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.

The following is an email excerpt to some farmers north of here, who are seasoned winter growers and supportive of this project. I wouldn’t blame anyone for skipping over it. Until recently my eyes glazed at the mere mention of greenhouse details and planting specifications, though in theory I was interested. Perhaps because starting ‘my own farm’ was an imaginary leap into a pit of venomous snakes. Despite the terrors inherent in committing to farming, now that I have my own project, I find the details riveting. You might too, if you are on the verge of growing food for people.

…the greenhouse has transformed since I emailed you. A proper swale has finally been dug and I don’t expect more flooding. I put aluminum flashing along the sides to deter voles, mounded earth against it for insulation, and left extra frame plastic hanging over for drainage. I’ve decided we should not invest in a heater, fan or shutters. I’ll do what I can to avoid reliance on unsustainable energy sources and expensive technology. I may look into affordable solar alternatives and grant availability for our minimal energy needs. For heating we have a double layer of greenhouse plastic and double row cover over the beds, which will not be raised. For air ciruclation we have doors and vents so large that opening them is essentially like removing the end walls. Considering our dimensions (26x12x60), later in the spring I think we’ll need more ventilation. I hope we can build at least one 4×4 vent into the ceiling, with an automatic, thermostatically controlled arm. I’ve amended the greenhouse soil with lime, composted horse manure and bloodmeal, although I’m still concerned about low phosphorus. This winter I’ll be growing in four 4′x50′ beds with 2′ pathways (covered with cardboard and straw). It’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago this patch of earth was complete sod. Equally as hard to believe is that next week thousands of spinach and mizuna seedlings will be getting established here. The greenhouse will double as a nursery, but not until May, since the field won’t be ready for planting until June. I had wanted to plant a cover crop in the greenhouse during the summer, but some farmers do not think this is a good or profitable idea. I haven’t decided how flexible this greenhouse will be in the summer. I don’t want to overextend the soil OR myself…

If a new farmer gets to the point where an apprenticeship is too basic, and wants to take their vocation to the next level without tying the knot, in addition to farm management, I recommend looking into funded pilot projects, and going so far as to advertise for them. Starting a farm for someone can be very rewarding. With an understanding of your basic needs – such as your bottom line needs, what you seek to learn, what you have to offer, needed materials and support, etc., you can draw up a rough employment contract.  When you find what seems like a good match, you’ll be prepared to negotiate an arrangement.

And yes, young, anonymous farmer, when you find yourself standing in the middle of a new field, you will be able to set the farm wheel turning with the same, mighty force that moved the pen of the poet, songwriter or artist who inspires you.

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 the rest of this post on Cooking Up a Story

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.

First, to the charge that sustainable ag is populated with luddites, techno-phobics, and hippies: good farmers love new ideas and technology and gratefully integrate them into a financially and environmentally sustainable system. They check weather reports obsessively the better to anticipate rain, frost, or drought—armed with this warning system, they are able to start growing earlier and end later, thereby producing more food. They use floating row covers (what looks like long, thin white sheets) to create a nonchemical barrier between crops and pests, to warm the earth for earlier planting, and to hold moisture in the soil. They employ portable electric fencing, without which intensive grass-based grazing systems could never have achieved the land restoring successes of farms like Joel Salatin’s Polyface. The type of farming practiced by today’s best farmers could never have happened in a previous century, because it takes advantage of recent inventions and a great deal of scientific knowledge that did not exist previously.

It is critically important to remember, however, that science and the scientific method are not a replacement for nature. Giving preference to one over the other is like hopping around on one leg when you have two perfectly good feet: you can get around for a while, but you’re liable to fall over eventually.

Last week, the young greenhorns of the Western Massachusetts CRAFT program visited Natural Roots Farm near Shelburne Falls, MA. Natural Roots is unusual in New England in that it is a strictly horse powered farm; the majority of the remaining draft horse farms in the U.S. are either in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Indiana, where large Amish populations still exist. Farmer David and his partner Anna are not Amish, however (though David’s outstanding beard might suggest otherwise); they are simply a farming family that finds horses both a pleasurable and practical part of their farm system.

To me, inexperienced with draftwork, the harnesses seemed a indecipherable web of buckles and leather, but apprentices Rachel and Dan deftly moved the horses from implement to implement, first discing a field, then mowing a cover crop, then lightly cultivating a bed. Their vegetables were immaculate in the field, their cover crops tall and strong. Watching David drive the team across a freshly turned field, you could easily form a Romantic (or skeptical) impression of their work. But if all you took from the farm was the idea of draft power versus tractor power, you would fail to capture the full lesson of Natural Roots. David farms with horses, but he also manages his cover crops intensively for weed supression and takes soil samples monthly to see how fertility levels fluctuate throughout the season. He feeds his crops a foliar spray of organic amendments for elements he considers insufficiently present in the soil, in hopes that healthy plants will ward off pests and diseases. And as we gathered to begin the tour he showed us the washing station in their new barn, which had been carefully designed for maximum efficiency and minimal waste. This is not your grandfather’s hobby farm.

