite will probably still be able to afford the program, and some half dozen of the poorest applicants will still receive scholarships. But everyone else will be turned off by the high prices, bad news for a sustainable food movement already struggling to shed the image of being the exclusive project of the affluent. “If you keep raising tuition, we are going to be pricing people out,” Bernau told me.

I know I couldn’t have done the program at the $12,000 price. I doubt very much that my buddy Matt McCue, who now runs Shooting Star CSA , could have swung that tuition. McCue had finished a combat tour in Iraq before coming to the Apprenticeship and his Army wages wouldn’t have been enough. Same with Robyn “Rose” Hosey, a working class gal from Pennsylvania who now works at Morning Glory Farm, one of the most successful organic farms in Massachusetts. Thinking about the alternate universe in which Hosey or McCue couldn’t have afforded the Apprenticeship is like imagining the agrarian version of “It’s a Wonderful Life”—only in this case the bastard Mr. Potter triumphs and the world is the worse off for it.

The way Bernau sees it, the tuition increase isn’t just a threat to farming education, but is also an assault on the broader principle of public education. “I believe the cost of education cannot and should not be borne entirely on the students’ backs,” he said. “The cost of educating an apprentice is $13,000 per student per year. So the tuition for 2013 is supposed to be $12,800. Even at elite, private universities, the full costs of education are not borne by the students. And certainly at a public institution there is a public role and a public responsibility to bear some of those costs, because the benefits from that education are accrued by all of society.”

In the case of the Apprenticeship education, the benefit is obvious and tangible: Real food, grown by people with a commitment to environmental stewardship and social justice. For more than 40 years, Apprenticeship alumni have been at the forefront of the movement to create sustainable food systems. Surely that’s a public good, one that deserves to be supported by the public purse.

Click here to make a donation to support the farmer education at UCSC.

Photo 1: Carolyn Lagattuta, Photo 2: Courtesy of UCSC

I was born in raised in a city, “the city” if you live in the Bay Area. Growing up in San Francisco taught me to value diversity, to be creative, to care about saving the world. Somehow, living in the city, I also got interested in farming. This interest came about out of a realization that our fossil fuel-based economy couldn’t continue indefinitely, and that our most basic need—food—was also in jeopardy due to the tenuous situation wrought by peak oil.

Upon this realization I decided to learn how to grow my own food, and to teach other people these skills. This wasn’t just a prelude to an escapist fantasy wherein I would move to the country, get “off the grid”, and form my own self-sufficient farm (replete with shotguns and stockpiled wheat) to weather the collapse of the industrial economy. No, instead I sensed that food could be a tool to get city people interested in taking control of a key aspect of their lives, and by doing this hopefully challenge the soul-crushing dynamics of modern urban existence (wage slavery, alienation, pollution and ill health being a few aspects). With these goals, some friends and I began to cultivate a piece of land which became known as Alemany Farm.

Alemany Farm consists of 4.5 acres of land in the middle of San Francisco; once an illegal dumping ground, it was converted to a productive farm program in the 1990s by the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), but once again fell into disrepair in 2002 when SLUG disbanded. With all the proper infrastructure in place, and no attention being paid by anyone in the Recreation and Parks Department (the owners of the land), it was the perfect place to start growing.

Over the next four years, we weeded, mulched, pruned, planted, watered, and nurtured the farm back into working order. At the same time, we organized. The farm site sits adjacent to the Alemany Housing Development, which are pretty standard urban low-income projects (ugly, neglected, and isolated, sited next to a freeway). We knew that the farm project would only be worthwhile if it addressed the issues and needs of its closest neighbors, the residents of Alemany. But those needs, economic, social, and difficult to explain fully, were not going to be solved by some organic produce. In fact, conversations with residents indicated a lack of interest in sustainable agriculture, but a real interest in creating positive change in the community. And so the Alemany Farm project developed beyond its base of volunteer workdays and environmental education to encompass a larger, more challenging goal: stemming the tide of violence in the community by “growing green jobs” for neighborhood youth.

Without going into the details, it became obvious that this valuable work was not what I was cut out for. After years of organizing cross-culturally with leaders in Alemany, trying to teach gardening to youth who had no respect for me, themselves, or each other, seeing vandalism caused by the same kids I interacted with every time I went to the farm, dealing with overpaid and ineffectual city bureaucrats, and hosting thousands of new and returning volunteers (as a volunteer), I became frustrated. I got into this thing to grow food, and here I was instead stressed out by the realities of trying to address, as an outsider to the Alemany community, deeply entrenched social injustices. On top of it all, I felt like I was failing miserably.

Early this year, I knew that I had to step back from the project before my long-standing (and in my estimation beneficial) humorous cynicism morphed into full blown and debilitating jadedness. And what luck: in March I was offered a job (well, internship really) at a farm about 40 miles away from the city, working with a friend I had met during my work at Alemany Farm. My secular prayers had been answered! I made quick decisions and arrangements, and at the end of the month, found myself for the first time living a rural life, farming 5 days a week.

