Civil Eats

Step out of the realm of thought, get on your hands and knees and start building. Set poetry in motion. You can start your first draft and I promise the poem will grow increasingly interesting.

My poem is about a tiny farm I’m starting for a couple of farm smitten NYC non-farmers who own a restaurant, cafe and grocery store in Brooklyn, and who want to grow some of their own produce. My goal is to set in motion year-round, efficient, ecologically sound and manageable growing systems to help them reach their goal of farm to table. Oh, and to keep the seedlings alive. Without the challenge of turning a profit this first year, and with support for low-budget experiments, I’ve landed in a great place to learn and grow alongside my adventurous employers. Read More

According to the latest 2007 USDA National Agriculture Statistics Service, roughly 4 million family farms have been lost since the 1930’s, though it should be noted that small farms (50 acres in size, or less) have increased about 13% compared to the earlier USDA 2002 census data). As the population of family farmers continues to age, there is also a critical shortage of young farmers to take their place. Michael Paine is a rare breed; he doesn’t come from a farming family, and he’s relatively young. His story is a good example of the unique challenges facing those who wish to take up farming. Read More

As has been reported here before, choosing to farm sustainably is not a call to forsake technology, lower your productivity, and mortify your flesh. Far from “returning to the 19th century” (the straw man that some critics love to first erect and then tear down), contemporary sustainable farming methods are rooted in a careful balancing of the old and the new. In other words, we will no more blindly accept tradition than we will heedlessly race after the newest fad, simply because a someone swears that the latest model will solve all your problems and wash the dishes too. Read More

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. Read More

As an apprentice farmer hoping to strike off on my own sometime soon, I’m pretty much always asking myself, “where should I farm?”  Should I return to Georgia, where I have family and friends?  Stay in Massachusetts, with its farmer-friendly state government and affordable health insurance?  I hear Pennsylvania has a great climate for tree fruit…  Recently I asked my current farm boss, Don, if he thought that the market near Williamstown could support another CSA farm.  “That depends on whom you ask,” he noted after some thought.  “There are farmers who hear of a new farm in the area and worry that the extra competition will hurt their own business; others view a new farm as an asset, an additional resource when you’ve got problems or questions, as well as another reason for townsfolk to buy local.”

His answer stuck with me.  And since I received it, I’ve begun to notice more and more the ways that the farmers I know support and assist one another. Read More

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. Read More

The number of landless and itinerant young farmers, working alone or with a few other people, is a pretty large demographic in my world. What is sometimes missing is not only land ownership but the sense of community that can come from an agrarian culture. None of these farmers wants to farm alone, removed from the company of like minded people.

The reality is that the work of farming requires a lot of time, and extra time is not always available to pursue the sort of friendships and bonding with other area young farmers that make the experience more fulfilling. Farming might not be as sexy as the New York Times sometimes makes it out to be, but can definitely be as fun as it looks. However, it can also get lonely and monotonous. Read More

Something there is about springtime that would, I think, bring hopeful thoughts to the most inveterate pessimist. There’s a reason Williams Wordsworth was driven to poetry by the sight of a field of daffodils–this season is intoxicating. Lately spring has settled upon Western Massachusetts like a landslide of life: our asparagus is exploding out of the soil, the covercrop of rye grass in our fallow middle field is blue-green and lush, and our seedlings reach higher every day. Our calves frolic, kicking up their heels and all but dancing, as we let them out each day onto new, green pasture. Frankly, I feel about the same each morning as I walk up the hill from my cabin and breath in the smell of sunrise.

At such a time, it seems only appropriate that our CRAFT visit this week was to Farmgirl Farm, a young CSA farm whose grower, Laura Meister, spoke to us about the challenges and successes of her farm’s first 5 years. Beforehand, as we stood in a circle and introduced our company of bright-eyed young apprentices, Laura asked us to state whether we hoped to start our own farm someday, and if so how soon. Suffice it to say that we are an ambitious bunch. Read More

We Americans can be notoriously self-centered when it comes to, well, everything. In the environmental and food-justice movements, voices from Europe or Africa struggle to be included in the American discussion. But as a young country, we would do well to learn from other countries who never stopped plowing, harvesting, and eating in a sustainable way.

Recently I joined 200 other young people to participate in a pilot agriculture-experience program in Japan. Read More

All around the country, classes are back in session this week and a lot of college kids are recovering from week-long hangovers. Fort Lauderdale, Cancún, or Cabo, spring break has earned its rowdy reputation for drunken, beach party debauchery.

The images of bikini-clad beer-bonging are a far cry from the original spring break tradition in America. Back in the day when most people grew up on farms, schools let out this time of the year so that kids could lend a hand with the spring planting. It was a time when farmers made up a sizeable chunk of the population – not the puny 2% of today – and when kids grew up with an inevitable, ingrained knowledge of growing food. Read More

Matt McCue is a new farmer. He is also a returned Iraq war veteran and former Peace Corps Volunteer. Matt got involved in farming in California after meeting Michael O’Gorman, founder and Executive Director of the Farmer-Veteran Coalition. Now, he is starting Shooting Star CSA Farm in Solano County, having secured a lease on some beautiful and productive property. “What is your life going to be defined by?” he asks. “In the military, if you get into an altercation, your life is defined by tragedy. My life is defined by growing and harvesting things, and there’s a lot to be said for that.” Read More

There’s a saying in Arabic: “That is not my apricot; my apricot is some other apricot.” It became a favorite of mine and five other interns two summers ago as we worked on the Yale Farm. When we were confronted with a challenge, the saying made the situation clear. It’s not that I don’t have an apricot—I do—it’s just that that’s not it.

