As a gardener in the Midwest, I am surrounded by agricultural farmland and housing developments that have largely replaced the tallgrass prairie that provided habitat for pollinators and other wildlife prior to European settlement. I decided to devote some of my outside space to these essential creatures. But before I started, I needed to figure out which plants would thrive in my yard’s environment. 

Starting a pollinator garden with small plants, or plugs, results in mature plants quicker than seed and reduces the amount of time weeding. Photo courtesy of Cydney Ross at Deep Roots KC

Choosing plants native to the region is best as they are well suited to the local soil and climate. Pollinators have adapted to native plants; they have co-existed for hundreds of years. There are plenty of native plants to choose from that are attractive and provide pollinator habitat. 

“Be a planner, not a plopper,” says Cydney Ross, outdoor education program manager for Deep Roots KC, a Kansas City, Missouri nonprofit. 

Ross suggests taking photos at different times of the day for at least one season to find out how many hours of sunlight each part of your yard receives. Pollinators forage in areas with six to eight hours of full sunlight a day. 

I planted patches of pollinator habitat in my yards in Nebraska and Iowa, and for each location, I learned to pay attention to the hours of sunlight available after the trees have fully leafed out. When there are mature trees nearby, the hours of sunlight available can change quite a bit from early May to July!

Soil and moisture are other considerations. Ken Parker, a western New York-based native plant grower and consultant with Native Plant Guy Consulting, says fancy soil tests are unnecessary. Simply identify the type of soil that you have—for example, is it clay, loam or sandy? To determine soil type, I place a ball of wet soil similar to the consistency of Play-Doh in my hand. Sandy soil is gritty and hard to form a ball, whereas clay is much stickier. Loam tends to be a mix of the two and feels silky in your hand and forms a loose ball. 

Next, I observed where water pooled in my yard to identify areas that are especially wet. I mostly worked with sandy and loam soil and have noticed the plants that thrive in my area can change depending on soil conditions. Cream wild indigo and prairie dropseed are among the species that have grown better in my sandy soils, while a wide variety of plant species such as New England aster, wild bergamot and sideoats grama (a short prairie grass) grow well in loam soil. 

When planting native plants, it’s unnecessary to add amendments to the soil such as peat moss and fertilizer. These plants are hardy and do not need these supplements, which will just encourage weeds.

Once I understood sunlight, soil and moisture conditions, I was able to pick plant species that fit my yard’s environment.

Purple poppy mallow (foreground) is an example of a shorter native species that looks good at the front of native flower beds. Photo courtesy of Cydney Ross at Deep Roots KC

State native plant societies are a good starting point for finding a local native plant organization and nursery that specializes in growing natives. These organizations and nurseries are good resources for learning about the habitat requirements of different species and how to plant them. I have ordered most of my native plants from regional nurseries in flats through the mail, and they have arrived in good condition. 

Established plants are advised for starting smaller pollinator gardens (less than roughly 250 to 500 square feet); they are more expensive than seed, but they will establish more quickly, reducing time spent weeding. 

I planted my first pollinator garden with a pre-made native grass and wildflower seed mix when I was in my 20s and a graduate student with a flexible schedule. I enjoyed spending time on my hands and knees with a plant ID guide getting to know which young seedlings were something I had planted and which were weeds that needed to be pulled. However, as I got older and wanted to spend less time weeding, I switched to planting small plants. I also like getting to mature plants quicker when starting with plants.

Parker recommends choosing an equal number of wildflower species that bloom in the early spring, summer and fall—he likes four flowering species during each season. “The more species you have, the more your habitat becomes a buffet” for different types of adult pollinators and larvae, which will also attract birds, he says. 

My current garden has patches of pollinator habitat with 20 native plant species; the wildflowers bloom from May through early October. In my sunny, steep front yard, I planted a five-foot-wide strip with taller species such as stiff goldenrod, wild bergamot and common milkweed in the back and the shorter prairie dropseed grass and smooth aster in the front. Monarch larvae feed on milkweed, but adult monarchs and many other pollinators feed on the nectar and pollen of a variety of flowering species––in the fall, the blooms of the stiff dropseed are alive with activity from small bees to butterflies.

Near my vegetable garden there’s prairie alumroot, sweet coneflower, Joe Pye weed and foxglove beardtongue. The beardtongue is among my favorite plants. Its tubular white flowers are especially popular with bumblebees and hummingbirds. 

