Greenhorns

by Paula Manalo

  It was spooky how much the place met our needs — it truly felt like this farm was where we were supposed to be.

  Being a small farmer in the Pacific Northwest can at times lead to some insular thinking. All the positive feedback about the work we do — from customers at the farmers’ markets, restaurants, local media, local food organizations, and schools — is tangible. Tell people you’re a small farmer and chances are they’ll beam back at you and say how great that is.

  We felt good about our chosen work, and about our plans for the future.

  With our parents’ help, we had enough money for a decent down payment. We had a solid and realistic business plan that anticipated higher levels of off-farm income in the beginning, as we built both soil and infrastructure. Before we could negotiate for the land, however, we needed to know we could get a loan, so I started calling around to banks to talk about small-business loans. By the third or fourth bank, I was getting used to the deafening silence that always greeted the word “farm.”

  “Well,” a banker would say slowly, clearly aware that he was talking to a crazy person, “we don’t do farm loans.”

  “But we’re a small local business,” I would counter. “We need a small-business loan. We work with growing plants, and we sell to other local businesses or directly to local customers. We need to move our small business to a new location. It’s a live/work situation. Would you like to see our business plan?”

  We finally found a bank that didn’t flinch when I said “farm,” a branch of a national bank that prided itself on its super-green, socially responsible business image. The people there were enthusiastic about local organic agriculture, loved the part of our business plan that involved making the farm available for school tours, thought our plans for wildlife habitat in the wetlands on the farm were great, and said they looked forward to working with us to bring more fresh local food into our community. The 8 to 9 percent loan they were offering made our eyes water, but we were getting desperate, so we kept talking.

  It didn’t help that our loan went up for review the day the stock market crashed in September 2008, although that wasn’t the reason they gave for turning us down. Crazy as it seems, our business plan involved us actually living on our farm. And unless we could guarantee that 100 percent of the income we would use to pay back the loan would come solely from farming —which meant no off-farm income to cover our expenses while we built infrastructure and waited for our first harvest — what we were really asking the bank for was a home loan, which it didn’t do.

  I’d like to meet the farmer who can buy a piece of land, till it, prepare the soil, sow the seeds, grow the plants, harvest the crop, take the crop to market, sell it, deposit the cash in the bank, and write a check for the mortgage all in one month. In October. On the Oregon coast.

  Hoping to talk to people who at least understood the physical realities of farming, we called the USDA Farm Service Agency about its small-farm loan program. The FSA agent we met with listened to our plans, then paid us the compliment of saying that it seemed like we actually had our act together. But she went on to be brutally honest about the FSA small-farm loan program and our chances of actually getting a loan to buy land for our farm. To her, a small farm was one growing four hundred acres of grass seed or running three hundred head of cattle. She told us that our proposed five or six acres of cultivated land growing mixed vegetable, fruit, and flower crops, and raising chickens with some off-farm income rounding out the economic edges fell into the USDA category of a “lifestyle farm.”

  “We don’t normally make loans for lifestyle farms,” she told us politely.

  “It’s a damn hard way of life, not a bloody lifestyle,” I muttered, annoyed, on the subdued drive home.

  The seller of the farm we loved still wanted a crazy amount of money for it, and we had no loan options that would let us even begin negotiating, so she stopped talking to us and we sadly tried to accept that we were just never going to farm that land.

  We spent the next six months scrambling, trying to come up with some way to keep farming on the Oregon coast. We had market customers calling us with land-for-sale referrals and offering to sign up for a CSA program before we even had a farm to grow the food. We explored many, many ideas: buy land with a group of people and start a nonprofit education farm; temporarily lease another piece of land; find a cheaper land option; renegotiate with our current landlords; borrow money privately. Each option was explored and each gradually disintegrated as we tried to cobble together a solution to keep our dying farm alive, all painfully in the midst of our best market season ever.

  A grim day in June found us sitting at the kitchen table facing the bleak reality that we were going to have to quit farming. It was a painful moment for me. At forty-three years old I had finally found work I loved, work I was actually good at and that I cared passionately about. I could grow plants, I could feed people, and I could teach them how to grow plants and feed themselves. The support from our community for the farm we wanted to have was heartening to us, but it couldn’t get us the loan we needed. With deep resignation, we each made phone calls, went for interviews, and accepted “real jobs” with the understanding that we would start part time to allow us to finish out the current farmers’-market season, pay off bills, and put the farm into hibernation.

  Farm or no farm, we needed to find a new place to live. While cruising around online to figure out what kind of house price we might be able afford with our new job income, we stumbled across a local real-estate company on whose home page under the heading NEW LISTINGS was that farm. The farm we loved. The farm we’d tried to buy for more than a year, the land we’d dreamed about and planned for and had finally, depressingly given up on some six months ago. Still for sale. Price reduced to something we could now maybe afford.