The perennial bed was our apricot. Read More

Last month, thirty-one biodynamic and organic farmers and gardeners gathered at Hawthorne Valley Farm in Harlemville, New York for the first Farmer-Mentor Workshop of the North American Biodynamic Apprenticeship Program. The farmers came from across the United States and Canada. Their operations run the gamut from small homesteads to large CSAs. Some have been farming for ten years or less, others for forty years or more. What they share is a fierce commitment to the education of young farmers. They see themselves not just as growers, but as teachers, and they have all chosen to participate as mentor farmers in the new apprenticeship program. Read More

People from all over the world travel to Namibia because it is rich in charismatic megafauna like elephants, lions, zebras, cheetah, kudu, oryx and springbok. Having grown up in New York City, I developed an insatiable desire to surround myself with wild, beautiful animals and landscapes. I was delighted to go to Damaraland in the Kunene Region of northwestern Namibia to join a team studying the nearly-extinct desert-dwelling black rhinoceros.

Our research looked at the effects of livestock herding practices on rhinoceros habitat. Since rhinoceroses and livestock occupy the same region and utilize similar food and water resources, we wanted to know if the presence of livestock negatively affects the rhinoceros population. I hadn’t guessed that it would be farmers, not rhinos, who would change my way of looking at the world. Read More

Amidst all the hubbub about last year’s Farm Bill, which healthy food advocates criticized for maintaining the commodity subsidies that make “Big, Unhealthy Ag” profitable, young farmers-to-be might have missed a few small but significant changes worth celebrating. Read More

On a cold, sunny Kentucky day at a solar-powered livestock gathering, otherwise known as the American Grassfed Association’s annual conference, I began to feel something like nostalgia. I say “something like” because it was an ironic reminiscence for a past agriculture I’ve never known yet at the same time feel connected to. Maybe this experience was not nostalgia, but instead an apparition of a sensibility returning to sow the seeds of posterity’s stake. Read More

For farmers up and down the West Coast and for many more across the country, Eco-Farm marks the arrival of the new year. Some call it a conference, though you won’t find any dark suits or laser pointers or cafeteria food. I call it a three-day wonder. Read More

Many of us never meant to become farmers. We had ambitions to enter the world as accountants or lawyers or teachers or some other clean, respectable professional. We never really thought about the origins of our food; we always knew that the supermarket shelves would fill themselves, that food came in boxes or cans ready to serve and that farmers were simply one dimensional photographs in the mix of a hot new marketing campaign. Read More

I had my first apprenticeship the summer before my senior year of college. I had just returned from a tumultuous year abroad in South America and was ready to get back to “the simple life.” Map in hand, I scrolled through description after description of idyllic farms that participate in the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners apprenticeship program. I dreamed of crates of blueberries, bundles of fresh cut flowers and baskets full of newly laid eggs. Needless to say, the excitement and possibility of a new adventure completely ran away with me. Read More

A photograph that hung on a wall near my desk in the Slow Food Nation office has been an inspiration, an adventure, a disappointment and perhaps now a call to action for me. It was a print of a work called Sei un Coniglio (Italian for “You are a rabbit”) by the artist and goats’ milk ice cream-maker Douglas Gayeton, an American who lived in Tuscany for many years. Sei un Coniglio shows a young farmer standing casually next to a rabbit he has just skinned and hung up by its feet. In the photograph, Gayeton has written over his overalls, “Riccardo is 19 years old and a rarity in Tuscany. Instead of wanting to leave the farm, Riccardo has already decided to remain a ‘contadino’ (peasant).” Read More

I must admit, as with many seminal choices in my life, I came to farming as much by chance as by design. I was surfing through the Georgia Organics website for a grower who might supply me with the trappings for a haggis; I stumbled across the posting for full season apprentices at Serenbe Farms; I thought to myself, “now THAT could be a great way to spend next year;” and life somehow fell into place. I do not think that most haggis quests end quite so fortuitously. Read More

The thought of finding a farm apprenticeship makes me a little nauseous, but I remember how exciting it once was. I remember a tangle of possibilities, an array of types of farms, sizes of farms, types of folks to work for, places to live – it was all a bit overwhelming. Having found and finished my first apprenticeships, I can now share a few lessons for young farmers-to-be beginning the search. Read More

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. Read More

In his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver, Barack Obama told us, “America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done… Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save.” The group of about 20 of us who were listening to his speech on a laptop as we got ready for the “young farmers seed swap” about to take place at Slow Food Nation stood straight up and smiled. “Did he say farms? Does he mean that?” As 80 other young activists, students, cooks and farmers streamed into the room, that phrase – “farms to save” – swam circles in our ears. Obama was confirming what we are all beginning to feel is mission of our generation: saving farms, rebuilding the food system, digging back into the land. He didn’t mention what kind of farms we have to save, but he did imply that the future of the economy and of our cities is bound to the future of agriculture and that the security and livelihood of our nation depends on our ability to grow food. That’s an old-fashioned idea, but it’s still a big one—even to young people. Read More