So what do you hate more about this NY Times piece on indie farmers?

NYT 6 months behind the rest of the New York media as usual.

My Empire of Dirt, New York, September 10, 2007

The opening of the third paragraph is the most hateful, I think.

Raised on the Upper East Side by a father who is a foundation executive and a mother who writes about criminal justice, Mr. Shute graduated from Amherst and worked for an antihunger charity.

*phew*

What a screwball that Trip Gabriel is! Had me worried for a minute.

Why do you hate it?

I wonder if they are working in the fields or have hired others to work in the fields. I think that makes a big difference.

man i really wanted to be a farmer but now that its the cool thing to do i guess ill just have to be a yuppie like everyone else

I found the writer far more hateful than any of the interviewees.

It's irrelevant to the story (which is actually pretty interesting).

Style section scoring system.

Alan Partridge on Farming

haha xpost I was going to say Ed to thread

^^response to youn

25 and 27 are the ideal ages for getting married?!?!!????!!

man i really wanted to be a farmer but now that its the cool thing to do i guess ill just have to be a yuppie like everyone else

-- max, Sunday, 16 March 2008 22:55 (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

^this

I have gotten my summer farm share from Hearty Roots the past 2 years.

my neighbor has chickens and wears a trucker hat but he is also like 80 years old.

If I had a summer farm share, I would grow Japanese sweet potatoes (satsumo imo) and beets in different colors. I'm fairly certain both are easy to grow.

yeah, there is always an abundance of beets and radishes every week.

If I buy my grandma's old house, I'm seriously thinking about keeping a few chickens. Still has my grandfather's old coop in the back, and fresh eggs would be sweet.

There's about a 10x10 planter out front that's mostly weeds now, wonder if I could plant corn?

That would be sweet. You probably could do corn. Corn is pretty up and down and likes to be close together or in a circle.

Just-picked corn is the best. :)

That's my sister in the lead photo and I too am a member of Hearty Roots
I wonder if they are working in the fields or have hired others to work in the fields. I think that makes a big difference.
^^ this is pretty insulting
the writer does come off like a total tool, but the worst is whoever says our rockstars are ricotta makers.

Sorry. I truly didn't mean it that way. I thought a farm could be big enough to have hired employees, but I should have realized that these farms probably don't get that big on purpose.

dang this makes me so mad!!!

i'd sooner clean the toilet stalls of the most reviled homosex club with my tongue than eat some fuckin williamsburg hipster farmer fagshit

I just seriously can't imagine how anybody'd give a shit. do people imagine that the guys bottling your milk at the big dairy are really your kinda people and they'd love you right back?

The Styles section always focuses on the stupidest shit. If you've ever been to a liberal arts college campus, there's about a million of these dorks.

Of course, the Styles section also declared the New Jersey suburbs "the next Williamsburg" a few years back.

But the growing market for organic and locally grown produce is making it possible for well-run small farms to thrive

The "it's not just for irony anymore" angle is what's really obnoxious about the article. But I can't really work up any rage about the subject itself. Privileged kids will be privileged kids, but trying to run a farm -- schmancy organic or no -- is an immensely challenging and life-consuming task, and anyone who can do it must have at least a bit of character.

I dunno, I was kinda bothered by precisely the cavalier attitude. I have a hard time believing that family farms across the country are struggling so badly or going under completely, but these people aren't. Something besides 'a really good market' is in play.

“We lost all of our soybeans last year to Japanese beetles,” Ms. Latzer said. She often wakes up at 5 a.m. and collapses into an exhausted sleep by 9 p.m. She earns enough to afford health insurance, but if the landlord doesn’t renew their five-year lease, the enterprise could become untenable.

A number of colleges have added organic farming classes because of demand from students. “A lot of them come out and realize they’re not cut out for it,” said John Biernbaum, a professor of horticulture in Michigan State’s new one-year certificate program. Last year, the first, there were 9 students. This year, 18.

