Honeybees might be a good metaphor here, not just because they hustle hard and need to come together, but also because they like to dance. Greenhorns have organized over 30 parties for young farmers over the last two years, from a bicycle-powered Goat Spit in Brooklyn; a Rabbit Roast upstate; to a Maine Chautauqua and old school mixers in places as far flung as Portland, Charlottesville, Petaluma, Detroit, Burlington, and Vashon Island. This fall we are swarming west with free mixers and farmer preview screenings of The Greenhorns documentary in California.

Social gatherings are a crucial fourth piece of the young farmer puzzle, alongside better land access, interest-free start-up financing loans, and new farmer training and development at all levels of our educational system. Greenhorns mixers are venues where young farmers can hang out, but also learn how to break down a pig, identify beneficial insects, harvest seaweed, write a budget, and make compost tea. They can connect with local and regional ag nonprofits and service providers. They can kick back with a beer and a plate of delicious farm food, and get up and dance to live music. What an essential pleasure for the new land insurgency! As one young farmer from Washington state told us: “I need these kind of networking events for support and momentum.”

If you listen to some young farmers’ bleak social options you will see that these are events with purpose: “Since starting a farm, we have had almost no time to do anything fun,” writes an entrepreneur from California, who had to let go of her first farm business and take to living in an RV. Within 24-hours of her blog posting, there were 18 replies from fellow farmers across the country offering consolation and new work. The community of support is available and waiting to be rallied.

Today’s young farmer movement is a motley crew in terms of gender and ethnicity, so let’s get comfortable being diversely characterized. We can convene under the banner of a quilting bee, but just as easily for a film screening in the countryside or a West African dance session in an old barn. Greenhorns are preparing a guide called “Punk Yeoman Event Prep” that will walk young farmers through the process of staging their own get together. (You can also vote now for our Free Range Youtopia Grant to create a dynamic online event planning template and archive for young farmers everywhere.)

Following on the success of our battery of beta-testing events, the next step is securing government support for cultural enrichment for young farmers. There is precedent for this in France, where the Jeunes Agriculteurs receives funding from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) to “ensure economic and social vitality.” In 2007 the JA hit the streets of Paris with a “Techno Parade” promoting French agriculture. Our Greenhorn goal to institute party posture among farmers nationwide is far less costly and more aimed at bringing farmers together, but you get the idea.
But right now, we really need your help. Until the end of this week (10/22), Greenhorns are accepting donations to our campaign for America’s young farmers on Kickstarter. In exchange we are offering copies of our Guide for Beginning Farmers, handmade tote bags and bike flags, heirloom seeds, and invitations to farmer parties. Please consider helping us reach our goal so we can add networking features to our online map, distribute our film in more places, and host more parties for young farmers. Subsidize celebration! Share the link with friends, family and Facebook.

We, as young farmers, are seeding social change through an American agricultural revival. With your support, we can keep our events free and not-for-profit.

In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation awarded urban farming visionary Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power, a genius award. The announcement made Allen a food justice icon and fueled public interest in urban agriculture. With this interest in view, I will be profiling here, and at my blog envo, nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and small farmers who are transforming the urban food landscape one plot, one market, and one community at a time.

When asked to describe the mission of Fondy Food Center, executive director and Community Food Security Coalition board member Young Kim has this to say: “I think any kind of change in individual behaviors, really happens one conversation, one relationship at a time. And so there’s a term that’s been bouncing around in my head—‘micro-politics’—the politics of a 120-block neighborhood.” Fondy Food Center is proof positive of this 120-block approach to food system change. A 501(c) nonprofit, Fondy serves the near north side neighborhood of Milwaukee, Wisconsin through a May-November market, nutrition programs, and Youth Chef Academy.

Focused on just three zip codes, Fondy builds on the intergenerational traditions of its community, which is predominately African American and Southeast Asian. Case in point is the Fondy cooking club series. The series features professional and home chefs from the community who are already updating family recipes with the latest ideas in health and wellness. “Updating” is a key concept at Fondy, where staff and patrons integrate, rather than do away with, existing community knowledge (replacing pork with smoked turkey or preserving summer produce, for example). This principle inspires cooking demonstrations that blend comfort foods with ingredients like wild arugula that nudge the community out of comfort zones and “stretch their palates.” As Kim puts it, the Fondy cooking club says to the community, “Let’s look at your grandmother’s recipes, and ask how can we can adapt it while keeping the cultural continuity, so you are making your ‘contribution’ to the tradition.”