Afterward, as I spoke to Rachel, one of the apprentices at Natural Roots, she described how visitors had once come to the farm wanting a photo op of teamsters at work. “Make it look hard!” the photographer requested, as Rachel drove the team through the field. She laughed at the memory, “That’s the whole point,” she said, “the horses do the hard work so that we don’t!” Indeed, the apprentices at Natural Roots never hoe and rarely weed by hand—cultivation with horses and cover cropping keep weeds to a minimum.

Sustainable farmers want results—good food, certainly, but also a healthy biological system—and we farm in a way that fulfills us personally. Some of us (yours truly) like to hoe, but simultaneously appreciate the thoughtful use of a tractor. Some others of us prefer the clinking of horse harnesses to the belch and roar of machinery. The beauty of farming is its great flexibility. There are a great many paths from seed to salad mix, which respect the soil in equal, though different, measure. “Sustainable agriculture” encompasses environmental impact, but also finances, practicality, and a farmer’s well-being. The myth of industrial ag is that we have everything—more food than Americans even eat, successful family farms, safe food, and dirt cheap prices. The reality is not so simplistically cheery, but nor is it a dismal tale of hunger and societal collapse. As Natural Roots declares it its existance and success, we can grow into our future without denying our past.

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!

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.  There’s Cricket Creek Farm, the raw milk dairy down the road, which provides us with milk all winter long in return for a share of veggies come spring.   Or Hand Hollow Farm, a fledgling CSA 20 minutes in the opposite direction, founded by one of Don’s former apprentices (we call her the Prodigy Farmer).  With Don’s help, she spent her spare time in the fall of her apprenticeship planning the following spring on her own farm, and she hasn’t looked back since.

I saw this spirit of mutual support more clearly than ever on Monday, when I and about 30 other apprentices visited Indian Line Farm for one of our bimonthly lectures and tours through the CRAFT (Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training) program.  Indian Line is a farm with a story, by virtue of its having been the first CSA farm in the country.  In between that founding in 1985 and the present day, the farm passed through several manifestations before settling into the capable hands of its present farmer, Elizabeth Keen.

Elizabeth and her husband Al had only apprenticed for one year when the opportunity to take on Indian Line presented itself for them in 1997.  With only a single shared apprenticeship between the two of them, their learning curve was steep, as they related to us.  So steep, in fact, that for Elizabeth’s second and third seasons at Indian Line, she took on off-farm work in the mornings—working for Martin Stosiek of Markristo Farm down the road. After two seasons of farming in double-time, Elizabeth made Indian Line her single focus, though the close ties between Indian Line and Markristo remain strong.

As the tour led us into the basement of the barn, Elizabeth spoke to us about her decision to opt out of the USDA organic certification process.  While USDA certification can certainly be a boon to supermarket consumers, many of the farmers I know consider the associated paperwork and fees a headache not worth the cache of the organic label.  Indian Line concurred with this perspective, but had sought a way to convey to customers at market the sustainability of their growing practices.  Their solution, to join the farmer-based non-profit “Certified Naturally Grown,” perfectly suited the thread of cooperation and farmer community that runs throughout their operation.

Certified Naturally Grown is grassroots alternative to the USDA, through which farmers audit one another for sustainable practices.  Certified Naturally Grown is neither costly (the program requests a donation of $50-150 annually, though the exact amount is left to an individual farmer’s discretion), nor overburdened with paperwork, thus allowing small farmers to devote their energies to farming, rather than to proving themselves to strangers via a mountain of forms.

Though a Certified Naturally Grown farm leaves less of a paper trail than a Certified Organic one, all CNG records are openly available online. Growers clearly state their growing practices and sign a statement that they have abided by all of the CNG regulations (which are essentially the same as certified organic).  So what’s the difference?  Besides price and time, the auditors are other farmers and are allowed offer advice as they walk the fields, talk to the grower, and evaluate the farm (USDA certifiers, on the other hand, are not allowed to offer any suggestions during an audit).  To avoid conflict of interest problems, you are not allowed to audit the farmer who audited you.  In addition, every year, CNG randomly selects farms for pesticide residue testing, at no cost to the farmer.

