The New Traditionalists: Young Small-Farmers

by Katherine Gustafson

category: Farm Labor

Published October 26, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT

A friend recently told me she sits in her cubicle daydreaming about the charm of an agrarian life. She finds it ironic that she now longs to do precisely what her Lithuanian ancestors struggled so mightily to escape. They worked their fingers to the bone as peasant farmers to provide better futures to successive generations, on down to my present-day friend who has had the opportunity to get an education and become a well-paid professional with a comfortable life away from the hot sun and taxing fieldwork.

"It's funny," she mused, "that now I just want to go work on a farm."

Well it turns out she's not the only one. Mike Smith reported last night that in the U.S., young people -- often college grads who might have had lucrative desk jobs -- are discovering the appeal of getting their hands dirty.

These young people believe in maintaining one of the world's oldest traditions, in protecting our agricultural legacy against the onslaught of corporate capitalism. Their task is deeply conservative -- to farm the land the way their great-great grandparents did -- though the politically charged agenda to which many of them subscribe is a fundamentally liberal ethos of pushing back against what they see as a flawed and unsustainable status quo in agriculture.

It is indeed more than fluffy idealism or the desire for a simple life that is motivating these kids who could be making bank in office jobs to work back-breaking hours in the fields for little pay. According to Alicia Jabbar, 26, a farm worker featured in the article and accompanying video published yesterday by the Washington Post, this is about a new and sustainability-focused generation taking up the mantle of growing the nation's food.

"The average age of a farmer is between 55 and 60," she says in the video. "We're all going to be in not very good shape if all of our farmers die off and nobody else has taken over."

For Susan Planck, co-owner of Wheatland Farms, where Jabbar works, it's about returning to the fundamental independence of the way humans have always lived. Doing small farming, she says in the video, means running a small business, which is the traditional thing people have done to survive for millennia. "It is industrial agriculture that is a blip, going to be a blip on the scene because it's not sustainable" she told the Post.

It is ironic that the traditional agenda these young farmers are pushing is often distrusted and even discredited by those fixated on its anti-establishment focus.

What is more traditionalist, after all, than going back to our roots and holding fast to age-old methods and priorities? What is more fundamental to our society's origins than a desire to be free to farm the earth with one's own two hands and by doing so design one's own destiny?

Photo courtesy of Mad City Bastard on flickr.