Where will farmers & farms come from?

(CSA Newsletter: Week 5)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

A few weeks ago, Casey and I attended a brainstorming summit at OSU called “Growing Opportunities.” The goal was to address two related questions: how to help older farmers successfully transition out of farming (without selling their land to developers) and how to help new farmers get into farming. In other words: how can we as a community help farming survive in Oregon into the future?

The answers we came up with were unsurprising and vague: preserve farmland! train new farmers! provide financial assistance! support farm transition! Yes, yes, yes, and yes. How to accomplish these goals continues to be the big challenge, as many forces work against them: development pressure, lack of funding, and limited time.

But the question remains an urgent one. The 2007 Farm Census reports are beginning to be analyzed and American farmers are continuing to get older. According to a Farm Census report: “The average age of U.S. farmer operators increased from 55.3 in 2002 to 57.1 in 2007. The number of operators 75 years and older grew by 20 percent from 2002, while the number of operators under 25 years of age decreased 30 percent.”

Of course, while those of us at the Summit see these numbers as problems (who will farm when these farmers pass on?), few Americans are seeing the urgency in their own lives. Go to the grocery store today, and you’ll continue to find the full selection of food products — in fact, more than ever before. The produce displays are well stocked, as are shelves of bread and the meat cases. So, what’s the problem?

The problem is that we’re more and more outsourcing the American food supply. Less and less of the food we eat has been grown and processed by American laborers on American soil. Right now, this strategy appears to be working from the consumer point of view. But in the long-run, we will face many significant problems.

As the cost of fuel inevitably rises again due to dwindling supplies, transporting food from overseas will be cost prohibitive. In the long-term scenario, we will inevitably need to produce food again in the United States. However, to transition back to a U.S. food supply, we will need two things in abundance: available farmland and trained farmers. Certainly, in a crisis, people can scramble to get skills, but learning to farm is a long-term process akin to becoming a doctor. Just as a doctor must see case after case before he or she learns the nuanced art of diagnosis and treatment, a farmer needs to experience season after season to learn how to most effectively and profitably grow crops.

And farmland is an equally important piece of the equation: if we continue to pave over farmland with development or dig it up to mine the resources below, then it is gone forever.

Sometimes I find myself frustrated with the well-intentioned efforts of urban farmers who grow food completely out of context, such as in kiddie pools filled with potting mix on downtown rooftops. I worry that the optimistic press these schemes receive might undermine the urgent need to preserve the land as is. Yes, you can create something similar to soil in a kiddie pool — but real living topsoil is a living ecosystem akin to an old-growth forest. You can technically grow food in many mediums, but topsoil within its original land-based context is capable of feeding and maintaining itself through the activity of the many organisms that live there.

Topsoil is intrinsically connected to the place and the surrounding ecosystems. Removing topsoil from its context is similar to cutting a tree out of the forest: it stops being a living force and becomes a commodity, an object — useful for human purposes, but no longer part of a living ecosystem.

Biologically speaking, topsoil is difficult to replace; and geologically, it is impossible to replace within the human timescale. The deep layers of subsoil and topsoil are the product of geological activity over hundreds of thousands of years.

Our first goal as farmers is to respect the place that allows us to grow food: respect its uniqueness, respect its age, respect its connectedness. When we plant crops on our ground, we believe that the place itself is what makes growth possible — our role is to respect, tend, and time things correctly within the seasonal cycles. Regardless of us, the processes continue; we simply place food crops in the flow and temporarily harness the living forces for human use.

A useful analogy for our farm would be an old-fashioned water wheel on a river: the river flows with or without the water-wheel, but the user of the water-wheel can harness the river’s power if the wheel is constructed properly and the river is respected and allowed to continue flowing.

This is not fundamentally a criticism of urban gardening as activity in of itself, but instead an impassioned plea for urban dwellers to realize that a soil-filled kiddie pool is simply a pale imitation of a vast tract of ecologically connected rich topsoil — growing out of context is not a real solution. We need to openly acknowledge this fact in order to value the continued preservation of farmland.

And, I think that understanding is part of what makes a skilled farmer. I think that an essential aspect of training future farmers is simply to reconnect more people to the natural world.

This is a topic that was not discussed at the summit, and I’m sure the crowd would have dismissed it as too romantic. But, to me, the basic foundation of a good farmer and of a society that respects and preserves its land are the same: an understanding and love of the natural world and its processes and cycles.

It’s a seemingly simple solution but unfortunately one that is being ignored today. The movement I see in society is away from the natural world. Any interaction with the natural world is becoming increasingly mediated by technologies, including our interactions with our own selves. Medical treatment is becoming increasingly reliant upon diagnostic technologies that bypass basic senses; and we communicate more through electronic mediums than ever before.

We too are natural beings, but we hardly acknowledge our own important connection to the ecosystem we live in, including other physical human beings. (For a great analysis of disconnection from the natural world and its negative effect on children, read Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.)

What would reconnecting to the natural world look like? Turning off the television and computer. Spending time outside: gardening, playing, traveling by bike or foot, bird watching, etc. Revitalizing and renewing respect for the naturalist branches of science. Caring for and loving our friends and family as physical natural beings. Teaching our children about the natural world and celebrating its cycles.

How much less would a new farmer have to learn if she already innately understood the seasonal weather cycles in her region? How much easier would it be to continue preserving farmland if every child understood exactly where food grows?

Or, we can just continue talking about food, farming and the natural world as something separate from our society — which is unfortunately more or less what happened at the summit. Our societal tendency to compartmentalize topics of discussion does a great disservice to our understanding of the world, which is in fact an endless series of connections and interdependencies.

Thank goodness, some people are fully aware of this. Wendell Berry is the most prolific writer on these and other connected topics. And brave young and old folks are continuing to enter the profession of farming, despite what the statistical trends say.

This Sunday, over thirty CSA farmers and affiliated persons descended upon our farm for the final Portland Area CSA Coalition (PACSAC) meeting of the winter. After a tour of our farm, we crammed into our tiny house for a delicious potluck lunch, followed by a meeting to discuss farming. It was heartening to sit closely side-by-side with others working hard to keep farming real in Oregon.

And, of course, you are an equally important part of the solution as well. By choosing to eat produce grown locally rather than miles and miles away, you preserve farmland, support farmers, and reconnect yourself to your home place. May you be especially conscious of your connectedness as your enjoy this week’s vegetables.

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla