The California farming community is facing a demographic crisis. The average age of a California farmer is 58, and nearly 20 percent of them are 70 or older. As these farmers approach retirement, California needs to train new ones if we are to continue to feed our country and keep a healthy rural economy in the decades ahead. And with farm internships in California subject to strict labor laws, opportunities to get a hands-on farming education have become even fewer.

To help meet this need, the Center for Land-Based Learning in Winters, CA recently launched the California Farm Academy (CFA) to train beginning farmers in specialty crop production. The six-month incubator program is designed to help aspiring agriculturists transition quickly into starting their own farms. Unlike many programs and apprenticeships that require students to participate full-time or live on a farm, the CFA meets on evenings and Saturdays to accommodate the busy schedules of people who currently work at non-farming jobs. Academy students spend time in the classroom as well as in the field, greenhouse, and packing shed.

To provide perspectives from the frontlines, the CFA has teamed up with local farms such as Ferry Plaza seller Capay Organic, which also markets produce through its Farm Fresh to You CSA and Ferry Building store. Second-generation farmer Thaddeus Barsotti (pictured below), co-owner of Capay Organic with his brother Freeman, volunteers as a teacher for the Academy, and the farm serves as a site for classes and demonstrations.

When Barsotti learned about the new incubator program, he welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the education of new growers in California. Although he trains and hires workers as part of his farm business, he realizes that his farm cannot grow forever. In his work with the Academy, Barsotti can help “grow new farmers” who will start their own businesses with economic viability and sustainability in mind.

Other experienced farmers from several farms in the area, professors from the University of California at Davis, and National Resource Conservation Service employees teach Academy students the fundamentals of sustainable farming: field preparation, crop planning, soil management, pest control, irrigation, and equipment use. In the classroom, experts from organizations such as the California Alliance for Family Farmers and California Certified Organic Farmers teach students how to handle legal and financial issues, identify and develop markets for their crops, and hire, train, and manage farmworkers.

Barsotti recognizes that it is difficult for beginning farmers to understand how a farm works if they haven’t lived on one before. “If I hadn’t grown up on a farm, I wouldn’t be in the business,” he says. He believes the program gives students “an appreciation for the amount of expertise that goes into modern farms,” and serving as a mentor has also renewed his own appreciation for his line of work. “Teaching others has reminded me of how complicated the whole thing is,” he reflects. “There are a lot of details that go into farming. Farmers are always making decisions based on a set of circumstances that are never the same.”

For their final project, students will use their new knowledge to develop business plans that they will present to a panel of farmers and lenders prior to graduation. Similar to the farm training and incubator program at Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association(ALBA), the Academy will provide support to graduates after their initial six-month program by offering them the opportunity to lease land at the Center for Land-Based Learning and at Russell Ranch, located at the University of California at Davis. They can lease 1/4- to 1/2-acre plots at half the market rate for up to three years.

CFA director Jennifer Taylor explains that the first five years is a critical time for new farmers. “The Farm Academy can take some of the luck and uncertainty out of it and provide a scaffold for beginning farmers,” she says.

Graduates of the program who are renting land will be able to ask for guidance and advice from experienced farmers at the two locations. By farming plots near each other, they can also connect with other program alumni and create a support network. Taylor notes that students have already started talking about working together and sharing equipment.

Traveling from as far as San Francisco each week, the 20 students in the Academy’s first class range from young people just entering the workforce to midlife career-changers. Students come from diverse backgrounds, motivated by a love of farming as well as an interest in raising a family on a farm, working with youth, or agritourism. Some plan to farm a small one-acre plot, while others hope for hundreds of acres.

Taylor, who previously worked at an incubator program that trained beginning dairy farmers in Wisconsin, would love to see more programs like the CFA spring up in other parts of California. She envisions hubs around the state that would connect beginning farmers with regional farms and resources for mentorship and support. The last farm bill allocated money for programs that train beginning farmers, and Taylor hopes the next farm bill will continue to fund these efforts. The CFA is funded by a grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Specialty Crop Block Grant program, which is also dependent on authorization in the next farm bill.

The first session of the Farm Academy began in February and runs through August 2012. Session two will begin in late 2012 or early 2013. An application and information can be found at the Center for Land-Based Learning’s website.

Originally published by CUESA

In February 2008, Zoë Bradbury left her job at Ecotrust, where she was a regular contributor to Edible Portland, to start farming on Oregon’s southern coast. Right after leaving, she wrote, “I pulled up to my new greenhouse on Floras Creek with a riot of saw-toothed artichoke divisions in the back of the truck, teased them apart into one-gallon transplant pots, and officially began my first season farming for myself, next door to my mom and sister.”

