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The rising age of farmers is alarming, but the Quivira Coalition took that challenge and made it the centerpiece of their tenth annual conference, shining the spotlight on a series of enthusiastic and innovative young agrarians who are blazing trails toward farming’s future.
The Quivira Coalition itself is a unique collaboration of ranchers and environmentalists originally formed in 2002 to defend public lands ranching, but it has evolved over the years to cover the niche where ranching and resource management interests overlap and to promote responsible land stewardship, including riparian restoration and carbon sequestration. Founder Courtney White plans to take a leave of absence in 2012 to write a book about how food production and land management can be used to build up soil and counteract climate change.
The coalition has also been actively cultivating a new generation of sustainable farmers. In 2008, the group launched an apprenticeship program that pairs aspiring young professionals with farmer-mentors willing to host them for an intense educational experience. So far seven individuals have completed the program.
Dan and Becca James, artisan cheese-makers at the James Ranch near Durango, have been hosts. They admitted it is initially a liability for a farm to take on an inexperienced farmhand, but said the Quivira Coalition makes it easier by carefully screening each of the candidates.
The couple didn’t hesitate about their reason for doing it.
“We want to support this next generation of people that are serious about it and are ready to launch out there and do something,” Dan James said.
The future face of farming
Roughly half of the 400-plus convention participants were from New Mexico and southern Colorado, but dozens of speakers traveled from as far away as California and New England to tell their stories of gaining a toehold in farming and why it was worth the struggle.
One name familiar to many in the region belongs to Jeff Gossage, son of major league baseball player, Goose Gossage. The younger Gossage has been managing the Medano-Zapata Ranch for the past six years after apprenticing for three and a half years under manager Duke Phillips on the Chico Basin Ranch near Colorado Springs.
That he wasn’t from a traditional farm family didn’t stop Gossage from pursuing something he enjoyed.
“Dad bought a ranch when I was a kid. That’s how I got exposed to ranching,” he recounted. “I was never very school oriented. I did some work in construction, but I knew that wasn’t for me. But working for the Stirrup Ranch (which his father owned for 22 years and his uncle managed) really opened my eyes to ranching.”
He was so excited about the profession that he was willing to take an internship that paid next to nothing just to get his foot in the door.
“I didn’t think I knew anything. I was willing to learn,” he explained.
He deeply respected Phillips and loved working at Chico Basin. But in the interest of broadening his experience, he left to work on horseback every day at the huge Padlock Ranch in Wyoming, then at a large stocker and crop operation in Nebraska. One day he got a call from Phillips, who had taken over management of the Medano-Zapata for the Nature Conservancy and needed an on-site person to help run the 301,000-acre spread near the Great Sand Dunes. Gossage was a natural choice.
The ranch runs both cattle and bison with a strong emphasis on wildlife and environmental management.
“The reality of my future is that I’ll never own a ranch, so the best I can do is to manage a ranch,” Gossage said. “Our organization is interested in managing for other landowners. I think there’s a future in bison, too, so this is a good position for me to be in.”
Many others, of varying ages, appeared at the podium throughout the two-day conference to explain how they had ended up in farming or worked to help others get there.
Katie Wallace spent the past seven years working for New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, most recently as one of two fulltime sustainability specialists. “I started out forecasting beer sales, and the company helped me evolve into this position. I didn’t realize when I was younger that you could follow your passion and make a career out of it,” she said.
The company and the culture in Fort Collins shaped her in important ways, she added.
“I grew up in the suburbs. I didn’t know much about farming,” she said. “So this has been a huge shift for me personally. And after making this shift, which has brought me closer to the earth, I find that I am a much happier person.”
Several leaders from indigenous communities in the region talked about how traditional food and farming is an avenue for developing leadership and vocational skills among the younger population.
Lilian Hill, a traditional builder and organizer from the small Hopi village of Kykotsmovi, Ariz., helps coordinate youth training programs centered on permaculture and food growing. “Today in the Hopi community we see a great reduction in the production of fruit and the knowledge that goes along with that,” she said. “We are engaged in an effort to restore old orchards that had been cultivated for hundreds and hundreds of years. All of this is very important to us because we see a lack of engagement by the youth in our community.”
Miguel Santistevan, of Taos, N.M., came from a large family and watched some of his own relation fall prey to crime and drugs before becoming a farmer, educator and youth mentor. “It’s a passion of mine,” he said.
“We’ve opened up our own farm as an educational center,” he added. “When you are investing in young people, it might be 10 years before you see a seed germinate. I teach college, too, but I really feel the greatest rewards working with young people who never knew farming was even an option.”
The rising age of farmers is alarming, but the Quivira Coalition took that challenge and made it the centerpiece of their tenth annual conference, shining the spotlight on a series of enthusiastic and innovative young agrarians who are blazing trails toward farming’s future.
The Quivira Coalition itself is a unique collaboration of ranchers and environmentalists originally formed in 2002 to defend public lands ranching, but it has evolved over the years to cover the niche where ranching and resource management interests overlap and to promote responsible land stewardship, including riparian restoration and carbon sequestration. Founder Courtney White plans to take a leave of absence in 2012 to write a book about how food production and land management can be used to build up soil and counteract climate change.
The coalition has also been actively cultivating a new generation of sustainable farmers. In 2008, the group launched an apprenticeship program that pairs aspiring young professionals with farmer-mentors willing to host them for an intense educational experience. So far seven individuals have completed the program.