Grasses and sedges (grass-like plants with fine leaves) provide texture, and their dense roots will occupy space, reducing weed establishment. I like to include clump-forming grasses such as little bluestem that are host plants for the larvae of skippers, a type of butterfly. I have also started planting more sedges around my flowering plants since they green up early in the growing season and deter rabbits from feeding on other plants. As garden designer Benjamin Vogt with Monarch Gardens in Lincoln, Nebraska, says, “Sedges are wildflower bodyguards.” 

A healthy sedge. Photo by the author

Before the actual planting could begin, the area needs to be prepared by reducing weeds and grasses. This can be very labor intensive, but there are several methods that garden designers recommend––my favorite is sheet mulching for my gardens. 

Sheet mulching: Mow or weed whack your lawn and weeds short, then put layers of cardboard or newspaper down for several weeks; add mulch on top to keep the layers in place. Poke holes into the layers and insert your plants. 

Solarization: During the summer, staple clear plastic tarp into the lawn to use heat to kill the grass, weeds and weed seeds. Leave in place for two to three weeks in dry climates to several weeks in wetter climates until the vegetation is dead. Remove the plastic before adding your plants in the fall.

Herbicide: This is the most controversial method. Glyphosate is very effective at killing grass and weeds, but most pollinator experts avoid using it because of potential effects on human health, the environment and the pollinators they are trying to attract. 

The solarization method for preparing an area with weeds and grass. Photo courtesy of Cydney Ross of Deep Roots KC

Each of my gardens were planted over time. Ross suggests that planning in stages, even when converting large portions of a lawn to a pollinator habitat, keeps the project affordable and manageable. And starting with a small area allows you to confirm which species establish well and the weed control methods that work well before scaling up. Including native ground-spreading covers to serve as a living mulch can also reduce weeds.

In the first year, plants should put their energy into growing roots. To support their growth and to reduce weed competition, I add a one- to two-inch layer of mulch after planting and regularly water for the first two weeks if there isn’t regular rainfall. 

Over the second and third year, allowing the mulch to break down, trimming weeds and giving plants space to spread will allow the natives to replace the mulch. “They will find where they’re happiest,” says Parker.

The right garden preparation has paid dividends in creating an hospitable habitat lively with pollinators and other wildlife. My gourd plants are plentiful each year thanks to natural insect pollination. I watch birds feed on caterpillars in the spring and summer and the seed heads of sweet black-eyed Susan and Joe Pye weed in the fall and winter. It’s a small step to make my yard a more welcoming place for these creatures, but, selfishly, the pleasure I derive in seeing a butterfly float by on a summer breeze or bumblebees visit my flowers is immeasurable. 

The post Prepare a Slice of Your Yard For a Pollinator Garden appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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.

“Trout need lots of clean, fresh oxygen to thrive,” says Walker, 34. Some grass is good, but too much can deplete dissolved oxygen, slow waterflow and clog drains, “which stresses the fish. And calm fish are healthy fish; healthy fish are delicious fish.” 

Earthen ponds at Smoke in Chimneys trout farm.

This is part of Walker’s annual maintenance routine at Smoke In Chimneys trout farm, which opened in 2019. He’ll spend the day weeding and cleaning, then harvest the remaining fish in the next week or so. The pond then gets a break from production to naturally incorporate or filter out excess nutrients from the ecosystem. In the fall, it will again be loaded with thousands of baby trout. They’ll start their lives here, then cycle through a dozen similar impoundments—that together hold more than 20,000 fish at various stages of maturation—for about two years until they’re ready for harvest. 

“It takes a stupid amount of labor to do it this way compared to big commercial aquaculture operations,” says Walker. “But this is the only way to raise trout that consistently taste like they’ve been pulled fresh out a mountain stream.” 

That’s because the pond is part of a restored, 1930s US Department of the Interior gravity-fed trout hatchery and research facility in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains that was abandoned in the early 1990s due to budget cuts and remoteness. Here, there are no electric pumps, plastic tanks, antibiotics, mechanical agitators, recirculated water, chemical additives or computer monitoring. Water comes from a pristine, 54-degree spring that gushes from the bedrock at 2,000 gallons a minute. It is carried to the ponds through a series of pipes and concrete raceways that mimic natural trout streams, then empties into an adjacent creek. The shale-bottom impoundments are lined with native plants, surrounded by pollinator gardens and selectively managed forest. They’re filled with naturally occurring microbes, insects, amphibians and crustaceans. Walker and two employees hand-survey populations monthly for signs of illness or stress. They harvest and process about 400 whole trout a week, then pack them in coolers for shipping to restaurants and individual customers.

