As the daughter of academic urbanists, my early childhood was spent 'on the road' with my lecturing parents—baby food jar nestled in the center of their slide console. My mother says I was in 40 states before I was two.
Traveling to a new town, the challenge was always—"ok, who can find the church, what about the town hall… let's trace the urban logic, the civic geography, the built environment."
At about age 20, it became clear that I had become a bit 'anti-urban.'
Having helped found an organic farm on my college campus, I became a vocal agrarian and a practical activist--much more concerned with building a tool shed, keeping cucurbits from crossing, or organizing a tree delivery.
I wanted to do things whose impact I could see and eat.
I left school to travel. I explored up and down Western coastal ranges in my vegetable oil powered F250 pickup truck, rode across Europe in trains, hitchhiked around New Zealand, bike-commuted to an internship in Scotland, worked for some farms and the botanic garden in South Africa, and stowed away with as many fabulous women as I could find. It was a funny time of being alone in the world, watching everything—forming an analysis.
I was looking for the logic of the movement, for the trajectory of its swell, the lineage of ideas, and the river valleys where it was most fertile. Mapping, meeting, talking, and bopping from farmstead to market, I found my own hopes echoed in the people I met.
We want to reclaim place. We want to steward. We want to feed, and we want to access the generosity of photosynthesis directly—with our hands touching the soil.
Everyone finds a different way into farming. Some start as romantics, some as ecologists, some as tree-sitters, and some as gourmands. Some are lucky enough to be born into farming. My travels—fluttering and hovering above the ground—gave me a vista, a mosaic of the webs other people had built to span a particular place. At first I saw only glimmers: local leaders, veins of discourse, and regional models.
But then I realized something magical: We young farmers are an emergent social movement. We exist. There are a lot of us from coast to coast, and all sorts of unexpected places between—all over the world. We are serious, and if there were about 20 million of us, we could probably feed the whole United States.
My premise is simple. If I can make a movie showing you what is possible, introduce you to these myriad rockstars, I believe I can inspire more of my generation to become farmers.
Our job in this generation is to rethink, recycle, retrofit and restore our land and our community; the Greenhorns have come to this revelation and taken action. This film is a way to convene a movement that is for now quite thinly spread out on the ground. Population density of young farmers might be as low as 1-2 per county in America. Yet, once seen as a whole in the film, you will find it an attractive and coherent sub-culture: proud, strong, tough, and a little bit nuts.
Being a young farmer is a good thing, a fun thing, a hard thing, and worthwhile. My parents are skeptical about farming, and so are many of my friends. The point of the movie is to prove that it is possible to succeed. The young farmers that we've been meeting are the leading edge of a revolutionary trend. They are tracing the shape of an agrarian future: more farms, more farmers, better food.
I want to help revive the fairytales that inspired me. I want to share the experiences that shaped today’s young farmers’ impulses to be producers. So I will tell our story.
Imagine: small towns with no traffic and good music. Uncontroversial if you ask me.
