Access and Desire

I have seen quite a few articles of late lamenting how young people aren’t getting in to agriculture; a correspondingly smaller number of articles talking about the growing number of young people in agriculture (particularly in my state of Vermont), and yet even fewer articles talking about the difficulties young people face in starting agricultural enterprises. In my own informal research, I have found a number of opportunities for funding, grants, networking, mentoring, etc. exist in Vermont if you already have a farm or farm business. I am a young person, one of those many young people in this state who actually do aspire to be farmers. My wife and I currently garden on a homestead level, and raise chickens and ducks for meat. We have the beginnings of a pickling and preserving business, with (if I can say this) really good products. But let’s not mince words. We’re poor. We scrape by, piecing together paychecks, luck, generosity, and (ironically) food stamps. We are both hard workers and fast learners. We both have liberal arts educations. But those high-paying job offers all the adults in our lives in high school told us college would bring-- they’re not materializing, and I can think of a number of reasons why. Neither of us went to college for agriculture or any physical/technical skill. We both could have pursued graduate schooling which may have led to careers (and certainly to more debt), but we found it wasn’t in our hearts to do so. I chose to stay here, and my wife chose to come here-- Vermont. Promised Land of “unspoiled,” idyllic, cultured ruralness (a crazy mix of zillionth-generation blue-collar workers and farmers, rich out-of-staters in search of that “simplicity“, middle-class suburbanites running away from New Jersey and Connecticut, various ages of hippy-types, and quite the grab bag of others). I love my beautiful, independently minded state. Love it, love it, love it. If you ask me, “Who are you?” it’s always the first thing I say, “I’m a Vermon’er.” But jobs, financial opportunity? The cost of living is high, especially near Chittenden County, where I grew up. In Vermont, or at least the areas of Vermont vaguely close to Chittenden County, you practically have to have a BA and three years experience in order to get a job as a barista at a coffee shop. People with liberal arts educations-- no Masters or PhD, and no technical skills training-- we’re a dime a dozen. And that’s why Vermont hemorrhages young people. They go to Boston and New York and DC for jobs in their fields, or they go away to grad school so they can come home in ten years qualified enough to get the jobs that require two to five years of experience in a related field. Meanwhile, housing and land prices basically never go down, because we continue to sell plots based on the views that everyone loves rather than on the potential uses of the land or on any commitment to availability. (And if you can price your acreage at $1 million, and actually get close to that from some rich flatlander who wants to retire to all this idyllic beauty, then why wouldn’t you?) The point is, those people that choose to stay here, we have chosen the uphill battle, and trying to get into agriculture is even more of an uphill battle.  From what I know of the local foods movement, I suspect that Vermont is one of the best places in the country to be right now if you are looking to start in agriculture. There are more support structures in place (governmental, non-profit, and social) than in many other places. The working of many of our regulations and laws allows for or directly supports a lot of small agricultural business endeavors and some of the local foods renaissance. But, in my own informal research, I have found that most the opportunities for funding, grants, networking, mentoring, etc. exist if you already have a farm or farm business, not if you are looking to start. Don’t get me wrong, that isn’t said to put down the efforts that are being made to help starting farmers. But the way I see it, the real hurdle for starting farmers isn’t desire, it’s access. All the networking in the world, all the help writing a business plan that the SBA can provide, all the channeled planning on paper that groups like WAgN and Holistic Management Inc. can be of little use if you don’t have start-up capital. Money. And most the grants out there are (understandably) for fledgling business that are, however, already in existence. So it’s a Catch-22. You could get a grant, if you could start your farm business, but you can’t start your farm business until you have the money. Even if I’m wrong, and there are grant opportunities that I am unaware of, grants available to truly starting farmers, there would have to be quite a few grants to help out all the young people with both the desire to start a farming venture and head on their shoulders to do so.  The money help that starting farmers need is not minor. A couple hundred bucks might buy a new charger for some electric fence, but it won’t finance the purchase of a few sheep to start a breeding stock, it won’t buy you the time and materials to build a barn, it won’t buy you a decent tractor, and it certainly won’t get you any closer to a reasonable land lease or ownership. 
The options, as they have presented themselves to me thus far, are as follows:
Rent an apartment or house with land— This is not necessarily a bad Idea, but in my experience, this only works if you want to garden, not farm, and if you don’t want to grow a business. A handful or backyard chickens and your own tomato patch isn’t going to be a problem with many rural landlords, it’s when you want to get bigger that you start to butt heads--understandably so; it’s not your land.
Get into a partnership with a landowner who wants their land farmed for them or Lease— This is also not  a bad idea, but this set up is completely reliant on all parties having the same vision and being able to effectively communicate and get along. Alternatively, it could work if the landowner didn’t have any interest in how the land was being farmed, so long as the land was open and not being laid to waste. One of the questions that goes with this scenario, though, is, “Where will you live?” If the landowners are also your landlords for your housing, things can get even messier. If you’re not living on-site, how long is your commute? How do you make sure pests and predators don’t wreak havoc while you’re not there?
Join or form a community housing situation or  commune—Communes and their permutations seem to have a history of falling apart due to personality clashes, money problems, and other social issues. That’s not to say that “community living” doesn’t seem to work for some people, just that it has its own set of difficulties.
Live the city life in Burlington and start a micro-farm in the Intervale— This is a great idea and a wonderful opportunity not widely available. The Intervale allows many starting farmers to get their feet under them and learn from people with more years of experience. It is, however, not ideal if you want to have animals and keep an eye on them, or don’t really want to live in Burlington because, well, you want to live on a farm. The high cost of living in the Greater Burlington area also needs to be considered.
Buy land with or without a house— There is plenty of land available. There are parcels of different sizes in every town-- with and without houses, on good, fair, or poor soils, wooded, open, scrubby, hilly, low and wet, with stunning views or surrounded by trees. But if you have to put down a down payment of easily more than $15,000, where is that money coming from? And then what will your mortgage be, plus all the other costs of owning a home? There will be monthly costs that at the beginning  will certainly not be coming out of your farm business income. At least one person will have to have an off-farm job. That brings us back to the conversation about the availability of paying work for someone with just a BA in this state. And then, say you have both people with part- or full-time, off-farm jobs, how much farming will get done? How can you effectively grow a business?
The next time I see an article about how young people don’t want to farm, or about how few young people are getting in to farming, I think, rather than just getting angry, I’ll send the author what I’ve written here. The problem is not desire, the problem is access.  I believe that this is not an insurmountable hurdle. We in Vermont have overcome all manner of obstacles in building our local food movement, and we continue to do so with both vision and practicality. What needs to happen is a meeting of the minds on this subject. Let us find a way to create a fund, or form an organization that places the people with desire and little access in a conversation with people who have access, or funds, or some connecting vision.  Then we will be moving forward into an even stronger future for our state, and, by example, for the country.