Can you tell me a bit about the book–how you got involved, who the writers are, and why you think it’s a good read?

The idea for the book hatched about three years ago when [co-editor] Severine von Tscharner Fleming and I were at a food and farming conference together. We got Storey Publishing interested in the idea and spent the next couple of winters–during our “off” seasons–putting the book together. The essayists are from all corners of the country, and all of them are beginning farmers, meaning they’ve been running their own operations for fewer than 10 years.

When you’re just starting out farming, the heartaches and breakthroughs are so acute. It’s a rocky road for most of us. We’re short on cash, short on sleep, short on time, and long on optimism and pure buckle-down grit. A lot of the essays in this book shed light on that–some funny, some exuberant, some sad. It’s a great medley of stories for that reason, all woven together by a singular passion for growing good food.

What gives you the most hope for the coming generation of young farmers?

The fact that public awareness has shifted so much in the past ten years. I remember a time when I would strike up a conversation with a stranger on an airplane, and when they asked me what I did, and I replied that I was a farmer, they looked puzzled/unimpressed/dismissive. Now when I have that same conversation, people’s eyes light up and they say, “REALLY!!!?? That’s awesome! My sister is part of a CSA farm…” or something to that effect. More and more folks are learning about alternatives to industrial food, supporting local family farms, eating more seasonally, trying kale.

Still, there’s a lot working against beginning farmers; access to capital and land are the foremost. Money and credit are hard to come by, and buying affordable land is maybe even harder. It’s why you see so many creative arrangements–non-conventional leases, incubator farms, etc.

A few years ago, you used to write your own dispatches for Edible Portland as you began farming, Diary of a Young Farmer. How has your perspective changed in the years since, and what has remained constant?

I’m in my fifth season of running my own farm now, and things have definitely stabilized—thank God! Financially, the farm is on solid footing, and the big push to build and buy all the infrastructure we needed—barns, irrigation systems, equipment—is largely behind us for now. I’m able to focus more on fine-tuning and improving my growing practices and my marketing strategies. It’s still a roller coaster–unpredictable weather, crop failures–but the ride feels less bumpy now, I think in large part because our community of loyal customers and CSA members provide such a foundation of financial and moral support. With them behind us, things feel less catastrophic than they did in the first year or two of scratching out this little farm and getting established.

I wonder about the phrase in the title “New Farmers’ Movement.” What about new farmers today has created a movement? What is the movement and what are its goals?

I imagine every single one of the essayists in this book would have a slightly different answer to this question. Personally, I think it feels like a movement because it’s not just the farmers themselves talking about these issues, spreading the message, and doing the work. It’s a larger community of eaters, advocates, policy-makers, and everyday newspaper-reading citizens who are connecting to it. People want clean, green, fair food. They want family farms, not factory farms. And the farmers in this book want to create just that kind of world.

What are you most excited about that’s growing in your fields right now?

Other than my one-year-old, who is doing a lot of her growing in our fields right now, I’m pretty excited about the new rhubarb planting. It’s been doubling in size everyday, which feels like a little nod from the plant world that things are A-OK out there.

Originally published by Ecotrust

When I was in undergrad in the Northeast, around 15 years ago, a degree in “Food Studies” was unheard of.  A campus farm or edible garden was something reserved for agriculture schools or off-campus hippie/granola enclaves. However, the past 5  years have shown a proliferation of opportunities to get trained as farmers, gardeners, food policy makers, and food law practitioners.

On a recent site visit to Portland, Oregon, I met with FoodCorps service site supervisor Caitlin Blethen and her service member Jessica Polledri. Caitlin told me about her local program that trains school garden coordinators. This signaled to me a similar kind of sea change. It indicated that there is a desire out there to be trained in this work, and that there is a (slowly) growing market of jobs being created to do this work. I’ll let Jessica—a graduate of the program– take it from here:

Sometimes, pieces just fall into place. Soon after I moved across the country to Portland, Oregon, I heard about something called the School Garden Coordinator Certificate Training course (SGCCT), a 35-hour course offered by Growing Gardens, a local nonprofit.

I didn’t know something like this existed, and I applied for the course in the hopes that I could climb out of an illustrious past in retail work and unpaid internships. I crossed my fingers, was accepted, and propelled myself into the career track that I didn’t even realize was a career track.

That’s because it’s relatively new: school gardens date back to World War I–when the national school garden program was called, aptly I think, the United States School Garden Army–but have only recently enjoyed a resurgence. Gardens are growing in schoolyards all over the country, a trend that is highlighted by the recent inception of FoodCorps, a national organization dedicated to building and tending school gardens, providing hands-on nutrition education, and bringing high-quality local food into school cafeterias (full disclosure: I am a FoodCorps service member currently serving with Growing Gardens).