But the weekly market and culinary programs are only two aspects of the Fondy mission, which the group has just rewritten. If the prior mission statement emphasized the community’s deficits—grocery stores, public funding, and nutritional expertise—the 2010 language conveys a proactive, community-center framework for urban food activism.

“Fondy Food Center,” the new statement reads, “Connects Greater Milwaukee to local, fresh food from farm to table through support of small-scale Wisconsin farmers to secure the supply of fresh food to Milwaukee, cooking-based nutrition education for youth and adults, and finally, the historic Hay Market tradition.” Kim poignantly explains that the statement offers an alternative to the idea that inner-city communities are “food deserts” and embodies Fondy’s commitment to transform the food system on a neighborhood, rather than national, scale.

The mission statement reflects the third, and perhaps most unique feature, of Fondy Food Center. Fondy goes beyond advocacy for the small farmers who supply the Saturday market. Through their GrowRight Program, the group not only provides a commercial venue for farmers but also facilitates farm visits as well as business and marketing education. Here, Fondy is responding proactively to the changing needs of its market farmers.

The Fondy market has deep roots, reaching back to the 1930s. From those origins through the 1980s, most farmers were European American. But the “face of the Wisconsin farmer” is changing, Kim explains, and today is comprised of both Hmong families, who farmed in Southeast Asia before emigrating to the U.S. as refugees, and post-college graduates, who grew up in cities or suburbs but are keen to make farming their livelihood. (On this note, I would encourage readers to check out the work of the innovative Greenhorns group, which advocates for and recruits young people to farming.)

As of 2003, Fondy’s vendors were 90 percent Southeast Asian, a community of seasoned farmers who lease land on the outskirts of Milwaukee while living in the same near north side neighborhood that the market serves. Put differently, the boundaries between farmer and eater, city and country, are collapsing in Milwaukee, a trend observable in other cities from Detroit to New Orleans. Most of the Hmong farmers that sell at Fondy’s market have decades of farming experience that results in new crops for the market: sorghum, sweet potato greens, and mature cucumbers, for example. Yet this talented farming community faces real challenges: exorbitant land prices, a lack of irrigation and machinery, and limited access to refrigeration facilities. These factors translate into daily harvests and manual tilling of the soil, preventing what Kim calls a “humane schedule” of farm work.

With this complex picture in view, Fondy is taking a wide view of its mission while sticking to its focus on micro-politics. In collaboration with foundations and social entrepreneurs, the group is working to transform how its market farmers farm while building bridges between inner-city neighborhoods and Wisconsin farmland. While the specifics of new projects have not yet been released, Fondy Food Center is no doubt visionary on this score, offering a model for groups around the country whose commitments are to changing the urban food system one zip code at a time.

We need healthcare. Many of us cannot afford it. Farming is physical labor with physical risks and with great demands on performance over time. As a nation served by many workers, some unionized, some wearing uniforms, we recognize the importance of retaining skilled practitioners with benefits. Our firefighters, coast guards and electricians are all provided with benefits, and healthcare. Why not farmers? Our enlisted soldiers and their families are provided with coverage for their service. Why not our farmers?

The reclaiming of our local economy will hopefully, in the next decade, be characterized by greater institutional regionalism. This means schools and hospitals buying food from local farms, this means deep partnerships of commerce within residential districts and within agricultural districts. In order to succeed at this level of engagement, the farmers will negotiate the hurdles of liability, red tape and logistics of rescaling. We’ll be operating forklifts and mid-sized delivery vans; we’ll be scaling up production. We will spend a lot of time resizing, retrofitting and rethinking systems of food production and distribution, in real time, and at real physical risk to ourselves. This is important work. We cannot lose the hardworking members of the team to illness and injury. We cannot lose any fingers or toes. We cannot afford for our farmers to be distracted by financial worry associated with the birth of
a child or the infection of a blister. We need to provide health coverage for farmers, young and old, owners and workers, for the longevity of the sector and of the nation.

Lobbying for these issues is crucial. Are you interested in joining our National Young Farmers Coalition and working with partners to figure out possible solutions to the affordable health care situation? Please join the Greenhorns mailing list so that we can keep you in the loop. And read more about what’s happening on the ground for young farmers in our newsletter, the Greenhorns Circular.

Almost two years after its founding in a basement in Berkeley, California, The Greenhorns has matured from an idea for a recruitment film into a widespread national community. We are now happily rooted on my first commercial farm, Smithereen, on rented land in the Hudson Valley of New York.

