Two years before the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was researching a book idea about rewilding—a subculture of the better-known land conservation movement where people pursue a preindustrial or even preagricultural, hunter-gatherer existence. My interviews included survivalists living on a tropical island, primitive skills enthusiasts creating forest schools and subsistence homesteaders. 

I’ve lived in cities my entire adult life, so it doesn’t take a psychologist to unpack my personal attraction to the idea of backpedaling from the increasing overwhelm of life in the twenty-first century: the incessant infiltration of technology and media; social isolation and loneliness; disconnection from nature, especially its troubling impact on our kids; escalating global conflict; and accelerating natural disasters validating our fears that the endgame of climate change is not only inevitable but happening now. 

Still, as time went on, I became a little weary of the doomsday pre-occupation. More importantly, I was unsure of its helpfulness. Everyone can feel the tumult of these times, but very few of us, myself included, have the wherewithal or the chutzpah to toss aside everything they’ve ever known and hunt and forage from a cabin in the woods. 

Some of the solutions being touted in the world of rewilding were inspiring, but I wished for a doable purpose in the here and now; preferably one where I would feel more alive and useful than I did rhapsodizing in front of a computer.

I also had a concurrent realization: In my longing to reclaim the ways of the past, it was traditional food culture that most lit my fire. And so, six months into COVID lockdown in Los Angeles, my husband and I decided, “enough with the daydreaming,” and sold everything we owned and moved with our two young daughters to Central Oregon, where I serendipitously stumbled into the area’s local food movement and subsequently enrolled in a groundbreaking farmer training program. The immersive internship was centered around regenerative agriculture—a new (but actually ancestral) and holistic approach to growing food that restores soil and biodiversity and sequesters carbon in the ground.

I’ve covered the ills of our industrialized food system for more than a decade, so regenerative farming was a field I was closely following. High-profile books and documentaries were pointing to its promise while sounding the alarm on the finiteness of intensive agriculture—warning of vanishing groundwater and the world’s dwindling supply of usable topsoil. Yet, until I encountered the training program in Oregon, it never occurred to me to actually take matters into my own hands and consider small, sustainable farming as a viable career path.

Author Jennifer Grayson at her first farmer training program.

A week into my first farm job, I realized it was the most joyful and fulfilling work I had ever experienced. After two months of being outside all day, nearly every day, I felt the best—both physically and mentally—that I ever had in my life. But the real transformation occurred as I began to meet and learn about the new and driven farmers, graziers and food activists emerging all over the country. They hadn’t grown up in farming families; they came from backgrounds vastly underrepresented in agriculture; and many of them were far younger than I was, not to mention decades younger than the average American farmer. I was awestruck by their intention and ingenuity. They hadn’t turned to this way of life as some back-to-the-land fantasy. They had chosen sustainable agriculture as a tactile way to affect environmental activism and food justice; for cultural reclamation; to reconnect to nature, food and community; to live aligned with their values; to do “something that means something.”

And during the environmental and societal reckoning of the pandemic—not to mention the collapse of the industrial food supply chain—the work of these regenerative farmers became more meaningful than ever before. They filled the void amid empty supermarket shelves and miles-long food lines and fed millions of Americans not just food but the most delicious food many of us had ever tasted. They witnessed hundreds of thousands of people needlessly dying of COVID due to diet-related disparities and pushed ahead for funding and food sovereignty. So I started to wonder: How could we scale a “greatest generation” of sustainable small farmers?

What would this country look like transformed by a vast network of resilient local food systems that restore the environment and ensure healthy, fresh food is accessible to all?

Archer Meier and Marlo Stein of Round Table Farm, a cheese and flower farm in Hardwick, Massachusetts. Photography via author.

These two questions launched me on the journey to write this book. But it was only later that I learned of their urgency. In the coming decade, 400 million acres of American farmland—nearly half of all farmland in the United States—will become available as the older generation of American farmers retires or dies. Meanwhile, the groundswell of new growers eager to steward that land are up against seemingly every obstacle: access to affordable land, access to capital, a livable income and the billionaires and corporations now grabbing farmland at a staggering pace. 

And yet, there’s hope: Big Ag may be the norm in the United States, but small growers globally produce around a third of the world’s food on farms of five acres or less.

Mapping research shows up to 90 percent of Americans could be fed entirely with food raised within 100 miles of where they live. Project Regeneration highlights regenerative agriculture and other nature-based farming methods as critical strategies in the plan to reverse global warming. And the human power exists: The number of new, beginning and young farmers has been increasing for the past 10 years, a trend unparalleled in the last century. 

Alison Pierce of Common Joy, a sustainable luffa farm run with husband Brian Wheat in Charleston, South Carolina. Photography via author.

I came to farming as an outsider, and that’s exactly the point. Two hundred years ago, nearly all of us lived and worked on the land that fed us (although not all of our own free will). Even a hundred years ago, one-third of us did. Today, that number stands at one percent. Yet, right now, so many of us are yearning for something we can’t name, an intangible we don’t even realize has been lost. It’s our connection to our food, that most fundamental of human needs, and it is that which ties us to everything else.

These are the stories of a new, diverse generation of agrarians unfolding an alternate vision of the future, if only more of us would join the call.

The post How Can We Mobilize New Farmers? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

This story is part of our Future Farmers series, highlighting the joys and hurdles of a career in agriculture today. 

Graeme Foers

Farm Name: Lost Meadows Apiaries & Meadery
Location: Essa Township, Ontario, Canada
Age: 33
Years Farming: 13

Tell us a bit about your farm: 
My farming season begins early February with the maple syrup season. I make maple syrup more traditionally with buckets and flat pans over fires outside. The season then turns to bees with my first queen graft right at the beginning of May. I produce around 100 queens per week for 12 weeks which are sold to beekeepers across Ontario. My queens are bred for a number of traits, but the most important being hygienic, mite resistant and overwintering ability. Aside from the queens my 200 hives make honey from around mid may to September. I keep the honey separate from each meadow and each month. This makes a huge range of different tasting honeys based on what was blooming and in what quantities when the bees collected it. I try and keep my bees away from commercial agriculture to help minimize the impact it has on my bees and also on influencing the flavor of the honey. I also own a small meadery on the farm with my sister, we use the honey from my hives to make the mead and have won several awards for it at the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto.

Why farming? What drew you to it as a livelihood?
I want to work at something that I find meaningful in life and that I feel I can leave behind as my contribution to society. For me that is through beekeeping and specifically breeding queen bees. My first beehive I had died and I was devastated. I decided that if I was going to have bees again I never wanted another hive to die, so I would have to be the best beekeeper I possibly could be. This lead me to queen rearing and eventually queen breeding and finding bees that are resistant to varroa mites, and other brood diseases, that are gentle and can thrive in this changing climate.

What advice or insight do you have for young people interested in farming?
Don’t stop believing in yourself, and try and be around people who believing you. Don’t be afraid to be part of the change even if a more experienced farmer tells you that’s not how to do it or its not the conventional way of doing it. Doing it your way may be the small difference you need to have customers buy your product and gain market share.

What are the barriers to being a young farmer, and how are you dealing with or overcoming them?
The biggest barrier for me is the extreme cost of everything from equipment to land and anything else involved like fuel and gas. I have had family members lend me some money for equipment purchases and I try not to expand too much at one time so I don’t stretch my resources too thin.

Greg & Amber Pollock

Farm Name: Sunfox Farm
Location: Concord, NH & Deerfield, NH
Years Farming: 5 years at Sunfox and total of 17 years of experience farming

Tell us a bit about your farm: 
Sunfox Farm is a small family operation in Central New Hampshire with a focus on sustainable and environmentally responsible agricultural practices. We specialize in growing sunflowers for oilseed production. A huge part of our business is agritourism, with our Annual Sunflower Bloom Festival being a quintessential summer event in the capital city of New Hampshire. We love reuniting people with the land and encouraging them to bring the whole family out to the farm! We grow using organic practices, and we’re currently working towards organic certification. We believe that by taking care of the earth, we can produce delicious and nutritious food that nourishes both the body and the soul. 

Our 2024 Sunflower Festival is August 10-18th. We have live music, local food trucks, and an artisan craft fair, with over 20 acres of sunflowers! In addition to the festival, Amber is a professionally trained chef and orchestrates seven-course, fine dining, farm-to-table meals in the sunflowers.

Why farming? What drew you to it as a livelihood?
There’s something truly magical about working outside and growing nutritious food for our community and family. It’s rewarding to see something through from start to finish—watching someone taste our sunflower oil for the first time and seeing their eyes light up makes us so proud. The work is hard, the days are long, our hands and feet are callused, and we wear our farmer tans with pride. We’re drawn to farming because it’s honest work, and it feels good to do it.

What advice or insight do you have for young people interested in farming?
You learn so much by doing. If you’ve never grown pumpkins, try it. If you’ve never set up an irrigation system, try it. If you’ve never changed the oil on a tractor, try it (with a little help from the owner’s manual). Farmers are jacks and jills of all trades, masters of none. It’s a perfect career for the curious mind. If you have even the slightest interest in farming, try it. The things you can learn are endless and it will always keep you on your toes. Farming isn’t ever perfect, but you can always find joy in the life of a farmer.

What are the barriers to being a young farmer, and how are you dealing with or overcoming them?
The biggest barrier we face as young farmers is land accessibility. Our dream is to someday own our own property, however, as of now we’ve only be able to secure leased or rented land. Finding a place to farm can make the adventure nearly impossible for many young farmers.

Another barrier is funding for equipment and infrastructure. Something that helped us was having a solid business plan. Within a year or two of starting our farm, we were able to provide well thought out projections and accounting documents. Being confident while discussing these items was integral in helping us acquire a loan to purchase our own equipment.