For over a decade, Growing Gardens has been steadily building its youth programming but recognized that the need for school gardens was outweighing the organization’s capacity. In an effort to keep the school garden movement blossoming in Portland, they decided to develop and offer the training. Nationwide, there are precious few school garden coordinator training programs: it is possible that Growing Gardens’ SGCCT was, in 2009, the very first.

Growing Gardens’ Youth Grow Manager, Caitlin Blethen, put the course together using her experience working in the field as a garden educator. Over the course’s 35 learning hours, Blethen and a host of guest speakers cover developing a master plan, community organizing, teaching students in a school garden setting, how to connect school garden activities and lessons to the curriculum, and planning a planting calendar, among other topics. To sweeten the deal even more, SGCCT students can opt to receive continuing education credits from Portland State University, an incentive for current teachers and graduate-degree seekers alike.

Though locally directed–speakers include Michelle Markesteyn Ratcliffe, the Oregon Farm to School Program Manager; and there is a special evening class dedicated to understanding the procedures that surround using garden produce in Portland Public Schools cafeterias–the skills taught are universal.

Graduates of the program have gone on to great things: There has been a steady stream of graduates stopping by the Growing Gardens office to peruse our seed library for flowers and vegetables for their new–and thriving–school gardens. Two graduates applied for and received a lucrative grant to get their garden project off the ground. We get constant feedback on how integral certain topics (creating a garden committee, working with school custodial staff, writing mission and vision statements) really were to the graduates’ success. And this particular graduate can ensure you that the course got her exactly where she had hoped to be.

Jessica Polledri is a FoodCorps service member in Portland Oregon, serving under the Oregon Department of Agriculture, with Growing Gardens.

I have a weird fascination with inventions, and often wonder what the beginning of something was. What led to someone coming up with stained glass? Or what about an alarm clock? These are simple creations that pale in comparison with even more complex items that we also use without much thought…dishwashers? Copy machines? This computer? Maybe I should have pursued a career in engineering, but more likely my preoccupation with these inventions is due to the fact that I have little understanding of them. It seems that that disconnect between the things we use and depend on and how they function leads to a pretty common level of frustration. The rise in DIY projects and interest that we are seeing these days surely has to do with that frustration leading to a push for self-reliance.

I think it also has to do with a larger disconnect, one that has moved us away from community minded information sharing and collaboration. We have less and less opportunity in this modern world to wave down a neighbor with a question about chicken husbandry or how to fix a broken well pump. Instead, we jump on the Internet and Google the answer, hoping that the source we choose to trust is reputable and fact-based. The National Young Farmers’ Coalition (NYFC) has launched a project for the today’s sustainable farming community that brings the best of both worlds together. FarmHack taps the same age-old premise of learning directly from others in a similar community while creating innovative open source sharing technologies to reach small farmers around the globe.

Co-Founder of FarmHack, Severine von Tscharner Flemming (and Founder of The Greenhorns), says that the idea “grew out of a frustration of using 1940’s tractors that were busted” and then finding that the new technology available to fix or replace them was based on chemical and energy dependent industries, not ecological stewardship. “FarmHack is a core complement to reclaiming a more bio-intensive, resilient, prosperous, locally oriented, appropriate scale to farming,” she says, and it is driven by the needs of farmers but built by reciprocal relationships among people with various applicable skill sets. That means, not only farmers but hackers, makers, engineers, even robot builders; all becoming allies in developing opportunities to monetize ideas, create commerce, and to share blueprints for the future.

This Tools Repository on the newly revamped website features clear descriptions, plans and instruction on creating or fixing a variety of implements. It can be utilized and contributed to by anyone who may have more information about any particular item. Although it is still in Beta mode, this development offers tons of potential in assisting folks trying to fix, make or find certain farm tools and innovations. What started with solar tractors moved into wool and chicken processing equipment, then led to securing a grant that will create technology for text messages to be sent when your greenhouse gets too hot. One of the newest inventions shared a recent FarmHack event was a bike powered root washer.

Mainly, though, the key issue to what NYFC and FarmHack are working towards is that a new generation of farmers step up to the plate. It is essential that we have capable, viable, passionate people growing our food who in turn, encapsulate those very same traits into what we eat. There are so many hurdles in the way, from funding to policy to access, that make these kind of collaborative sharing networks that much more important as we look ahead. In essence, as Severine points out, FarmHack “is also a cultural project of re-evaluating what is valuable…to rebuild our economy.”

