Every time I come in from my farm fields and tune into the news these days, the headline is about food: food prices, food scares, food shortages, food riots. Food has America’s attention these days, but folks are overlooking a critical piece of the brewing crisis: a national shortage of farmers.

We farmers make up a mere 1.6% of the U.S. population right now. Picture an inverted pyramid balanced precariously on its nose: that’s our national food supply, with about 3 million of us feeding three hundred million of you. It’s an elephant in a pair of stiletto heels.

With the average age of farmers approaching 60, young farmers like me in short supply (a scant 5.8% of us are under the age of 35), and three quarters of the country living the city-life, you’d be wise to wonder who’s going to milk the cows and grow the grain for your morning bowl of cornflakes down the road. More and more our collective knowledge about growing food is housed in nursing homes, and in another twenty years today’s average aged farmer will be dead.

Proponents of modern industrial agriculture will argue that there’s nothing to worry about - that we don’t need more farmers to feed ourselves, we just need bigger tractors, bigger farms and biotechnology. Except for one big problem: oil.

America’s industrial food system relies almost entirely on oil, which it transforms into everything from carrots to Coke by way of diesel-powered tractors, petroleum-based fertilizers, oil-derived pesticides, and gas-guzzling trucks. When all is said and done, the average American “eats” 350 gallons of fossil fuel a year, and close to one fifth of all the energy used in the U.S. is burned up producing, processing and transporting food. It means that as oil supplies peter out and fuel costs keep ballooning, America is headed for hunger if we bet our lunch on industrial agriculture.

Our chance of weathering this challenge better than various other civilizations that have collapsed for lack of food throughout history hinges in part on rebuilding a whole new generation of farmers in America. About 50 million of us in the next thirty years, estimates Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute, and we can’t be addicted to oil. It’s one reason that I just bought a team of draft horses for my farm in Oregon.

Pulling it off at this scale is going to take a lot of things: land reform that gives new farmers access to farmland, land use planning that prioritizes agriculture in both urban and rural settings, low-interest loans to help beginning farmers get their start, training and technical assistance to teach smart farming practices, and an American government that puts an end to subsidizing industrial agribusiness and starts investing purposefully in a crop of sustainable family farmers - starting with the fastest growing segment of farm operators today: women, Hispanic, Asian and Native American farmers.

It’s also going to take a cultural shift that revitalizes farm culture, breathes life into rural towns, and throws a party when a college grad decides to be a farmer. A hundred years down the road and well-fed, we’ll be looking back on these times and marveling at that short, weird blip in our history when almost everyone lived in cities, when we didn’t farm with horses and mules, and when eating bananas in Alaska seemed as normal as a sunrise.

As for the naysayers who insist that family farmers can’t feed the world, there is no shortage of data showing that the net productivity of smaller scale, diversified farms can be equal to or greater than that of industrial monocultures. In Amish country, comparative studies showed that the net cash return per acre of cropland on horse-powered farms was up to half again the average of mechanized farms.

With diesel leaning towards five dollars a gallon at the pumps today - and rising - the writing is on the wall: we’re staring down the barrel of a true food crisis unless we cultivate a new cadre of farmers who can keep the pantry stocked when the oil runs dry. Dinner – and everything else - depends on it.

Zoë Bradbury is a young farmer and a Food & Society Policy Fellow.

This feature-length documentary from the Pacific Northwest examines Community-Supported Agriculture (csa), through which consumers buy shares of a local farm's harvest, receiving a weekly supply of fresh food throughout the growing season. Small-scale organic farmers and csa members from around the South Puget Sound region share their views on the present reality of small-scale farming and its impact on farmers, consumers, and the local community as a whole. With issues of sustainability and food security coming to the fore throughout North America and beyond, Growing Awareness illustrates the importance of local small farms to a community and critiques the emergence of an organic-industrial complex as well as the modern corporate-controlled and government-subsidized global food system.

Pardon us while we sound a trumpet.  The young farmer movement is taking root--roots deepening everyday in healthy soil and healthy communities.  Young farmers are in the public sphere--the NY TIMES and LA TIMES and KPFA Radio.  They are bridging the generational gap, farming in cities and suburbs, squatting land to farm, and negotiating partnerships to farm--farming by any means possible.  This might be the gateway impulse that leads others down the garden path--along the personal and professional trajectories of sustainability.  This brings us to our very good friend Zoe Ida Bradbury.