“There are a lot of small-scale trout producers in the US, but this is truly a diamond-in-the-rough situation,” says freshwater aquaculture researcher and current US Trout Farmers Association president Jesse Trushenski. Most similar facilities either vanished during the big-ag-fueled Blue Revolution of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s or are still used to supplement native wild trout populations for fishing. Then there’s the production side: The nation’s largest commercial producer—Boise, Idaho-based Riverence—churns out more than 22 million pounds of trout a year compared to Smoke In Chimney’s give-or-take 120,000.

This is a small, extremely high-end facility operating on historic infrastructure, says Trushenski. “If other commercial facilities [like the Walker’s] exist, there can’t be more than one or two.”

Walker also touts Smoke In Chimney’s sustainability versus typical fish-focused commercial aquaculture farms. On one hand, he likens his farm’s production methods to the inland freshwater equivalency of regenerative livestock farming. 

“This approach is without a doubt going to affect a net positive environmental impact,” says Trushenski. The system acts like a natural waterway, using gravity and hydrostatic pressure to move perfectly balanced water from a limestone aquifer. It requires no electricity or additives to operate. It’s effectively a restored habitat for depleted natural fish populations where, like rotational grazing, trout cycle through different impoundments as they grow and mature, nurturing their needs while playing a supportive role in the overall ecosystem. A percentage of newly hatched fish escapes into the nearby stream, bolstering habitat and wild populations. 

Smoke in Chimneys trout farm.

Meanwhile, more farm-raised trout on the market means less extractionary pressure on local streams. It also helps balance the increasing gap in wild-caught seafood production due to overfishing, climate change and human population growth.

“This is an ecological win-win,” says Trushenski. “You’re boosting stream health and native fish populations while making inroads on a problem that is only going to get worse with time.” 

Walker appreciates sustainability and historic novelty—and leverages both to market and tell the story of his trout—but he’s more concerned with the quality of product the method yields. And testimonies back up his claims. 

“There’s this rich, nutty, buttery decadence. It tastes clean and refreshing, like spring water,” says Patrick Pervola, research and development chef at Michelin-starred Washington D.C. eatery, Albi. “This is some of the best fish I’ve tasted in my career. It rewrites what you think of as possible for farm-raised fish.”

The limestone aquifer. Photography via Smoke in Chimneys.

But despite all the benefits—and roughly 2,900 miles of native wild trout streams—Smoke In Chimneys is one of about three other commercial trout farms in Virginia. And the others are tiny by comparison and sell almost exclusively to family friends or at local farmer’s markets. That means, by Trushenski’s estimate, about 95 percent of trout consumed in Virginia comes from production strongholds like Idaho, Washington or North Carolina. 

She says the problem stems from issues around education. 

First, most seafood consumers have never tasted wild-caught or truly healthy farm-raised trout, and that lack of exposure leads to decreased demand. Second, Virginia focuses aquatic agricultural resources on marine seafood, so there are no dedicated high school or collegiate-level educational programs for inland freshwater aquaculture. And would-be farmers can’t pursue opportunities they don’t know about.

“To put it into perspective: When I started out, I called around to agricultural extension offices at [the state’s leading universities] and there was literally nobody there that could tell me anything useful about farm-raised trout,” says Walker. “I had to rely on old books from the 1930s I dug up on eBay, rangers working at hatcheries, farmers in other states and trial-and-error to figure it out.”

Photography via Smoke in Chimneys trout farm.

But Walker remains undaunted. He and wife, Shannon, spent a year sifting through regulatory red tape and launched a small USDA-inspected processing plant near the farm. They work tirelessly on social media and with restaurateurs to educate eaters about the virtues of healthy, farm-raised trout. 

Walker has also joined the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Aquaculture Advisory Board and is in talks with administrators at the new Virginia Tech Aquaculture and Seafood Production Facility. He’s using the position and access to advocate for increased resources around gravity-fed inland freshwater aquaculture. He envisions a future where Smoke In Chimneys has expanded to include one to two dozen sister farms and helped dramatically increase trout consumption throughout the state and Mid-Atlantic. 

