In downtown Petaluma, California, Iraq war veteran Matt Mccue brings the carrots, squash, greens and a cornucopia of his other garden crops to sell to his neighbors in Sonoma County. Matt’s story – at least up to the point that he had gotten his training in sustainable farming – can be found here on our site. The happy ending, so far, is Matt having a job doing something he loves and for which he is appreciated. He’s also helping to begin the rejuvenation of the small, local farm – a resource sure to become more of a treasure for all of us in the years ahead.

1. America’s rural communities have taken the hardest toll in both Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, “the death rate for rural soldiers is 60% higher than the death rate for those soldiers from cities and suburbs.”
2. We are losing our farmers. There are eight times as many farmers in the US over the age of 65 as there are under the age of 35. This is a national crisis that threatens our very ability to feed ourselves, effecting our quality of life and security of our nation.
3. Our veterans are coming back to our same communities. These communities, already lacking in the employment opportunities for its young families, are also lacking in the much needed medical and mental health services. “Our rural members”, says Paul Rieckhoff, President of Iraq and Afghan Veterans of America, “are having the hardest time.”
4. The current wars are taking a huge toll on our national treasury. While taxpayer dollars still fund large farm subsidies – done primarily for the benefit of the large multi-national food processors – monies needed for conservation, credit needed for the family farmers, wages needed for the farm worker and help and training needed for the new and start-up farmer are all lacking.
5. Since the beginning of the latest Gulf War oil prices have more than tripled. While oil company profits and those of all military related industries have skyrocketed, the American farmer has once again paid his undue share of this unprecedented cost of fuel.
6. While the US farmer pays his unfair toll for these wars, so too do the farmers of the countries where the wars are fought. Afghani farmers have turned to opium as the only viable crop in a countryside ravaged by several decades of international forces doing battle in their homeland. The fertile farmland of the Tigris-Euphrates River has been seriously damaged and many of the farm families who haven’t lost members directly to the war have lost their farms to ethnic cleansing.
7. We farmers are on the front lines of both global wars and global warming. Higher temperatures, draughts, and erratic weather patterns are hitting us hard already. Going to war with fossil fuels, for fossil fuel is giving our farms a one-two punch while benefiting the very forces that threaten us.
8. Control of land, water and food production will become important issues in preventing new wars. As the world’s population continues to grow and resources continue to shrink the issue of food sovereignty – the right for all people to decide what they eat and to ensure that agriculture in their community is fair and healthy for all – will be key to a peaceful world.
9. We can change things by changing the way we farm. By creating healthier and more diverse farming systems, with food, fuel and fiber grown closer to where it is consumed, we can rebuild our rural economies, create work for our returning soldiers, promote national security, rebuild our democracy, improve America’s economic and physical health and do more for global warming than any other single change by any other industry.
10. We can create a progressive voice for agriculture. By bringing together America’s family farmers, its organic farmers, the farm workers, the new generation of urban gardeners and farmers, along with consumers who demand a safe and just food system we can change the voice of American agriculture.
11. Farmers are the biggest workforce in the world. There are more farmers in the world than there are believers of any one religion or followers of any one political dogma. Together with the fishers and the foresters we feed the world, and manage most of its land and water. We can come together in groups like Terra Madre and La Via Campesina that can become powerful, democratic forces in the coming decades.
12. A connection to the land is essential to being peaceful people. American writers from Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, to Scott Nearing and Wendell Berry have shown us that our connection to the land is essential to our spirit as a nation. Generations of Amish, Mennonites and others have chosen farming as part of a simpler life, without need or capacity for violence. And young Americans growing up during the War in Vietnam pushed organic farming as the ultimate statement against a country that had lost its moral center of gravity. More than ever, in a shrinking world, we need to look at how we farm, how we eat, and how we live as both means and ends in our search for a more peaceful and just world.

Michael O’Gorman

Co-Chair, Farms Not Arms

From the battle field to the tomato field is a long way psychologically. We’re not going to see many soldiers gracefully making that trip as we try to help them find their places in the agriculture community. That’s why it’s so important that organizations like Veterans Village set an example for supporting veterans as they readjust to civilian life and life away from the violence and tension of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here’s a video featuring the founders of Veterans Village and some of the people who appreciate and add to what they are doing.

The Kellogg Foundation (yes, the “Frosted Flakes” Kellogg) provides grants to benefit rural development and studies of rural life in America. A previous article here included a slide show that was part of its Rural People, Rural Policy initiative.

Rural People, Rural Policy (RPRP), a multi-year national initiative, is based on the premise that rural America has abundant assets and that the brightest potential for rural America emerges when a critical mass of rural people are stronger, more organized policy actors. RPRP builds and strengthens skilled networks and organizations to advocate and act in the rural policy arena. Rural People, Rural Policy energizes and equips networks of organizations to shape policy that improves the lives of rural people and the vitality of rural communities.