In the autumn of 2007 we officially began seeking out mentors and characters for a film, traveling the country with a confident intuitive sense of an emerging movement of young farmers and a series of borrowed cameras and generous cinematographers. On the road for these 2 years we have found that the movement has emerged—scrappy, resourceful, adaptive young Americans have brought the products and the spirit of this movement into the sun, and we are proud to be the reporters of its successes and a hub for a much-needed centralized network.

This is America, and it takes all kinds. All over the country we have met enterprising, hopeful greenhorns: descendants of family dairies, punky inner-city gardeners, homesteaders, radical Christians, anarcho-activists, ex-suburbanites, graduates with biological science degrees, ex-teachers, ex-poets, ex-cowboys. The sons of traditional farmers, the daughters of migrant farm workers, the accidental agriculturalists and the deliberate career switchers all mark our maps. In foothills, warehouses, back valleys, and vacant lots they are popping up as we reclaim human spaces in the broad lazerland of monoculture that has engulfed rural America.

This Obama spring finds the young farmers as unlikely poster children of a new zeitgeist. Aptly so. Ranging around the country in my filmmaking, I have met hundreds of new and aspiring young farmers. I have found them a powerful, proud and wily sub-culture. I have found them to be charismatic icons of change, patriots of place, sensible and sensitive stewards of land and resources. They are the creators of a retrofit future, and just in time. We now have the political change.

We have reawakened our democratic will and discovered a dilation in the realms of possibility. We must take advantage of the moment. Yes! We are farming! We are hopeful.

The produce of local agriculture is in hot demand with the most loyal of customers. CSAs all have waiting lists, and healthy mothers determined to have healthy babies are fiercely devoted to nutrition and the farmers who provide it. Popular literature and sensibility is gravitating to our message of health for our selves, our soil, our social fabric. I have learned that it is possible for us to succeed, to prosper; meanwhile the market continues to grow!

Farming in America is simultaneously a privilege and a service. And no, it is not easy. Young farmers in America face tremendous structural obstacles. They seek access to land, capital, education, and business training. They seek cultural support and open minded consumers. They need reasonable paths to acquiring mechanical equipment and other infrastructures of medium-scale agriculture. These are missing components of our culture and our laws, and they are deeply missed by young farmers who are forced to improvise and invent new institutions to serve their new needs and new marketplace.

The movement is for real. Its practitioners are skilled, savvy and ferocious. They are assets to their community and guarantors of our future. They are shovel-ready, shovel-sharpened. Relishers of flavor, recipients of the generosity of photosynthesis. Hellbent on recovering from the age of convenience. They are young farmers with young muscles wisely applying their lives to the problems at hand. But it takes the applied passions of thousands, hundreds of thousands of courageous actions to repair a nation. It will take a radical shift in the structure of the Farm Bill, in the literacy of eaters, in the shape of commerce and land management. It will take the support of you all.

If you are thinking of farming, do!

If you cannot join us, connect with your stomachs and please buy and savor and share our products!

If your kid wants to farm, tell them it’s ok! Help them open a savings account or lend start-up capital to a young farmer in your town.

Please collaborate. Please facilitate. Please donate. Please join us or rally on your own to ensure the success of America’s young farmers.

*Editor’s note: The Greenhorns need a boost of funds in order to finish editing their film. A 15-minute preview was paid for using the deposit on their former office. I know these are hard economic times, but donate on their website if you are able!

My style is more Birkenstock than Birkin bag, so Fashion Week doesn’t do much for me. You know the Shopocalypse has arrived when designers go dumpster diving for shoulder pads in the Dynasty/Dallas dustbin. Padded assets in this Grapes of Graft depression? Dust Bowl duds, à la the Waltons, would be more fitting for the hard times ahead.

But the John Patrick Organic fashion show managed to bypass both eighties excess and seventies scarcity and find fertile ground in “Green Acres,” the sixties spoof starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as neophyte homesteaders. I knew this wouldn’t be a run-of-the-mill runway show because (a) it featured a “young farmer bake sale,” and (b) the invite came from Greenhorns director Severine Von Tscharner Fleming.

Von Tscharner Fleming–oh, heck, let’s just call her Severine, life’s too short–is the pastoral pied piper who’s luring America’s youth back to the land with her Serve Your Country Food campaign and the Greenhorns Guide For Beginning Farmers. The guide, available as a free download, is a marvelous mash-up of “permaculture, Ben Franklin, your farming grandparents, Van Jones, Robert Rodale, Wendell Berry, Chip Planck, Gandhi, Will Allen and the Nearings,” as the Rodale Institute raved, “re-mixed as an agro-ecological cultural renaissance wrapped in a cool buzz.”