We have “the natural resources and the market potential is there,” says Walker, noting $67.5 million in USDA-reported 2018 sales at farms in the top two US trout-producing states alone. “All we need is the support to help us get the ball rolling and tap into that potential. And I don’t plan to quit until that happens. I want to remind Virginians why trout is our state fish.”

The post Meet the Modern Trout Farmer Using Gravity to His Advantange 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.

Virginia Ortiz with the GoFarm team on their farm in Colorado. Photo courtesy GoFarm

“Our vision is a strong, resilient, environmentally sustainable and equitable local food system,” says Virginia Ortiz, GoFarms executive director.

Ortiz sees GoFarm’s role as a hub that takes care of the logistics of supporting small farms and feeding the community. 

Building community partnerships is a crucial element, and GoFarm works with other food access organizations such as Hunger Free Golden and JeffCo Food Policy Council to reach more people and create a broader base of resources.

Founded in 2014, GoFarm started with its local food share program (essentially a CSA curated from multiple farms). More than a decade later, it has become an organization that trains and develops beginning farmers and creatively tackles the problem of how to get affordable, fresh food to the community. As a nonprofit, it is able to fundraise for grants and donations to support its programming and supplement that with revenue generated through produce sales. 

GoFarm’s incubator farmer program gives beginning farmers access to a quarter acre of land for the two-year duration of the program. The farmers receive all the training they need to plan, plant and manage a farm—regardless of their background. 

“The average age of current farmers is 55 to 59, and we know that, over the next 10 years, half of current farmers are going to retire, which means that we need to develop a new base,” says Ortiz. But she points out that there is a “tremendous need” for agricultural education.

Incubator farmers in an irrigation workshop. Photo courtesy of Lindsey Beatrice 

“Part of our goal is to change the paradigm of farm ownership. Currently, in Colorado, there are approximately 34,000 farms and only one percent are owned by people of color. Yet, 95 to 98 percent of farm workers are people of color, primarily Latinos,” says Ortiz, who shares that she comes from a long line of farmers and farm workers. She says she is proud that, in the farmer development program, 50 percent of participants are people of color, 65 percent are women and 40 percent self-identify as LGBTQ+.

Moses Smith of Full Fillment Farms was an engineer who had gardened before taking GoFarm’s 20-week course and joining the incubator program. “The important thing was the Whole Farm Planning course that really focused on what it takes to actually grow food,” says Smith.

“One of the biggest benefits is that they not only provide us with land access, which is very hard as a starting farmer, but they also give us a market avenue,” says Ann Poteet of Three Owls Farm. As incubator farmers are establishing their businesses and learning how to generate their own markets, they sell produce back to GoFarm. 

Ann Poteet of Three Owls Farm and Moses Smith of Full Fillment Farms.    Photo courtesy of GoFarm

GoFarm’s local food share program feeds anywhere from 500 to 800 members each summer. Members come every week to pick up their share from a few different locations where GoFarm has refrigerated shipping containers to store food after it’s delivered by farmers. Plus, GoFarm takes Chuck out and about in Denver and Jefferson counties every week to ensure they can reach underserved populations that are challenged with food insecurity, disability, transportation and other barriers, such as the communities living in designated food deserts in south Golden. 

“I have an interest in nutritional insecurity,” says Poteet, who was a nurse practitioner before starting her farm. 

“It’s been really inspiring,” says Smith about being able to see his food nourish the community through GoFarm. 

But farmer’s market prices can be high, as producers need to be fairly compensated for their labor and costs. “Customers were clear to us that having access to healthy food was critical to them and affordability was a barrier,” says Ortiz. So, in 2022, GoFarm found the funding it needed to implement a new solution that goes even further to improve accessibility for the 2,600+ households it reaches. 

Customers at its mobile markets can choose from one of three price tiers to shop that day, depending on their needs. For example, bags of mixed greens have three prices listed: $2 (purple), $3 (green) and $4 (orange). And the microgreens are even cheaper, at $1, $2 or $3 for a box. Pasture-raised eggs can be $3, $5 or $7 a carton. 

Flexible pricing sign with Chuck, the mobile market truck. Photo courtesy of Lindsey Beatrice

“You are what you eat,” says Kaylee Clinton, a first-time GoFarm mobile market shopper. “I just feel better about myself when I eat fresher.” As inflation has hit grocery stores, she says that SNAP has helped make food more affordable and she appreciates that GoFarm lets shoppers pick their price point. “I really love it. I think it’s great for everybody.” 