"thrive" sounds like an overstatement

this makes me think of the scene on the commune in easy rider where the kid is haplessly arbitrarily tossing seeds around looking dour and you can tell he's thinking "IM AN 18TH CENTURY FARMER, I'M AN 18TH CENTURY FARMER"

my brother-in-law (future) does this. he started about ... 10 years ago? it is immensely difficult work and he doesn't break even.

Corn does well in a lot of places.

For example, This guy planted corn on the center divider at Broadway and 153rd up in Harlem in the early 90s. It got pretty tall, IIRC.

The headline and this paragraph are pretty stupid from a style point of view:

Just a few years ago the prevailing style statement in Williamsburg featured metrosexually groomed urbanites wearing trucker hats and pristine Carhartt jackets and quaffing Pabst beer.

Quaffing. Surely a gimme hat is useful for driving a tractor or even for ironic spackling/caulking in the Burg.

Generally, I am in favor of more people working and fewer sitting on charity boards.

Ed = bang on - it's the writer who can suck a bag of dicks here, good luck to the people trying to do something about the shit state the food industry is in at the moment. A visit to Stone barns yesterday pretty much sealed my idea of getting out of my crap food-service supporting job and trying to get into something that has a bit more integrity and, yes, soul.

OTM. Cutting out the middleman, fair trade and food with integrity are stories.

there is sort of a weird assumption here that young people getting into farming is some weird new-fangled thing, or that people are either farmers or nonfarmers by nature, like either your family's been doing it for 250 years or you're a hayseed.

some of the most successful farms in california were started in the 20s, 40s, 60s by people with little or no prior experience.

weird assumption = common or garden variety american classism, i guess

lmao the 20s is a longass time ago doggie

http://www.hearingdogs.org.uk/assets/images/remembering/humphry_and_ted.jpg

if you build it they will come...

http://www.rachelleb.com/images/2006_04_29/johnny_knoxville_lookalike.jpg

i don't see why it matters how long ago the 20s were?

is it harder to start a farm nowadays?

lololol scott how did u find that pic?? did u google hipster kickball~

hipster kickball episode of king of the hill was the best. did everyone see it?

hank: is everyone a dj?

peggy: yes.

Yeah, I think Hurting said that upthread.

Please step away from the "trucker" hat and show proof of eligibility to wear Carhatt. No funny business or the rescue puppy gets it.

I haven't thought of an angle to take in this thread. Can someone assign me one so I

a) don't have to read the posts above this one
b) don't have to read the article

Thanks (and I'm a Williamsburg resident)!

I think you've already found one.

i'm all for the farmsters by the way. just as long as they don't ALL give it up in a couple of years and write books about how they were a farmer and how hard it was. they are smart kids though. they could end up getting rich selling fancy greens.

Jon, Ned wants to know what you hate more:

a) "Leaving Behind the Trucker Hat"

or

b) "Their Carhartts are no longer ironic. Now they have real dirt on them."

a or b

I think I hate B more because most dudes I know who wore Carhartts got them dirty but with unhonest hipster scumbag dirt from biking and being a drunk unclean lout

I have a hard time believing that family farms across the country are struggling so badly or going under completely, but these people aren't. Something besides 'a really good market' is in play.

-- milo z, Sunday, March 16, 2008 9:41 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Sure, and it's very likely that some of these people are getting help and that many others will fold after a few years. But I do think one of the few actually noteworthy points that this article brings up is the way the premium paid for small-batch organic products changes the game a bit. Unlike almost everything else reported as a trend in this article, that wasn't always true.

hearty roots is pretty affordable and the pickup is 2 blocks away from where I live, the nearest vegetable stand is more like 5 blocks.

