By Peter Mann
Something new is happening in the food and farming world. Over the past decade, we have begun to change what we eat and how food is grown, but we are only gradually getting to know the great numbers of new, young, and often urban farmers who are emerging across the United States. A book signing on Wednesday, September 30 in Soho’s McNally Jackson bookstore helped us understand the changing role of American farmers and much more.
Lisa M. Hamilton, author of Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness (Counterpoint), moderated and also shared her wide experience of the new farmers through her photography and interviews. Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of The Rural Life (Little, Brown & Co.) and New York Times columnist, shared his family’s experiences growing corn and soy in Iowa. Mary-Howell Martens, a New York family farmer from the Fingerlakes region, described her transition to organic feed production. Fred Kirschenmann, farmer and leader in the sustainable agriculture movement, connected the discussion to wider food system issues. Together, they considered the paradox that the US agricultural community is shrinking in numbers, aging, and caught in a vice between overproduction and collapsing prices, and yet new farmers are continually entering our communities and our lives. More than 80 people, mostly young, packed into a small bookstore space to listen to the speakers, something the panel saw as “unimaginable only 12 years ago!”
Rural and Urban
There is a huge gap between rural industrial farming, as in the Midwest, and urban and peri-urban farming, focused on feeding cities. Verlyn Klinkenborg, whose family farmed in Iowa, described the decline in Iowa of biological 
diversity, agricultural diversity, and social diversity. Iowa grows 92 percent corn and soy, and yet farmers are losing money on their products. He quoted one extreme comment that has been made that “Iowa’s real exports are rural poverty and crystal meth.” Klinkenborg described the “intentional and purposeful dismantling of the agricultural infrastructure linking Iowa in the first half of the 20th century.” This infrastructure “will have to be rebuilt.” We also have to rethink farming ecologically, so that land is not only for food and fuel, but also for habitat.
The vast proportion of government subsidy money goes to the largest farmers and agribusiness. How do we broaden the recipients into a much wider group? How can we broaden the consciousness of people so that they become aware of the health of the soil, of seeds, and the devastating effect of pesticides? The panel discussion moved to the principles of industrial agriculture, based on the industrial model – efficient production, short-term returns, specialization, uniformity, monocultures, and economies of scale. However, although it is now called “conventional agriculture,” this kind of farming is very new, appearing in the roughly 65 years since World War II. The correspondence was pointed out between US industrial agriculture and readily available food products, which have to be “fast, convenient, and cheap.” There was a strong conviction in the panel that the transformation of our food system will not come from the rural areas to the cities, but will spread out from the urban centers to the rural areas.
What Does Local Mean?
Other speakers described the radical changes happening in the food system as we connect food to health, community, and the environment. “Organic” production is one response to these linkages and Mary-Howell Martens described how one farm after another in her neighborhood moved to organic production and found customers to support it. Another response is “local” as a new driving force connecting people to farmers. But what does local 
mean? How personal can you make local? Is it as small as a kitchen garden or a window sill? Is it food grown within a 50 mile radius, as farmer Eliot Coleman believes? Is it within 150 miles? Or 500 miles? This led to a discussion of the foodshed as the area from which a community can draw its food.
The foodshed concept is clearer when we look at people living in the Hudson Valley with its many smaller towns and small-scale farms. However, Fred Kirschenmann of Stone Barns raised major questions of how to feed year round the 30 million people in New York State, including the more than 8 million in New York City alone. This question of how to “scale up” local and regional food production continued through the evening. In Kirschenmann’s view, the foodshed is an elastic concept – “it is any region where people decide to take charge of their food, as ‘food citizens.’” Kirschenmann saw signs that the UN itself is beginning to change its policies, by admitting that the global food crisis, with the number of hungry people rising from 800 million to one billion, has not been solved by previous agricultural strategies of “technology, trade, and aid.” The new UN paradigm, according to him, is “food justice, food democracy, and food sovereignty.” Having attended many recent UN meetings, I personally would not be as sanguine: it is true that recent UN reports have supported this new paradigm, but in its official documents the UN still tends toward the positions of the most powerful governments and big business.
The Challenges Facing New Farmers
How can new farmers get access to land, to capital, to a living income? These are serious challenges, and it seemed from the discussion that the relationship between farmers and eaters is critical, but not yet the whole answer. Farmers build relationships with CSA members and farmers’ market customers, but the outreach of the new farmers must become wider - not always easy for typically independent farmers. Websites are one step farmers can take into a wider context. The “Edible Cities” publications are spreading across the country. The Edible Cities website will soon be able to direct consumers to local food wherever they live.
Another possible step would be political contacts on an occasional basis such as Barack and Michelle Obama’s unexpected visit to the Blue Hill restaurant during their recent night out in New York, a visit which changed the fortunes of farmers servicing the restaurant, according to Mary-Howell Martens. The new vegetable garden in the White House, along with the economic recession, seem to be having a catalyzing effect on American gardeners, a panelist reported - “companies supplying seeds for US vegetable gardens ran out of stock in the spring.” The new urban farms explosion was placed by Kirschenmann within the history of urban gardening in America, from the “potato patches” in the economic depression at the end of the nineteenth century, to the “liberty gardens” of World War I, the “relief gardens” in the Great Depression, and the “victory gardens” of World War II.
Another vital step for new farmers – as it has long been for conventional farmers – is systemic political support. The new Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, has had a critical reception from some on the progressive side, given his past ties to agribusiness, but Fred Kirschenmann mentioned one promise of Vilsack - “to change school food” - that could radically alter the food system. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer was mentioned as a radical advocate for local food, given the food deserts both urban and rural in New York State: Stringer is campaigning to get 20 percent of New York City’s school food budget from local farmers.
America’s New Farmers must work to shift the paradigm from farmers competing against each other to one of mutual cooperation. Panelists gave examples of this new paradigm such as Organic Valley dairy farms, and Shepherd’s Grain, an alliance of progressive farmers connecting growers, millers, bakers and consumers, with the motto : “We want to bring the consumer back to the farmers, to the land.”
New Farmers and the Coming Crisis
Underlying the good news of new farmers emerging despite the crisis of family farms and the threatened collapse of US dairy farming, was the sense of an even greater crisis to come for conventional agriculture and beyond. It was summed up by Fred Kirschenmann as an energy crisis in which fuel costs could go up to $350 a barrel for an agricultural system totally dependent on fossil fuels; a freshwater crisis in a system based on wasteful irrigation; and a climate crisis which will bring floods, droughts, and extreme weather. New farmers and the wider community will need to push for change in major public agendas of nutrition, health, education, energy and much more. We must develop models of sustainable, regenerative, and organic agriculture as the norm, not the exception, and build an ecological consciousness which creates healthy landscapes and a healthy ecology around farm animals and local wildlife. Above all, we have to stop seeing ourselves as a dominator species, and see ourselves as part of an ecological community. We live in a world of habits, as one panelist said. For these changes to happen, we have to change our habits, and then we can make good choices.
Peter Mann is co-director of WHY’s Global Movements Program
