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News from Full Belly Farm (reprinted from The Beet newsletter)

I have never written for this newsletter before, but when I was asked by Full Belly to address their CSA customers, I was excited by the opportunity to talk with you. I have lived next to Full Belly Farm for twenty years. For years, Full Belly and a few other like-minded rebels have turned questions about the wisdom of industrial agriculture and free market ideology into something much grander. Not a revolution quite, but a statement. A quiet, yet humbling statement of commitment to stewardship of farmland, respect of wild land, responsibility to neighbors and community, and respect for our agrarian heritage. For years, this statement has been in my head as I have been around Full Belly as a neighbor, employee, and fellow farmer.

After seeing firsthand with awe and delight what someone with conviction in the necessity of sustainable farming and a love of hard work can do, I can see no other future for myself except on a farm. I have an opportunity at education through playing football at the University of Minnesota and it drives my mother nearly to tears when I tell her that, no, I am not interested in law or medicine, that “Mother, I want to farm.”

Farming is a dying sport in rural America. Every year there are less farmers everywhere and the face of agriculture is more and more industrial, more corporate, and less sustainable and less community based. Farmers are an independent lot, the work is often solitary, and the life lonely. A farmer may often feel a ‘me and my farm against the world’ mentality in the face of corporate agriculture, GMO’s, structural readjustment, debt, and fluctuating prices. As a youngster though, the sense that really affected me was that while the grown folks farmed their own land, they really all farmed together. Farm families rarely went more than a few days without seeing each other, and each farm was part of a greater fellowship. A fellowship of farmers and neighbors all committed to a sustainable future in agriculture. I never forgot that sense of farming together that I got from our circle of friends and neighbors.

For a young person hoping for a future in farming I think that the exodus of young people from rural living and farm life is the most daunting. A recurring conversation I have with aging farmers both locally and in other states is an old guy saying how he took over the family farm at twenty-five years old in 1975 (12 years before I was born) and was the youngest farmer in 40 miles, and now he is 61 and still the youngest farmer in 40 miles. It’s hard to think that our agricultural heritage and the knowledge gained by our parents and grandparents are literally only a generation or two from being extinct.

What the Full Belly partners and their peers have been able to do is incredible, but the family farm is disappearing in America. Looking ahead at the future of rural communities like this, my greatest hope is that people within the community as well as outsiders look closely at what is going on and become inspired by farming. When I talk to other young folks about creating a future farming locally, they often say: “I know enough about farming to know I don’t ever want to do it,” or simply express resignation at how hard it is to get into farming without either being very wealthy or assuming massive debt. The modern economy is unfriendly to small farmers, and many smart young folks realize the difficulties of following their parent’s footsteps and forsake the farming life.

What I have realized though is that it will be easier for us than it was for our parents. When they set out, they had to completely rethink the modern approach to farming, create a new organic philosophy and fight against conventional beliefs and the same economic and social issues we face today. We have the opportunity to stand on their shoulders and follow the trail they already blazed. I am not sure what the overall point of this ramble is, except to share with the customers of a very good farm how I have been affected by living around here and how I hope that we all look closely at our relationship to the land and see that there are alternatives to the modern dilemma and that those alternatives have been proven. The future depends on making sure that our inheritance is not lost and that we young folks do have opportunities to continue the good fight for food democracy and political ecology.

- Cole Baker

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