When Jesse Kuhn started Marin Roots Farm at age 28, he already had dirt under his fingernails. He’d studied ag in college, managed a student farm, and worked as a landscaper. But when it came to succeeding financially in the farming business, he had a long way to go. “I was charging up my credit cards like crazy and bouncing balances back and forth,” he says. “I almost had to declare bankruptcy during the first year.”

Almost 10 years and many lessons later, Marin Roots is a well-established organic specialty produce business. “It’s a lot of people’s dream to live off the land, but the reality of it is, you have to have a plan for how you’re going to pay the bills,” says Kuhn.

His journey is not unlike that of many beginners who are eager to try their hand at farming but don’t yet have all the necessary skills and resources. In a recent report titled Building a Future with Farmers, the National Young Farmers’ Coalition (NYFC) surveyed 1,000 young and beginning farmers across the US and found that access to land, capital, health care, credit, and business training posed huge challenges.

“What’s different for young and first-career farmers is that they don’t have a lot of equity,” says Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a young farmer in New York’s Hudson Valley who is also co-chair of NYFC and director of The Greenhorns, a film and nonprofit organization that advocates for young farmers. “You see a lot of student debt. Farming is a high-capital industry—an industry that really needs us, but we’re walking in without any cash.” 

Green Thumbs To Greenhorn

Kuhn’s path to farming started as a child in San Geronimo, where he had little exposure to agriculture but picked up a passion for gardening from his grandmother. “She had two green thumbs for sure, and I learned from that,” says Kuhn. When he went to Humboldt State, he joined their new agriculture program and studied permaculture on the side. He also took time off from school to work at an organic soil company and contemplate career paths.

After college he started farming a small one-acre plot, using the model he’d learned on the student farm, but realized the operation was more like a hobby farm than a viable business. So he worked as a landscaper while farming small plots in friends’ backyards, which eventually helped him build the courage to take the leap into full-time farming.

He took out a “land wanted” ad in the Press Democrat and, after receiving a number of responses, settled on a 15-acre agricultural plot on a goat dairy ranch near Petaluma. But there were setbacks infrastructure-wise, such as having to install a new irrigation system, and Kuhn began charging up his credit cards. Right when he was about to declare bankruptcy, a low-interest beginning farmer loan through the USDA Farm Service Agency came through. He was able to buy a tractor, a delivery truck, and seeds.

Through much experimentation, Kuhn found his niche growing organic specialty crops such as baby greens, roots, beans, and summer squash for farmers markets and grocery stores, restaurants, and wholesalers. “A lot of the products I was selling weren’t standardized because I was doing open-pollinated varieties, but there was certainly a market for that,” he says. He now employs a handful of full-time market and field staff.

Kuhn has had to learn much through trial by fire, particularly the organizational side of growing a successful business. He’s found support in his family (his mother helps with accounting, and his father is on call as farm mechanic), as well as in other Marin farmers and the Bay Area farmers market community. “It’s definitely tough farming,” he says. “The farmers market has been a great support network for me, meeting up with the other farmers every week, bouncing ideas off each other, seeing what they’re bringing to market, and getting their advice.”

Growing Roots

Kuhn is still a young farmer by national standards, which place the average farmer at 57. The USDA estimates that 500,000 US farmers (about one-quarter) will retire by 2030, leaving a large gap for the next generation to fill. “We have ever older farmers and ever fewer people who are growing our food,” says Fleming. “I think young farmers are especially well poised to address food security and the re-regionalization of our food system.”

As a result of the Building a Future with Farmers study, the NYFC has proposed a policy agenda including recommendations such as improving credit and savings opportunities, addressing land access and affordability issues, legalizing farm apprenticeships, and expanding training programs. (For more about legal issues related to apprenticeships, see The Farm Intern Conundrum.)

The NYFC study underscores the viability of direct marketing as a start-up strategy for new farmers, with 61 percent of their respondents selling at farmers markets and 49 percent through CSAs. “Helping young farmers means reorienting our food systems so that we’re not just supporting producers who are growing commodity crops and abandoning the small- and medium-scale producers who are more than likely selling directly to the marketplace,” says Fleming.

For aspiring greenhorns, Kuhn recommends getting a job or volunteering on a farm in order to get to know the business. When taking the plunge into starting your own farm, he emphasizes finding the right piece of land, with infrastructure already in place, and developing a niche.

But despite the challenges he’s encountered along the way, Kuhn loves what he does. “Being able to wake up on the farm is incredible,” he says. “And it’s rewarding to go to the farmers market and meet the people who are going to be eating my food.”