Could someone cheat this system?  CNG admits that “no one can ever really know what may or may not be happening on an isolated farm at 5AM on a Sunday morning,” but they believe that their combination of deterrents (random testing), community support (audits by other farmers), and a transparent, easily navigated process to certification create a system that is uniquely accessible to small farmers and informative for consumers.

From my perspective, probably the most striking example of farmer collaboration I see is the CRAFT program itself.  The exposure to varied farming models and practical agricultural information is priceless, but I imagine that the greatest benefits will only become visible over time.  Through CRAFT I’m interacting with 40 other apprentices, most of whom seem eager to grow their own farms as soon as they can scrounge together a few packs of seeds and a flat patch of earth.   We probably seem a motley crew–drinking from mason jars, traipsing uphill and down in thick rubber boots and manure-stained work pants—but we are a passionate crowd, full of questions, ideas, and dreams of good food.

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.

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.

Fortunately there is enough social thread around here (in Chatham County North Carolina) to keep everyone together, whether it is through interactions in sustainable agriculture classes, conferences, or the newest idea around here – crop mobs.

A crop mob isn’t necessarily a new idea. Migratory groups of farm laborers, starting with “hobos“, have been a part of the American landscape for quite some time. And if you attended high school in the United States you might remember reading The Grapes of Wrath, the Steinbeck novel about traveling farm workers. Yeah, poor traveling farmers have been on the road a century and half. That doesn’t seem to be ending even as the number of farms available to work on diminishes.

So what makes it different this time around? For one thing, the idea of economic hardship as the driving factor has been removed. Most everyone involved is likely enduring some sort of financial or structural ruin in their lives. I don’t have running water, but I own land and make a mortgage payment; another lives in a tent, but lives rent free and worries very little about buying food.

We all have our problems, but none of them are sufficient enough to demand that we wander around the country doing meaningless labor for horrible wages. We demand and get better treatment and farm in the places we want to farm, for the experience it provides.

We farm because we want to, not because we need to. At some time or another we were infected with a desire to give and take from the dirt, whether it is the red clay of Chatham County or limestone infested soils of Western New York.

What brought this group together was the need to establish a community of people going through the same sorts of movements, many of which keep folks separated during most days. Classes, part time jobs, internships, harvesting and living far apart from each other keeps us in our own little bubbles. This new crop mob goes where it is needed, does the work that is needed, creates the community that is needed and gets us out of those bubbles.

To date the crop mob has visited seven farms with an eighth on the way. An average of thirty five people have joined each mob so far, and that number is growing. To learn more about the crop mob, please visit cropmob.org.

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.

Laura came to Farmgirl Farm without such grand designs. She signed on for the farm’s first season as a partner to an old friend, whose dream it was to run a small CSA farm. The white lie that she was “just helping for a year” proved “the blindfold that you need for such a crazy thing,” Laura laughingly explained. By the end of the year, her friend had pulled out, due to health problems and personal reasons. But Laura remained, took an ag business class that winter, and came into her second season with even more passion than the first.

Driving up, Farmgirl Farm seems petite and unencumbered by the detritus that old farms collect (tractor implements, wood scraps, scavenged miscellany which might come in handy some day). The main fields all fit within a neat, flat rectangular parcel which is bordered by an invitingly clear tributary of the Green River. Part of the reason for this tidy appearance is Laura’s lack of heavy machinery. Though she is now growing on 3 acres, she has not yet purchased a tractor and instead hires friends’ machines for the rare big job or preps beds herself with a walk behind rototiller. Because her land is all leased and she’s not exactly rolling in cash, Laura has intentionally kept her farm lean. She has invested in the fertility of her soil, certainly, but almost everything else–from the greenhouse to the coolers to the irrigation system–can be disassembled and moved, should a better opportunity present itself. She leases another, unirrigated piece of land across the street, and from these two small spaces she feeds a 75-member CSA and assorted restaurant customers.

To young farmers such as ourselves, Laura’s model is something that finally feels attainable. Many of us are working on deeply rooted established farms (Caretaker, for instance, was one of the first CSA farms in the country). While such farms are fantastic learning environments, they don’t give us much of a sense of how a 25-year-old could ever operate her own farm business. I can’t afford Caretaker’s beautiful old barn or its 38 fertile acres. But with a little bit of blind insanity and a lot of hard work, I imagine I could do something like Farmgirl Farm. For example, Laura is a brilliant scavenger. She found the frame of her greenhouse standing skeletal in someone’s field one winter, sleuthed around for the owner, and bought many of the components for a fraction of their cost. Laura uses bartered CSA shares not only to pay her lease (there were, I kid you not, audible gasps when she revealed this fact), but also to secure legal services, chiropractic care, manure for her compost, and housing for her apprentices.