“Typically, I either buy green or orange. I like buying orange when I can. It’s good to have the flexible pricing,” says Ed Gazvoda, who has been shopping at GoFarm for years. “I want to live a good, long, healthy life, so it’s a personal thing, but I just love the food.”

Jess Soulis, director of the Community Food Access program, highlights that accepting SNAP’s DoubleUp Food Bucks—where shoppers essentially get a 50-percent discount—is just one way to make food more affordable. The group also partners with WIC’s Farmers Market Nutrition Program, where participants get a credit to shop. Through its market locations at Littleton Advent Hospital and Juanita Nolasco Senior Residences, the program offers shoppers $10 worth of produce for free. SNAP/DUFB account for 13 percent of its mobile market sales, but all of these incentives combined are closer to two-thirds.

“We’re building this beautiful, vibrant, local food system and we don’t want to replicate the injustices and inequities that are so prevalent in the existing food system,” says Soulis.

The vision continues to grow. The only limitation? “Infrastructure,” says Ortiz. GoFarm is currently seeking out refrigerated warehouse space along the I-70 corridor between Golden and Montbello. 

“That area is important because we need to make it accessible to farmers along the Front Range,” says Ortiz. “With that refrigerated warehouse space, we could easily source from more farmers, distribute more food and serve more communities.”

The post A Vibrant Local Food System Grows in Colorado appeared first on Modern Farmer.

They represent some of the oldest wines in North America, as the vines arrived in Italian immigrant Joe Busnardo’s suitcase in the late 1960s. Busnardo planted those Pinot Blanc and Trebbiano vines at Hester Creek Winery, and those vines are still producing fruit today. 

According to Kimberley Pylatuk, public relations coordinator at Hester Creek Estate Winery, Busnardo went through official channels. He grew up on a farm in Italy’s Veneto region; when he came to the Okanagan Valley in 1967, he saw a landscape that looked like home. He wanted to bring 10,000 vines, but the federal and provincial governments said no. They allowed him to import two cuttings of 26 separate varietals in 1968. Adding to the red tape, the government quarantined the vines before they released them. Luckily for Busnardo (and his cuttings), he was patient. 

Oliver Osoyoos Wine Country. Photography by Leila Kwok

By 1972, he had more than 120 different varietals planted on the property, all Vitis Vinifera, and long before the BC government offered grape growers $8,100 an acre to pull out the Labrusca grapes and plant vinifera—a move credited with changing the tide of the wine industry in the region.

“We consider British Columbia a new wine region. But when you look at the people that live here, there are French winemakers, Australians. People bring their knowledge, their legacies and their traditions growing grapes and making wine,” says Pylatuk. “People like Joe back in the 1960s started that. He knew how to make good wine, how to grow grapes and how to pick the right vineyard property. We look at the ancient Romans who knew to plant their vines on a hillside because of cooler drainage, and look at the spot Joe chose—it speaks to ancient traditional knowledge.” 

Oliver Osoyoos Wine Country. Photography by Leila Kwok

Busnardo sold the property in 1996 and winemakers have puzzled over where some of his vine originated since then. “We call block 13 Joe’s block. We know they came from Northern Italy, but we don’t know exactly what they are. We sent them to UC Davis and McGill University on more than one occasion and they’ve come back inconclusive,” says Pylatuk.

A few months ago, Hester Creek’s winemaker made the trek over to Vancouver Island to ask 90-year-old Busnardo directly. His response? “I’m taking that to my grave.” 

Oliver Osoyoos Wine Country. Photography by Leila Kwok

“Forty years ago, the original owners of Road 13 [Golden Mile Cellars then] identified their site as akin to what they had at home in Europe and probably thought, who’s going to check my suitcase for a couple of plants? Let’s take it back to the Okanagan Valley and see if it grows,” says Jennifer Busmann, executive director of Oliver Osoyoos Wine Country.

Lest you think Busnardo was the only vine smuggler to arrive on BC’s shores, rest assured other folks have gotten around customs laws as well. According to Alfredo Jop, assistant guest experiences manager at Road 13 Vineyards, the Serwo family brought German vines carefully wrapped in a damp towel in their luggage when they moved from Germany (where they grew grapes) to Canada in the late 1960s. There are also Chenin Blanc vines around the region that can be traced to other suitcases and intrepid travellers. 