  * * *

  The irony of having to quit farming so we could finally get a loan to buy the land to move our farm to stuck in our craw.

  * * *

  In a daze, we called a local bank and made an appointment to talk about a straight-up, super-normal home loan. We told our long story to the very nice broker, reassured him about our commitment to our regular-paycheck “real jobs,” described the down-payment fund we had waiting, and explained our plan for keeping the farm going part time to help with additional income to pay the mortgage.

  “No farming,” he said sternly. “Quit the farming, right now. Only work the regular-paycheck real jobs. Then, maybe, we can make it work.”

  So that’s what we did. The irony of having to quit farming so we could finally get a loan to buy the land to move our farm to stuck in our craw, and was made even harder to swallow when we had to provide written reassurance to the lenders (nervous about our worrisome “history of farming”) that although we had indeed spent five years running a “hobby farm,” we had seen the error of that life path, now had nice safe real jobs, and only wanted to buy eighteen acres of land zoned agriculture-forestry so we could continue to live a “rural lifestyle.”

  It wasn’t a legally binding document, and besides, I had my fingers crossed behind my back when I signed it. I can’t say I recommend lying to your bank as a road to farm ownership, but it worked, and I’m not ashamed that that’s what we did. The shame I feel is for a country that makes it virtually impossible for hardworking beginning farmers — people who are willing to devote their lives to growing healthy food for their communities — to own land.

  We’re still working off-farm to make ends meet, slowly building our soil, rebuilding our infrastructure, putting down roots, heading back to being farmers again. Challenges are still there every day, and they always will be. Some of them seem impossible in the moment.

  “Do you really want to keep farming?” we ask each other.

  And the answer is always, “Hell, yes.”

  Worth

  * * *

  BY BEN JAMES

  With his wife, Oona Coy, Ben James runs Town Farm in Northampton, Massachusetts. This yea
r he is obsessed with compost-turning pigs, greenhouses on wheels, and doubling the value of food stamps at farmers’ markets.

  * * *

  Last week at market a customer complained about the price of our dill (two dollars for a not-huge bunch). He said the price was an outrage, but he was smiling, so I was too confused to ask why he was going ahead and buying the dill, or even how he’d arrived at his notion of its value.

  This is not an unusual occurrence; every week at market we get at least one or two potential customers who shake their heads in dismay at a $2.75 head of lettuce or a $4.00 pint of strawberries. Sometimes I engage in conversation, sometimes I don’t. I try not to get defensive, and I frequently encourage a customer not to buy the product, offering suggestions of where to find cheaper food, either at the market or elsewhere. I do my best not to reveal that the value of our produce is a question that regularly fills me with a tremendous amount of anxiety.

  What is a carrot worth? A bunch of kale? A handful of berries? Too often, I find myself on the tractor making quick calculations in my head. For a bed of carrots, there are the soil amendments, the cover crop last fall, the chicken manure, the organic fertilizer, the plowing, tilling, seeding, irrigating, thinning, weeding, harvesting, washing, bunching, packing, and selling. Plus the cost of the tractors, implements, and fuel. Plus the cost of childcare and preschool. Plus, somehow, all the time spent on the computer (where does that fit in)? And I haven’t even mentioned the cost of the land (hundreds of thousands of dollars, in our case). The sheer number of labor hours and material and property costs that went into helping this soil produce these carrots. I ought to shellac the carrots and hang them on the wall.

  For us, the value of our produce can be measured — at least imprecisely — by how hard we and our crew work to grow it.

  But what if the workers were just slow weeding the carrots that day? Or what if the farmer himself is a hack? What if it takes him three seedings over that many weeks before he even manages to get a row of carrots to germinate? (I’m not naming names . . .) Should the customer be expected to pay for the incompetence of the grower?

  Fortunately for me, I suppose, incompetence is much less an issue than the very nature of the project we’ve undertaken. We grow many different crops (forty-six and counting) on a small amount of land (eleven acres), and this — as each of our variously weedy rows can attest — is a fundamentally inefficient thing to do. Although we strategize endlessly about how to make our operation run more smoothly — setting up systems, buying new equipment, instructing and correcting the crew — it’s a hopeless endeavor. Eventually, we’ll need either to substantially increase the size of our farm or shift our marketing strategy to grow only a handful of the most profitable crops. Until then, we mechanize whenever and wherever we can, but even the potato harvester and the water-wheel transplanter I’ve got my eye on would have a hard time paying for themselves at our scale, and so we’re left with that most versatile and least cost-effective of technologies: our hands.

  * * *

  The value of our produce and the value of our labor are unsolvable computations that I puzzle and worry over constantly.

  * * *

  All of our hands: Oona’s and mine, the hands of our four full-time employees, plus the scattered extra people who frequently fill in the week. And if there’s anything to match the anxiety of assigning a value to our produce, it is, for me, the challenge of figuring out how much to pay our crew (currently at least $9 an hour).

  I was raised by leftist labor organizers in Kentucky, Detroit, and Queens, and it’s fair to say that the plight of the Big Boss Man was not a frequent topic of conversation around our breakfast table. I learned the importance of work and the compromised position of the worker, and I was taught to question at every level the judgment and the ethics of the person in charge. So, to that small subset of the American population that was raised in the inner-city by Marxists before going on to start small, diversified farms and employ several recent college graduates, I say, “Hey, I can relate.” It’s not easy to be a boss, especially when your workers are getting paid more than you are, the pigweed is as high as your navel, and the man at the farmers’ market is smiling while he complains about the price of your dill.

  The value of our produce and the value of our labor: These remain for me unsolvable computations that I puzzle and worry over constantly. And although some parts of Oona’s and my situation are unusual, the basic equation is not: Small-scale farmers and their employees are earning nowhere near the money they should be making for the endless, all-encompassing, dangerous, exhausting work they’re doing. Easy to say, but difficult to figure out what to do about it, whether you’re the farmer or the customer.

  A whole can of worms, these questions, and in the midst of all of it is my son, Silas. He is four this summer and recently he’s made some startling revelations, namely that this is our farm, we own it, these are our vegetables and our workers, and Momma and Poppa are in charge. I’m pleased by his pride and sense of ownership in the farm, but I also want to laugh and say, “Yeah, we own these vegetables, but do you know what they’re actually worth?”

  I also cringe a bit at the entitlement that comes with the package. The few times I’ve seen Silas try to play boss to the crew, I’ve pulled him aside to say that when he learns how to do the jobs faster and better than all of the workers, he’ll have earned the right to tell them what to do. (I don’t say he’ll also need to learn to see things from their point of view, but he will.)

  Recently he and I walked across the road so he could meet the new lambs I’d put on pasture. Along the way we checked to see what crops were coming in. The first sugar snaps brought tremendous satisfaction. I’d known they were there, but for him it was like discovering a room you didn’t know you had in your own house. His mouth was full of the juice and strings. We walked over a few beds and I pointed down a row.

  “Go check out those,” I said, and he stepped into the field.

  “It’s kale,” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “It’s onions.”

  “No, look closer.”

  He bent down and rubbed his palms across the curly greens.

  “Look in the ground,” I said.

  “Hey! It’s carrots!”

  He’d been asking about them for weeks, and now we pulled a few, cleaned them off in the wet grass, and he ate his first one of the season. It was pale orange and slender, not even as fat as a Sharpie marker. It was gone before I could blink. And I say this with all sincerity: It was worth it.

  Learning to Measure Success under the Big Sky

  * * *

  BY ANNA JONES-CRABTREE

  Along with her husband, Doug, Dr. Anna Jones-Crabtree traded twenty years of savings for 1,280 dryland acres and a diverse organic crop rotation in north-central Montana. Although honored as a Sustainability Institute Meadows Fellow and as a Presidential Sustainability Hero, Anna is most proud of her responsibilities as a land steward.

  * * *

  “One of the most powerful ways to influence the behavior of a system is through its purpose or goal. That’s because the goal is the direction setter of the system, the definer of discrepancies that require action, the indicator of compliance, failure or success toward which the balancing feedback loops work. If the goal is defined badly, if it doesn’t measure what it’s supposed to measure, if it doesn’t reflect the real welfare of the system, then the system can’t possibly produce a desirable result. Systems, like the three wishes in the traditional fairy tale, have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce. Be careful what you ask them to produce.”

  — Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

  Sunday, November 8, 2009, 3 p.m. Doug and I have both crawled up into the end of “Ernie,” our combine, to clean out the flax straw that seems to be packed solid in the beater grates. The quarters are tight, and Doug’s a bit grumpy because we weekend farmers never get the full list checked off.
We really ought to be driving home right now, since we both have big things to do at the day jobs on Monday. It’s a rough time, so lately I’ve been working really hard at reframing our situation. At least we’re out of that incessant wind for a bit and it’s not freezing cold, I say. We should be celebrating.

  We’ll have only a few more weekends at the farm before hibernation. After all the hard work this year, all that’s left is cleaning up equipment and the shop, and hauling the wheat to market. We deserve to be a bit more celebratory. But we really aren’t.

  Behind the scenes lurks the reality of our situation. We’ve both hinted at it, but haven’t really found the time to dump the pieces on the table, rearrange them, hold them up to the light, and look at them holistically. We started farming at a time when prices would garner a small but positive cash flow in year two. We had a plan. We’d grow specialty crops. We’d be organically certified. We had watched the markets. We had spent years interviewing other organic farmers and attending farm tours. The five college degrees between us would really be put to use. We had savings. And as if our good credit and sheer gumption weren’t enough, we’d researched and participated in all the 2008 Farm Bill beginning-farmer programs that applied to us. We often understood those requirements better than did our local USDA officials.