Zoe is an ally and multi-level hero.  She is a greenhorns collaborator and young farmer out in Oregon.  She is documenting her experiences in Diary of a Young Farmer over at Edible Portland.  Her stories are wonderful springtime reading--if only there were time in the spring!

Oh grand emergence--little sprout, without doubt. Thanks for your simple, purposeful, lucky little gesture.

April 25 and April 26

8PM

Friday Night:

The Rural Route Film Festival was created to highlight works that deal with rural people and places. The festival, which showcases rural themes in an urban environment, features award-winning narrative, documentary, and experimental films as well as music videos. Based in New York City, the most urban of environments, the festival brings an alternative to the box office action flick so often set in New York or Los Angeles, or the overdone generic suburban dramedy. .

This year’s “Rural Route Tour” program definitely leans towards the more artistic and documentary side. We’ve got fun and serious pieces from all around the world. Arctic owls in Montana, Canadian riding lawnmower races, films about light pollution, a Ukrainian poetic peasant masterpiece, dancers in the snowy Norwegian tundra, plastic lawn deer lost in Brooklyn, a man’s captivating search for his ancestors in Lithuania, and some good, ‘ol banjo playin’ at a Kentucky old folks home. Total running time is 97 minutes.

Saturday Night:

Our “Go Organic!” program, originally screened at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, is a new component to the Rural Route tour that we consider absolutely essential. These films provide a refreshing education on the current state of agriculture, and point out positive sustainable and organic practices that you can take part in. The Meatrix and Frankensteer expose the ways of unethical farming, while others provide us with role models through CSAs, Cuban community, sustainable lemon farms, organic choices, and a new wave of female farmers leading the way. Includes Ladies of the Land, Academy Award Winner for Best Student Documentary. Total running time is 110 minutes.

47 acre educational farm in Queens is looking to add one full-time, year-round worker. Primary responsibilities will be to assist farmer in vineyard and vegetable production, but must be willing to do general labor work as required. Some weekend work and seasonal attendance at farmer's market. Farm experience and interest in organic and sustainable practices preferred. Gladly willing to train an inexperienced but enthusiastic and hard-working assistant. Tractor driving experience a plus; must drive standard transmission. Starting ~ $12/hr. Background check, clean driving record, two week trial period.

Description of Farm

The Queens County Farm Museum occupies New York City ’s largest remaining tract of natural, undisturbed farmland. Encompassing a 47 acre parcel in Floral Park, this remarkable piece of land is among the last vestiges of a 400 year history of agriculture as a way of life and livelihood in New York City . The farm is expanding its farming operations and is committed to sustainable practices. To embrace the history of agriculture is to acknowledge the ecological and social importance of agriculture in our present lives. The Farm Museum recognizes the interdependence of the health of our farm and the health of the community of New York City . The farm is home to a two acre vineyard, a small orchard, a 4000 sq foot glass greenhouse and 3000 square feet of cold frames. We are currently developing a comprehensive composting program, refurbishing our cold frames to grow market vegetables in the winter, and expanding our fruit and vegetable fields. The farm is also home to laying hens, goats, sheep and pigs.

Contact Michael Grady Robertson, mgrobertson@queensfarm.org

"I ran downstairs and Bebe came running up to me, bleating and looking at me with distress. Tail up. That’s always a sign of pending birth. But I thought it wouldn’t be for another two weeks! Luckily, I’m obsessive, so I had all the supplies—the iodine, the petroleum jelly, gloves, towels, bottles, colostrum, beet pulp and oats—ready to go." Keep reading...

Spring is here…a bit early.
We joyfully welcomed two new Nigerian Dwarf doelings
to GhostTown Farm:

Orla
Weighing 1 pound
and
Georgina Blaze
Weighing 1.3 pounds

on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 2008 at 3:30pm
Half Pint Bebe and National Hero are the proud parents

We hope they'll be champion milkers!

With Love,
Farmer Novella

Sandor Katz is a fermentation fetishist. Sandor is a film advisor and elfin-mentor to the project. He lives in a cob cubby set into a hill in rural Tennessee, on a mountain sanctuary of lovely, lively back to the land freaks--almost all of whom relish, covet and evangelize about his three year old garbanzo miso.

I was lucky enough to visit Sandor at his digs in the forest--to witness the crocks in his cellar, to sidle up to his cold-frames, and drive with him to some area farms and the Georgia Organic Conference.

