Agriculture Legacy Initiative

On the second to last Sunday in April, a group of young farmers gathered on what just might have been the last chilly day of the season. Some hoped that a patchy frost wouldn’t get their newly planted spring crops. Others were thankful for a respite from the post-March sunburn, a 2012 special. All were glad, as far as I could tell, to be spending the afternoon together at this year’s Agriculture Legacy Initiative gathering.

The hosts of this second yearly event were Carolyn Sesbeau and Jacob Gahn of Food Leaf Farm, a one-year-old farming venture in Stanford, Ky. On this day, a group of 20 or so farmers talked over a potluck meal, sharing the outdoor space with a patch of garlic and a herd of goats. Conversations ran the gamut: the benefits of fermented cabbage, the methods for teaching apprentices, the mild winter, and the ensuing potential for a pest plague this summer.

ALI is comprised of a total of 75 Community Farm Alliance members whose shared vision is to become the next generation of farmers to work the Kentucky soil. These young farmers are doing what their name says, preserving an agricultural legacy. To call them young is to call them green – new to the trade of farming: the sowing, cultivating, and planting that has defined this state for generations. For the past two years, young farmers have been gathering through ALI to both define and organize an effort to preserve the agricultural legacy of their shared Kentucky home.

Similar groups of young farmers exist throughout the United States. The Greenhorns is perhaps the best known. Based out of New York, The Greenhorns organization supports young farmers across the nation. ALI, in contrast, is a smaller organization that not only focuses on the education and support of young farmers, but also grounds itself in the cultural heritage of a shared place.

“It’s about the land…and creating a pathway to the land for the next generation,” said Martin Richards, CFA executive director.

ALI officially began during the CFA 25th anniversary Annual Meeting, although the idea has been there from the beginning. CFA was founded in 1985 by a group of farmers. The farmers were responding to the decreasing economic viability of tobacco farming, which had sustained generations of family farms in Kentucky.

“Their bigger concern was how to keep the family farm viable,” said Richards. “This whole issue of maintaining a legacy on the farm has been there from day one.”

As CFA has grown, so has its mission to support Kentucky’s small family farms. To support those farms is to support those farmers and, with an aging farmer population, CFA saw an increased need to support young farmers through a more cohesive organizing body, like ALI.

Ten years ago, Richards noticed a small but growing number of young farmers in membership with CFA. He also started getting phone calls. The calls were from landed families in need of farmers; these families were contacting CFA in search of young farmers to work their land.

“There were farms without farmers and farmers without farms,” said Richards.

Most of the calls were from families who had formerly tenant-farmed their land to tobacco farmers.

“A big challenge for older farmers, who may have been tobacco farmers, is that Kentucky has lost that cash crop,” said Sesbeau. “So what’s the next cash crop that this generation of farmers will be able to get into and start a family farm from?”

ALI seeks to rebuild the link between generations of farmers and reimagine the family farm. The new cash crop may not be just one plant or animal, but a diversified system, as is evident from the diverse farm systems represented at the April meeting. Each young farmer could be described as a young entrepreneur – a businessperson – trying to make a living off the land through farming.

Sesbeau and Gahn’s Food Leaf Farm is an example. The farm is situated on a portion of St. Asaph Farm where Preston and Rachel Correll manage a herd of cattle. Their alliance is an example of the exchange between older and younger generations of farmers that is mutually beneficial, even symbiotic, as Sesbeau called it. St. Asaph Farm was looking to grow vegetables on their land, but needed the farmer power to do so. When they met vegetable farmers Sesbeau and Gahn, they saw the potential for growing their farm production, while providing a low-risk opportunity for Sesbeau and Gahn to experiment with different farm systems.

Just as CFA saw a need for ALI, so did its young members.

“We were starting to notice and sense this energy around the young farmer movement,” said Ben Abell, the CFA treasurer.

Abell and several other young seasoned farmers helped form ALI at the CFA Annual Meeting in 2010, and helped plan and host the first young farmer gatherings and workshops. Thus far, the group has worked to identify common issues and build fellowship. The primary issues for young farmers are access to land and access to credit, as well as technical training on business management and farming skills.

“Healthcare has come up a lot,” said Abell. “Health insurance is a bottleneck on our entrepreneurial inclinations…It plays a limiting role.”

ALI hopes to link itself with other young farmer organizations, both statewide and nationwide, to help address these barriers through policy.

This April, the young farmers helped define those common challenges, their shared experiences allowing a natural fellowship to take place.

“I think one of the biggest challenges of farming is that it’s easy for it to seem lonely,” said Abell. “A lot of the problems you tackle alone. With ALI, you see yourself as a part of a movement. The challenges you face are not just yours.”

The shared experiences of the farmers at the April gathering were obvious. Two field crew leaders talked about how to create the best experience for new apprentices. Two couples, both just starting their own farms, discussed marketing strategies for their value-added products (farm produce for which value has been added through processing, in this case granola and sauerkraut). There was bartering (goat’s milk for plants). There was also a discussion of herbal medicinal remedies for common health issues.

This shared experience can be traced geographically. Draw a map of the state and dot the apprentice farms and the farms started by those apprentices and you’ll notice a pattern. New farms emanate from the old, as apprentices start out on their own near the land on which they learned. The shared experiences can also be represented by a family tree, defining generations of apprentices through the years. Apprenticeships represent a time-honored and traditional way of educating young farmers through work. Apprenticeship programs throughout the state have helped grow the number of young farmers in the state in the past 10 years. Many of the farmers at the meeting found their farm education this way, and others found it through programs in sustainable agriculture offered at the university level.

Sesbeau would like to grow the capacity for this grassroots fellowship among young farmers. Because of the small scale of many young farmers’ operations, she sees a need for a sharing of resources – of the tools, labor, and goods necessary for a small farm to thrive. Farmers who were focusing on value-added farm goods were looking for a way to share a commercial kitchen. Small growers hoped to aggregate their produce in order to compete in larger markets outside of the Community Supported Agriculture and farmer’s market models. For both the policy and the grassroots work that remains to be done, many young farmers expressed a need for an organizer.

“We’re working on building capacity to allow for staff to focus on the ALI,” said Richards.

CFA is already helping young farmers through ALI, in collaborating with other young farmer organizations to work on national and state policy, and through working with universities and colleges to help establish programs in sustainable agriculture.

The camaraderie between all of those in the Kentucky greenhorn movement is seen most clearly in the common goal of land stewardship. ALI is about the land first, and the common way of using it to sustain Kentucky families through farming. As the organization continues to build its mission and membership, the legacy continues, as new family farms get started and are supported by the community of young farmers from around Kentucky.

“The more we meet, the more advanced the conversations can get,” said Sesbeau.

 

–Caroline Stephens

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