Down and Out in Upstate New York

A farmer friend sent me an email this week looking for work. The owner of the land she was farming had decided to sell and she’d be moving on in a month -- another dream dashed, another well funded, well intentioned farm upstate down the drain.

She asked if I knew of any restaurants hiring, said she didn’t know if she could keep farming after 4 years of building a place from nothing, then all at once, because her funders lost the romance, leaving with nothing. No capital, no equity, no home.

I wish this was an anomaly. I wish those of us who want to farm could in fact farm for a living. I wish we could access land and capital, or barring upfront ownership, we could earn sweat equity in the places we help build. There are some of us who have made it work, but I would wager my friend’s story mirrors the vast majority of young prospective farmers’. It certainly mirrors my own.

So what makes these barriers to entry so severe? Why can’t those of us willing to perform the arduous, unglamorous work of producing food do so?

Before looking at the failures, perhaps it would be constructive to look at one of the success stories of sustainable farms. Joel Salatin -- the Twainian hero of bucolic America, the straw-hatted, grass loving prophet of pasture, the ecological advocate of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Inc. fame -- is undeniably a success in the world of alternative agriculture. His 550 acre, Polyface Farm is a model of sustainability and regenerative, ecological farming. He’s written a dozen books on agriculture, many of them evangelizing the potential of his models to revitalize rural places, and encouraging young people to take up the mantle and farm. Many aspiring farmers, myself included, look towards his work for inspiration and as a light in the darkness of industrial food production, as an example of someone living the dream.

But there’s one problem with using Salatin’s farm as an example for young farmers -- he inherited the land. 550 acres in Virginia where land is valued at $21,921 per acre. That’s over $12 million for the property, folks.

When I got the itch to go and farm I quickly realized I didn’t know the first thing about it and decided to apprentice myself for a few years to learn the trade. I ended up doing this for 4 years, working at a different operation each season. I made about $800 per month, sometimes a bit more, often a bit less. My housing was included but that $800 barely covered the cost of living. It certainly didn’t allow me to save. At the end of the 4 years apprenticing, I was confident in my skills and knowledge, but I was broke. Too broke to start a business. Way, way too broke to purchase land.

So I got a job similar to the one my friend who just lost her’s had. A millionaire restaurateur in NYC bought a farm upstate. He thought wouldn’t it be romantic to produce eggs and pork and vegetables for the restaurant, and hired a group of young farmers to do the work. And work we did. We poured endless hours into building an operation. We sweat and toiled and barely slept to produce the best quality food we could. And when the farm went under through no fault of our own (turns out our industrial food system, as polluting and unethical as it is, has accomplished massive economies of scale. Industrial food is cheap, way cheaper than we could compete with, and the restaurant, needing to turn a profit, couldn’t afford our food) we had nothing to show for it. The owner could sell the farm, but because the farm was our business, we couldn’t sell. We didn’t build equity. We just had to move on.

And unfortunately the options for moving on mostly resemble the same scenario as above. A well funded individual decides they have a passion for sustainable food and buys a farm. Then they hire young people to build the farm business. They offer housing and a meager salary, but never any equity. If it’s not a wealthy individual at the helm, it’s a non-profit, and the cycle goes on and on.

Toward the end of my time farming, a non-profit agricultural center near me held a seminar/round-table discussion on ‘Next Steps for Aspiring Farmers.’ The panel was made up of a farmer who worked for the non-profit, another farmer who worked for a restaurateur, and a county-extension agent whose salary was paid by the government. The irony that these three, who didn’t own the land they were farming and didn’t pay their own salary, were apparently the most qualified to give advice to prospective entrepreneurs with aspirations of owning their own land and businesses seemed lost on the panel. They gave advice in earnest -- lease land, network, brand yourself -- but didn’t address this inherent flaw in our dreams. The barriers to entry for farmers are so steep that many of us burn out before we reach the summit. We spend our energy building businesses for the elite among us who can afford land, and when those businesses don’t grow fast enough or the owner loses interest, we lose, and we have nothing to show for it.

After I received the email from my friend, I did a quick job search online and found a posting for a farm manager position. A restaurant group in the city was starting a farm upstate and needed someone with experience to build the operation. Sound familiar? It seems the ‘this was grown on our farm’ marketing scheme still has a hold on people’s imagination and still draws in well-intentioned people trying to do their part to change the food system. But many of these attempts at change in reality resemble a form of sharecropping and harken back to a dark past of exploitation in agriculture. And many of them make about as much economic sense for the farmers as sharecropping.  

It seems they don’t make that much economic sense for the owners either. If I had to guess the fate of the aforementioned farm looking for a manager, I’d give it about 4-5 years before the owners grow tired of their money pit and sell. The farmer will have spent unfathomable hours building a business for which they won’t have equity. If they’re like me, they’ll become discouraged and look for a new way of life. Another potential producer turned away. Another farm gone belly up. And that’s not a bad name for these types of farms, Belly Up. Feel free to use it if you’re in the city looking for land.