Oliver Osoyoos Wine Country. Photography by Leila Kwok

The variability in growing seasons and diverse micro-climates of the Okanagan Valley allow many varietals from around the globe to flourish. As a result, many of the 200-plus wineries in the region have similar luggage lore. Okanagan winemaking is not just a story of pioneering farming practices but of immigrants journeying to new homes with a piece of their heritage tucked into their luggage. 

Visionary immigrants like Busnardo and the Serwo family may not have understood what they were starting at the time, but they planted the seed that grew into a wine region that produces half of British Columbia’s award-winning wines across almost 50 wineries. Busmann adds, “I believe that vision from those growers and winery owners set us on our path.” 

The post Packing Light appeared first on Modern Farmer.

At nine years old, I started a rabbitry. Raising my trio of Dutch rabbits to take to the fair, I fell in love with the breed and raising them. Before long, I expanded to include Polish rabbits, Dorset advantage sheep and Welsh Harlequin and Call ducks. I eventually added horses and hogs to my growing small business, raising animals for sale in my community. I named my business Diamond B Show Stock, a nod to my family farm, Diamond B farms. The family business started in the 1970s and is still running strong today. I’m proud to be the next link in the chain for my family’s agricultural business, and I hope to keep it going for the generations that come after me. And I got here with the help of 4-H. 

Day old twin lambs. Photography via author.

I grew up in a farm family and, as a result, I’m entirely hooked on agriculture. There’s something special about watching a newborn lamb’s first steps, seeing it grow and ultimately feeling the satisfaction after its sale on a humid August county fair day, knowing that I’ve given it a life full of long evening walks, gentle hands, tasty treats and security. Those moments reassure me that agriculture will always be a part of my life; now, as I work through my plethora of 4-H projects, I’m in college studying to be a veterinarian and eventually working to protect and improve the lives of livestock. 

But not every kid has the opportunities I’ve had. Our industry is suffering from an inability to summon enough youth passion to join its ranks. I attended the National 4-H Conference in Washington, D.C. this April, where US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack explained it best: The average age of a farmer is close to 60 years old. To protect the future of America’s food, youth must become involved in agriculture, and organizations such as 4-H are the solution. 

Tom Vilsack addresses the crowd at the annual 4-H conference. Photography via USDA/Lance Cheung

More than just agriculture

Established in 1912, 4-H (collectively, head, heart, hands and health) was originally conceived to introduce youth to agricultural work through after-school programs. More than 100 years later, it’s grown to encompass so much more. Each regional 4-H club hosts a variety of programs, with a focus on hands-on learning. You can raise animals, like I do, but you can also learn about all sorts of things, such as photography, public speaking, sewing or technology.

McKenzie Diamond, a recent high school grad from New York, is looking at college. A few years ago, she saw agriculture as just a hobby, not what she thought she could pursue as a career. But that changed last year. 

Along with her other 4-H projects in nutrition, art and community service, she raised goats with her mother. After one of the goats needed to have her leg amputated, Diamond and her family met with vets from Cornell University to discuss their best course of action. It was this meeting where she realized that her hobby could become her career. “My mom grew up in a very agricultural family, and I think that it implanted on me at a young age that [agricultural] lifestyle and goals in life. Truthfully, I don’t think I would be who I am without ag in my life.” Now, Diamond intends to major in either agricultural education or agribusiness. 

Fighting for the future

As lawmakers open their ears to youth voices, 4-H members have been put on the front lines in advocating for farming practices. Wyatt Morrow, a 4-H alumni and college freshman from Ohio, was selected for Citizenship Washington Focus, a nationwide 4-H opportunity recruiting teens to share their thoughts with legislators on Capitol Hill. 

Morrow got to speak to the office of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance in 2023 on behalf of 4-H. Upon his return home and starting his first year at Wilmington College, he was trusted with a position by the college, one of only three freshmen in the group, to again travel to D.C., this time to advocate for the passage of the Farm Bill. Morrow called the lobbying “one of the most eye-opening experiences I’ve ever had. It showed me that advocating for issues you and others are passionate about can really make a difference in shaping our country.” 

Through 4-H, he not only was given a life-altering opportunity to gain hands-on experience working with legislators, but he was able to use it to foster growth in the industry. 