In scanning some of the news articles the RPRP site features, I came across one about the challenges of entering the small farming arena. This passage stood out in the context of the Farmer-Veteran Coalition:

The shrinking opportunities are changing the profile of future farmers. The next generation will include those who grew up on the largest, most successful farms. Yet it also will be filled with part-time farmers; those who get into small, niche markets such as raising hormone-free beef cattle, growing organic produce or operating vineyards; and middle-aged career changers with business experience.

“We have people in their 40s coming back to farming,” said John Baker, administrator of the Beginning Farmer Center at Iowa State University and president of the National Farm Transition Network. “Many of them come back with some good business skills and some capital.”

To keep farmland from being gobbled up by larger farms or sold to developers, more than two dozen states have been helping young farmers get started. And bills are pending in Congress that would provide $25 million a year in grants to train and mentor beginning farmers and ranchers and help them get credit.

Operating in 25 states, the National Farm Transition Network pairs beginning farmers, often young, with established farmers on the verge of retirement. The matchmaking gives young farmers a chance to get into farming without having to spend a lot of money, to avoid financially fatal rookie mistakes, and then come up with a financial arrangement that allows them to take over the farm.

Attorney Paul Wright, a former agricultural law professor at Ohio State University, has counseled farmers since the 1960s about how to pass on their farms. He said it is hard to match up farmers with someone not related to them.

“I’ve seen it blow up,” he said. “You have to match personalities and business objectives and financial feasibility, which is very difficult to do.”

Along with pairing novices with old hands, Connecticut – where dairy, corn, tobacco and flowers are major crops – has spent $30 million over the past 11 years to buy the development rights of 70 farms totaling 10,000 acres. That makes it more affordable for beginning farmers, keeping the value of the land as much as 80 percent cheaper than if it were opened for development.

While these programs have helped some young people get started, the number represents a fraction of those farming. For many new farmers, the only way in is by taking over for a relative with an existing farm.

Waters said he has some college friends who’ve been able to go to work with older farmers.

It’s one way to figure out if it could be a successful endeavor.

“They really need to go to work on a farm and find it that’s when interests them and if that’s what they want to do for the rest of their lives,” Water said.

Ben Block of Worldwatch Institute wrote an article on the WorldChanging site describing the recommendations of these studies. In summary, the studies call for an end to “business as usual” agricultural practices and a shift to sustainable farming everywhere.

The reports are the largest international collaboration to date to advocate more sustainable farming practices such as crop diversification, use of organic fertilizers, and the adoption of labeling and certification schemes. More controversially, the commission suggests policy options that include “ending subsidies that encourage unsustainable practices.” The reports also stress the ineffectiveness of genetically modified crops in aiding food productivity in some developing regions.

Global society must undertake a “paradigm shift” in agriculture, the authors said at a press briefing. And without more sustainable practices, the problems will only worsen. “These are long-term trends that we really need to take into account,” said Shelley Feldman, a Cornell University sociology professor and report co-author. “We’re going to continue to work with less labor; less water; less arable land; increasing land policy conflicts; the loss of biodiversity, genetic species, and ecosystems; increasing levels of pollution; and as we all know, climate change.”

Because many farmers lack knowledge about sustainable practices, governments should increase their financial support for research and programs that encourage less-damaging techniques, the reports say. In North America and Europe, large transnational corporations currently dominate the funding for agricultural R&D, considerably influencing research priorities, they note.

In an era where federal farm bills encourage farmers to grow monocrops of subsidized hybrid corn, a family in South Dakota has decided that the rewards – both social and financial – are better found in diversified organic farming. In this informative article titled Betting the Farm, written for Gourmet magazine, the system behind The Farm Bill is described as an almost irresistable force that drives farmers to join the herd and serve the increasingly industrial market.

Farm law has its roots in the New Deal efforts of the 1930s to control overproduction of agricultural commodities, and it has been revised, reworded, and reauthorized every five years since then. Both the House proposal and the Senate version run more than 1,000 pages. The language is impenetrable. It is traditionally hammered out by an informal bipartisan alliance of farm-state politicians and agribusiness groups as if the food we eat and the way it is grown is their private preserve. In recent years, public-health experts, conservationists, chefs, healthy-food advocates, and family farmers have tried to insert themselves into the debate, but their voices are almost completely drowned out by those of industrial agriculture. As this year’s bill lumbered through negotiations, one frustrated congressional staffer observed that it would once again be “a patchwork of parochial programs lacking a vision.”

The Stiegelmeier family, who arrived as in South Dakota over a century ago, works hardscrabble land – lacking the deep, glacially-deposited topsoil of states further east.