Sean Pessarra

Farm Name: Mindful Farmer
Location: Conway, Arkansas
Age: 36
Years Farming: 15

Tell us a bit about your farm: 
Mindful Farmer emerged from my desire to empower, educate, and equip the next generation of growers with appropriate technologies and tools tailored to small-scale farmers and gardeners, as well as sustainable and productive techniques. This inspiration struck when I worked at Heifer International and witnessed the challenges faced by small and mid-scale farms in the Southern US. Many struggled to find regional supplies and resorted to expensive shipping for products from distant sources. I also noticed that existing tools were often unsuitable for small-scale and beginning farmers, including many female farmers who make up a majority of newcomers to the field. In response, I designed multifunctional, scalable, high-quality tools with inclusivity in mind, setting the foundation for Mindful Farmer. I also set out to design high tunnels that were more affordable and approachable for beginning farmers.

Why farming? What drew you to it as a livelihood?
I’ve been in the farming industry for over a decade, starting my journey with part-time beekeeping while working as an environmental scientist in Texas. My passion for sustainable land stewardship led me to transition into sustainable agriculture in Central Arkansas. During this time, I managed organic vegetable production, conducted research, and hosted workshops. Farming, for me, represents a way to positively impact our environment, communities, and health. Witnessing the challenges conventional farming practices posed to our world’s health and the growing emotional and physical disconnect between people, their food, and the natural world, I felt a deep calling to be a part of the solution by promoting sustainable, regenerative agriculture. Farming as a whole is a dying trade, with the average age of farmers increasing and many farms consolidating under corporations and foreign entities. I believe that when farms are owned and operated locally, they are more motivated to steward the land well. This not only benefits the land and the farmer but also the local economy, public health, and the community as a whole.

What are the barriers to being a young farmer, and how are you dealing with or overcoming them?
Just as with the housing market, inflated prices, high-interest rates, and corporate competition have put farms and raw land out of reach for most young and beginning farmers. My wife and I dreamed early on in our marriage of raising our future kids on a farm of our own. Our oldest is 10 now, and we still have a ways to go. Without starting with a large sum of money or family land, the path is extremely steep. There is also a bit of a Catch-22 in that the jobs that give you the most agricultural knowledge often offer little in the way of disposable income to save up for a farm of your own.

Agriculture, especially small-scale sustainable agriculture, is a high-risk and low-margin industry. Most young farmers bootstrap the best they can as financial resources are hard to come by, often growing on leased land or going the route of small and intensive production.

Keaton Sinclair & Alanna Carlson

Farm Name: AKreGeneration
Location: Treaty Six Territory at Fiske, Saskatchewan, Canada
Age: 32 and 33
Years farming:  5 years (20+ years experience as a 3rd generation farmer)

Tell us a bit about your farm: 
We are connected to our family farm and do grain cropping and custom grazing using regenerative agriculture practices that prioritize plant and soil health. AKreGeneration is committed to restoring the land for generations to come, acre by AKre. Using the seven generations principle, we remember whose who came before us, and our decisions are guided by the seven generations that will come after us. Some of the different practices we use include: diverse crop rotation, cover crops, intercropping, low chemical use, biological fertilizer and seed treatment, soil amendments, and livestock incorporation.

After managing a 5-acre organic market garden for five years and selling wholesale, I saw the need and opportunity for a mid-scale diversified specialty crop operation in Arkansas. I am working toward my dream of cultivating 20 to 40 acres of organic vegetables for retail and wholesale markets. This type and size of farm, uncommon in the Southern US, could not only serve major production gaps in our area but also train apprentices and demonstrate a replicable model for organic mid-scale production.

Until our dream of a larger farm of our own becomes a reality, we are growing a small selection of vegetables and cut flowers in our backyard garden and at an urban farm we are leasing in Little Rock at the St. Joseph Center, a nonprofit focused on saving a historic urban farm, promoting agricultural education, and assisting in food security projects in the area. We sell vegetables and flowers to the farm stand on the property and to Bell Urban Farm in Conway.

Why farming? What drew you to it as a livelihood?
We grew up farming with our families and thrived working on the land and being connected to and learning from the plants and animals and other farmers. We see the regenerative farm as a good way to listen to the land, improve the soil health, natural ecosystem, nutrient integrity of the plants, improve profitability and enhance our lifestyle. We both got educations and live in the city, but are drawn back to the land, and want to farm in a way that is sustainable for us and the ecosystem.

What advice or insight do you have for young people interested in farming?
Go get your hands dirty and get experience working on the land, any land. You might not get much for clear answers if you directly ask for advice. Build relationships. Join groups and unions. Find farmers that will spend time talking or working with you so you can learn different practices and principles; everyone does things different. Listen to their stories and wisdom and follow what you think is aligned with your plan. Nothing happens in a hurry.

Nick DiDomenico & Marissa Pulaski (DAR) || Azuraye Wycoff (Yellow Barn Farm)

Nick DiDomenico & Marissa Pulaski

Farm Name: Elk Run Farm | Yellow Barn Farm
Location: Longmont Colorado
Age: All are 33
Time Farming: Elk Run since 2015, over 9 years; Yellow Barn since 2020. 
 

In 2015, Nick DiDomenico set out to farm 14 deeply degraded acres in the foothills near Lyons, Colorado. There was only enough well water to irrigate less than an acre of de-vegetated property. When Nick reached out to the NRCS for advice on how to restore the land to a farmable state, they advised him to find another piece of land; without irrigation potential, there was no documented way to revitalize the land. From that moment, Elk Run Farm became a living experiment in how to restore deeply degraded land in a semi-arid climate without irrigation.
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Today, Elk Run Farm is a thriving oasis in the high desert. Using passive water harvesting contour swales, 1000 trees and shrubs have been planted without irrigation, demonstrating a 79% survival rate across four years. What was a compact gravel parking lot is now five inches of rich topsoil that supports bioregional staple crops including blue corn, dry beans, amaranth, and grain sorghum. An average of 10 interns and residents eat 90% of a complete diet year round from the integrated forest garden, staple grain, and silvopasture systems on site.

In 2015, Drylands Agroecology Research (DAR) took over management of 14 deeply degraded acres on the Front Range of Colorado. The unprecedented regeneration of this land set the stage for our organization to grow.

Azuraye Wycoff and family

Established in 1865, Yellow Barn Farms was originally Allen’s Farm– an international equestrian center operating as a large-scale event and boarding facility with over 50 horses and 100 riders. Yellow Barn revitalized the land for low-scale, high-quality food production, community-supported agriculture, and sustainability education. In partnership with Drylands Agroecology Research (DAR), Yellow Barn researches, implements, and practices regenerative farming, animal management, carbon sequestration, soil health, and dynamic/adaptable organizational structures.

For too long modern agriculture has ignored the call of the land, exploiting its gifts and decimating thousands of species — species integral to the health of our ecosystem — to serve a single one.

Now, it’s time to make amends with the land, its inhabitants, and its original stewards. By implementing circular, regenerative, closed-loop systems, we’re engaging in a reciprocal relationship with the land, offering services like composting, workshops, farm-to-tables, indigenous-led celebrations.

Why farming? What drew you to it as a livelihood?
This work is for the future. This work is so that our children can have a future. Not just any future, but a future worth getting up in the morning for. A future to take pride in, to savor, to relish, to enjoy the sweet victory of laughter that glows on late into a summer night. The taste of fruit off the vine. Together with music and the smell of warm food and smiles. That’s what we want our children to remember us by.

In the last 4 years, it has become even more clear to us the distress that so many are facing in this time. It has become even more clear what is at stake. It has become even more clear what we have to gain. But throughout, the original instructions continue to anchor us: take care of our home, this Earth; take care of each other.

The post Young Farmers Cultivating Change appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Dzap’l Gye’a̱win Skiik translates to busy eagle or an eagle who gets things done. A perfect name for Jacob Beaton. As an Indigenous businessman from the Tsimshian First Nation, he never imagined himself farming or teaching others. He lived a quintessentially suburban life with his wife and two sons before devastating wildfires and floods in B.C. inspired him to start thinking about climate change and food security for his family. 

In 2018, they bought Tea Creek, a 140-acre farm outside the village of Kitwanga in northern B.C. With the intent of keeping most of the property forested and only farming a few acres, they settled into farm life. But Beaton had to learn from scratch. He turned to YouTube videos and started visiting other small organic farms throughout the Pacific Northwest and as far away as Europe. 

Jacob Beaton stands in his field on Tea Creek.

“Farming, ranching, field base food production were a big part of Indigenous culture in this region that got wiped out by the Indian Act,” says Beaton. When the act was enacted in 1876, it took control over land rights and access away from Indigenous populations, which blocked most agricultural opportunities. “Immediately, from day one, our First Nations friends local to the area started dropping by, really excited that we were farming,” he says. Some remembered stories their grandparents and great-grandparents had told about farming in the area and asked Beaton to come to their communities and teach them.

But he was busy learning himself and, as he put it, there’s only one of me to go around. In 2020, the pandemic struck, and with food sovereignty top of mind for Indigenous communities in the region, it quickly became clear to the Beatons that they could do more to help their community and it was time to expand. Developing the Food Sovereignty Training Program, they invited Indigenous people interested in learning how to grow their own food to Tea Creek. 

Providing skills training in a culturally appropriate and empowering way is not an easy thing to do, but Beaton is “the eagle who gets things done.” 

Realizing that whatever was taught at Tea Creek had to translate into marketable skills and employment opportunities, Beaton enlisted support from SkilledTrade BC. Working with  employers, industry and government, Skills Trade BC approves non-public training providers, such as Tea Creek, to train and certify individuals who meet industry and government accreditation standards in their trade of choice. Tea Creek is able to offer apprenticeship programs and train an individual all the way to Red Seal certification. Recognized as the interprovincial standard of excellence in the skilled trades, it is the highest level of training in the country. 

Programs run from January to November, and they are open to Indigenous peoples 16 and up at no cost. Meals are provided and bunkhouse accommodation is available. All programs have Indigenous instructors and include carpentry, safety training, first aid, drone mapping, heavy equipment operation, cooking, horticultural training and administration. 

An aerial view of the farm. Photo courtesy of Tea Creek

Tea Creek is not a school with desks and classrooms. The land is the classroom. All courses are held outside as much as possible. Instructional cohorts are small, ranging from three to six people. This creates better opportunities for instructors and mentors to connect with trainees who in turn receive more hands-on learning experiences. 