We arrived at the conference after a short stop in Chattanooga--a very cool city with vital downtown energy, and a revitalized waterfront with legendary local pizza shop. Almost immediately Sandor introduced me to the Keener Family, tremendous farmers of Katadhin sheep and vegetables at Sequatchie Cove Farm in Sequatchie, Tennessee. Kelsey Keener, having gone to Santa Cruz to attend the AgroEcology program, has returned to Tennessee to start a farm on an island in the Tennessee River.

We sat next to the boys at dinner, and when they heard I was homeless, they offered to take me back to sleep in the greenhouse at Williams Island Farm. We got there in the dark, yet even still I could see that we were driving into an industrial storage facility with great huge canisters, or I guess they are called tanks -- 30 feet tall and shining with corrugation in the lights of the family Volvo. We got out surrounded by gravelly potholes full of the day's rain, surrounded by 7 foot high razor wire fencing, and a forest of yellow concrete bollards. The boys told me that the only other residents of the island are a couple of cattle ranchers who apply sewage sludge to the land--causing a great stink.

We clamored down the gangway into a misty layer of the aforementioned stink and jumped into an aluminum launch boat. I had my trusty little headlamp out (well prepared for such circumstances, and slightly gleeful) and was zooming my little camcorder to try and film the beaver who was flapping his tail against the water. It took quite a while for the motor to turn over--actually the boys paddled for a while first--but then it sputtered to life and we were off, gliding across the dark river with the half moon behind us and the cliffs up ahead lit up with dormitory windows of Baylor Prep School.

We slept in the greenhouse that the boys made, and the boys drank the Frey wine we had rescued from the dinner tables surrounding us, played their guitars, and discussed the local issues (institutional purchasing, farmers market meetings, well drilling logistics) and Bryan played the guitar. The four of them are terribly earnest, terribly sweet, and super delighted with the misty mornings and fescue grass and solar powered chicken coop. Look out world--they are growing!

"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Last time we were here we visited the 20 year burn site where Ceanothis had grown up in a thicket to cover the ash. This year the butterflies had discovered the long scar of fresh, vital Ceanothis and had congregated there to feed their young, the catapillers. The catapillers would feed, feed, feed and then turn themselves up into capsules.

The capsules looked like alien pods hanging, dangling and swining from the clean-munched branches of the Ceanothis. They were gray and dapply and horned. Inside the caterpillers had disolved into a liquid paste- vulnerable, and delicious to certain parasites, they had developed a defense mechanism. A clap, a hum or a song would set them into motion- swinging and bobbing up and down- without muscles, without purpose, except to evade the hungry flies. So as we walked along the fire road along the scar of bare trees and sang out and looked, we saw all the metamorphic cacoons jiving up and down and moving the branches of the trees, and the trees, and the trees on either side until the whole forest was moving.

Inside the liquid begins to fasten itself to the imaginal plates- and slowly, slowly the wings of the butterfly take form.

When, wet and weak, the butterflies finally emerge, it is called eclosing. The butterflies eclose, puff liquid into their wings and soon as the sun shines off the haze, they take those new wings for a flutter.

Viva la tierra. Severine.

First: The Natural World

The Back to the Land movement in the late sixties and early seventies was a whole culture in itself. Many Humboldt old timers laugh (and rightly so) at the shanties put up by the foolish newcomers. But the greenhorns had a great deal in common with the old pioneers who first settled here. Many were hard working families determined to create a home amongst hostile natives. Some of the resulting homesteads are works of arts. With the help of family and neighbors, my father-in-law created one of the most beautiful small farms I've ever seen. His vision is of every day objects being art and art being everyday.

Every beautiful home starts with a beautiful landscape and my father-in-law choose well.

Then he carefully added lovely and useful ponds where they would be filled by natural springs.

The Pond

Each detail, from the sunburst window in the loft above the adobe brick house to the carefully twined grapes curling up the vineyard posts seemed designed both for beauty and for function.

Welcome to the Homestead

He crafts gates with the passion and pleasure usually reserved for high art--searching the woods for the right branches, the right trees--always seeking simplicity even in complexity.

The Chicken Yard Gate

He often repeats a pattern--not from lack of imagination but for the same reason a painter might echo lines in the same creation.

The Orchard Gate

Even the tools he uses daily are placed so perfectly that they seem like great art. Yet they are practical and necessary.