She gave us practical advice on irrigation systems, marketing, and the value of transplanting vs direct seeding your first year (weeds won’t be as likely to choke transplants compared to direct-seeded crops). But what I remember most clearly and have been mulling over since was her humbling and inspiring benediction that “there will never be a moment when you think you know enough.” Get out, she said, ask questions, find mentors. Just commit to giving it your best shot, and the rest will likely follow.

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. Here’s the very simple idea: send 18 to 40-year-old city slickers to rural communities for a free five-day trip to learn farming, meet local people, and perhaps be tempted to adopt that way of life for themselves. Administrated by an environmental nonprofit group, a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture paid our food, bullet train fare, lodging — everything (and I’m not even a citizen!). Seems extravagant, but compared to the amount of money spent on recent bank bailouts it’s a very cheap form of stimulus — and benefits rural areas, young people, and the agricultural sector simultaneously. We were dispatched to rural communities across the country — I went to a tiny village called Kanna-machi (“God-Flowing Town”) a few hours north of Tokyo. Over half its 2600 residents are over 65 years old, reflecting the aging of the farming sector that is occurring all around the world.

Still, Japan remains a lot closer to its agricultural roots than the United States. Elementary school children take day trips to rice fields to practice planting and harvesting, and kitchen gardens are less of a novelty than common practice for many people. Walking through suburban or rural neighborhoods in the summer or fall it is easy to find a roadside shelf heavy with Welsh onions, potatoes, or squash and a battered box with a slit: “Leave 100 yen here.”

For those of us who are sincere about changing American food systems, we may learn a lot from books and the Internet. But nothing quite matches learning how to plow the earth from an experienced human teacher.

In my case, that teacher was Kurosawa-san. His family has been growing potatoes, cucumbers, sweet peas, and other row crops for generations in a sloping valley overlooking the Kanna river valley. When my teammates and I from the “Inaka de Hatarakitai!” program (loosely translated as “Countryside Working Squad!”) showed up at his farm, he regarded us skeptically. We were pale, skinny, and sneezing uncontrollably from the spring pollen, which rose in yellow clouds from the hills behind us (partially a result of 1960s monoculture timber policies, but that’s another story). Typical useless city folk, dressed in too-clean work clothes and fluorescent rubber boots.

Still, he patiently guided us through a spring clearing and planting day. Using hand plows and pure muscle, we started by turning over a dry crumbly field that had been left all winter. Stab its front tines into the ground, use feet and thigh power to get a deeper mouthful of soil, heave everything out, sling it to the side. Repeat. Repeat. After about two straight hours of crunching through this field, I started to realize a few things. One was that my flimsy city body needed a rest and probably accepted too quickly when Kurosawa-san’s wife invited us inside for a midmorning break of hot green tea, homemade manju (rice cakes filled with sweet bean paste), homemade pickles, and other treats. (Kurosawa-san refutes the image of the overworked, overstressed Japanese: “In the old days, we always had a 10 a.m. snack break, a one-hour lunch time, and mochi and tea at 3 p.m. The 3 o’clock break-time is very important, as is the homemade sake at night.”)

The second thing that working in Kanna helped me realize is that all sustainable farms have families somewhere in them.  Plants can be cranky and cantankerous; their care demands patience and knowledge built up over good years and bad years.  Farms cannot be run by economists, nor worked by undocumented immigrants in exploitative conditions, as is increasingly the norm in many parts of the U.S.

But the New York Times criticizes Japanese family farms as “tiny and woefully inefficient,” and American pressure is relentless for Japan to “reform” its agricultural and trade policies towards large-scale monoculture farming. But that would crush the thousands of small farms being tended with love by people like Kurosawa-san. When the sun started to set over the stunning Kanna valley, we surveyed our work with satisfaction: a neatly furrowed field of potatoes, waiting for the spring rains and a hot summer.

The next day, we took a tour of an organic agriculture farm owned and worked by the Okamotos, a couple in their 80s. With help from a local economic development advisor, they’d transitioned their entire farm to certified organic but were desperate for young people to help them work it. Perched on two flat portions of a hillside, their family gravestones overlook the fields, a traditional practice largely abandoned in modern Japan. How does someone treat the land differently when generations of ancestors are sitting right next door?

Many of my farming colleagues were recently laid off or otherwise adrift on a perennial sea of part-time work, casualties of a 1999 deregulation of Japan’s lifetime employment system. Some were obviously depressed over their lives not living up to an image of prosperity and consumerism projected 24 hours a day by Japanese mass media. Yet, in Kanna-machi I saw awkward computer boys and shy secretaries came out of their shells doing farm work and experiencing the pride of tangible achievement.