Arriving at Tea Creek in 2020, Sheldon Good was 23 years old when he learned to repair and operate tractors. He says the experience at Tea Creek motivated him to get up during the day and do things. “The environment is really welcoming and there are really nice people taking care of everything,” he says. Acquiring skills he otherwise wouldn’t have learned, he now works at a sawmill.

Tea Creek though is more than learning to operate a backhoe or tractor. The farming methods taught here include best practices from regenerative and conventional farming. This includes learning how to make fertilizer from compost and using a tractor to till the soil. Beaton’s business savvy has him insisting that trainees leave Tea Creek with a range of economically viable farming skills. With food sovereignty top of mind, traditional Indigenous crops such as corn are grown alongside kale, broccoli and lettuce. In 2022, the first crop of Ozette potatoes was harvested. These fingerling potatoes, renowned for their nutty flavor, were brought to the Pacific Northwest from South America by Spanish settlers 200 years ago. Grown primarily by First Nations peoples, they were rarely known outside of Indigenous communities until the late 20th century.

Tea Creek in B.C. Photo courtesy of Tea Creek

In 2023, Tea Creek hosted Farmstand Fridays where 20,000 pounds of fresh mixed vegetables were distributed to Indigenous families and communities. Tea Creek also prepares and serves 100 hot meals per day to trainees and staff using vegetables from the farm. 

In 2021, Tea Creek’s first year of accredited training, 33 people graduated from Food Sovereignty Training programs. Last year, 292 Indigenous people enrolled in training programs and more than 140 graduated from at least one course. 

“Tea Creek, can solve Canada’s farmer shortage. If funded and supported in a real way, Tea Creek could be scaled with multiple training centers across the country.” Jacob Beaton

It’s estimated that, by 2033, 40 percent of all farm operators in Canada will retire. Two-thirds don’t have succession plans in place. 

“Tea Creek, I’ve been told,” says Beaton, “in the area of agriculture, outputs more people in a year than any other agricultural training program in the province.” With a waiting list of 75 First Nations from the east to west coasts eager to learn, there is no shortage of enthusiasm. 

The legacies of Canada’s Indian Act, though, are far reaching. Canada’s residential school system stripped Indigenous children of their cultural identity and language. This has caused intergenerational harm that continues to be experienced through ongoing marginalization and systemic racism.

In 2023, 93 percent of Indigenous youth attending programs at Tea Creek identified this historical trauma as a factor in their mental health challenges. Through the peer-to-peer counseling Tea Creek offers, the sense of belonging and the purpose it provides through its training, 100 percent of trainees 30 and under, in 2023, reported improvements in their mental well-being. This is Tea Creek’s real success. 

“Before I got here, I was really in a dark place,” says Justice Moore, who is featured in the film Tea Creek, part of CBC’s Absolutely Canadian documentary series. “I was getting to the point of, just, no return. That’s the only way I can put it. I wouldn’t be here if Tea Creek weren’t here. That’s a fact.”

This story is part of our Future Farmers series, highlighting the joys and hurdles of a career in agriculture today. You can read more of this series here. 

The post Meet the Farmer Training Indigenous Youth and Revitalizing a Culture of Food Sovereignty appeared first on Modern Farmer.

For young people interested in a career in agriculture, there can be many roadblocks in their path. The price of land continues to rise, grants and educational opportunities can be hard to come by and there’s a steep learning curve for folks who didn’t grow up in a farming family.  

As we kick off our coverage of Future Farmers, we wanted to hear directly from the people facing these impediments: the young farmers themselves. What issues are they really grappling with? Is our perception of the agricultural landscape accurate or do they see a different future playing out? 

Sara Dent. Photography courtesy of @youngagrarians/Instagram.

Modern Farmer sat down with Sara Dent, co-founder of the Young Agrarians, to talk about issues young farmers face and some surprising ways we can start to solve them. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Modern Farmer: It seems that there are a lot of issues that young farmers face when starting out: cost, a knowledge gap, land access and more. Do you see a common thread that ties these issues together or does it seem like we’ll have to tackle things individually?

Sara Dent: Well, just to start, I’d like to note that I’m on Tla’amin, Klahoose and Homalco Nation land. And I think this conversation is really fascinating, because if you look before colonization, and see how the land was stewarded and the abundance of systems, you look at how colonization came in that it used up a lot of the natural resources. It broke up the people and the ecology of the landscape and parceled it into the British land title system. And now we’re in 2024, we have market failure conditions for agriculture. And there’s a low tolerance at the institutional level for recognizing those market failure conditions. 

When I first started Young Agrarians, it was really driven by enabling coordination in the sector and addressing three main barriers, which is access to land, access to capital and access to knowledge.

The piece that we could start with was access to knowledge and facilitating that through farmer-to-farmer conversations. Farmers are the ones that train new farmers and support new people to get their feet underneath them. We started working on the land access piece in 2016, and now we’re trying to increase influence around the access to capital piece, advancing policy at a municipal, federal and provincial level. But policy is really like a living body. It’s composed of everybody. It’s composed of the eaters, it’s composed of the people growing the food, it’s composed of the banks [that] are lending it to the agricultural space, governments that are regulating agricultural space and creating the eligibility criteria that evaluates the whole sector.

And we are seeing a major decline in agriculture; the farming population in Canada is very low. Indeed, the last census showed that [of the 262,455 farm operators] fewer than 23,000 were under the age of 35.  

MF: So, if policy is the most, let’s say, unwieldy of the areas of influence you mentioned, what are the policy challenges?

SD: One of the big policy challenges for new farmers in the country is that, for a lot of governments, their norm is bigger industry, the policy is really driven by bigger industry, bigger farms. But when you look at new-generation people coming in, they have to start somewhere. So, we often talk about “scale-appropriate” policy.

For young people entering the sector, people that are actually accessing land, how do we support them? And then the people who are in that startup window of your one, two, year five? And they’re all starting at different scales. But we really try to focus with government on talking about scale appropriate. The old market analysis says “the bigger the better.” But a lot of big farms have huge debt margins, and if they have a bad year, it can be really damaging for them. However, what they have going for them is if they own the land, at least they have that equity in the land. 

You can see that smaller-scale models might actually be more effective financially than larger-scale models. New farms today have to figure out what their value proposition is, they have to be really super focused to figure out how they’re going to survive and what their niches are. So, in my mind, one of these big policy shifts is understanding that bigger isn’t always better. 

Ardeo, the farmer at Rake & Radish Farm in Saanich, BC. Ardeo was matched to farmland through the B.C. Land Matching Program in 2020. Photography via @youngagrarians/Instagram

MF: You mentioned that there are three main areas that new farmers can struggle with: access to capital, knowledge and land. Let’s start with capital. Why is it more difficult for young people to get access to capital or loans?

SD: So, traditional lending is based on leveraging asset as collateral in order to get approved for a loan. If you look at new-gen farmers that are coming in, that don’t necessarily own the land, so they have nothing to offer up as collateral, and they aren’t able to access traditional lending. They can’t afford to buy the property, they can’t qualify for that mortgage and they can’t access the lending. 

What we’re working towards is getting the Canadian Agricultural Loans Act updated so that it allows character-based lending and working capital for farmers, so that they don’t have to own the land in order to access the lending program. There’s a really interesting loan program out of Quebec called FIRA, the originator of which, Paul, has done incredible work. It’s a land acquisition fund, and then they sell it back to the farmer as they get their business underneath them.

Kailli from Dancing Dandelion Farms (left) mentors Lolo from Buttercup Sandwich Florals. Photography via @youngagrarians/Instagram

But there’s a big lending gap in the country today. For example, there’s no provincial lender in British Columbia that does character-based lending. In Ontario, the Fair Finance Fund has a national fund for BIPOC candidates, because those candidates weren’t able to get their loans from the traditional lenders. For example, First Nations farmers on reserve land, they aren’t the title holder of the land, so accessing that loan capital is just not possible. 

MF: Access to land feels tied into the access to capital issue, as well. Many people just can’t afford to purchase land. 

SD: Yeah, absolutely. Every year, farmland values are published across the country, looking at the per-acre rates, and I always find the per-acre rates a little disingenuous, because you might have a per acre average rate for an entire province, but if you’re trying to buy something in northern BC versus southern BC, it’s going to be completely different per acre. 

But for people who can’t acquire the land, leasing becomes an important option for new farmers who are just getting their feet underneath them—and, you know, making sure that farming is really for them, that they have a value proposition in the business that they’re operating, that they’re working at the right scale. So, we’re running our BC Land Matching Program, putting out resource guides for farmers across the country to help them navigate that leasing space. Because when you’re leasing, you’re at risk of losing the property if the owner sells. Or what if the owner dies, what if the kids inherit the land? How do you negotiate a lease that has all the right terms in it for your agricultural operation? That’s part of the educational resource work that Young Agrarians has been doing over the last decade, to try and prepare new entrants better for leasing properties. We learned a lot from looking at the US models, like Land for Good and California FarmLink. 

MF: And then lastly, there’s access to knowledge. Young Agrarians has an apprenticeship program to pair up new farmers with working mentors to help bridge that gap. 

SD: Yeah, we work with farmers who are doing agri-ecology, who want to do education and train. I think we’ve had something like 70 farms work in the program and a little over 80 young people go through the apprenticeship program, but in the big picture, we actually need about 500 of apprenticeships and farms per province. Right now, we’re running that program in Western Canada, British Columbia to Manitoba. And the question is, will that program work at a national offering? The complexity there is finding the right farms and then also having things like housing and being well suited to being educational. 

It’s really beautiful when somebody comes in and they have this life-changing experience and the light is turned on and they’re in love with farming and that’s their pathway forward. 

MF: It must be so gratifying when it feels like a match between apprentice and farm really clicks. 

SD: That’s why I still do this work. We get notes from people regularly, like someone who took a business boot camp course, and then you talk to them two years later, and they’re operating their business. And there’s a lot of beautiful stories that have come out of the network that definitely keeps the staff going. 

Steve and Julian of Milpa Naturals are growing their farm and business with the help of the Business Mentorship Network. Photography via @youngagrarians/Instagram

MF: We’ve talked about some community-level and grassroots solutions, like your apprenticeship program. But what might solve some of these issues at a federal or policy level? 