The family—Russian-Germans who fled the tsar’s draft—came to Walworth in the 1880s with the first wave of homesteaders. They were self-reliant and, unlike most homesteaders, knew how to grow wheat on windswept plains. Matthew is the sixth generation. He knows the family history back to his great-grandfather Jacob, who passed the land to his son Milton. Milton expanded the farm. “You could make money farming in the ’50s,” Matthew ex­plains. “But people didn’t want to farm. They wanted jobs in the cities. So there was good land available to buy.” When Milton’s sons came of age, he gave them land and loaned them money to get started. “That’s the crux of it,” Matthew says, his voice rising to emphasize the first rule of family farming. “If one generation won’t help the next get started, these farms can’t sur­vive.”

Wheat has always been the main crop for farmers in their area, but the push today is grow corn, which is used for livestock feed and myriad industrial uses. A basic farming value in the Stiegelmeier family began to be challenged, and Matthew described some practical problems, too, that come with relying on subsidized corn planting.

“I’ve got a philosophical problem with growing corn. Most corn goes to livestock. I prefer to feed grain to people, and I prefer for cattle to eat grass.” He also has practical reasons. “I hate to cultivate. We’ve got rolling land. We’re always dealing with erosion problems. In Iowa, they have four feet of top­soil. We have four inches. Besides, I can’t use pesticides.”

The family farm has gone organic, betting on a practice that may not benefit from the Farm Bill, but provides access to a growing market and greater satisfaction.

The Stiegelmeiers diversified into organic spring and winter wheat, flax, rye, barley, and buckwheat and relied on age-old ways to fight weeds and fertilize the soil. They certified their pastures as organic and grew alfalfa to feed a herd of registered British White beef cattle. Dan­elle started a small herd of sheep.

This past year, Matthew made $11 a bushel on winter wheat at mills in Kansas and North Dakota, at the time a four-dollar premium over commodity wheat. Organic flax sold for $19.50 a bushel, a premium of ten dollars.

This may not be a trend that’s spreading like wildfire, but if a family farm in South Dakota can take the alternative route, it may provide an example that other traditional and new era family farms can follow.

This online slide show with both video and audio components is based on surveys and focus groups exploring impressions and attitudes held by Americans regarding life in rural America. The study and presentation are by the Frameworks Institute, which translates and models scholarly research to re-frame public discourse. In this case, it’s remarkable how clear the messages are that describe the misconceptions and generalizations that people carry about rural life, from over-romanticizing it to coupling it with poverty and ignorance.

Most of this erroneous thinking is the product of mass media depictions. If you’ve never lived in the country, you’re pictures of it may be formed by television programming – Little House on the Prarie, the Andy Griffith Show and the Beverly Hillbillies.

Remember that almost all of our food is grown in rural areas today just as it has been throughout history.

Cornell University is making available a 9-week course for farm enterprise start-up training and the number of applicants has far exceeded the available openings.

Round one had only had 25 slots available. The course is designed to benefit participants from a diversity of backgrounds. Participants include those just exploring a new idea to those seeking to diversify or expand existing farm operations.

Classes began on March 19 with introductions and orientation to the online course structure. Over the next few months, students will learn about the basics of building a business plan; goals, skills and resources; marketing; evaluating land, equipment, and facilities; choosing an enterprise; land stewardship; profitability; regulations; taxes and legal issues.

The course offers opportunities to interact with agricultural entrepreneurs from around New York State, receive feedback and offer input on other ideas and issues encountered in today’s changing food and agriculture systems. To learn about upcoming beginning farmer online classes, contact Erica Frenay, project coordinator, at 607-255-9911 or ejf5@cornell.edu.

An article in the LaCross (WI) Tribune tells about Lyyne Tschumper, who became a produce grower at age 50 and for 10 years has increased the percentage of her product she sells to local buyers through the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. With more people wanting to buy food grown nearby, she’s finding success.

And a new blog called Freshman Farmer, chronicles the startup efforts of a younger, much newer CSA farmer named Andrew. His blog is sponsored by Peaceful Valley Farm and Garden Supply, probably thinking that this local farming occupation could catch on.

Farming is an untapped and gainful alternative source of employment and civilian transition for returning vets.

An article in the Wall Street Journal describes the plight of Iraq War veterans competing for jobs with their civilian counterparts. The article quotes figures from a new report by the Veterans Affairs Department:

…the percentage of veterans not in the labor force — because they couldn’t find jobs, stopped looking for work, or went back to school — jumped to 23% in 2005 from 10% in 2000. Half of the young veterans — ages 20 to 24 — with steady employment earned less than $25,000 per year…

The report said, “Transitioning into civilian life and the workforce requires help and guidance. “

Military and civilian policy makers increasingly are concerned about a different aspect of the long wars — the physical, mental and financial well-being of the young veterans who leave the military and attempt to reintegrate into the civilian world.

Veterans Administration efforts so far have failed to do a good job of guiding veterans through the transition to civilian employment.