Here is an excerpt from Call to the farmby Jennifer Grayson, now available. The excerpt has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Two years before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I was researching ideas for a book about rewilding—a subculture of the more well-known conservation movement, where people live a pre-industrial or even pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. My interviews included survivalists living on a tropical island, primitive enthusiasts creating forest schools, and subsistence settlers.
I have lived in cities all my adult life, so it doesn’t take a psychologist to explain my personal attraction to the idea of stepping back from the increasing overwhelm of 21st-century life: the constant intrusion of technology and media; social isolation and loneliness; the disconnection from nature, especially its disturbing impact on our children; escalating global conflict; and the increasing number of natural disasters that validate our fears that the consequences of climate change are not only inevitable but happening now.
Over time, however, I grew a little weary of the apocalyptic obsession. More importantly, I was uncertain of its usefulness. Everyone could sense the chaos of our times, but few of us, myself included, had the means or the audacity to throw away everything we had ever known and hunt and forage from a cabin in the woods.
Some of the solutions touted in the rewilding world are inspiring, but I long for a purpose that is viable here and now; preferably one that I will feel more alive and useful than sitting in ecstasy at a computer.
I also realized something at the same time: In my yearning to rediscover the ways of the past, it was traditional food culture that lit a fire inside me. And so, six months into the COVID lockdown in Los Angeles, my husband and I decided, “enough with the daydreaming,” and sold everything we owned and moved to Central Oregon with our two young daughters, where I stumbled upon the area’s local food movement and later signed up for a Farmer Training ProgramThe intensive internship program focuses on regenerative agriculture – a new (but essentially traditional) and holistic approach to growing food that restores soil and biodiversity, while sequestering carbon in the ground.
I’ve been reporting on the evils of our industrialized food system for more than a decade, so regenerative agriculture is an area I’ve followed closely. Popular books and documentaries have touted its promise while sounding the alarm about the finiteness of intensive agriculture—warnings about disappearing groundwater and the world’s dwindling supply of usable topsoil. But until I learned about the Oregon program, I’d never thought to actually take matters into my own hands and consider small, sustainable agriculture as a viable career path.
Author Jennifer Grayson at her first farmer training program.
A week into my first farm job, I realized it was the most fun and fulfilling job I had ever had. After two months of being outdoors all day, almost every day, I felt the best I had ever felt—physically and mentally—in my life. But the real change came when I began meeting and learning about the new and dynamic farmers, ranchers, and food activists emerging across the country. They didn’t grow up in farming families; they came from backgrounds that were very underrepresented in agriculture; and many of them were much younger than me, not to mention decades younger than the average American farmer. I was amazed by their intention and ingenuity. They didn’t see this lifestyle as a dream of returning to the land. They had chosen sustainable agriculture as a tangible way to impact environmental protection and food justice; to restore culture; to reconnect with nature, food, and community; to live in accordance with their values; to do “something meaningful.”
And amid the environmental and social reckoning of the pandemic—not to mention the collapse of the industrial food supply chain—the work of these regenerative farmers has become more relevant than ever. They fill the void between empty supermarket shelves and long grocery store lines, providing millions of Americans with not just food but some of the most delicious food many of us have ever tasted. They watch hundreds of thousands of people die needlessly from COVID due to dietary disparities and push for funding and food sovereignty. So I began to wonder: How can we scale up a “greatest generation” of small, sustainable farmers?
What would this country look like when transformed by a vast network of resilient local food systems that restore the environment and ensure fresh, healthy food for all?
Archer Meier and Marlo Stein of Round Table Farm, a cheese and flower farm in Hardwick, Massachusetts. Photo via author.
These two questions set me on the journey to write this book. But their urgency only dawned on me later. Over the next decade, 400 million acres of American farmland—nearly half of all farmland in the United States—will become available as the older generation of American farmers retire or die. Meanwhile, the new wave of growers eager to manage that land faces all manner of obstacles: access to affordable land, access to capital, a living wage, and the billionaires and corporations that are now grabbing farmland at a dizzying pace.
There is hope, however: Big farming may be the norm in the United States, but small growers around the globe produce about a third of the world’s food on farms of five acres or less.
Mapping studies show that 90 percent of Americans can be raised entirely on food grown within 100 miles of where they live. Regeneration project emphasizes regenerative agriculture and other nature-based farming methods as key strategies in plans to reverse global warming. And the power of people is there: The number of new, beginning, and young farmers has increased in the past 10 years, a trend not seen in the past century.
Alison Pierce of Common Joy, a sustainable squash farm run by husband Brian Wheat in Charleston, South Carolina. Photo via author.
I came to farming as an outsider, and that’s exactly what it was. Two hundred years ago, almost all of us lived and worked the land that fed us (though not all of us willingly). Even a hundred years ago, a third of us did. Today, that number is just one percent. Yet right now, so many of us are yearning for something we can’t name, something invisible that we don’t even realize is missing. It’s our connection to food, the most basic of human needs, and it’s the thing that ties us to everything else.
These are stories of a new, diverse generation of farmers who are opening up a different vision of the future, if more of us join this call.
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