Billyburg, trucker cap, skinny jeans,The Strokes, PBR, Union Pool, Sparks, vegan, free-range tofu, "originally from Boston", Vassar, SVA, Pratt, Barnard, Oberlin, Sarah Lawrence, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and the "other" other hoods, X of the word "iron", "art loft", X = the ,urg, ther hoothStrts (non-Western), booth" otcap, skinny jeans,The Strokes, PBR, Union Pookes, = the new Williamsburg (aka Billyburg), offensol, Sparks, dively incorrect usePirBR, Union Poarks, diveat shoes Billybs, X = the nrucker vegtofu Greenpoint, Bushwick, w L train, trust funds, track bikest use, plaid shol, Sp, "origand ew Williamsburg (aka sively incorrec of the worad n", "art loft", X = tneinally from Boston", Vassar, SVA, Pratt, Barnarde "other" Billyburg), offenotcaerp, skinny jeans,The an, "irofree-rnge , Oberlin, Sarah Lawrencehe new L train, trust funds, track bikes, plaid shirts (non-Western), boat shoes

Plenty of space, too much of it even. To supporta farmer's market you need to have

a) space, that the owner is amenable to having a market on
b) that space needs to be somewhere people go or you will rely on people making special journeys
c) needs to have enough people close enough to the space to make participating in the farmers market worthwhile.

Broadway market, in London, is a good case in point. there is a lot of empty space there and not because traders aren't queuing up to sell there. they restrict the number of traders of each type of product to ensure that the traders that do sell can turn a profit on the day.

It's all well and good to say every suburban school yard could/should have a farmer's market but not every suburb could support one even if popular with the residents. This is one of the problenms with low desity suburbs.

My parents were "indie farmers" of a sort in the 80s I guess. They raised pigs, some of their friends donated money and/or time and/or feed, and everyone got a share. Same with cows and corn and apples and maple sugar. It was very small scale, and a lot of people pitched in. We just had the land.

Plus, my mom has always had gardens. When we lived in the country she had at least an acre plot going, and even after we moved into town she kept a pretty good one. The other main difference was that we didn't live anywhere near a big city where we could have sold stuff.
I think there's no one factor that can be pinned down why this kind of thing appears to be getting popular again, except for maybe city trendiness bringing it back to mass media consciousness. As has already been pointed out, it's not exactly a new thing.

McMansions were called something else back then, but we totally had them *and* a food co-op. The point is, US suburbs, and not just the affluent ones, have loads of farmers markets and co-ops.

The joke is that low-density suburbs (exurbs) are always built on ex-farmland.

In my experience of middle America, Laurel is wrong; I live way out in the middle of the country (basically rural KS) and farmers markets are big here; every little town has one, and often more than one, a week.

Too bad it's not like that around here. Tupelo has a farmer's market, but it's pitiful. Amory tried one two years ago -- it lasted two weeks. Basically, everybody who wants fresh produce grows their own or has a neighbor who grows their own; everybody else is a dumb sheep happy to go to Wal-Mart.

Is the interest in local/slow/farm-fresh/what-have-you really that much greater in the last few years, or was it just named and talked about more? Or is there growth, but only among a certain demographic - a sheen of trendiness making it more acceptable for certain sorts of younger people and the media that target them to discuss?

-- gabbneb, Monday, March 17, 2008 9:37 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

I would agree with laxalt that interest in going back to the land hostorically correlates with economic downturn. Although it was speculated that Gen X or Gen Y (which ?) were more socially responsible than the yuppie generation (which I think is true), I do think this is a more specific trend. Perhaps it started in around 2000 with No Logo, Fast Food Nation, living wage, green design, sustainable architecture, inconvenient truths.

The difference perhaps is in establishing a new mainstream urban cool rather than a counterculture dropout, as in the 70s?

can someone post pictures of american apparel models in gold lamé pants morphing into delcious organic pretzels?

This thread is hostory.

haha, for a second I thought I had accidentally opened the Spitzer thread

When will Madonna go into farming?