Photo: Gary Yost. Chart by the National Young Farmers Coalition.

Originally published on CUESA

In this era when consumers want to know how many “food miles” their carrots traveled and restaurant menus list the distance from farm to fork, restaurant owners are increasingly putting in their own farms on rooftops, abandoned lots and nearby agricultural plots.

The trend has caught on with high-end, Michelin-starred restaurants in California such as The French Laundry in Napa and Manresa in Los Gatos as well as more casual places, such as Pauline’s Pizzeria in San Francisco and the Fremont Diner in Sonoma.

The growing number of restaurant farms is welcome news to new farmers like Rose Robertson, 28, who, like many new farmers, is trained but without a plot of land to call her own. After interning for a year at a farm in Santa Barbara, Robertson knew she wanted to farm but also knew she did not want to be a cog in a large-scale farming operation. She worried that at a big farm, workers like her would end up, “spending your whole day picking beans,” she said.

She found a job managing the one and a half-acre garden at Ubuntu, a high-end vegetarian restaurant in Napa. The owners and staff of Ubuntu describe the garden as the heart of the restaurant, not just a side project. In the summer months up to 90 percent of the produce served comes from its garden.

“The chef says he’s not the chef,” said Robertson. “That the gardeners are growing the food that dictates the menu.”

Ubuntu’s owner, Sandy Lawrence, set out to create that dynamic, and says the importance of hyper-fresh produce is heightened because the restaurant is vegetarian. With the increasing number of young people flocking to agricultural training programs and farming internships, Lawrence never worried about finding eager farmers to employ.

“The reason we’ve been so confident is we’ve always had loads of young people who want to work,” she said. In addition to Robertson, another full time gardener and two part time workers, the garden has an internship program that attracts a constant stream of willing volunteers.

The trend represents a different kind of job opportunity for young people trying to break into agriculture in regions like the Bay Area, where land prices are prohibitively high. The average plot of cropland in California sold for about $9,000 an acre in 2010, according to USDA data, compared to about $4,000 an acre in Iowa, or $800 an acre in Montana, the cheapest state. Prices can go much higher in the Bay Area, though–a plot currently for sale in Sebastopol, Sonoma County is priced at about $21,000 per acre.

American farmers are getting old–in 2007, the average age of a farmer was 58, compared to 39 in 1945. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of farmers under 45 decreased by 21 percent. Still, in recent years, more young people have shown interest in farming and policy makers are working to recruit and incentivize new farmers. The latest version of the Farm Bill allocated $18 million for training new farmers.

Several Bay Area farms offer apprenticeships and internships for new farmers, mostly based around organic or biodynamic methods. But it is still difficult for many of the young people who complete the programs to get a paid job farming when they finish, which makes restaurant farms an appealing option to some.

Misja Nuyttens, 30, was an intern at Green String Farm in Petaluma and recently took a job starting a farm for the restaurant Central Market, also in Petaluma.

She says the experience of starting a farm from scratch has been invaluable. It’s not uncommon for beginning farmers such as Nuyttens to hold multiple jobs or look for non-traditional ways to use their farming skills. Samantha Langevin runs the internship program at Hidden Villa farm and education center in the Los Altos hills. She says she encourages interns to think about taking a diversified approach to their careers.

“The trend we’re seeing is young farmers, in addition to farmers markets, they might be selling to restaurants, they might be offering a CSA program, they might be working with a local school, whether that’s elementary to university, to offer programming on-site, they might be working with other community organizations that are looking to purchase food,” says Langevin.

Managing a restaurant garden lets farmers try out running a farm without having to take on debt or over-commit. And for restaurants, being ultra-local and having control over access to produce gives the chef flexibility. Robertson, the manager of Ubuntu’s garden, says the chef likes being able to harvest vegetables at any stage of growth. He also sometimes uses parts of the plant which are edible but often aren’t traditionally sold, such as carrot tops and beet stems. And he has Robertson grow plants that are difficult or impossible to find in the marketplace, including an edible ice plant with a lemony taste called ficoide glaciale.

Misja Nuyttens says part of the motivation for the chef and owner at Central Market restaurant to start his own garden was to be able to serve produce at its absolute freshest. Even when he purchased from farms only a few miles away, the produce would often go through a distributer that trucked items all over the Bay Area before getting to his kitchen.