4-H delegate Alexandra Harvey asks Tom Vilsack a question at the annual 4-H conference. Photography via USDA/Lance Cheung.

But it can be difficult to get kids involved in agriculture, especially urban kids or people who don’t grow up in farm families. “Kids are involved in so many different activities that demand their time. Oftentimes, coaches and teachers are not allowing them to have the time off from school or extracurricular activities that they need to fully engage in 4-H since it’s not a school-sponsored activity,” says Kathy Bruynis, an Ohio State University Extension 4-H educator. 

Fortunately, one thing 4-H does have going for it is choices. With more than 200 projects available in the state of Ohio alone, such as livestock, gardening, robotics, nutrition, financial management, welding and more, there are topics for nearly every kid. Additionally, keeping with 4-H’s traditional creative spirit, 4-H professionals and volunteers are working hard to come up with new ways to recruit members. Jamie Stacy, an Ohio 4-H advisor and Junior Fair Board director, hosts bowling or swimming parties and always brings snacks. “Offering some type of food is usually a pretty good way to pull kids in when they get free food and fun,” says Stacy. 

Sara Bailey.

Becoming royalty

Fair or 4-H royalty serve as another valuable tool for recruiting new 4-H members. I was chosen as my county’s queen nearly a year ago after completing a lengthy application and interview process. On the first day of our county fair, I was presented with my crown and sash and given the job of representing 4-H not only to others in agriculture but the general public as well. After a week of helping out at shows, sales and other fair events, I was tasked with visiting other local fairs and festivals. When the fair season wrapped up, I made it a priority to involve myself in the community in other ways. I passed out candy at a Trunk-or-Treat, taking time to socialize with each child and talk to them about why 4-H really mattered to me. I read a book at my local library and eagerly answered the questions fired at me from kids and parents alike. I hugged a veteran as he accepted a quilt made by a 4-H-er at my fair’s annual quilts for veterans and first responders event, and I later connected with Wreaths for Veterans to place wreaths at a nearby cemetery at Christmas. One of my favorite experiences was taking a few baby rabbits and a baby goat with a 4-H friend to a nursing home and seeing the reactions of the residents.

Sara Bailey (left) leads a 4-H club.

All of these experiences helped 4-H project a positive image onto the local community. Prior to my visits, many of the people I met didn’t even know what 4-H was, but I left them knowing more and feeling good about it. Keeping 4-H present in the community is essential to its survival.

The post Young People Need to Find Farming. 4-H is the Answer appeared first on Modern Farmer.

There are also huge benefits to supporting new farmers. Aside from bolstering our food supply, new and young farmers tend to bring unique new perspectives to the field, including a dedication to sustainable farming methods. According to the National Young Farmers Coalition’s (NYFC’s) 2022 National Young Farmer Survey, 86 percent of young farmers practice regenerative farming—growing in harmony with nature—while 97 percent use other sustainable practices.

However, 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. 

With these stories, we spoke to young farmers directly about how they see farming as a viable future and what they need to succeed.

What Are the Big Issues for Young Farmers? We Asked Them

By Emily Baron Cadloff

Modern Farmer sat down with the co-founder of Young Agrarians, a farmer-to-farmer resource for young people, to find out what might hamper young folks looking to enter the agriculture industry.

Where to Get Started: A Guide For Young Farmers

By Emily Baron Cadloff

If you’re a young person looking to start a career in farming, check out these organizations.

Meet the Farmer Training Indigenous Youth and Revitalizing a Culture of Food Sovereignty

By Jennifer Cole

An Indigenous-led training hub, Tea Creek, in northern B.C. may be an answer to Canada’s looming farmer shortage.

Young Farmers Dig Into Land

By Claire Duncomb 

These new farmers get by with a little help from their friends—a co-housing community, a food co-op, and lots of trail and error.

Young People Need to Find Farming. 4-H is the Answer.

By Sara Bailey

The average age of farmers in the US is close to 60, and young farmers have trouble finding a way into the field. Programs like 4-H are the best option.

Coming soon….

Five Young Farmers Cultivating Change

From the Modern Farmer Community

We asked our community to share their favorite young farmers and we’ve profiled a few of these inspiring individuals.