I’m now a month and a half into this new life, and (like any experience) I’m learning from the good and the bad.

The good: I get to wake up every day in a beautiful and serene place, where the only loud noise comes from the local school children who visit and explore the farm every Wednesday. I spend all day doing what I love, and visiting the greenhouse is an everyday occurrence (my favorite part of farming). I have Wi-fi in my cabin. I milk goats. I am officially the “intern”, but since my friend is in charge and he’s a champ, he lets me make decisions and treats me as an equal not a peon. Therefore I get to learn from both his accumulated experience on this land, and my own experimentation.

The bad: I am the only person on site who has to crap in a bucket. Something mysterious keeps leaving small bites on my legs. The farm is not a “true” sustainable farm in the economic sense. The land (220 acres of wild lands, 20 of pasture, and about .5 of cultivated vegetables) is owned by a wealthy environmentalist. She pays our salaries, lives here half time, and so far seems to be an agreeable, intelligent, and forward-thinking woman. However, she still runs the site as a hobby ranch more than a working farm, and so she no doubt spends far more money on upkeep of the lawns, housing, and infrastructure than she makes back with the money earned selling produce at the local farmers market. Why is this bad? Well, it fails to address a few issues of our broken food system that frustrate a would-be farmer like myself.

First is food access. Everyone knows that, with a few exceptions, organic foods are the realm of the rich. We only sell our produce at the Half Moon Bay farmers market. Half Moon Bay is a coastal community just west of the hill from the Silicon Valley. Like lots of other places in California, it boasts beautiful vistas, prime agricultural soils, and extremely high land prices. The clientele at our market are predominately white, well off, and are excited to be buying local (and in our case, non-certified organic) food. In my mind, selling this food to these people is not a political act. It is not addressing social injustice; it is not changing governmental legislation; it definitely isn’t creating an alternative culture of altruistic interdependence. Although I do enjoy working the farmers market, I feel that all I’m doing, at best, is providing a feel-good activity for members of the leisure class to indulge in on a Saturday morning.

Then there is the issue of land access. There is no doubt that the owner of our ranch is doing the best that she can, with what she has. But why are we still in a situation where the rich get to decide the best uses for land, while hard working, intelligent, compassionate, humble workers just do what we’re told? Most opportunities that I hear about for young farmers in this area involve farming for someone with land, and that someone is no doubt rich, and almost as likely, they KNOW NOTHING ABOUT FARMING. We get told to mow the lawn with a fossil-fueled machine, instead of having it grazed by sheep. We are told that floating row cover looks tacky, “can we not use it?” Well, maybe not, if you don’t mind grubs in your radishes.

My point is this: the sustainable food system will never truly exist under the currently existing conditions around land ownership. It’s not just enough to create local markets for organic food. If we truly need 20,000,000 new small-scale farmers to make this thing work, then those millions of farmers need secure access to land. No matter how many well-intentioned “progressive” rich people there are in the Bay Area who want to see a farm on their land, tenant farming, sharecropping, or—as they used to call it—“serfdom” isn’t going to cut it.

So while I spend my time feeling grateful about the peaceful and blessed experience I’m having on the farm, I’m also thinking of ways to turn these situations into something more akin to activism. What if we could convince the rich to lease (for free) pieces of land to new farmers, in exchange for a share of their CSA? What if we could form a union of farmers dedicated to the simple concept “the land should belong to those who work it”? What if we could channel the wealth of the wealthy into the health of the poor?

I think these things are possible, but only if we aspiring farmers don’t just settle for a self-image that sees organic farming itself as a radical act. Organic farming won’t save the planet from human-imposed destruction, and much less will it save human beings from the continued inequality, oppression, and exploitation entrenched by 5000 years of empire. For that ambitious goal, we must look higher and farther. Whether you are a rural new farmer, or an urban conscious consumer, I see solutions in the same kinds of actions:

1) Connecting with each other; (create community cohesion and foster social action, whether through barn dances or rock shows; urban food buying clubs or rural equipment sharing),

2) Connecting with the other; (the urban/rural, exploiter/exploited relationships can only be made well through communication and collaboration),

3) Changing culture; we’ve only got the power if we change the story so that we have the power. For too long the story has been about making do with what the elite offer us. We have to craft a better vision; a stronger vision that believes that more is possible and that demands no less.

So while I’m taking my outdoor shower, feeding the chickens some bolting chard, cleaning up sheep poo from a lawn, weed-whacking, transplanting basil, seeding out some strange new green or boring old lettuce, or looking out over our valley from the new tomato field, part of me will be satisfied with the day’s work, the company I keep, and the relative ease of my life. But part of me will be searching, knowing that something better is still to come.