SD: I started doing some national policy writing stuff on behalf of the organization in 2021. And I started to understand that there were a lot of people at the institutional level who were interested in these issues, but the knowledge gap (from the policy makers) was significant. 

One thing I talk a lot about is eligibility criteria for new entrants. I think that’s really important, because new farmers are totally under invested in Canada and arguably also in the United States, in North America in general, perhaps even globally. They’re extremely under invested, so getting people to think about their eligibility criteria is really key.

I could be in a meeting with somebody working on eligibility criteria for a financial loan program and I’ll say ‘could you put a $50,000 greenhouse on your credit card and then wait to get reimbursed months later?’ And many people realize, ‘oh, yeah, that’s right. I can’t do that. I can’t just go out and buy all this equipment on my credit card and wait to get repaid for it.’

So, I’ve been addressing the elephant in the room by going directly for the eligibility criteria. Because without it, the farmers that look at this application form are just never going to be able to access your programs. 

MF: That sounds like a great entry point into this conversation. 

SD: Exactly. And some of the legislation needs to change, and a lot of it is just getting the right people at the table over and over to change the cultural conversation. 

This story is part of our Future Farmers series, highlighting the joys and hurdles of a career in agriculture today. You can read more of this series here. 

The post What Are the Big Issues for Young Farmers? We Asked Them appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It was mid-February, and in Oaxaca City, Mexico, temperatures were just starting to climb into the 80s. Spring is the hot season here, and in addition to weathering the heat, my partner and I were also in the midst of a move from the home we’d rented near the city center for two years to a little house out in the countryside.

Our spacious spot in the city had served us well, but we had become increasingly worried about the one main issue we had faced there: the severe water shortage experienced by many of Oaxaca City’s approximately 300,000 inhabitants. For several months every dry season, we and our neighbors received municipal water only once every 42 days—a situation that has become the new normal over the past few years. When this water is sent through the city’s aging system of pipes and arrives in private households, Oaxaca dwellers store the water in giant rooftop water tanks called tinacos—or, even better, in large underground cisterns—in order to have continual access to water throughout the month. But even though my partner and I rented a house with a large 10,000-liter-capacity cistern—and although we took daily measures to curb our water consumption—more frequently than not, our cistern routinely ran dry before the next water delivery, leaving us without water for days at a time: Hello, washcloth “showers” using bottled water purchased from the corner store.

Lauren Rothman with her partner and dogs.

When we looked for a new house to rent outside the densely populated city center, we reviewed listings located in areas known to have more regular water delivery. We found a new space, but with just two days left to clean the large house from top to bottom in order to recoup our security deposit, we woke to bone-dry taps. We hurriedly contacted several pipa companies— water trucks that extract the liquid from private wells and deliver between 3,500 and 10,000 liters at a time; most of them, completely at capacity shuttling water around the municipality, never responded. Those who did quoted us outrageous prices and couldn’t even deliver until several days later. So, our final hours in our city home saw us toting heavy 20-liter plastic bottles of water up our hot asphalt street, in order to be able to wash the windows and mop the floors before moving out.

Day Zero is coming

Even those far from Oaxaca City have likely heard about Mexico’s headline-making droughts and Mexico City’s dire lack of municipal water. That enormous megatropolis—home to an estimated 22 million people—is possibly facing a “Day Zero”—or complete loss of water—as early as this month. A one-two punch of a combination of climate change and rapid urban growth is quickly draining the aquifer underneath North America’s largest city, according to Scientific American, and the problem is far from unique to either Mexico City or Oaxaca City, with historic water scarcity affecting 30 of 32 of the country’s states or almost 131 million people. 

To get a sense of the situation here in Oaxaca City—and, by extension, the entire state, home to approximately four million inhabitants—I spoke with Juan José Consejo Dueñas, director of INSO, the Instituto de la Naturaleza y la Sociedad de Oaxaca (Oaxacan Institute of Nature and Society). Established in 1991, the civil association supports communities across Oaxaca in projects focusing on environmental conservation and, since 2003, Aguaxaca has been the association’s main project. The goal is to secure consistent sources of clean water through the restoration of potable water networks, installation of absorption wells and rainwater collection systems.

Juan José Consejo Dueñas, director of INSO, photographed at his office downtown. Photography by Lauren Rothman.

“Water doesn’t really need an explanation,” says Consejo as we sit around a large table in his office scattered with informational handouts and books published by INSO. “It’s essential for life: not just biological life—we are all basically water—but also at an ecological level. There is no ecological system that doesn’t require water, and it’s essential for any social system.” 

It’s not a shortage, it’s a loss

So, how did Oaxaca’s water situation get to where it is today? First of all, Consejo is quick to correct my usage of the term “shortage.” “There is no water shortage,” he says, explaining that the local climate is characterized by a dry season of little to no rainfall (typically November through April) and a wet season of abundant rainfall (typically May through October). “We can’t speak of scarcity when what we really have is an excess— a destructive excess—of water for many months.”

During the rainy season, says Consejo, an average of 88 cubic meters of rain falls every second during a heavy rainstorm, enough to fill 88 1,000 litre tinacos. The real problem, says Consejo, is the difference, over time, in the way this rainfall is absorbed by the earth and filters down into the underground water table. In a functioning “hydrosocial” water cycle, about a quarter of each rainfall should be absorbed back into the earth. But in Oaxaca, where rapid urban development has led to a huge increase in paved roads and unchecked deforestation and where a robust mining industry has altered the physical landscape, water infiltration has been severely reduced, to about 15 percent. 

“It’s an enormously destructive process, drastically altering the soil and requiring an enormous quantity of water,” says Consejo of the open-pit mining industry in Oaxaca, particularly the mining of gold and silver. Since 2003, residents of the Oaxacan community of Capulálpam de Méndez have railed against the government-approved mining of minerals there by the corporation La Natividad, claiming that the activities have drained 13 of the area’s aquifers as their clean water has been diverted towards mining operations. Earlier this month, widespread protests by citizens shut down access to the rural town, and local participation in the national presidential election on June 2 could not proceed. 

A “pipa” truck delivering potable water in Oaxaca’s colonial city center. Photography by Lauren Rothman.

In an analysis of land coverage, INSO found that, in 2005, about 50 square kilometers of Oaxaca’s urban center were paved, in comparison to 1980, when about 10 square kilometers were paved, with other coverings including agriculture, forest and pastures. All that pavement causes rainwater to just run off, instead of sinking into the ground, and prevents it from settling into natural pools and man-made dams. 

“We lower absorption, we raise runoff, we lower evaporation, and then what do we do with any clean water we have left? We pollute it,” says Consejo, referring to the practice of mixing pure water with human waste, as well as all the chemical runoff present in the soil.

Searching for solutions

SOAPA, Sistema Operador de los Servicios de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado (Drinking Water and Sewage Services), is the state governmental agency responsible for the distribution of municipal water to city residents. While the agency did not respond to requests for an interview, I was able to speak with Elsa Ortíz Rodríguez, secretary of the city’s department of Environment and Climate Change. She says the municipal system of underground pipes that deliver the water distributed by SOAPA is extremely old, built more than 40 years ago—and rapidly and haphazardly expanded since then. “In some spots, the pipes are fractured and leak water underground,” says Ortiz. “With old pipes, you also have to think about rust, which can also reduce the final amount of water that’s delivered.”

Secretary of Environment and Climate Change Elsa Ortíz Rodríguez, photographed at her downtown office in front of trees slated to be planted throughout Oaxaca City. Photography by Lauren Rothman.

In order to address the water scarcity issue, Ortiz’s department finances a variety of projects focusing primarily on reforestation within the city limits. However, she admits that the usual impediments have limited the impact of these projects over the 2.5-year course of her administration, which will turn over in another six months: a lack of funding and a lack of coordination among city, state and national governments.

As Juan José Consejo Dueñas explains, governments tend to propose complicated and expensive engineering projects to “solve” the water problem. In the case of Mexico City, the “solution” has been Cutzamala, a sprawling system that directs water to the metropolis from the river of the same name, located 100 kilometers away. Oaxaca’s government has proposed something similar: a grand engineering project to extract water from the Paso Ancho dam in the Mixteca region, located 100 kilometers south of the city. 

Because the Cutzamala system relies on a vast network of dams to store the water—and dams are subject to increased evaporation due to rising temperatures—it’s not the most efficient system. “We have the Mexico City model, which is exactly what we shouldn’t be doing,” says Consejo.

The bulletin board at INSO. Photography by Lauren Rothman.

Instead, Consejo says, the solution to the water problems faced by the region lies in redefining our relationship to water. One of INSO’s primary projects is a restored nature area in the community of San Andrés Huayápam, called El Pedregal. An operating permaculture center, El Pedregal features dry toilets, rainwater collection systems, humidity-preserving trenches,\ and other responsible water use projects. Generally, Oaxacan sentiment places little faith in the ability or desire of the government to suitably respond to the complex water issue, making grassroots initiatives such as El Pedregal all the more important. 

In my new home—located, incidentally, a stone’s throw from El Pedregal in the community of Huayápam—we receive municipal water at least once a week, sometimes twice. The area, at a higher elevation than the city, has been known throughout history for possessing clean water; its name, in the indigenous language Nahuatl, translates to “on the ocean,” referring to its large bodies of water. Even here, however, the water situation is by no means stable, with recent photos showing two of the area’s largest man-made dams at some of their lowest historical levels. 

Our move has alleviated most of the water issues we face, but moving is simply not an option for many families, nor would doing so solve the problem impacting millions around the country. This feeling of hopelessness has led to numerous protests around Oaxaca, with citizens demanding that SOAPA send more water. In mid-March, residents of the Monte Albán neighborhood close to Oaxaca’s world-famous restored pyramid site took to their streets to denounce more than 40 days without municipal water. Residents of the Figueroa neighborhood, near SOAPA’s downtown headquarters, followed suit a week later, making it clear that as long as widespread water mismanagement persists in this area, so too, will social unrest.

