Growing new farmers
From CFI
From Mary Zellachild:
Although Willits was a farming community in the past, most of our food now comes from grocery stores. We’ve all taken advantage of the ease with which food can be obtained and few people now see any sense in being farmers. There’s no blame in this; it’s just the way our society has evolved.
However, things are changing. Most of our food comes from far away, and as the price of oil continues to rise, so does the cost of food. News stories about contaminated food, pesticides in what we eat and the benefits of healthier eating are leading a large number of people to seek food that’s produced closer to home.
Many of us here in Willits are working towards creating a more local food system. One of the challenges of doing this is not only finding people who want to farm, but finding people with the skills to farm successfully. Each year since the 1950s a continuing flood of farmers have left farming. We’ve probably all heard this before, but what isn’t so generally recognized is that as farmers leave, the skills passed down through their family or community for generations can be lost in just one generation away from the farm. It’s these complex skills that need to be relearned and reclaimed.
Touch the Soil, a new sustainable agriculture magazine, has an article about an organization in Monterey County—the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association—(ALBA) that offers a comprehensive and successful organic farmer-training program which could prove to be a national model for the revitalization of agriculture.
In the first step of this program, applicants are trained for six months in the technical and business aspects of managing an organic farm. Classes are given on Thursday evenings and fieldwork takes place on Saturdays. Participants learn about marketing, conservation, regulatory requirements, crop insurance and the various risks that go along with farming.
ALBA owns two farm properties, one 110-acres and the other 195 acres. After students have completed their six-month training and have developed a crop and business plan, they can qualify to lease a piece of ALBA’s land the next spring. It’s leased to them at 10 percent of market rates, increased to 80 percent over the course of six years. The amount of land each person farms depends on his or her years of experience. The Rural Development Center is headquartered on the smaller piece of land and includes a classroom, maintenance workshop, produce cooler and distribution facility, giving beginning farmers the experience of using these types of facilities.
In 2002 ALBA created ALBA Organics, to support the sales and sales-training needs of its farmers. The beginning farmers learn how to market produce to institutions as well as individual customers. Some of its large customers include Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Cruz.
ALBA students come from diverse backgrounds but the program works to reach Spanish-speaking growers and farm workers in the county as well as low-income people.
Our situation here in Willits is very different from Monterey County, where over one-quarter of its population works in agriculture. But I believe ALBA’s program has components that would contribute to the success of any agricultural training program. These include a stable, ongoing organization to supervise the process; hands-on as well as theoretical training (set up so that participants can keep their jobs while learning); follow-up assistance; and available land for beginning farmers to learn on.
