On my family’s farm, the sun sets over the mountains and rises over the ponds, its morning rays glimmering through the apple trees that have stood on the eastern edge of our land for a century. I learned to orient myself from an early age, knowing which way was north, south, east, or west was helpful for a child who roamed free over acres of field and forest. My father grew hay and raised beef cows. The sweet scent of first cutting, the sputtering tractors bringing in the bales, the swallows swooping low across the fields, these were the summer days of my youth. To farm is to honor the circular rhythms of the seasons, to intrinsically tie oneself to the earth, to grow roots. I never traveled when I was young and the thirst to see the world was powerful. I wanted a life that took me places, whose trajectory was upward and forward and decidedly not rooted. I was the first in my family to go to college, then onto graduate school. I married a man from another place, got a job, and lost touch with where the sun rose and set every day.
I am the youngest of two. At some point after I had gone away to college, my father told me he was leaving the farm to my sister. There would be no dividing the land, no discussion of who owned what, or what would happen to the house, the barns, the animals. It all went to her. “I can give you other things,” he said to me. Other things likely meant money, and money could buy land. But money couldn’t buy that land, the land my family had farmed for four generations.
I don’t really believe in owning land. It existed before we were here and will continue to exist after we are gone, back to ashes, into the very earth that we perceived to own. But in the best cases, we can tend the land and in so doing, form a kind of symbiotic relationship. Certainly, my family were not the first people to preside over these fields and call them our own. But like many sentimental things, the land had become part of us, a compass to which we oriented ourselves in a harsh and unpredictable world. The sun would always rise over the ponds and set over the mountains. That would never change.
As fate would have it, my heart led me back to agriculture, and I wanted to put down roots, to be nourished by the earth. In my blood ran four generations of farmers, but I found myself landless and hungry for a home. And I was not alone: access to land is the biggest challenge facing new and aspiring farmers across America. Owning land, especially large tracts of productive agricultural land, is a privilege that has always correlated to social and economic injustices. Most farmland is owned by men; specifically, old, white, wealthy men. But over the next two decades, a vast amount of working land, some 370 million acres, will change hands as aging farmers retire. What does the next generation of farmers look like? Refreshingly, many are women: over half of American farmland has a woman stepping into a decision-making role and 60% of new and beginning farmers are women or non-gender conforming. Most are still white but black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are beginning to gain traction. BIPOC farmers face an even steeper road to gain entry to agriculture. From accessing land and capital, to participating in government programs that support farm enterprises, BIPOC farmers are working to overcome decades of injustice within systems that are still predominantly controlled by white men.
The next generation of farmers is facing unprecedented challenges in accessing and retaining land. We are burdened with the excesses of the generations before us; we carry student debt, make do with stagnant wages, and sink under the highest inflation rates seen in fifty years. “They don’t make more land,” the saying goes. But they do seem to make more money. Competition for development, energy, and capital is fierce and unyielding. Most farmland is kept within the same family; inherited if you’re one of the lucky ones.
For those of us who aren’t as lucky, there are options. Leasing land is the starting point for many aspiring farmers. Relying on government programs, such as USDA, that offer farm business loans and low interest mortgages on rural land, is another option. But to date, only 16% of participants in these programs are women. Even fewer identify as BIPOC and of those, many have faced discriminatory practices that have recently come to light.
Our world is an imperfect one. But the pull of the earth is strong. When I felt this pull, I retained a realtor and put down a deposit on the largest tract of land I could afford: 6.9 acres of scrubland on hard pan clay with an old house, a derelict barn, and decades of trash buried beneath a mess of invasives. Any farmer worth her salt had given up on this land half a century ago. Years before, this farm had been sub-divided from the hundred acres surrounding it and sold for development. Only this little tract remained, bordered on one side by a creek, waiting for caretakers to nurture it back to life. In buying my piece of earth, I became the first person in my family to hold a mortgage. It wasn’t much, but it was mine and I felt like the luckiest person in the world.
My farm sits outside of the protected agricultural zone and is just under the acreage threshold to qualify for agricultural tax exemptions. These were things I didn’t understand at the time we bought it and have only come to grasp their importance while trying to access USDA programs. I am, for the most part, locked out of resources that serve agricultural landowners: my land is too small, unproductive, and located in the wrong place to qualify. The systems at large are telling me I am not worthy of farming. In this, I stand shoulder to shoulder with my next-gen farmer cousins. It is a hard world to break into. I called myself a homesteader, a gardener: the title of farmer seemed to be just out of reach.
Without government assistance, equipment, or capital, we tackled our land with grit and determination, removing invasive shrubs that had taken over the fields and felling dead trees. We pulled trash from the soil, hauling away dumpsters of neglect and abuse: hard, exhausting work. In their place, we planted trees, a garden, and berry bushes that delighted our children. Soon, we added a flock of chickens, then sheep to our little piece of land. We set up a rotational grazing pattern in our field and marveled at how quickly the sheep brought it back to life. If we nourish the land, it will nourish us. Tenuously at first, then with growing confidence, we began to call ourselves farmers.
To farm, and to do it well, does not require vast acreage or even land ownership. The desire to put down roots, to grow something from the earth, can be answered in many ways. Sometimes, the injustices of our world make that journey more difficult, or even nearly impossible. But there are ways to carve a path despite the systems constructed by generations before us. Persistence. Ingenuity. Hope. These are the traits of a farmer. It doesn’t matter how much land you own; it’s how deep you grow your roots.
Here on my little farm, the sun rises over the willow trees and sets behind the creek. There is a stately old Sycamore on the western streambank that has presided over the sun’s dying rays for a century or more. It will likely still be here long after I’m gone, and I hope the next caretakers of this land see it as a sentinel of the setting sun. I hope they use it to orient themselves in this world, and I hope they call themselves farmers.
NOTE: I wrote this essay with the hope it would be published in Taproot magazine, a truly beautiful publication connecting farmers, artists, and makers. I recently learned that the magazine folded, like so many other publications. I hope there is still light at the end of the tunnel for worthwhile magazines. I miss them dearly.