The post Mexican Cities and States Could Run Out of Water. What’s the Solution? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Era mediados de febrero y, en la Ciudad de Oaxaca, México, las temperaturas comenzaban a subir a los 80 grados Fahrenheit. La primavera es la temporada de calor aquí, y además de soportar el calor, mi pareja y yo estábamos en medio de una mudanza desde la casa que habíamos alquilado cerca del centro de la ciudad durante dos años, a una pequeña casa en el campo.

Nuestro espacioso lugar en la ciudad nos había servido bien, pero nos preocupaba cada vez más el principal problema que habíamos enfrentado allí: la grave escasez de agua que experimentan muchos de los aproximadamente 300,000 habitantes de la Ciudad de Oaxaca. Durante varios meses, en cada temporada seca, nosotros y nuestros vecinos recibíamos agua municipal solo una vez cada 42 días, una situación que se ha convertido en la nueva normalidad en los últimos años. Cuando esta agua se envía a través del envejecido sistema de tuberías de la ciudad y llega a los hogares privados, los habitantes de Oaxaca almacenan el agua en grandes tanques de agua en los techos llamados tinacos, o mejor aún, en grandes cisternas subterráneas, para tener acceso continuo al agua durante todo el mes. Pero, aunque mi pareja y yo rentábamos una casa con una gran cisterna de 10,000 litros de capacidad y tomábamos medidas diarias para reducir nuestro consumo de agua, con más frecuencia de lo que quisiéramos, nuestra cisterna se quedaba vacía antes de la siguiente entrega de agua, dejándonos sin agua durante días: Hola, “duchas” con toallitas usando agua embotellada comprada en la tienda de la esquina.

Lauren Rothman.

Cuando buscábamos una nueva casa para rentar fuera del densamente poblado centro de la ciudad, revisábamos listados ubicados en zonas conocidas por tener una entrega de agua más regular. Encontramos un nuevo lugar, pero con solo dos días restantes para limpiar la gran casa desde arriba hasta abajo para poder recuperar nuestro depósito, despertamos con los grifos completamente secos. Nos apresuramos a contactar a varias compañías de pipas, camiones de agua que extraen el líquido de pozos privados y entregan entre 3,500 y 10,000 litros a la vez; la mayoría de ellas, completamente ocupadas transportando agua por el municipio, nunca respondieron. Las que lo hicieron nos cotizaron precios escandalosamente elevados y ni siquiera podían entregar hasta varios días después. Así que nuestras últimas horas en la casa de la ciudad nos vieron cargando pesadas garrafones de 20 litros por nuestra calurosa calle de asfalto, para poder lavar las ventanas y trapear los pisos antes de mudarnos.

Se Acerca el “Día Cero”

Hasta los que viven lejos de la Ciudad de Oaxaca a lo mejor han escuchado de las sequías en México que aparecen en los titulares y de la grave falta de agua municipal en la Ciudad de México. Esa enorme megápolis, hogar de un estimado de 22 millones de personas, posiblemente enfrente un “Día Cero,” o una pérdida total de agua, tan pronto como este mes. Una combinación de cambio climático y rápido crecimiento urbano está drenando rápidamente el acuífero debajo de la ciudad más grande de América del Norte, según Scientific American, y el problema toca a muchos lugares más que la Ciudad de México o la Ciudad de Oaxaca, con una escasez de agua histórica que afecta a 30 de los 32 estados del país, o casi 131 millones de personas.

Para tener una idea de la situación aquí en la Ciudad de Oaxaca, y por extensión, en todo el estado, hogar de aproximadamente 4 millones de habitantes, hablé con Juan José Consejo Dueñas, el director del INSO, el Instituto de la Naturaleza y la Sociedad de Oaxaca. Establecida en 1991, esta asociación civil apoya a las comunidades de todo Oaxaca en proyectos enfocados en la conservación ambiental y, desde 2003, Aguaxaca ha sido el proyecto principal de la asociación. El objetivo es asegurar fuentes consistentes de agua limpia mediante la restauración de redes de agua potable, la instalación de pozos de absorción y sistemas de recolección de agua de lluvia.

Juan José Consejo Dueñas, director del INSO, en su oficina en el centro de Oaxaca.

“El agua casi que no se necesita explicar,” dice Consejo mientras nos sentamos alrededor de una gran mesa en su oficina, llena de folletos informativos y libros publicados por el INSO. “Es esencial para la vida: no solo para la vida biológica—somos básicamente agua—sino para el nivel ecológico. No hay ningún sistema ecológico que no requiere el agua, y es esencial para el sistema social.”

No es una escasez, es una pérdida

Entonces, ¿cómo surgió la situación actual del agua en Oaxaca? Antes que todo, Consejo rápidamente corrige mi uso del término “escasez.” “No hay escasez de agua,” dice, explicando que el clima local se caracteriza por una temporada seca con poca o nada de lluvia (típicamente de noviembre a abril) y una temporada húmeda con lluvias abundantes (típicamente de mayo a octubre). “No podemos hablar de escasez cuando en realidad lo que tenemos es un exceso—sobre todo un exceso destructivo—de agua en muchos meses.”

Durante la temporada de lluvias, explica Consejo, caen en promedio 88 metros cúbicos de lluvia por segundo durante una tormenta fuerte, lo suficiente para rellenar 88 tinacos de 1,000 litros cada uno. El verdadero problema, destaca Consejo, es la diferencia, a lo largo del tiempo, en la forma en que esta lluvia es absorbida por la tierra y se filtra hasta el acuífero subterráneo. En un ciclo “hidrosocial” funcional, aproximadamente una cuarta parte de cada lluvia debería infiltrarse en el suelo. Pero en Oaxaca, donde el rápido desarrollo urbano ha llevado a un gran aumento de calles pavimentadas y a una deforestación desenfrenada, y donde una robusta industria minera ha alterado el paisaje físico, la infiltración de agua se ha reducido severamente, a aproximadamente un 15 por ciento.

“Es un proceso enormemente destructivo porque implica un cambio muy drástico del uso de suelo y se requiere una enorme cantidad de agua,” dice Consejo, refiriéndose a la industria minera a cielo abierto en Oaxaca, particularmente la minería de oro y plata. Desde 2003, los residentes de la comunidad oaxaqueña de Capulálpam de Méndez han manifestado contra la minería de minerales aprobada por el gobierno de allí, llevada a cabo por la corporación La Natividad, alegando que las actividades han drenado 13 de los acuíferos de la zona, ya que su agua limpia ha sido desviada hacia las operaciones mineras. A principios de este mes, protestas generalizadas por parte de los ciudadanos cerraron el acceso al pueblo rural, y la participación local en la elección presidencial nacional del 2 de junio no pudo proceder.

Una pipa entregando agua potable en el centro colonial de Oaxaca.

En un análisis de la cobertura del suelo, INSO determinó que, en 2005, aproximadamente 50 kilómetros cuadrados del centro urbano de Oaxaca estaban pavimentados, en comparación con 1980, cuando unos 10 kilómetros cuadrados estaban pavimentados, con otras coberturas que incluían agricultura, bosques y pastizales. Todo ese pavimento hace que el agua de lluvia simplemente escurra, en lugar de infiltrarse en el suelo, y evita que se acumule en pozas naturales y presas hechas por el hombre.

Disminuimos infiltración, aumentamos escurrimiento, disminuimos evapotranspiración, y el cuarto es que las fuentes superficiales y también las del subsuelo las estamos contaminando,” comenta Consejo, refiriéndose a la práctica de mezclar agua pura con desechos humanos, así como a todos los productos químicos presentes en el suelo.

Buscando soluciones

SOAPA, Sistema Operador de los Servicios de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado, es la agencia gubernamental estatal responsable de la distribución de agua municipal a los residentes de la ciudad. Aunque la agencia no respondió a mi solicitud de entrevista, pude hablar con Elsa Ortíz Rodríguez, Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Cambio Climático de la ciudad. Ella explica que el sistema municipal de tuberías subterráneas que distribuyen el agua de SOAPA es extremadamente antiguo, construido hace más de 40 años, y expandido rápidamente y desordenadamente desde entonces. 

“En algunos lugares la tubería ya está vieja y está fracturada,” dice Ortíz. “E incluso cuando estás hablando de tubería vieja, estás hablando de oxidaciones que pueden de alguna forma aminorar la calidad del agua.”

Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Cambio Climático Elsa Ortíz Rodríguez, en su oficina en el centro, delante de unos árboles que se sembrarán por Oaxaca.

Para abordar el problema de la escasez de agua, el departamento de Ortíz financia una variedad de proyectos centrados principalmente en la reforestación dentro de la ciudad. Sin embargo, admite que los impedimentos habituales han limitado el impacto de estos proyectos durante los 2.5 años de su administración, que terminará en seis meses: la falta de financiación y la falta de coordinación entre el gobierno metropolitano, estatal y nacional.

Como explica Juan José Consejo Dueñas, los gobiernos tienden a proponer proyectos de ingeniería complicados y costosos para “resolver” el problema del agua. En el caso de la Ciudad de México, la “solución” ha sido Cutzamala, un extenso sistema que dirige agua a la metrópolis desde el río del mismo nombre, ubicado a 100 kilómetros de distancia. El gobierno de Oaxaca ha propuesto algo parecido: un gran proyecto de ingeniería para extraer agua de la presa Paso Ancho en la región de la Mixteca, ubicada a 100 kilómetros al sur de la ciudad.

Debido a que el sistema Cutzamala depende de una vasta red de presas para almacenar el agua, y porque las presas están sujetas a una mayor evaporación debido al aumento de las temperaturas, no es el sistema más eficiente. “Ya tenemos el modelo de la Ciudad de México de lo que no se debe hacer, osea aquí podríamos haberlo hecho mejor en vez de pensar, ‘ay, ¿como lo hicieron allá?’” comenta Consejo.

La cartelera en las oficinas del INSO.

En cambio, Consejo cree que la solución a los problemas de agua que enfrenta la región radica en redefinir nuestra relación con el agua. Uno de los proyectos principales del INSO es un área natural restaurada en la comunidad de San Andrés Huayápam, llamado El Pedregal. Un centro de permacultura funcional, El Pedregal cuenta con baños secos, sistemas de recolección de agua de lluvia, zanjas de infiltración y otros proyectos de uso responsable del agua. En general, el sentimiento oaxaqueño no confía mucho en la capacidad o el deseo del gobierno para responder adecuadamente al complejo problema del agua, lo que hace que iniciativas de base como El Pedregal sean aún más importantes.