The cultural events felicity listed are sort of brands upon pre-existing practices/movements (that, I concede, and as others said, may have helped catalyze them, at least for certain demographics). I think that what led to such branding was partly generational, as I said above, and may have just been a, wait for it, tipping point, but it also may have a lot to do with late 90s prosperity and urban revival ane the rise of wired media culture (plus youth demographic bubble) - there are just a lot more people getting paid to write about trends all the time, and lots more young people willing to move to big cities, so anything even vaguely countercultural and/or popular with the kids has been talked into a phenomenon.

Aside, maybe I shouldn't make too much of parents who are far from stereotypically countercultural in the rock 'n roll or back to the land senses, but were there at the beginning on the environment/'organic'/wired fronts. But I think there really is a cohort of such people - and they're not accurately generalized as yuppies, if the word means anything other than middle to upper middle class anymore, as many are neither young nor professional - who played a significant role in sustaining farmers market culture in the mid-80s to late 90s.

i have been visiting coops and farmers' markets since infanthood, and i can't begin to tell you how much better and brighter they have come to look in the last five or so years

where? (how many of those five years did you spend in CA vs how many of the preceding years?)

and in what sense? i'm guessing at least part of it is diversity of offerings (i.e. 5 years ago you didn't see tat soi everywhere)? which i understand to be demand-driven and reflective of increased prosperity and interest (and diversity) in food culture generally.

guys did you not see the part where JW invented the term "unhonest hipster scumbag dirt" for that stuff that is on my carhartts

"unhonest hipster scumbag dirt" could also be the subtitle to all of nick denton's operations

My baseline for farmers markets is the one held on the University of Rhode Island campus. At least for the purpose of discounting the regional bias afforded by CA climate and growing options.

Gabs, you are absolutely right that the diversity of offerings has improved, though not just with regards to the more exotic fruit/vegetables now available.

What I have observed, mostly, is the increased presence of vendors selling prepared items: breads, cheeses, soaps, breakfast cereals, fish, sausages, candles, floral arrangements ... at prices very near to those offered at any market.

I am not sure that this change is necessarily representative of a nuevo sophistication on behalf of the consumer, but more a frustration with the limited, chemical-addled, generic options of Kroger/Safeway/Delhaize Group market outlets.

any self-respecting hipster would rather wear dickies

you can even flip it into "unhipster honest scumbag dirt" for what is under a migrant landscaper's fingernails

I prefer the uncorrectness of unhonest.

discorrectness

Dickies are for fatasses.

fatasses are dishonest

http://www.agonyboothmedia.com/images/articles/Zoom__Academy_for_Superheroes_2006/Zoom__Academy_for_Superheroes_2006_017.jpg

What I have observed, mostly, is the increased presence of vendors selling prepared items: breads, cheeses, soaps, breakfast cereals, fish, sausages, candles, floral arrangements ... at prices very near to those offered at any market.

yeah, the rockist in me (being raised to look down on the non-farm 'highstalls' of the pike place market) sorta objects to all of that - you don't farm those things, they're for the market tourists who are looking for a souvenir as they pass through.

i kind of don't see the problem with this trend

i mean yeah lol hipsters but if you ask me this country could use more farmers

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/24/121559/017?source=daily

The reporter wanted the story to have a strong hipster slant, but none of us fit very well into that mold (I don't know any young farmers who really do). He asked me plenty of pointedly hipster-related questions ("Do you have tattoos? Piercings?"), and seemed less interested in the emphasis I put on my community gardening. When he tried to dig up appropriately hip free-time activities, I kept explaining that I spent most of my free time at my community garden, but that didn't work for him, so he kept asking for other things. I finally mentioned that I played darts very occasionally -- and that's what made it into the article.

haw

i ran into a former coworker today who just had a baby. she and her husband just moved to a farmhouse in new jersey and she is taking a job to only work two days a week. and plans to have sheep and make cheese. i think that sounds fucking amazing.

that article sucks though.

what about that dude's hat?

