Pittsburg Post Gazette, PA
080-25-07
New crop of farmers takes to the fields
Many of them are college-educated and don't come from farm families
background
By Joann Loviglio, The Associated Press
PERKASIE, Pa. -- Tom Murtha studied English at Penn. Tricia Borneman
majored in journalism at Shippensburg University.
Like most college graduates, they finished school with a good idea of where they
wanted their career paths to lead. But unlike most, it was a dirt path.
So on a recent summer day, instead of working in an air-conditioned office
building 40 miles away in Philadelphia, the pair were tending to kale, collard
greens and broccoli in Bucks County.
"It's been so dry, we're really hoping for rain soon," said Ms. Borneman, squinting
in the hot afternoon sun under a straw hat, weeding impossibly straight green
rows with a long-handled stirrup hoe.
Several yards away, Mr. Murtha tilled new rows for more plantings on a
temperamental red tractor. And before dusk, there would be drip tape to unroll for
irrigating the soil, and yellow squash to harvest in an adjacent plot.
"We went to college, we were on track to have some sort of professional careers,
but it just didn't resonate," Mr. Murtha said. "The thing about farming is it
engages you on all levels, which doesn't happen with a lot of jobs."
Mr. Murtha, 34, and Ms. Borneman, 32, are among a new crop of farmers
sprouting up around the country who weren't raised on farms, have college
degrees, and in some cases have left other careers behind.
"Agriculture has been so subsidized, corporatized and globalized," Mr. Murtha
said. "There's definitely an interest and desire for younger folks to get involved in
agriculture."
Mr. Murtha and Ms. Borneman have been farming together for eight years, the
last two at the 70-acre Blooming Glen Farm in Perkasie. Parents of a 2-year-old
daughter, they did stints in Oregon and New Jersey before returning to
Pennsylvania, where they do farmers markets and operate a communitysupported agriculture program in which local families do four hours of farm work
during the growing season and receive regular shares of produce from spring
through fall.
"Beyond the family aspect, it's enjoyable because it so all-encompassing: the
office work, the selling, the planting, the mechanical aspects," Ms. Borneman
said. "Even when it's hot and I'm working hard, I can still hear the birds."
A walk through Blooming Glen also reveals plots of fragrant basil, feathery dill
astride neat rows of beets peeking above the dirt, pumpkins and summer squash
lying nearby. Bees work pollinating tomato plants in small greenhouses across
from lettuce planted in alternating lines of red and green.
The farm eschews synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, and is seeking certification
as organic. They are among many smaller-scale farmers who say they're
responding to consumers, who increasingly are demanding food that's organic,
locally grown, or both.
Recent food scares -- from last year's nationwide E. coli outbreak linked to
California spinach to tainted Chinese imports -- are raising public concerns about
industrialized megafarms and the globalized food trade. Other issues include
pollution from fuel needed to ship food long distances, genetically modified foods
and bug-killing chemicals.
"It's amazing to me how, over the last four or five years, food issues have
creeped into the general psyche," Mr. Murtha said. "There's kind of been a food
awareness that's risen up, and that rise of consciousness is the tide we're riding."
Ben Wenk didn't work on his family's century-old 350-acre fruit farm in Aspers,
Adams County, during high school, and mulled a music education degree.
"But when I stopped to think about it, I realized that music was more of a hobby,
and farming was what I enjoyed the most and really wanted to do," he said. "I
saw an opportunity to expand the business in a new direction."
Mr. Wenk, 23, became the seventh generation to work Three Springs Fruit Farm
after graduating from Penn State last fall with a degree in agroecology, or the
science of sustainable farming. He added a half-acre plot for tomatoes, peppers,
cucumbers, squash and melons that he brings to Philadelphia farmers markets.
He created a MySpace page for the farm, where weather conditions are posted
and customers post thank-yous. He said the work requires business savvy and
creative thinking to control costs and optimize sales, and Mr. Wenk is thinking
about ways to expand.
"If I wanted to make a small fortune and retire at 55, I wouldn't have gone into
agriculture. But I look at these beautiful rolling hills and think, this is my office," he
said.
Such enthusiasm runs counter to the notion of farming as a dying vocation of
dreary, thankless work.
"People always say, 'Oh, farming is a hard life,'" said Dawn Buzby of A.T. Buzby
Farm, a 55-acre fruit and vegetable farm in Woodstown, N.J. "Sure there are
hard parts -- the weather, the hours -- but doesn't every job have hard parts?
Overall, it's a very satisfying, very rewarding career."
Ms. Buzby, who with her husband has been farming for 20 years, welcomes the
fresh crop of people entering the farming field -- including her 25-year-old son, a
college graduate with an engineering degree who returned to farm full time.
"The new blood entering farming is a great trend that has really energized
longtime farmers," she said. "There's a lot of enthusiasm out there."
Still, huge hurdles exist, from the cost of land to the threat of suburban sprawl.
U.S. Agriculture Department data paint a grim picture, showing that the average
age of U.S. farmers has been increasing for decades and is currently 55 to 56,
while the overall percentage of young farmers continues to fall.
People within the movement, however, say the numbers can be misleading.
"Are there young people who are going into farming? Yes, more and more," said
Dennis Hall of the Center for Farm Transitions, a Pennsylvania Agriculture
Department office providing technical assistance to new and established farmers.
He said the landscape started to change about 3 1/2 years ago.
Nearly one-fourth of people who currently contact the center for information don't
have farming backgrounds, Hall said. They range from college students to people
leaving established careers, he said.
"What I will say about a lot of the young folks is that they're more entrepreneurial,
more agile and more intuitive," he said.
John Baker, president of the National Farm Transition Network, said the trend is
happening around the country including his home state of Iowa. The group
connects aspiring farmers with retiring farmers who don't have family members to
pass along the business.
"There's a confluence of a lot of things that's driving this," said Mr. Baker, who
also serves as administrator of the Beginning Farmer Center at Iowa State
University. "People are aware of things like carbon footprints and energy use,
they're being re-educated about food, about local farms, about health issues."