Dan and Becca James, artisan cheese-makers at the James Ranch near Durango, have been hosts. They admitted it is initially a liability for a farm to take on an inexperienced farmhand, but said the Quivira Coalition makes it easier by carefully screening each of the candidates.
The couple didn’t hesitate about their reason for doing it.
“We want to support this next generation of people that are serious about it and are ready to launch out there and do something,” Dan James said.
The future face of farming
Roughly half of the 400-plus convention participants were from New Mexico and southern Colorado, but dozens of speakers traveled from as far away as California and New England to tell their stories of gaining a toehold in farming and why it was worth the struggle.
One name familiar to many in the region belongs to Jeff Gossage, son of major league baseball player, Goose Gossage. The younger Gossage has been managing the Medano-Zapata Ranch for the past six years after apprenticing for three and a half years under manager Duke Phillips on the Chico Basin Ranch near Colorado Springs.
That he wasn’t from a traditional farm family didn’t stop Gossage from pursuing something he enjoyed.
“Dad bought a ranch when I was a kid. That’s how I got exposed to ranching,” he recounted. “I was never very school oriented. I did some work in construction, but I knew that wasn’t for me. But working for the Stirrup Ranch (which his father owned for 22 years and his uncle managed) really opened my eyes to ranching.”
He was so excited about the profession that he was willing to take an internship that paid next to nothing just to get his foot in the door.
“I didn’t think I knew anything. I was willing to learn,” he explained.
He deeply respected Phillips and loved working at Chico Basin. But in the interest of broadening his experience, he left to work on horseback every day at the huge Padlock Ranch in Wyoming, then at a large stocker and crop operation in Nebraska. One day he got a call from Phillips, who had taken over management of the Medano-Zapata for the Nature Conservancy and needed an on-site person to help run the 301,000-acre spread near the Great Sand Dunes. Gossage was a natural choice.
The ranch runs both cattle and bison with a strong emphasis on wildlife and environmental management.
“The reality of my future is that I’ll never own a ranch, so the best I can do is to manage a ranch,” Gossage said. “Our organization is interested in managing for other landowners. I think there’s a future in bison, too, so this is a good position for me to be in.”
Many others, of varying ages, appeared at the podium throughout the two-day conference to explain how they had ended up in farming or worked to help others get there.
Katie Wallace spent the past seven years working for New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, most recently as one of two fulltime sustainability specialists. “I started out forecasting beer sales, and the company helped me evolve into this position. I didn’t realize when I was younger that you could follow your passion and make a career out of it,” she said.
The company and the culture in Fort Collins shaped her in important ways, she added.
“I grew up in the suburbs. I didn’t know much about farming,” she said. “So this has been a huge shift for me personally. And after making this shift, which has brought me closer to the earth, I find that I am a much happier person.”
Several leaders from indigenous communities in the region talked about how traditional food and farming is an avenue for developing leadership and vocational skills among the younger population.
Lilian Hill, a traditional builder and organizer from the small Hopi village of Kykotsmovi, Ariz., helps coordinate youth training programs centered on permaculture and food growing. “Today in the Hopi community we see a great reduction in the production of fruit and the knowledge that goes along with that,” she said. “We are engaged in an effort to restore old orchards that had been cultivated for hundreds and hundreds of years. All of this is very important to us because we see a lack of engagement by the youth in our community.”
Miguel Santistevan, of Taos, N.M., came from a large family and watched some of his own relation fall prey to crime and drugs before becoming a farmer, educator and youth mentor. “It’s a passion of mine,” he said.
“We’ve opened up our own farm as an educational center,” he added. “When you are investing in young people, it might be 10 years before you see a seed germinate. I teach college, too, but I really feel the greatest rewards working with young people who never knew farming was even an option.”
Corralling the greenhorns
Severine Fleming heads up a small nonprofit association based in the Hudson Valley of New York that produces events and media for young and beginning farmers. She said the movement has gradually coalesced into the National Young Farmers Coalition, which plans to present a formal policy proposal to officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in December.
Fleming drew laughs and enthusiastic applause from the audience as she introduced concepts like “weed dating” — working side-by-side in fields and gardens in a new variation on speed-dating — and defined the movement as a compilation of food growing, politics and “hedonism,” with snapshots of tables laden with colorful food.
“Unlike our hippie mentors, we don’t have the advantage of cheap land,” she said. “So we have to get creative.”
In some cases that involves “squatting” on vacant city lots by starting gardens there.
In others, it means creating fresh approaches such as “Farm Hack,” which brings together engineers and farmers to retool and rescale equipment for smaller farms in an “open source” environment where technological innovation is freely shared. Farm Hack helped Dorn Cox, a Lee, N.H., farmer who also spoke at the conference, convert an old coca-cola delivery truck into a mobile bio-diesel processor.
Another recent invention are the crop mobs, which Fleming described as “kind of like an Amish barn raising,” where groups of volunteers converge at a farm to help out after being summoned by a social media list-serve. There are now 46 of these “mobs” nationwide, including one in Denver.
The point, she said, is “re-localizing and re-skilling” around activities like farming, baking and craft butchering.
If those pursuits are ultimately lots of hard work for little pay, she said young people today aren’t as easily deterred as adults might first assume.
“It’s an ancient thing to do. Why not?” she said. “Life has gotten too easy. The cool thing now is to do something hard.”