The post The Future is Farmers appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Sam Rudman, one of the first-year farmers of Friends Farm in Lafayette, Colorado, says covering a field with fertilizer shortly before 60-miles-per-hour winds started up was definitely one of his many “rookie mistakes” as a new farmer. He clearly remembers the day in February 2024 when winds threatened to blow away hundreds of dollars in supplies and hours of hard work as a big wakeup call. 

“We got lucky,” he laughs. “And that is going to be our strategy for the rest of the year going forward, to remain lucky in regards to Mother Nature.”

Rudman and Clifford work on trellising tomato plants. Photography by Claire Duncombe.

But the Friends Farm team isn’t counting on luck alone. The three team members—Rudman, Oliver Aurand and Kevin Reiss, who met in 2023 on a nearby farm—bring backgrounds in soil science, anthropology and just over a decade of combined field hand experience. They have also tapped into an innovative community network to find land and mentorship. “Land access is the top challenge cited by current farmers, aspiring farmers and those who have stopped farming,” writes the National Young Farmers Coalition in a 2022 report.

Friends Farm is not technically located on agricultural land. The two-acre vegetable operation is owned by Nyland Cohousing Community, a 42-house community established with the aim of creating connection and supporting sustainable ideals. A former member started the farm a decade ago but became disillusioned by the inability to make a profit. In 2023, Waves of Grain Food Coop leased the land to continue the organic farm in support of its mission to provide fresh and affordable produce to communities along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. 

“Solo full-time farming two acres is an insane thing to do,” says Waves of Grain co-owner Red Clifford , especially while also running a coop. Around that time, Clifford learned of the Friend Farm crew, who were looking for land to farm at the same time Clifford was trying to find help.

It was a serendipitous moment that helped inspire Waves of Grain to use its resources to establish an incubator farm. The coop continued to lease the acreage from the cohousing community and subsidized rent for Friends Farm. It would also help sell a portion of the farm’s produce at regional farmers markets.

Waves of Grain also started mentoring the new farmers, sharing insights about the particularities of the land, preparing the produce for market and helping build the relationship with Nyland residents. The farmers appreciate the practical knowledge Clifford shares from their own mistakes the previous season.

Waves of Grain also hopes to supplement some of the supply chain aspects of a farmer’s job, so the farmers can focus more on farming. During the growing season, a farmer is often focused on the small space of ground before them. Their “view is a 36-inch bubble,” says Clifford. “It’s like basically where they’re looking on the ground to weed.” So far this season, Friends Farm has had particular success selling its salad greens and hakurei turnips.

Friends Farm is located in Lafayette, CO, along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. Photography by Claire Duncombe.

But Friends Farm was also founded on the idea that farming is about more than cultivating vegetables. Aurand’s background in anthropology helped create a focus on nurturing community. So far this season, the farm has hosted nine classes covering topics such as edible landscaping and native gardening as well as community farm days, during which Nyland residents and others help work the farm and learn about growing food. In addition, the farm provides a CSA program to 20 of the Nyland residents.

Friends Farm has thrived because of help from its community, but even with support, it has learned that farming always comes with challenges. The farmers were spreading fertilizer on that windy day in February to amend a clay soil that had been compacted by years of heavy machinery use. A large weed seed bank caused problems in past years, such as the bindweed that consistently outcompetes crops. And the farm relies on municipal water for much of the season, resulting in water bills in the thousands of dollars, says Rudman.

“The concerns are not that you’re going to do a bad job and you’re going to run a bad farm,” he says. “It’s that things can go wrong. The weather can screw you over. Small mistakes can be very costly.”

Clifford and Aurand load up stakes to trellis tomato plants. Photography by Claire Duncombe.

The learning curve remains a challenge, the farmers agree. So far this year, they’ve explored more efficient ways to run the farm and fine-tuned their use of tools such as the Jang seeder, which helps speed up and space out seeds. They’ve also tried relay cropping experiments such as planting tomatoes and peppers before the other was finished growing to help optimize their planting space. Their efforts have yielded varying degrees of success. They consider the support from Waves of Grain and Nyland a leg up. Just having the buildings and irrigation set up was helpful, says Rudman. And Nyland residents have often helped fix problems with the water system.

The relationship between Nyland, Waves of Grain and Friends Farm works because of its reciprocal model, says Clifford. Nyland exchanges its land for a secure food source, and Waves of Grain provides its resources for a supply of food today and an investment to support the farming community and the food they will grow into the future.

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 Young Farmers Dig Into Land 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.