En mi nuevo hogar—ubicado, por cierto, a un paso del Pedregal en la comunidad de Huayápam—recibimos agua municipal al menos una vez a la semana, hasta dos veces. La zona, a una elevación más alta que la ciudad, ha sido conocida a lo largo de la historia por poseer agua limpia abundante; su nombre, en la lengua indígena náhuatl, se traduce como “sobre el mar”, refiriéndose a sus grandes cuerpos de agua. Sin embargo, incluso aquí, la situación del agua no es estable, con fotos recientes mostrando que dos de las presas artificiales más grandes de la zona están en niveles históricamente bajos.

Nuestra mudanza ha aliviado la mayoría de los problemas de agua que enfrentamos, pero mudarse simplemente no es una opción para muchas familias, ni resolvería el problema que afecta a millones en todo el país. Este sentimiento de desesperanza ha llevado a numerosas protestas en Oaxaca, con ciudadanos exigiendo que el SOAPA envíe más agua. A mediados de marzo, residentes de la colonia de Monte Albán, cerca del famoso sitio de pirámides restauradas de Oaxaca, salieron a las calles para denunciar más de 40 días sin agua municipal. Los residentes de la colonia Figueroa, cerca de la sede central del SOAPA en el centro, hicieron igual una semana después, subrayando que mientras persista la mala gestión del agua en esta zona, también persistirá la agitación social.

The post Ciudades y estados mexicanos podrían quedarse sin agua. ¿Cuál es la solución? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It was dark, with a sliver of a moon lending a Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland eeriness to the inherent novelty of my planned morning of activities. I pulled past the “No Trespassing” signs and found the trailer, cheerfully lit up against the dark meadow quietly swaying in the breeze behind it. 

I shook hands with the waiting stranger and grabbed one of the headlamps and a set of protective earmuffs (exposure to the sound of gunshots over time can damage your eardrums) on offer, and followed her—yes, her—into the woods, where we’d huddle in a blind for hours, waiting to see if any turkeys would show. 

Cheryl Frank Sullivan, a research assistant professor of entomology at the University of Vermont, grew up around hunting in Upstate New York, but she was never interested in it. “I studied environmental science in college, and I didn’t see until a little later how hunting could fit into that,” says Sullivan. Many folks may change their minds about a stance they took when they were younger. But hunting is a topic that inherently brings up strong emotions. And crucially, it hasn’t always been portrayed as friendly or open to women looking to join up. 

As I found out on that cold spring morning, that’s changing. 

Cheryl Sullivan. Photography by author.

The hunt

Sullivan led me toward the blind she had set up, telling her story. (I don’t have a license to hunt, so I could only legally observe her hunting.) Like many other female hunters, the route she took to get where she is today was meandering but meaningful. 

“For me, hunting has become a way of living and a way of being in the world and the woods,” said Sullivan as we sat in comfortable camp chairs inside a snug tent with windows we could zip and unzip as needed to see what was going on, disguise ourselves and—if all went well—Sullivan could target and shoot a gobbler.

Sullivan set up realistic (to me) looking hen turkey decoys in a patch of meadow in front of our ground hide. Hunters can also set up blinds in trees, but those are best utilized for deer hunts, or they can just completely camouflage themselves and set up next to a tree on the ground or move quietly from place to place, she says.

“Turkeys have eagle eyes, so wearing camo and staying very still is important, and they have incredible hearing, which is why I’m whispering,” said Sullivan. 

Cheryl Sullivan gets ready for the hunt. Photography by author.

In a bid to draw the birds, Sullivan brought out a slate call, scratching the striker against the slate to imitate a turkey’s distinct vocalizations. Sullivan, who seemed familiar with all of the state’s hunting regulations, was only able to target gobblers or male turkeys.

“May is nesting season, so you can’t hunt hens,” said Sullivan. “We can also hunt from a half an hour before sunrise to noon.”

Following the rules, which vary state to state and are generally handled by a wildlife management agency, is important to Sullivan and all of the hunters she knows.

Women have always hunted 

An army of female hunters may seem modern, but recent studies show it’s anything but. 

For millennia, the notion that men hunted and women gathered dominated the academic study of early human life. The popular imagination followed, and for many years, the idea that society would function better if men and women would do what comes “naturally” to them—in other words, stop trying to wedge your way into boardrooms and onto battlefields, ladies—seemed like common sense in many circles. 

But science and new discoveries have overturned that paradigm. New research out of the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University shows that, around 200,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens began their slow trudge toward space travel and excessive screen time, women were responsible for hunting, right alongside the men. 

The findings published in PLOS One found that, in 79 percent of societies across the world for which scientists were able to find direct evidence, women were hunting with purpose and their own tools. Girls were actively encouraged to learn how to join the hunt. 

Sullivan’s approach to hunting—as a way to respect and care for the land and the intricate ecosystem and food chain that it supports—reflects a consistent shift in the culture of hunting, says Mandy Harling, director of education and outreach programs at the National Wild Turkey Federation [NWTF], a foundation dedicated to wild turkey conservation throughout North America.

When the organization was founded in 1973, hunting heritage was foundational to NWTF’s mission. Since 2012, when it launched a refreshed preservation push, the NWTF has conserved or enhanced more than four million acres of wild land for turkeys and hunters, and it has opened public access to hunting on 600,000-plus acres of land. 

Maya Holschuh. Photography submitted.

Conservation and hunting, while at first glance perhaps unlikely bedfellows, share many of the same goals, says Harling. 

“Clean water is essential for all living things on earth, and where there is clean water, there are turkeys,” says Harling. “We work with partners to create healthier forests and watersheds. And when we manage a forest for wild turkey habitat, we also improve the land for all wildlife and the humans who live around it.”

Getting women interested in and invested in hunting is also part of the NWTF’s long-term strategy.

“We formally began organizing women in outdoor programs in 1998,” says Harling. “We have found that the conservation aspect is an important aspect of the culture of hunting that attracts women.”

While only 10 percent to 15 percent of hunters in the US are currently women, that number is on the rise, with the number of women applying for hunting permits almost equaling that of men and more organizations set up to train women hunters. Some states such as Maine have programs specifically for women organized by the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. There are also nonprofits such as Doe Camp Nation and companies such as Artemis and Wild Sheep which offer retreats and training programs for would-be women hunters. 

Maya Holschuh. Photography submitted.

Maya Holschuh, a 25-year-old Wilmington, VT resident who started hunting at 21, says the practice has been empowering and transformative. 

“I feel like it’s a much more ethical way to consume meat. I know how the animal died, I know it lived a great life in the wild and I know it wasn’t raised in captivity and pumped full of hormones,” says Holschuh. 

On my first foray into the hunting world, there were no kills. The experience left me with the same feeling I get after the first day of skiing every year: I connected with the natural world on a deep level that I somehow forget I know how to plumb on other nature excursions. I was OK with my performance, but I could do better next time. I know what I’d change. It left me sated but wanting more. 

I love eating meat. But I want to eat less beef because I know that continuing to support cattle farming with my burger habit is more destructive to the ecosystem and surrounding community than, say, shooting one deer or a handful of turkeys and eating their meat for an entire season. I opt for organic, grassfed everythin, and have developed a taste for wild meat thanks to my generous hunting friends who are always willing to share their hauls.

Hunting seems like the next step in my CSA-joining, farmer’s market-shopping food journey. Will I run out and get a hunting license? I haven’t yet. But I’m intrigued by the idea of joining my sisters in arms. 

Sullivan has introduced countless women to hunting and fishing, and she has instructed groups on weekend retreats through associations such as Vermont Outdoors Woman and Vermont Outdoor Guide Association. 

“If you want to learn to hunt, reaching out to an organization that guides women is a great place to start,” says Sullivan. “You’ll get guidance on technique but also learn what kind of licenses and gear you’ll need. Plus, you’ll be creating a network of other female hunters who are eager to learn.”

The post Women Are Reclaiming Their Hunting Heritage appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Yet, it’s not the same for all crops, everywhere. Each spring, along a hidden dirt road in northern Maine, my mother squats calve-deep in ditch muck to gather the edible, curled fronds of the ostrich fern, a delicacy that appears year after year regardless of rain, drought or fungus. While small-scale farms increasingly rely upon innovative technology to hedge their bets on a harvestable crop—think Kernza, complicated, mechanical planters or expensive, hybrid seeds—native, perennial crops, like my mother’s fiddleheads, persist regardless of an erratic growing season. This begs the question—what if annual crops can’t offer us the sustainable future we, as farmers and consumers, need? 

Finding an old way to farm

Mark Shepard’s New Forest Farm enterprise is built upon what he calls restoration agriculture: growing perennial food crops in a way that mimics native ecological systems. “We need to trust natural plant communities because they’re tried and true. They’ve done alright through just about every disaster that’s been thrown their way,” says Shepard. 

Native, perennial plant species—such as fiddleheads—are often better equipped to succeed than non-native, annual plants because they’ve evolved within an ecosystem for millennia. Native plants thrive with fewer or no inputs and, due to genetic diversity, are better equipped to survive in our changing climate. Because of this, landscaping with native species is already widely popular. 

Polyculture including hazelnuts, chestnuts, grapes, apples, and pasture. Together, these crops yield 2.5 times that of any individual component of the system. Photography via New Forest Farm.

Start with small changes

Farmers don’t need to make a whole-sale switch to native species to reap ecological benefits while tapping into an emerging, native-plant market. Small changes, such as converting a single, sub-prime field into a food forest,where a selection of diverse edible plants are grown mimicking the structure of a forest, can be effective. Shepard’s New Forest Farm began with annual crops and transitioned to perennial crops over time. 

Native species can also be included in techniques that many sustainability-minded farmers already employ. For example, hedgerows could be planted with species of American hazelnut, with the small, harvested crop offered in community-supported agriculture boxes or at farmer’s markets. 