Severine organized the bake sale to whet the stylish set’s appetite for tasty local food. Patrick’s goal is to be the “Johnny Appleseed” of the fashion industry, spreading the seedlings of sustainable style by using materials such as organic cotton, recycled textiles and vegan leather in his clothing lines for men and women. So Patrick generously agreed to share the spotlight with a few enterprising young agrarians that Severine enlisted in her campaign to swell the ranks of treehugging trendsetters.

Models posed center stage in Patrick’s refreshingly simple, elegant designs; off to the side, folks sampled fresh-from-the farm goodies made from free range eggs and grass-fed dairy while chatting with the people who made them. Now that those Skinny Bitches have raised awareness in the fashion biz about the horrors of our industrialized food chain, it’s the perfect time for Severine and her crew to drum up the demand for locally grown foods that we need to breed if small scale farming is going to be seen as a viable vocation by the millions of young people it will take to remake our food chain.

Admittedly, the cookies and cheeses on offer didn’t include any vegan options, so there was no instant gratification for the Skinny Bitch contingent. But for devotees of a plant-based diet, there was something far more thrilling on display: locally grown heirloom vegetable seeds from The Hudson Valley Seed Library, a “homestead- based farm and business in upstate New York” whose goal is to offer urban, suburban, and rural home gardeners “high-quality seeds of heirloom and open-pollinated varieties rooted in the history and soils of the Northeast.”

To appreciate how truly rare and wonderful a find the Seed Library is, it helps to know a bit about the seed business, which–like pretty much every other sector in the U.S.–has been largely hijacked by a few corporations who’ve gobbled up the smaller seed companies and now control a frightening percentage of the seeds we need to feed us. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate how scary this is, because they’re not just shoving their genetically modified seeds down the world’s collective throat, they’re actively working to stop small family farmers from engaging in the centuries-old practice of saving seeds from one season to the next to preserve rare, non-hybridized varieties–in case you wanted to have the choice to just say “bleech!” to bio-tech foods.

Ken Greene and Doug Muller, the (bio)dynamic duo who founded the Seed Library, are creating an invaluable resource for those of us in the northeast who are game to start growing even just a little of our own food. Their long-term goal is to provide “an accessible and affordable source of locally-adapted seeds that is maintained by a community of caring gardeners.” They’ve been hard at work for several years laying the foundation for this brilliant enterprise, which began as a seed-lending project at an upstate library. When you become a member, your $20 fee gets you ten packs of seeds–a real bargain for these rare, hand-picked varieties–and starts you on your way to actively helping to revitalize our local food chain. As the handout at the fashion show explained:

Anyone can buy seeds from our catalog, which is available on our website. However, those who chose to become members of the Hudson Valley Seed Library receive a great deal–and become involved in a community of regional seed-savers…Under the current program, members can select ten packs of seeds from the catalog (and additional packs at discounted rates), grow them in their home gardens, enjoy the flowers and eat some veggies, and, if they so choose, save seed from the plants to return to the library. For each variety successfully saved and returned, members receive credit toward their next year’s membership. This cooperative process creates a source of seeds grown in and adapted to our region.

Muller adds:

“Growing these seeds in your home garden and learning how to save seeds is a way for all of us to participate in the ceaseless renewal of life–and to practice frugality, develop regional food security, and enjoy being active and outside more often.”

Kudos to Severine and John Patrick for bringing a bit of Green Acres to Gotham. As Muller blogged on the Seed Library website the day after the show, “With all the pouty-lipped models and international paparazzi, it was definitely not our usual scene. But it was great to be there.”

So much of the fashion industry seems geared towards soul-deadening conformity to an unhealthy norm–not to mention planet-polluting consumption. No wonder the New York Post found John Patrick and Severine’s organic fashion show/young farmer bake sale “a much-needed breath of fresh, eco-friendly air.”

Patrick gets brownie points, too, for donating remnants of the organic cotton left over from his clothing production to the worthy non-profit Made With Love, which was also present at the fashion show displaying the stuffed animals made from that cotton. Sales of the toys raise funds for NGOs dedicated to helping women and children in need in Africa, Brazil and Haiti.

