Beginning Farmers

Eight years after starting this adventure we call Rock Spring Farm, we still have a soft spot in our hearts for beginning farmers. Maybe because both us spent the ten years before we bought this place getting ready for that moment, scrimping and saving and learning and experiencing on farms from California to Washington to Wisconsin to Maine. Maybe because we know that satisfactions of planting that first crop, as well as the heartaches of capricious weather, big mistakes, and forgetting to appreciate one’s surroundings as you work day and night to stake some kind of claim to a future. And maybe because we know that the hardest step is the first one, and how few people take the chance to follow a dream that is larger than life. And we know that our soft spot comes from a knowledge of how few farmers remain, the old age that farmers have collectively achieved, and how badly we need more of us.

Farmland accounts for an astounding forty-two percent of America’s land base; farmers control much more than that. Farmers have control over a huge proportion of our landscape, and play a major role in the quality of our environment. Careful farming practices and positive stewarding of the land have the ability to work environmental wonders, from providing habitat for migrating songbirds to reducing dead-zone inducing pollution in the Gulf of Mexico to sequestering carbon in organic matter-enriched soil; but it’s hard to expect hired hands on thousand-acre farms and mega-dairy feedlots to exercise the same kind of care and have the same deep understanding of the land as a farmer with a long-term commitment to a particular piece of soil.

Unfortunately, farmers in this country have shrunk to less than two percent of the population, with an average age of 55 (organic farmers don’t fare much better, with an average age of 51). And in 1997, the United States had more than three times as many farmers over the age of 65 than it did farmers 35 and under —a sure sign of a population in decline.

Despite this decline, a return to the land has a strong draw for many people today. Fortunately, most of the mostly-young people coming into agriculture from the outside have a strong organic—or at least ecologically-enlightened—bent. These are people who will care immensely how their livelihood affects everyone and everything downstream. We believe that, while agriculture is in the midst of a serious and ongoing crisis, this interest in starting vibrant and successful farms around the Upper Midwest provides a substantial reason for hope.

So on Tuesday night, Chris will make the first stop on his annual trek to the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings Program to teach the first of three courses this year on Financial Planning for beginning farmers. Each year, the Farm Beginnings Program provides an in-depth education about the principles of sustainable farming to a group of about 40 aspiring farmers. Chris discusses enterprise budgeting, time and money management, annual planning, and long-term planning with the group. We look forward to welcoming these students as our neighbors in the small community of farmers.