Starting a dedicated garden might not always be profitable for restaurants. Lawrence says Ubuntu’s garden is sustaining itself by providing produce to the restaurant, but it helps that most of the land is on the owner’s property. Similarly, the owners of the Farmhouse Inn in Forestville, Sonoma use their own land for their garden, and have set up a share-cropping arrangement with a farmer to make it affordable. Co-owner Catherine Bartolomei says the garden could probably be more profitable if she wanted it to be, but that the larger goal is to adhere to the business’s eating philosophy.

While more and more restaurants are finding ways to make it work, putting in a garden is not a business move that would make sense for every eatery.

Providing boutique vegetables for high-end diners also might not be the philosophical goal for many of the area’s young farmers, although Nuyttens does find connection to a greater cause in her work with the Central Market garden.

“It is a bridge to increasing awareness about the benefits of food grown this way,” said Nuyttens. Restaurant farms, she says, provide, “a springboard for this movement, allowing a new generation of natural process farmers to get established.”

Above, Oxheart carrots grown in Ubuntu’s garden. Photo: Rose Robertson. Below, Ubuntu restaurant’s chefs standing in the garden. Photo: Karen Mann.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Civil Eats and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism News21 course on food reporting.

Ana Catalán may seem young, but don’t let this 23-year-old fool you; when it comes to farming, she’s wise beyond her years. As the youngest child and only daughter of María Catalán, matriarch and owner of Catalán Family Farm, Ana plays a crucial role in the workings of this Hollister-based organic farm.

“I am basically trained to run the business right alongside my mother,” she said on a recent Thursday at the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market, while waiting in line at the Blue Bottle kiosk for her second (or was it third?) soy latte of the day. Anna’s three older brothers all work for the farm as well—one manages restaurant relations and orders while the other two sell produce at farmers markets for a commission—but, as Ana sees it, “together, my mother and I are the brain of the business.”

Being the brain of the business generally means working seven days a week, either at a market, in the office, or around the 15-acre farm. It’s not a lifestyle Ana shares with many other people her age. “I honestly only have close friends, because they understand that my job consumes my life,” she said.

Boss-Ladies

When it comes to co-supervising the farm’s crew of workers (a group that ranges in size from six full-time people in December to 40 part-time workers in the summer harvest months), Ana takes cues from her mom. Once a farmworker herself, María graduated from the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA) over 15 years ago and has run her own organic farm ever since.

But getting established as a woman farmer (and single mom) wasn’t easy; many in their extended family were skeptical. “People did not value organic farming as they do now,” recalled Ana. “It was a hard time. My mom knew how to farm, but she didn’t know about marketing. She invested a lot and lost a lot.”

Throughout it all, the drive to treat workers with respect has remained central. “My mom tries to be the best boss that she can be,” said Ana. “She says, ‘I’d rather pay my last dollar to my worker than pay myself.’” Like on any farm with a shifting, seasonal workload, retention can be a challenge. But, Ana said, “No one who has ever worked for us hasn’t wanted to come back.”

Not that it’s easy supervising people twice your age. Ana is a social person and she says it took her a while to figure out how to draw the line between work relationships and personal ones, since she spends so much time at the farm. “I tell them, ‘Once we’re working I’m your boss; off the clock I’m your friend. That stays there and the job stays here. Don’t think I’m going to mix it up.’ But I started so young—it took me a long time to figure this out,” she said.

She Hearts SF

Ana has been coming to the Ferry Plaza since she was 19; these days she runs the Catalán booth on Thursdays and Saturdays, along with one or two other markets in San Francisco. And although the drive from the farm can be grueling at times, she loves coming to the city for its exciting mix of people, food, languages, and cultures. “I started off doing markets in Berkeley. It was fun; but the City has my heart.”

It’s hard to say which came first, Ana’s love of San Francisco or her sense of independence, but there’s no doubt the two things are related. Last year, Ana moved off the farm to an apartment in San Jose with friends–a decision that requires her to drive 45 extra minutes every day (on Saturdays, it means she often leaves her house by 3 am).

“I was the first in the family to move out. In my culture, for a woman to be out of the house, unmarried, and without children…it’s a big deal,” she said. But Ana held her ground. “I’m the only one of my cousins who didn’t get pregnant in high school. I do want to get married and have children some day, but I want my kids to be raised in the home that I choose.” She’s had to have “a lot of sit-downs” with members of her extended family, who like to say she’s become too Americanized.

Since graduating from high school Ana has taken classes at several different community colleges in Gilroy and the Salinas area. But, in the end, it’s always hard to prioritize because the farm has to come first. On the bright side, she said, dealing with family politics primed Ana for her favorite class: Political Science. She thinks often about moving in with relatives in Southern California in order to get just far enough away from the farm to focus on finishing her degree. But for now, it’s hard to leave a family that depends on her (“everyone knows me as Maria’s daughter…I’m her Junior.”) and a job she loves.