Fashion may seem frivolous, but we all need to wear something, just as we all need to eat. And it’s official now–there’s a Slow Clothing movement, à la Slow Food, which celebrates things that some of us have been doing for decades: everything from foraging for second-hand finds at thrift shops and flea markets to making your own clothes from scratch or repurposing items. The movement also includes high-end, sustainably produced textiles and fashions from artisans and designers like John Patrick.

My favorite piece of fashion advice comes from Mrs. No Impact Man, aka Michelle Conlin, the former fashionista-turned-frugalista who offered me this gem: “Go shopping in your own closet.” How many of us haven’t got tons of stuff we never even wear or have forgotten about entirely? Will I ever have an occasion to wear that pair of Chanel overalls I impulsively bought on sale at Filene’s just because I couldn’t resist the absurdity?

I used to watch Sex and the City because it was funny, well-written, and–unlike so many supposedly NYC-based shows–actually filmed here. But I could never relate to the passion for fashion that infused the whole show. The closest I could come was to imagine that Carrie Bradshaw and her glamorous girlfriends got the same thrill from shopping for shoes and handbags that I get from trolling the Greenmarket seeking out rare fruits and veggies.

I may be the only woman in the West Village who’s more excited by burdock roots than Blahnik boots, but, thanks to Severine and her growing horde of horticultural hipsters, there’s hope that someday I’ll have plenty of company. Can’t wait to wear my Chanel overalls to the premiere of The Greenhorns, or No Impact Man–or both.

Greenhorn is a word I expect I’ll hear fairly often in years to come. A greenhorn, according to Severine von Tscharner Fleming, Paula Manalo and Zoe Bradbury – authors of the newly released second edition of The Guide for Beginning Farmers is “a novice, or new entrant into agriculture.” To be precise, it is a certain kind of new entrant into agriculture: one who was not raised to farm and who has no family farm to inherit but who is unconventionally and some would say irrationally choosing to become a farmer, no matter his or her lack of education and resources. Touches of madness are not uncommon among greenhorns. Gutfuls of passion aren’t either.

In the authors’ words, The Guide for Beginning Farmers is “part pep-talk, part institutional index, part career-planning guide” for greenhorns. It is a work in progress. While the authors seek a publishing house willing to expand it into a full-length book, The Guide serves as a “first, early stab” at compiling resources for young people who hear the call to farm but have no place to dig in. The Guide gives them long-ish lists of apprenticeships and mentorships; land trusts and FarmLink programs that help new farmers find land; books on organic cultivation; books on smart business; local, state and federal loans and grants for starting farms; even consumer and food activist organizations that support sustainable agriculture, food access and farmworkers’ rights. There are plenty of places to begin.

Reading through the breadth and number of these lists gives the sense that The Guide is still very incomplete. There must be many more manuals, funding sources, apprenticeship listings and unclaimed parcels of land than the authors have been able to compile. There are people farming wisely and organizations supporting their efforts in every state in this country. It seems to me that programs and policies to incubate new farmers already exist; they’re not extensive, they’re not all tested and they’re not widely known, but they are ideas to try and replicate. Books on how to manage a sustainable and profitable farm are in print. Innovative, successful models of urban and rural food production that meet the specific needs of our time are out there. It seems to me, then, that what we really lack in the movement to create millions of new farmers is awareness. There aren’t too many Americans asking for a Guide for Beginning Farmers. There might be more if city people who condemn corn syrup and demand good food also demand that incentives be put in place to make farming an economically and socially viable profession. Or if they speak up and declare that farming is radical; that farmers, no matter how they do it, are heroes. The first obstacle in creating millions of new farmers is not a shortage of land and capital; twenty-somethings have too little farm experience and too many student loans to buy land anyway. The first obstacle is getting agriculture onto the minds of twenty-somethings before they decide that medicine or banking or pop music or drug dealing is the only way to ensure a “respectable” quality of life.

Hence what I admire most about The Guide for Beginning Farmers is not its references to so many websites but the way it reads, at times, like a Manifesto for Beginning Farmers. In future editions, I suggest the authors play up the joy of growing food and the role of farmers in any sustainable, healthy and just society. They’ve already begun it on Serve Your Country Food, a website The Greenhorns have produced to document, connect and support the work of young farmers. Manifestos are risky, but they’re also exciting. Excitement grabs attention and starts movements. We’ll never know if the existing programs for new farmers or the ones now being proposed are worth their weight if young people don’t demand the chance to try them out.

This post is part of Gordon Jenkins’s Young Farmers Unite series, where he writes and invites others to write on the challenges young farmers face, and how we can support new farmers at their profession.