Ha, Ned - I didn't see that you had included the quote about rock star ricotta makers in your original post and was just coming here to say that was the piece of the article I found most offensive.

x-post It does. I want to make babies and cheese now too.

Do not confuse the processes to do so.

i ran into a former coworker today who just had a baby. she and her husband just moved to a farmhouse in new jersey and she is taking a job to only work two days a week. and plans to have sheep and make cheese. i think that sounds fucking amazing.

I wish I could do something like that but I would need a lot more money.

lol the only kind of real estate doing well in this entire country right now is farmland

I blame this guy for everything

http://www.ck-blog.com/cks_blog/images/2007/07/07/dirtyjobs.jpg

my parents still own the farmhouse in NJ that i spent the first 7 yrs of my life in... there used to be acres and acres of fields and orchards surrounding their modest property. in the 15 years since we moved out, all of it--literally, all of it--has been developed. ;_;

schadenfreude haw at developers!!!

I wonder how long before all this horrible misguided exurban build-up from the last decade gets turned back into farmland. probably whenever milk hits $8 a gallon and regular unleaded hits $5, so, 2009?

i'm allergic to milk

what about sheep cheese

what about babies

all men are allergic to babies max

unleaded is better in coffee anyways.

cheese can be okay sometimes, yeah.

babies? i don't know seems like if you're going to eat a human you'd want to eat something big and not something bite size

Babies taste of chicken.

wish I could do something like that but I would need a lot more money.

-- Nicole, Tuesday, March 25, 2008 7:29 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

yeah i think her husband has that :D

suckling baby

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/us/06farmers.html?hp

Another one? So soon?

Indie farming is racist. Poor Mexican and black food processing workers lose their jobs when white indie people urge everyone to grow their own food.

FWIW, I know a few people who have done this sort of thing in the last ten years, and are not particularly corny indie fuxor about it either. One devoted about five years to farm work (he even intensively studied plant science and such) until he decided he could never make even a meager stable living. One manages a gentleman-farmer's farm so he does fine (rich guy doesn't care if the farm is profitable). One couple I know have day jobs but also raise chickens and grow small quantities of vegetables in rural CO -- don't know if they count.

In order to compete with the agribusiness guys you have to produce something that's perceived as far superior in quality, so in a sense you're a luxury good producer. Sustainable local organic ethical is hard to scale. But if people find the lifestyle better for their souls, why not?

My sister is a community-farm, local foods person who's larder is probably 80% local or at least free-range or organic. She is most definitely not a hipster... I think it was always her childhood dream to live on a farm, but part of her whole drive is certainly a dislike of the agribusiness industry.

But she's all about community volunteer farming where a neighborhood produces a good portion of its own food cheaply, which I feel is a different vibe completely from people starting their own commercial farms where they grow fancy shit for rich foodies. I think there's room in this big world tho for both types of small farms, and there's a lot of interaction and trading that goes on between pretty much all local growers in an area, whether they are running the free community garden plots or running a free-range chicken ranch or producing the guys making the 30-40 dollar cheese. Those cheese guys need eggs, the egg lady trades her eggs for fancy cheese, the cheese guys get the best eggs in the county and the egg lady gets really nice cheeses. People specialize -- someone has a giant herb garden or they have like maybe have a dozen fruit trees. This kind of local food production is totally sustainable at a certain level and no, it isn't going to feed the world, but the people who participate in these subcultures pay almost nothing for amazing food because of they're own work and bartering.

New terms, new variants:

Folk school: The phrase calls to mind cloggers, birch bark hats, and strains of “If I Had a Hammer.” But these craft schools of yore are experiencing a resurgence of late, drawing young do-it-yourself homesteaders and restless baby boomers to the woods to learn about everything from organic farming to electric cars.

BECAUSE YOU GO TO THE FUCKING WOODS TO LEARN ABOUT ELECTRIC CARS.