The Farmer’s Daughter

“There’s just something about the farm when you’re harvesting. The work that you’ve done has paid off and you get to see the fruit of your labor, literally,” said Ana. “I like waking up before sunrise and going out on the field. The air is so fresh; it’s really beautiful out there.”

On top of growing vegetables, Ana has also been planning to expand on a canning experiment she started last fall; “I want it to be like Happy Girl Kitchen, but Mexican,” she says. And no matter what happens next, it’s clear that Ana enjoys being at the helm of the farm she’s built alongside her mother.

“When I was 13 I was so embarrassed to tell my friends that I had to get dirty and help in the fields. I didn’t want them to think I was just another farmworker.” Now, she said, “they’re all like, ‘Can you hook me up with a job?’”

Originally published by CUESA

As the average age of farmers in the U.S. continues to raise, young farmers are beginning to sprout up across the nation. The recent documentary GROW!, directed by Christine Anthony and Owen Masterson, showcases the resurgence of young organic farmers in the state of Georgia. The film highlights 20 individuals across 12 farms who have found their way back to the land, whether working on a family-owned farm, buying their own, or, in most cases, using another farmer’s land to grow food for their community.

GROW! is a story that does not seek to convince the moviegoer of any particular viewpoint, but instead offers the opportunity to understand a new generation of farmer and why they seek to live a lifestyle removed from the hustle and bustle of the corporate world. “It’s a beautiful story and we wanted these young farmers to tell it in their own words; no narrator, no scientific experts, no hand wringing gloom and doom, just an honest, on the ground account of a movement taking place at this very moment in time,” said directors Anthony and Masterson.

While we might be tempted to write their farming endeavors off as young, idealistic attempts at a simple life that simply no longer exists, what we get is a picture of hardworking, passionate and, yes, idealistic 20 and 30-somethings who feel called to a “real” job with tangible results. Not least of their reasons for becoming farmers is a desire to fight injustice and create a healthier, more sustainable world by growing “clean, fair food.” Being self-employed has its perks too.

Far from the back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s where, as Anthony and Masterson suggested, individuals were mainly concerned with dropping out of society and being self-sufficient, the young farmers of today are “fully engaged and participating in all aspects of society.”

“After the excesses of the 80′s and 90′s there is a sea change of values. A lot of young people no longer are drawn to earning a bunch of money working hard for somebody else in an unrewarding career.”

Add to this the fact that many young people are graduating college to find there are no jobs in their chosen career field, whether it be in accounting, chemistry or medicine, like some of the farmers in the film. But there are deeper reasons for becoming a farmer. “A lot of people of this generation want to work towards changing this world for the better, be it the environment or simply improving things in their local communities.”

As Rebecca Williams of Manyfold farm put it, “I got into farming because I like the idea of feeding people, and I like the idea of feeding people stuff that’s good for them, that makes them feel good, that makes their days better, that’s pleasurable and nourishing.”

The directors hope the film will inspire more would-be farmers and retired land owners to find each other and continue a legacy of small, organic farming, while working to change laws in support of small, sustainable farmers. They also hope it will encourage viewers to think about where their food comes. But viewers should also be prepared to leave with a desire to do more. As one moviegoer stated, “[it] makes me want to quit my job and become a farmer.”

To schedule a local screening of GROW! for your community or classroom, contact the filmmakers through the film’s Web site.

Filmmaker Junko Kajino grew up on a farm in Japan and, although she now lives in Chicago, she’s remained interested in the organic farming community back home. In the weeks since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Dai-ichi, Kajino has kept a close eye on the organic rice and vegetable growers in the area and she noticed certain themes in the messages appearing on blogs and social media sites. “They focused on how to reduce radiation, how to cultivate their contaminated land, and what they can grow in their polluted soil,” she recalls.

Despite the severe damage to their land and the heightened concern about ongoing radiation, Kajino says, the farmers were not complaining. Instead, she says, they’ve  started talking about what to plant. “This was the hope I saw in the last several months and I need to document that.”

This spring, Kajino and her filmmaking partner Ed Koziarski will travel to the Tohoku region of Northern Japan to follow several farmers who are working to rebuild. The farms they plan to document—in a film titled Uncanny Terrain—are just outside the evacuation zone (recently extended to 30km), and many are within the 80km warning zone declared by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Still other farms are further away, and have had no reports of nearby high radiation, but they’re still affected by the stigma against food (and people) from the Tohoku region.

Among those they plan to follow is 28-year-old Masanori Yoshida, who left his job as a chef in Tokyo to work his family’s land. In the past, he’s grown what’s called “firefly rice,” named for the lack of pesticides used in the growing process that have allowed the glowing insects to return. “We don’t know if our crops will be safe,” Masanori told the filmmakers. “We can’t ignore this issue. But we won’t stop cultivating our land”

Megumi Kondou is another example. She is still awaiting government approval to return to the farm she evacuated after the earthquake. Rather than rice, she is considering growing canola, which she believes may help reduce radiation in the soil, and is a potential source of biofuel.

There are significant questions at hand about how and when the land in this area can be used. As Koziarski and Kajino wrote on the film’s fundraising page, whether the land can be returned to its natural state, “or whether the farmers must abandon their ancestral homesteads, remains to be seen.”

Koziarski says he’s motivated by what he sees as tragic irony. “These farmers have done everything they can to be responsible stewards of the environment,” he says. “They now see their efforts undermined by the irresponsibility of executives and government officials who concealed the risks of nuclear [energy] in Japan.”

Kajinko echoes this statement. “Some of these farmers have been avoiding these energy sources, [and trying to] live a self-sustaining life. Now they have to find the way to live side by side with radiation. But I believe that they might find hope. And I think that we might all need this lesson sooner or later.”

Learn more about the film, see Uncanny Terrain on the fundraising site, IndieGoGo.

Food is the pulse of the millennial generation as thousands of young people are propelling the new good food movement forward by planting the seeds of a more just and sustainable food system. Across the country, students are activating for social change on campuses, while hundreds of new farmers and gardeners are digging into neighborhoods, and innovative food ventures are sprouting up. Come meet some of the best and brightest of these young food activists on Tuesday, May 3, as Kitchen Table Talks, in conjunction with UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism, hosts a lively discussion with some of the leading youth voices whose mandate is food.

Joining us in conversation will be:

Nikhil Arora is a former Hass School of Business graduate and the co-founder of Back to the Roots, which produces grow-at-home mushroom kits grown from recycled coffee grounds. On pace to collect and divert over one million pounds of coffee grounds this year, it recently launched in 250 Whole Foods nationwide and can be found at Peet’s Coffee, as well as other natural food markets. Back to the Roots has helped sustain 10 urban schools gardens by donating their premium soil amendment.

James Berk is an owner-worker at Mandela Foods Cooperative (a program of Mandela Marketplace) a locally-owned and operated full-service grocery store and nutrition education center located in West Oakland, a community long underserved in grocery retail. Berk also does youth empowerment work with West Oakland Youth Standing Empowered and works with the Healthy Neighborhood Stores Alliance, which focuses on getting nutritious food and positive businesses practices into convenience stores. He has been honored for his work with the Robert Redford Center’s The Art of Activism award.

Yonatan Landau is the co-founder and director of the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFed), a network, training program, and research institute that helps students create sustainable food cooperatives on their campuses. Before his current gig, he launched a successful campaign to prevent the first fast food chain from opening at UC Berkeley and helped raise over $120,000 for a cooperative alternative, the Berkeley Student Food Collective.

Samin Nosrat creates community around food with her varied endeavors as a cook, teacher, writer, and accidental activist. Since Eccolo, a restaurant she helped run, closed in 2009, she has tirelessly questioned and experimented with what it means to be a professional cook. She is known for the Pop-Up General Store, Tartine Afterhours dinners, Home Ec Cooking Classes, and the most recently successful Bakesale for Japan. At the heart of all of her work lies the fundamental belief in the power of food to create meaningful connection.

Hải Võ organizes with Live Real, a new initiative building community with youth across the country around food cultures and policies based on respect for ourselves, each other, and the Earth, and is currently recruiting Real Food Fellows as part of the initiative.  A member of the California Food and Justice Coalition, he is helping coordinate community activities for the Community Food Security Conference this November in Oakland.  Vo has organized and participated in youth-led food justice initiatives, including the Real Food Challenge, California Student Sustainability Coalition, and the Student Farmworker Alliance.

Haleh Zandi is a co-founder, permaculture landscaper, and community organizer with Planting Justice, a non-profit organization based in Oakland, CA dedicated to food justice, economic justice, and sustainable local food systems. She strives to implement notions of human rights into practice by taking back public spaces so that every community, within Oakland and to Tehran, has access and sovereignty over affordable, nutritious food.

When: Tuesday, May 3 from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

Where: UC Berkeley School of Journalism, Room 105, Northgate Hall, Berkeley, CA

This event is free and open to public. Space is limited, so please RSVP with consideration.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Food generously donated by Gather Restaurant.