Don Tipping of Siskiyou Seeds offers small quantities of unique crops—some of which are native plants—at farmer’s markets and sells them to customers, who are intrigued by the novel product. Although the success of a product can be hit or miss, as with products at any farmer’s market, sometimes, Tipping’s products sell out, with customers asking for them at the next market. He plans to experiment soon with plant-infused beverages. 

In addition, because native plant species support more biodiversity than non-natives, farmers looking to attract beneficial insects for pollination and pest control could plant alley crops of native species that provide food for pollinators and humans, such as sunchokes. 

Expand on silvopasture techniques

Much of the shift that farmers must make to incorporate native plants as food crops relies more on mindset than technique. For example, take silvopasture, which is a method of integrating foraging livestock and wooded areas. Farmers such as Kirsten Marra and Chris Wellington of Muddy Roots Farm use silvopasture practices to help feed and shelter livestock. In such a system, oaks and other nut trees are already key. “We know where all our hardwood stands are in the woods, so we choose our ends [of the pasture rotation] to finish the pigs under the nut trees. Tree nuts are high in fat and contribute to nice marbling of the meat; the unsaturated fatty acids help increase flavor and juiciness. They are also a good source of carbohydrates and protein. They’re very good for the animals, and they create a nice fat-cap or fat layer,” says Marra. 

In their woodland and field pasture system, the pigs are happier, fatter and healthier, all while eating far less grain—about two buckets a day for 10 pigs—which Marra and Wellington say the pigs don’t touch until yummier foods (including annual vegetable scraps) are gone. But this system also helps the environment. The pigs are rotated frequently to prevent any damage to the land, and their wallowing creates vernal pools, their foot traffic presses seeds into the soil and their munching keeps invasive species in check. 

To take a system like this one step further, creative farmers can use trees to produce crops for livestock and people—and not just using acorns or chestnuts. For example, linden tree leaves are great in salads, and their fruit and flowers make a unique (and delicate) chocolate substitute. 

Chris Wellington at Muddy Roots Farm.

A new market

While demand for native plant foods is different from that of annual agricultural crops, a market does exist. Elderberries are particularly trendy, but other native, perennial crops such as sunchokes, pawpaws and even chestnuts are also popular. Still others—such as hazelnuts, ramps and mushrooms—are already in demand at farmer’s markets and by wholesalers alike. 

On a national level, websites such as Foraged offer farmers an opportunity to reach a wider audience, with some of the website’s popular crops including boysenberries and American Ginseng. 

Using these native, perennial foods instead of annual crops often amounts to a simple substitution, such as frying fiddleheads instead of asparagus, using mashed sunchokes instead of mashed potatoes or using pawpaws in place of bananas in bread. 

Pigs at Muddy Roots Farm. Photography via Muddy Roots Farm.

Long term changes 

Changes in our food system must come at the policy level, but some of these changes are happening already. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) now recognizes the importance of agroforestry techniques by offering agroforestry grants and funding. More recently, the US Office of Global Food Security released its Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, which advocates for returning to more traditional crops that grow better in certain climates. 

Douglas Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home and other books, worries that farmers will over-spray native plant crops and thus mitigate any environmental benefits. But if we work to change consumers’ expectations for Instagrammable, blemish-free food and restore our environments with healthy, resilient plants, we can find a balance between harvest and hope for the future of agriculture. 

This isn’t a utopian dream. Consumers’ increased interest in hyper-local foods and regenerative, sustainable agriculture offers support for new ways of farming. Plus, changes in perspective can occur on a crop-by-crop basis as innovative farmers showcase unconventional, native plant foods, even if those foods aren’t staple, dinner-table commodities right now. A great example of crop success is kale, which was once a mere garnish but is now a popular superfood. 

With agriculture facing more climate pressure, tenuous land access and fewer resources than ever before, now is the time to make small or farm-wide changes toward planting native, perennial species as crops, even if the path forward seems untraditional or unusual. 

Says Chris Wellington of Muddy Roots farm, “They called us crazy for wanting to raise pigs in the woods.” 

The post Fiddleheads, Not Spinach appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“This is getting ridiculous! I just spent $370 on groceries and have barely any food… How are people supposed to survive like this? Why is having three meals a day a luxury now?”

“Since the boycott, I’ve spent some time analyzing what I spend and where, and I’ve realized I can go entirely without the big three: Loblaws, Sobeys or Metro. I haven’t stepped foot in any of their stores since and I don’t plan on ever doing it again.”

These are just a few of the thousands of comments that Canadian Redditors have left on the page “Loblaws Is Out of Control,” where members share stories of $9 butter or tubs of $28 feta (twice the price of a competitor). The page was started by an Ontario woman, Emily Johnson, in November, as a way to share frustrations about high grocery prices. It quickly attracted members, with more than 79,000 people joining up in a matter of months. And they had a lot to talk about. In February 2023, the Consumer Price Index noted that food prices were up more than 10 percent year over year, double the national rate of inflation. It was the seventh straight month of double-digit food price increases. 

As more members joined the page, talk of a grocery store boycott began to intensify. 

Loblaws store shelves. Photography via Shutterstock.

Canada’s grocery market is dominated by five main retailers, which make up 76 percent of the market. The country’s biggest grocery chain, Loblaws, has cornered 28 percent of the market entirely. The company runs multiple brands of grocery and pharmacy chains, has several in-house lines that it sells, including the President’s Choice and No Name brands, and has long been a source of ire for Canadians struggling with rising food prices. While general economic inflation and rises in the cost of living do account for some hikes in food prices, these Redditors allege that price hikes have more to do with corporate greed and lack of competition than anything else. 

In addition to high costs, Loblaws has refused to sign a proposed Grocer Code of Conduct, saying that it worried that would lead to even higher prices on food. Loblaws has also struggled to regain public trust after its involvement in a bread price-fixing scandal over the 2010s. [Update: On May 16, the CEO of Loblaw Companies Limited told media they would sign the code of conduct as long as its grocery competitors did too.]

Frustrations reached a fever pitch; Loblaws was an obvious target for a boycott for many Canadians. 

On May 1, Loblaws announced its  2024 first-quarter profits; they’re up nearly 10 percent over the same time last year. The same day, the boycott officially started, with tens of thousands of shoppers vowing to ignore Loblaws. In smaller communities, where Loblaws stores are the only option, thousands vowed to cut their purchases.

Boycotters are demanding that both Loblaws and Walmart agree to sign the code of conduct, as well as commit to price caps on essential items and no retailer-led price increases for the rest of the year.

Loblaws chairman Galen Weston told media that the boycott is an example of “misguided criticism.” Weston said that he understood the frustration, but that expectations that Loblaws would be able to dramatically drop prices “betrays a misunderstanding of what’s actually driving food prices higher in this country.” However, Redditors have posted their own examples of small victories, which they attribute to the boycott: offers of extra reward points, photos and videos of items with large markdowns and alleged conversations about falling sales numbers.

With a boycott underway, the Reddit thread has become a place for people to offer tips and help their neighbors—with many finding ways to highlight local food or farmer’s markets. One user created We Food Wise, a site to help shoppers compare grocery prices. Another shared the site AltGrocery, which promotes local and indie food sellers, as well as farmer’s markets and co-ops. 

“The pandemic made us all acutely aware of food prices and shortages, prompting questions about the trustworthiness of local supermarkets and whether food prices are justifiably higher post-pandemic,” said the creator of AltGrocery, in an email. They have opted to remain anonymous, as they say they want the focus of the site to be the farmers and food producers. 

So far, AltGrocery has received about 107,000 visitors, and it has even had to temporarily suspend the map feature due to high traffic. AltGrocery says it is updating the map functionality, so users can find local markets from their mobile phones. It is also working on introducing filter systems, which will allow people to sort food by price. It has also brought in about $800 in donations to put towards site upkeep. “I plan to keep running beyond any boycotts. I think, if anything, [the site has] educated people to second guess where they get their food from and how much something is being sold for.”

Photography via Shutterstock.

Local markets have seen a boom in sales already. Edmonton-based Forage Market, an online farmer’s market, saw a 37-percent boost in website traffic since the boycott began, leaving them cautiously optimistic. “The first day of the boycott, we were up 27 percent. That’s great, we’ll take that. And then the next day, we were up 175 percent,” says Courtney Hanak, business development manager for the market. “The support is always appreciated. But we’re definitely trying to think about how we can make this last. How can we show consumers that this is an option year round?”

Hanak and her business partner started the market during COVID, when empty grocery shelves were a norm. “We started asking ourselves, why aren’t we buying locally? I’m seeing empty grocery shelves, but I know that the farmer down the road grows [these products].” They found that traditional farmer’s markets weren’t always accessible, either by location or hours, so they opted for an online warehouse model. Customers can go on the website to select products from individual farmers, just like stalls at a farmer’s market, but Forage will package and ship them out together. 

Hanak says she’s happy to see people getting more acquainted with farmer’s markets and local food. “There’s still this myth that people assume the farmer’s markets will be more expensive. But with inflation and the grocery prices and where they’re at now, it’s not… We’ve done cost comparisons, and we end up beating the average grocery cart total by about $2.”

A PieceMeal Kit. Photography courtesy of Kara Friesen.

And many shoppers are happy to pay prices on par with grocery stores if they know where that money is going. “If you pay a farmer…then they’re going to take that dollar, and they’re going to spend it on a local hairdresser, they’re going to spend it at the local cafe, they’re going to spend it on items that are also provided locally. So, we are feeding our own economy rather than funneling our money to millionaires and billionaires,” says Kara Friesen, owner of PieceMeal, a Nova Scotia-based meal kit. Friesen works with local farmers to collect in-season produce, then puts together weekly meal kits, with recipes and instructions so people can easily throw meals together. When she heard of the boycott, she created the Loblaws Boycott promotion, offering a discount for new signups in the last two weeks of May.

Friesen is supportive of the boycott, but she recognizes that it’s not easy for everyone. “It is often hard for people to access food outside of the grocery stores, because these retailers are highly competitive and can sell food for less than it’s actually worth, because of things like the retail fees that they charge suppliers,” says Friesen. She recommends figuring out what you are able to purchase locally, with fresh produce at the top of the list. Then, make a meal plan around what’s available, and purchase only what you have to from bigger stores. 