The Tools

Like every homestead, it isn't perfection but perfection in progress. There are projects waiting to be completed. Areas that need work but somehow even they seem like art in the harmony of the whole.

But above everything else, even the carefully wrought details, is the huge vision. Other homesteads have beauty, have well maintained craftmanship but this place has Art in the grand scale-- a round cob guest house that could grace Natural Home, a front door that could have been crafted for a castle, a ladder to a loft that looks like sunshine from heaven, and a wooden bathtub made from local cedar surrounded by nasturtiums. But the best is this exquisite round greenhouse that rises in crystal beauty amongst the orchards and vineyards of the homestead.

The Greenhouse

There are more artists in Humboldt County per capita then any other California county and that is not counting the wonderful artists who create the backwoods beauty that is rarely seen in galleries or museums. These artists are known to only a few.

Now I'm sharing one of them with you. Welcome....

I watched family farms, as a child, go belly up one by one because of lower market value of their products and always higher cost for necessities to run those farms. Those who went to the bank to satisfy their needs ended up selling their souls to a system that took them even farther down the tubes. Only the very creative and alternative thinking farmers have been able to stay afloat along with their debt ridden counterparts. On my dad's dairy farm, we could not afford to raise our own meat, or make our own butter, or barely even drink our own milk because everything we had needed to be sold to make ends meet. And then we could not afford to buy these things at the store either. I can only imagine that it must be even harder now. Farming for a small farmer has become an expensive hobby at best unless they can figure out ways of getting around the many usual expenses.

So, it begins? The prices on staple foods at the grocery store go steadily up. The jobs go steadily bye-bye. The price of gas goes up. Supplies begin to run low due to border security. The roads fall apart and the taxes go up. People loose their jobs and can't pay the taxes or the price of gas. Mortgages go past due. The banks own more and more of our homes and possessions. Everybody's trying to sell their land and homes, but nobody's buying because everybody is in the same boat. King Coal and our government "leaders" run roughshod over the citizens  of West Virginia, using the buddy system, while trying to scare everyone with words like "unemployment" so they won't protest the state being sold out and destroyed by them in their hurry to grab the goods and run. Many of  the so-called financial experts are saying we are getting ready to have a depression that makes the first one look like a long holiday.

Revolution anyone?

...Viva La rEVOLution ! noituLOVEr aL aviV...
Now might be a good time to learn some survival skills and find some alternative transportation. Form alliances with your neighbors...
Grow a big garden, and like a repeat of the late 60's-early 70's, get "back to the land."

Things are looking just a tad different since I got out of

I'm witnessing the effects of the policies and greed of the last 10-20 years. Huge Korporate farms caused huge numbers of Midwesterners in small towns throughout Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas to migrate to urban cities on both coasts. Some changed as a result. Others brought their resentment and fear with them and made urban life just a tad more toxic than it already was.

But this isn't about finger pointing—because there is far too much blame to go around. No, this is about discovering that the new changes we'll all have to make in the future just may be more racially inclusive than we imagine. Those who are preparing to leave the malnourished environments that urban America will increasingly become (as the economy declines and crime rises) are people who wear all manner of "labels". Lesbian commune builders, new young black farmers, white permaculturists, Buddhist village creators, and Native American returnees will be opening aware hands and welcoming you.

Here in Oklahoma I see how economic struggle has forced many whites to be open to anybody with skills who wants to come here and better the economy by creating more jobs. Black Oklahomans seem respond by taking a more tolerant and accepting attitude in turn.

So, who for those who want to leave the no-win of life in the urban hood and move out to the land (once they've created the skills necessary to live anywhere), they are going to be surprised to find that they aren't alone, and that some of the kindest hands that reach out to them ... will be white, red ... yellow ... brown ... pink ... etc....

God has funny ways of opening our stubborn hearts. I came across this website as an example: Ryan Is Hungry

But last week I read an article on Dexter Cows. Not those big, intimidating things that "guard" countryside fence lines and stare back at me with unblinking eyes ... not them. I'm talking about Little Cows. Not pygmy cows or miniture cows ... a real breed of bovine ... that's naturally small. Cool.

I don't have a family so a "normal" size dairy cow would have me making cheese, ice cream, and butter on a 24/7 hour basis. But Dexters give smaller amounts of milk and every web site I've looked at swore they are "gentle." Have a look: