By JULIE FLAHERTY / NYT / 10/14/00
LINCOLN, Mass. - After a full day of plucking and pulling at beans, peppers and potatoes, Amy Sprague is thinking about tomorrow morning, and all the kale, collards and cilantro she has to gather before heading to the farmers' market. The late-rising sun means that she and her co-workers are hitting the fields later these days. "We're doing 6:30 now," she says, concealing whether she considers it an unwelcome delay, or a half-hour of extra sleep.
Since beginning her apprenticeship in April here at Drumlin Farm, outside Boston, Ms. Sprague, 27, has had some very full days, learning to bale hay, drive two kinds of tractors and repair farm equipment with a blowtorch. For her and the three other aspiring farmers at Drumlin this year, this crash course in hands-on agriculture was the only way to learn the technical side of running a small farm.
These internships, which entail working and often living on a host farm in exchange for a stipend and the experience of a growing season, are an increasingly popular recourse for a new generation who did not grow up on farms but who are drawn to that way of life. Part of the lure, as always, is the chance to live closer to nature, but these aspiring farmers also know they need to be well versed in the business end of farming - and see a future that makes financial sense.
They are taking up a task others are abandoning. Nationwide, there are 300,000 fewer farmers than there were 20 years ago, while the amount of land devoted to growing declined about 3 percent between 1987 and 1997, according to the Agriculture Department. The loss rate is even higher in New England, where cropland shrank 9 percent in Maine, 12 percent in Massachusetts and 13 percent in Vermont.
But these unseasoned farmers are hoping that a renewed interest in organic foods and locally grown produce will make their dream of running a farm of their own a reality. The New England Small Farm Institute, a nonprofit educational organization that helps coordinate internships on about 70 small farms in the region, sees everyone from recent college graduates to burnt-out business executives asking how they can learn to work the land.
"A larger percentage are coming from nonfarm backgrounds," said Kathryn Ruhf, the institute's co-director. She points out that in Massachusetts the number of farmers over 65 is four times that of those under 35, and when the older ones retire, their children are generally not planning to step in.
The executive director, Judith Gillan, who helped found the institute more than two decades ago, said that she was particularly optimistic about the newest farmers. Instead of the romantic back-to-the-land attitude prevalent in the 1970's, "people now understand they have to make it as a business," Ms. Gillan said. In New England, especially, they tend to be passionate about farming, but also well educated and financially astute.
They are people like Desiree Robertson-DuBois, 27, who was reading in the institute's research library on a recent afternoon, sitting near the "Tillage - Mechanical" section of periodicals. She discovered farming three years ago at Hampshire College, where she was studying American history, when she volunteered to work on the school farm. She is now an assistant farmer at Simple Gifts Farm in Belchertown, Mass., but hopes to become a partner there, once she is confident of the farm finances.
"I've told the farmer, `I want to see the books,' " she said. "To succeed as a farmer you need a good business plan or you are going to fail."
She has seen several apprentices decide that farming is not for them.
"A lot of people get into farming and have these grandiose ideas of working with the earth," she said, "but people don't know what that means."
"Sometimes it's killing Colorado potato beetle larvae on the plants," she said with a cringe of disgust. "Some people are seriously disillusioned."
Icky pests, early hours and smelly compost notwithstanding, Ms. Sprague and her husband, Thomas Harms, 29, plan to buy their own farm in Maine this fall. The owners have lived there for 45 years, but when their own children could not take over, they sought someone who would keep it as a working farm. Ms. Sprague will have 52 acres to work with, after she does some market research.
"I'll spend some time at the farmers' markets and see who is selling what," she said, although herbs, salad greens and tomatoes are good bets for food co-ops, health food stores and local farm stands.
"We're paying close attention to flowers," Mr. Harms said, "because they make money." In New England, farmers can no longer compete with their large Midwest counterparts. So serving niche markets - with items like heirloom vegetables, fancy garlic or goat's milk cheese - has been a reprieve. Restaurants and stores readily buy specialty products made from locally grown foods.
But Ms. Sprague's ultimate goal is to plant a spectrum, from strawberries to sugar maples, and sell directly to local families. Like many organic farmers, Ms. Sprague, who left her job as a naturalist and educator to take the apprenticeship, wants to raise consumer awareness.
"I want people to come to the farm," she said. "I want them to be connected to where their food is coming from."
Mr. Harms will get his hands dirty, too, but he plans to buffer the farm start-up costs by keeping his job with an Internet company. About half of Massachusetts' farmers are part time, many using farming as "income patching," an arrangement the farm institute encourages.
"You can have a small farm enterprise, and be a car mechanic, or an English professor," Ms. Gillan said.
The institute supplements the technical aspects of apprenticeships with its own programs on agricultural entrepreneurship, and its curriculum reads like the syllabus for a first-year M.B.A. student. It offers workshops on process budgeting, market research and legal issues - from product liability for a dairy farm to insurance for a pick-your-own apple orchard.
It recently secured a $1.7 million grant from the Agriculture Department, part of which will go toward writing case studies of established farms, surveying new farmers, publishing learning guides and setting up farmer networks.
Farmers will need the help if they are to survive, Ms. Gillan said. They are fewer and farther between, making it hard for newcomers to find support or advice by hanging out at the corner store coffee pot.
So some apprentices take field trips to other farms, where they learn the different ways to make a farm profitable. Some farms sell their products over the Internet, others team together to sell wholesale. In a twist on the language of Wall Street, "shareholders" of Brookfield Farm in Amherst, Mass., pay an annual fee in exchange for a portion of the harvest, an average of 14 pounds of produce each week through the season.
Dan Kaplan, the farm manager at Brookfield, is an ardent proponent of community-supported agriculture, as such arrangements are known, as well as apprenticeships. He grew up on Long Island ("I was supposed to be a lawyer or something," he said) but began working on farms as an apprentice in 1987. Now he has three apprentices of his own, and he sees to it that their curriculum is more structured than the one he had. Spring and summer are dedicated to outside work, but in the fall he gives a lesson in harvesting numbers, with assignments on cash-flow analysis, inventory control and database management.
"The biggest surprise for them is that farming is entrepreneurial," Mr. Kaplan said as his assistants hurried to get cabbage and peppers and onions stacked before shareholders arrived at the farm stand. "Unless you want to be taking risks, this is not a good job for you."
For now, at least, his apprentices are optimistic. "There is a lot of opportunity for somebody like me, for folks who want to farm, who want to be creative about marketing," said Jenny Housman, 30, who is finishing her fourth season as an apprentice.
A fellow apprentice, Susan Wasseluk, 24, does not know exactly what she will do with her newfound skill in harvesting leeks or maneuvering a cargo van full of vegetables through city streets to a farmers' market. Perhaps a community-supported farm? But as she leaned against the produce bins, her tanned arms marked with smudges of earth, she said the apprenticeship fulfilled her expectations.
"All I knew," she said, "was I wanted to be outside, and dirty.":