“I’ve devoted a lot of time to researching our food systems and how it affects every aspect of our lives,” says Friesen.”When I saw the boycott, I just sort of breathed a sigh of relief and thought this is really something that could gain traction and maybe help educate the public a little bit more about how important it is to understand the food system.” 

Many in the Reddit community have spoken about expanding the boycott past May or to include other stores. The creator of AltGrocery also told Modern Farmer they would be interested in expanding their site to include the US, as mergers and consolidation have also resulted in high food prices further south. 

Emily Johnson, the creator of the Reddit page, has met with officials from Loblaw to talk about the demands of the boycott. She’s also started a petition with Canada’s House of Commons to ask for stronger anti-trust laws and investigate the pricing structure of large grocery stores. The petition has nearly 7,000 signatures so far. 

Update: On May 16, Lobaw CEO Per Bank told media that the company was ready to sign on to the Grocery Code of Conduct, provided that other grocers also sign. 

The post $9 Butter? Canadian Redditors Say No Thank You appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Eikleberry was shocked at how difficult it was for her to source local ingredients. She lives in Wooster, a productive agricultural area that hosts Ohio State University’s Agricultural Research and Development Center. Yet, even surrounded by farmland, they were “chasing a turkey all around Ohio,” Eikleberry recalls. Eventually, the family succeeded in finding their local fare. They enjoyed it so much that they wanted others in the area to have the same opportunity to cook with local food but without the hardship of tracking it all down. 

Soon after, they got word of another conversation happening in Wooster. Betsy Anderson, who worked for OSU’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center—along with her family—had been dreaming of some kind of cafe combined with a market for local food. They had approached county commissioners with their idea, but it hadn’t progressed beyond that.

The two groups joined forces, meeting once a week, building support, attracting others interested in helping. By January 2009, they had formed a board and incorporated as a member-owned cooperative that June, striking a deal with the Wayne County commissioners to take over a run-down building and transform it into a one-stop farm shop. 

In May, 2010, the new store hosted a celebratory grand opening. Over a cheerful green-striped awning and generously windowed storefront, the hand-made sign welcomed shoppers into Local Roots Market & Cafe—the nation’s first year-round, everyday farm store selling local food on consignment. Vendors would set their own prices; when items sold, they’d get a percentage of the sale price returned to them in two-week payouts. It was a new store—as it turned out—that would launch a movement.

Some of the offerings from the Lakeshore Depot Farm Stop.

Funding the farm stop

The local food movement has always struggled with the conflicting values of paying farmers fairly without making food an elite commodity. In addition, it can be hard for customers to source food year-round, depending on where they live, and modern grocery stores have conditioned many people to expect fresh strawberries in January or pumpkins in June. Farmers markets are great, but many run only certain days of the week or months of the year. Enter farm stops. 

Farm stops are a hybrid of these models. With brick-and-mortar locations, they are open year-round for customers, and they allow multiple farmers to sell their goods at the same time. Most farm stops work on consignment, where farmers set the prices for their goods, and the farm stop takes a cut of the profit—generally about 30 percent. All farm stores also rely on wholesale purchases to fill out inventory with items that producers are unwilling to sell on consignment. 

But farm stops, like any other venture in the food and agriculture space, can struggle with tight profit margins. Some stops are experimenting with pricing to ensure profits can stabilize. Food access is a primary concern at FARMacy Community Farmstop in Rock Hill, SC, where founder Jonathan Nazeer is trying something new. 

FARMacy. Photography courtesy of Jonathan Nazeer.

He estimates that 70 percent of his customers are higher-income shoppers from surrounding neighborhoods who drive out of their way to support his store because they are, as he understands it, “motivated by the mission of bringing good food into what they know has been a community marginalized for decades.” The support has been critical. Not yet able to accept SNAP benefits, FARMacy prices were out of reach for many living in the immediate vicinity of the store.

To reach this community, FARMacy adopted a pay-what-you-will system. Select products are labeled with their “real-value” price—what farmers expect to get from those sales—but customers can pay whatever they choose. There’s a balancing act that relies on customers who can pay more than the posted value choosing to do so. The data collection is on-going, but Nazeer is happy with the response he’s seen so far—a 37-percent increase in shoppers from the immediate community. Grant money subsidizing the program from the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program is set to run out in June 2025, but Nazeer recognizes that “pay-what-you-will” was never a sustainable solution to the root challenges of food sovereignty, which is his primary concern.

“If communities are not working towards producing their own food, then they have to rely on other communities to do that. I think each community has to be independent when it relates to food,” he says, reflecting on the difficulty he’s had convincing South Carolina farmers to sell on consignment in his community. Working with several South Carolina-based partners, Nazeer has launched Crop Hill to establish an urban agricultural district.

Some founders of farm stops have relied on personal finances to acquire initial building space. Most others, as with Local Roots, have been given deals on municipally owned buildings. Keller Market House paid $1 for the title of a county-owned land bank building in Lancaster, Ohio. A gas station, owned and renovated by the town of Jonesborough, is leased, according to its executive director Lori Powell, “at a very low rate” to Boone Street Market in Tennessee. 

Apples at the Argus Farm Stop.

Fellowship of the farm stops

Over the first three unseasonably warm days of March, 2024—15 years after the founding of Local Roots—a first-of-its-kind conference was held at the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens. 

Kathy Sample and Bill Brinkerhoff—co-founders of Argus Farm Stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan—wanted to take stock of what they recognize as a movement, one that they’ve helped to accelerate. 

They tasked Argus manager Casey Miller with finding and inviting everyone associated with year-round consignment farm stores in the country, from those in operation to those in the inkling or development stages. The result was the 2024 Farm Stop Conference, which gathered 130 attendees from across the country, including representatives from all levels of government, several NGOs and half of the 14 recognized farm stops. 

Brinkerhoff recounted to the gathering the couple’s discovery of Local Roots in 2013. They were dropping off their son, Ben, at the College of Wooster when they happened upon the store and were enthralled. 

In November 2013, they began a detailed feasibility study to determine if and where a Local Roots-style store might work in Ann Arbor. Later that winter, they arranged a behind-the-scenes Local Roots visit to shadow employees and learn the nitty-gritty of the business. They were hosted by general manager Jessica Eikleberry. 

In March 2014, Sample and Brinkerhoff signed a lease for a former gas station situated along heavy commuter routes—car, bicycle and walking—on the edge of downtown Ann Arbor. The business opened later that summer as a low-profit, limited-liability social enterprise, including a small coffee shop that helps fund operations. They opened a second shop across town in 2017 and expanded that into an adjacent building in 2022. 

The Argus Farm Stop.

Last year, sales at these stores topped $6.5 million, two-thirds of that from sales of grocery items and the rest from cafe sales. Argus’ top 12 earners in 2023 saw more than $100,000 in sales and included seven farms selling vegetables, fruit, meat and dairy, along with two bakeries and a prepared-food vendor. But even smaller or limited season operators fared well: 75 vendors—half of them farmers—made more than $10,000 in sales. In its first decade, Argus has paid out more than $20 million to its vendors.

Brinkerhoff is passionate about the mission and the need for these kinds of stores. At the conference, he projects an image of a partitioned dollar bill from the USDA’s Economic Research Service showing that for every dollar consumers spend in a grocery store, a bit less than 15 cents went to the farmers producing the raw ingredients.

Tom Zilke, owner of Zilke Vegetable Farm, has been selling produce from his 25-acre farm through Argus since they opened. He describes selling through Argus as “very easy. The big benefit is they’re doing the selling. We come straight from the farm, drop it off and walk away.”

With Argus’ 70-percent consignment rate, Zilke will get 70 cents on the dollar when his products sell, without time and labor costs of manning his on-farm farm stand or a farmers market tent. 

Katie Barr has thought a lot about farm stops. She literally wrote the book on How to Start a Farm Stop as part of her Master’s thesis for the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. As she discovered, the establishment of a farm stop can result in profound and sometimes unanticipated benefits for farms and food systems. Interviewing more than 40 farmers who sell through farm stops, Barr documented numerous stories of farmers paying off debt and investing in critical infrastructure—including additional acreage, greenhouses and root cellars—and expanding or investing in entirely new production systems. One farmer shifted their operation to winter production in order to take advantage of their farm stop’s need for winter produce. Another farmer made enough money selling eggs and chicken that they were able to establish a goat herd and, eventually, a flock of sheep to add goat milk products and wool to their repertoire.

The science of ecology has a truism: In the face of disturbance, diversity confers stability and resilience to the biosphere. Perhaps the same holds true for food systems.

The beginnings of Local Roots. Photography by John W. Anderson.

Thinking of starting a Farm Stop? Here are some resources:

Get the book How to Start a Farm Stop by author Katie Barr. Purchase the book or find a free downloadable PDF at this link.

Argus Farm Stop offers online training workshops on starting a farm stop or an online market here: https://www.argusfarmstop.com/learn

You can also visit these farm stops. Know of others? Share your favorite farm stop in the comments!

Local Roots Market and Cafe in Wooster, OH
The Wild Ramp in Huntington, WV
Argus Farm Stop in Ann Arbor, MI
Boone Street Market in Jonesborough, TN
Agricole Farm Stop in Chelsea, MI
Keller Market House in Lancaster, OH
FARMacy Community Farmstop in Rock Hill, SC
Lakeshore Depot in Marquette, MI
Random Harvest in Craryville, NY
Bloomington Farm Stop Collective, Bloomington, IN
Philmont Cooperative in Philmont, NY
Public Market in Wheeling, WV
East Lansing Food Co-op in Lansing, MI
South East Market in Grand Rapids, MI
Meadowlark Market & Kitchen in Lander, WY
Foodsphere is The Entrepreneurial Center of Local Roots
Purplebrown Farm Store, in Peninsula, OH
Lowe Creek Farmer’s Market, in Prospect, KY
Liberty Prairie Farm Store, in Grayslake, IL

The post Is the Farm Stop Revolution Upon Us? appeared first on Modern Farmer.