Young Farmers, in Their Own Words, for the Greater Green
10 photos
<strong>Benjamin Shute, 30</strong> <em>âI grew up in New York City on 73rd and Lexington and went to school in New England. I went out to Oregon to do some farming and then moved back to Brooklyn to do some community gardening stuff at the Red Shed in East Williamsburg because I thought I'd worked the farming thing out of my system. Sure enough I hadn't so when I got the opportunity to <a href="http://www.heartyroots.com/">rent some land</a> 50 miles outside of the city, close enough to still see my friends and family in the city, I took it. My partner and I didn't have the option to go into debtâI don't know who would have loaned us money in the first place. I was asked to give a presentation on how the farm started because we were running the farm in our late twenties and we are an example of making it work. We drop off our harvested vegetables at <a href="http://www.justfood.org/csa/locations/">CSAs</a> and markets in East Williamsburg, Greenwood Heights, and in Bay Ridge. There are a lot of people working for other farmers who want to be, and should be, and can be, doing it on there own. If I had a time machine and could go back and give myself some advice, it's that the number one most important thing is to find the right kind of ground.â </em>
<strong>Emma Hoyt, 26</strong> <em>âI'm the field manager here at Stone Barns under <a href="http://www.stonebarnscenter.org/sb_about/staff.aspx?ContentID=10">Jack Algiere</a>, who oversees our entire vegetable production. Most of the time, I'm out in the fields and in the winter I'm in here (the greenhouse). I'm from New Jersey and studied environmental biology at Columbiaâit's like the light science degree, and it's been pretty helpful to know. I had worked on an organic farm in Connecticut before I was here and worked for the Parks Department, working as an Americorps in Manhattan. I came to visit and met Jack and became his first official apprentice three years ago. You get to do such a variety of things and each day is never the same: you could be harvesting, weeding, planting, driving the tractor, fixing things that are broken. My favorite writer right now is Michael Pollan and Jack, my boss, is a really big inspiration for me. Jack's mentor is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Coleman">Eliot Coleman</a>; I went to visit his farm this summer and it was amazingâso through him I've come to admire Eliot too.â</em>
<strong>Bennett Konesni, 26</strong> <em>âI started singing when I worked on schoonersâwe'd sing when we raised the anchor or the sails. Later, when I worked on farms people asked me to sing the sea shanties while we were working. We'd also sing "American Pie" but that got really old after about 5 times. I got this Watson Fellowship to go see where people are still farming and singing: Central Asia, the mountains of Switzerland, parts of Africa. And my plan was to bring it back here to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelter_Island_(town),_New_York">Shelter Island</a>, which my family bought in 1651. It's got this amazing history of food, all the way from the Native Americans to the feudalism system, to the local food era and the industrial food era. My goal is to create a fifth era of food there, a sustainable era: delicious and fair food. The thing about the slave era at Sylvester Manor is that there was no joy, obviously, in that work. I want to bring joy to the farm, through music. We just finished planting the garlic and I'm looking for dedicated people to work with me next March to October. Experience is preferred but not required.â </em>
<strong>Casey Knapp, 19</strong> <em>âI'm a fifth generation dairy farmer from Preble, New York. I had a rebellious phase where I wanted to be a commodity investor for a while, but after I graduated high school I went to Argentina and lived in a big city. It made me appreciate the country life. My family's farm, that's where I want to be. We have 80 milking cows on about 300 acres - 95 of those are closed off for permanent grazing and 70 are rotational grazing acres. The milk goes out to the cooperative <a href="http://www.organicvalley.coop/">Organic Valley</a>, who played a huge part in where we are today as a farm. One of the reasons we decided to sign on is that the offered us a stable, competitive, and always rising pay price. Anyone who works with milk prices knows that they can be very volatile and you can never plan more than a few months ahead. We also make compost on our farm, and two months a year we sell organic strawberries, free-range chickens, turkeys, ducks, and free-range eggs. Michael Pollan had an influence on my parents for sure, and Joel Salatin's ideas of rotational grazing. Charles Walters who writes for <a href="http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/magazine.htm">Acres USA</a> is very influential for me.â </em>
<strong>Cordelia Hall, 22 and Andrew Dygert, 19 </strong><em><strong>AD:</strong> âWe're from <a href="http://www.localharvest.org/farms/M15819">East Hill Organic Farm</a> in Middlesex, which is in the Finger Lakes.â <strong>CH:</strong> âI lived there from when I was 7 to 14, and now I'm moving back to the farm. East Hill is an intentional community.â <strong>AD:</strong> âIt's mostly based on crafts like pottery and woodwork, but there's also a focus on agriculture.â <strong>CH:</strong> âThe community is 50 years old and throughout their history, they've produced varying percentages, but a good amount, of their own food.â<strong>AD: </strong>âUp to 75 percent in the late 1970s. It's decreased a lot in the last decade.â<strong>CH:</strong> âA big part of what I want to do is bring that percentage up and also expand the market viability of the gardens. I don't know if you've noticed but the economy's not so great right now and I think rich people don't have as much expendable income to buy pottery but people are always going to need food.â <strong>AD: </strong>âWe wanted to connect with other young farmers but also see how people are making money.â <strong>CH:</strong> âI love living in harmony with the earth, but, you know, I have student loans to pay.â </em>
<strong>Cordelia Hall, 22 and Andrew Dygert, 19 </strong><em><strong>AD:</strong> âWe're from <a href="http://www.localharvest.org/farms/M15819">East Hill Organic Farm</a> in Middlesex, which is in the Finger Lakes.â <strong>CH:</strong> âI lived there from when I was 7 to 14, and now I'm moving back to the farm. East Hill is an intentional community.â <strong>AD:</strong> âIt's mostly based on crafts like pottery and woodwork, but there's also a focus on agriculture.â <strong>CH:</strong> âThe community is 50 years old and throughout their history, they've produced varying percentages, but a good amount, of their own food.â<strong>AD: </strong>âUp to 75 percent in the late 1970s. It's decreased a lot in the last decade.â<strong>CH:</strong> âA big part of what I want to do is bring that percentage up and also expand the market viability of the gardens. I don't know if you've noticed but the economy's not so great right now and I think rich people don't have as much expendable income to buy pottery but people are always going to need food.â <strong>AD: </strong>âWe wanted to connect with other young farmers but also see how people are making money.â <strong>CH:</strong> âI love living in harmony with the earth, but, you know, I have student loans to pay.â </em>
<strong>Shannon Algiere, 31, with Ojiah Algiere</strong> <em>âWe just finished attending âWork Songs: Agrarian Music on Four Continents,â which was super exciting. There's so much diversity that goes into the greenhouse, but there's also a real predictability. What's interesting about the work songs is that it's really livening up and awakening the space. We've sung in the fields and the greenhouse before, but if it's not singing then it's constant conversations. I really believe the plants and the soil are responding to this energy. My son Sedge is a young farmer himself, named after the most tenacious weed in the garden [3-year-old Sedge plays with a toy bulldozer nearby]. I worked here all through my pregnancy with him, and was actually in labor planting the strawberries so it was fun to return to the strawberries with him the year after. He does say he wants to be a diver when he grows upâI wonder if thatâs just the ocean life contrasted to farm life. And this is Ojiah here, who Sedge named after the Ojiah maple tree. A lot of our work in the greenhouse is focused on enriching the soil, and we get really nutritious carrots from that.</em>â
<strong>Andy Glaser, 20</strong> <em> âAs a little kid I spent time in my parents vegetable garden. By the time I was twelve I did a lot of planting. When I was 13 I worked on an apple orchard and when I could work legally, at 14, I started working on a CSA farm and learned how to do vegetable production. In college I knew I wanted to study agriculture and scienceâwhich I'm working towards right now at Rutgers. I'm really interested in diversifying the food system with non-traditional cropsâlooking beyond corn, wheat, rice, and looking to traditional African millet, sorghum, quinoa, and amaranth. These are good foods that taste good, but they're also really nutritious. I'd eventually like to do more work with grain breeding too. I got a grant and worked 5 months in Thailand doing soil work through their agricultural ministry. I think we have a lot to teach the developing world and that the developing world has a lot to teach us too. And I think it's important to remember that amidst the Eat Local movement. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry">Wendell Berry</a> is the man. And another person I look up to is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug">Normal Borlaug</a>, who was sort of the father of the green revolution and who saved millions of lives through better crop science.â</em>
<strong>Harrison Willets, 22</strong> <em>âI work for the grass-fed livestock organizer at Stone Barns, <a href="http://www.starchefs.com/features/heritage_breed_turkeys/html/index.shtml">Craig Haney</a>. I came here because I wanted an introduction to many things. I didn't have much farming background, though my dad has an heirloom apple and pear orchard in North Carolina and I worked there. I went to culinary school but decided I didn't really want to be a cook. I still wanted to be involved in the food industry so I found this outlet. Here I basically help take care of the animals - sheep, pigs, turkeys, chickens, egg-laying chickens. We just started a goose programâwe're going to try and breed them for meat and egg production. We tried making goose foie gras this year without force-feeding the geese. The theory was that they would seasonally self-gorge, since it's their instinct to fatten up before migration, before the winter. It was a good experiment but it didn't exactly work out. I enjoyed raising the turkeys. They're pretty easy going, not like chickens. They do a really good job foraging through the fields and spreading manure at the same time.â</em><strong>Sarah Garraway-Elisabeth, 41</strong> <em>âI started out in horticulture in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as an intern in 1999. I just wanted to get into plants, I didn't want to work in an office. I was at the gift shop but when this internship came up I went for it. Then I worked in penthouses and private gardens in the city for a season. I was at the Parks Department for five years but was much more interested in sustainability. The Parks Department used a lot of pesticides and I had an interest in using compostânow my favorite thing in the world [laughs]. I was so impressed with the compost pile hereâtotal recycling. I'm the greenhouse manager. It's a half-acre space, we grow year round, and we sell to (Blue Hill at Stone Barns) as well as other restaurants. We grow up to eight different families, lettuce, carrots, spinach, chard, and the mustard family. And we rotate crops so that when one family comes out another replaces it.â </em>