We cheered when the cooks at the city-run inn we were staying at served each evening’s meal and described its provenance: shiitake mushrooms from Nishimura’s farm, wild butterbur-blossom tempura, locally made konnyaku jelly, and on and on. By the conclusion of the program, we had all gained a few pounds and become fast nakama (tight friends). We set up a Kanna-machi group on Mixi (Japan’s largest social networking site) with the goal of returning next summer to help Okamoto-san’s harvest. In our debriefing session, everyone was surprised to discover that the most notable part of the program was meeting great people and learning from farmers like Okamoto. We had come to learn about the land and possibly jump-start a new career — and had ended up experienced a healing we hadn’t realized we needed. When we commit ourselves to taking care of forgotten corners of the land, we also commit to taking care of forgotten members of our society. What is more efficient than that?

The Japanese model is just one option. As Daniel Duane recently pointed out in Mother Jones magazine, the proliferation of farmers markets in the U.S. has not been matched by an equivalent expansion of small-scale, organic farms. This could lead to an undermining of the very concept of farmers markets. We need massive young farmer training programs, especially ones that focus on low-income Americans, the unemployed, people of color, the formerly incarcerated, and immigrants. Besides the glory of weeding, prospective young farmers need information on purchasing land, dealing with the USDA and other bureaucracies, and the basics necessary for any business: sales, distribution, taxes, and staffing. If the green movement is serious about expanding sustainable agriculture and healthy food for all, programs like the one I experienced in Kanna are a great place to start.

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.

Times have changed. Never before have so many Americans lived in cities (75% of the population). Never before has agricultural production rested on the shoulders of so few (2 million farmers in a country of 300 million). Never before has the food supply seen such monopoly control (four companies control 83% of the beef industry; five companies control half of food retailing; one company provides 40% of all U.S. vegetable seed). And related, never before have kids known so little about agriculture. A recent survey of Los Angeles fifth graders found that they could identify more corporate logos than local plants.

The “so-what” of all this comes when you ask “what happens to our food supply when agribusiness giants like Cargill, Monsanto, and Tyson tumble like AIG?” Or when oil is so expensive that we once again have to rely more on human hands – not just internal combustion – to grow food? What if nobody knows how to tend a tomato from seed to sauce, or has the means of production to do so, like land, water, equipment, and experience?

What do we eat then, other than our shorts?

Between population growth, petroleum shortages and climate change, peak oil expert Richard Heinberg predicts that America will need another 50 million farmers by the middle of this century in order to produce enough food. That’s a lot of farmers, especially when you consider that the average age of American farmers is 57, many of whom are headed for retirement in the next decade. Meanwhile, aspiring and beginning farmers are hobbled by high land prices, poor access to credit, a lack of mainstream cultural support to farm, and limited opportunities to learn the craft.

I’m one of those newbie farmers and, having just barely survived year one, I can tell you this: the system is not new-farmer-friendly. I had to scratch and claw my way into this career of low-paid, dawn-to dusk hard work in order to be able to serve my country food.

That has to change. If we are so keen on investing for the future right now, we ought to funnel some stimulus greenbacks towards the young greenhorns and greenthumbs of America. Could there be anything more “shovel-ready” than a beginning farmer? Can you think of a greener green job? Could there be any investment more important than our own national food security?

Call it the Peas Corps, call it the Farm Corps, call it what you will – but it’s time for far-reaching federal policy that will start filling the pipeline with young farmers.

My own struggle to start a farm has taught me that in order to succeed, beginning farmers need better access to good, affordable farmland. We need low-interest credit (I have yet to meet a beginning farmer who qualified for any of the USDA’s beginning farmer loan programs, myself included). We need more opportunities to learn hands-on skills through agricultural apprenticeships and gainful farm employment. We need an Agricultural Journeyperson program – similar to the trades – to help facilitate the transition from apprentice to bona fide farmer. And finally, we need the support of our neighbors, parents, guidance counselors, and the whole of American society. We need them to celebrate our decision to farm, instead of brushing us off.

Of course cultural shifts and federal policy change can take awhile, so in the meantime I’ve decided to take some measures to help turn the tide. In the original spirit of spring break, I extend an invitation to all you college students to skip out on Cancún next year and come spend a week on my horse-powered vegetable farm in southwestern Oregon instead. Not only will you go home with a genuine farmer tan, you might just discover for yourself that growing food is more intoxicating than beer, without the hangover.