On-farm education and preservation

Edited partial transcript from the Northeast Regional Discussion Group on behalf of the Small Farms Conservancy originally published in the Fall 2009 Small Farmer’s Journal and copyrighted thereto.

Held in the Sanborn Mills Ox Barn, Loudon, New Hampshire, end of September 2009.

Charles Capaldi transcriptor

Discussion lead by Larry Brewer, President SFC

LARRY BREWER (Oregon SFC):

We want to talk about education – specifically on-farm education, farmland preservation and conservation – in that order.

ELIZABETH HENDRIX (Vermont):

We at Sunny Hill Farm, plan to team up with an apprentice couple who will become co-caretakers of the farm, and then primary caretakers of the farm when we can’t do it any longer, that is, when we retire. At that point, they will also be caretakers for us, and should start looking for their own apprentices to continue the relay. This portion of on-farm education is narrow in focus, flowing among farmers and one or two generations of apprentices, but it is deep and land specific. Moreover, in addition to land, vegetable and animal husbandry, this piece of the education will evolve methods for caring for each other, the old, the prime, the youthful. That is, it will evolve methods for caring for continuity. Larry’s slowly turning, very large wheel completes some segment of its rotation as each generation finds its apprentices and as those apprentices become farmers and take on the responsibility of caring for their mentors, as well as their own apprentices, in addition to the farm. Who knows when one rotation of the very large wheel is complete. Perhaps it takes as long as the life of the earth. This passing on of profound teaching about one small farm, repeated millions of times at farms all over the earth is the axle that turns the wheel. Running up and down the spokes of the wheel are the portions of education that are more introductory – meant to awaken the inner farmer apprentices. Rural kids and adults need this as much as urban folks. Farming can be stigmatized in rural communities, as much as it can be romanticized in an urban environment. Such introductions can run the gamut from one day visits to the farm by acquaintances and their kids, to structured visits, maybe weekly, from a local sixth grade teacher and her class over the course of a year – with kids participating in garden design, building garden beds, preparing brood pens, learning how and why to plant seeds properly, learning patience from weeding and composting, learning about plant and animal health and sickness, caring for tools, harness and each other – all the way to harvesting plants and animals, nutrition, finally sharing the bounty with neighbors through a local food shelf, the rest of the school, or certainly for their families, or the elderly. I’d like to see some art in there – reflections on the farm life expressed by pen, brush, music, dance – there is an infinite variety of what could be done with such a class of kids. And among these sixth graders, perhaps each year, one or two of these kids will absorb these experiences so deeply as to recognize the nobility and possibility of pursuing the farming life. Others pursuing different ambitions may nonetheless recognize the balance on the tire of the Great Wheel and will be able to recall the agrarian spokes that lead inevitably to the true axle of all human life: honest sustainable farming. My thought is to let them come to know us when they are young, full of hope and natural intelligence and plant the seed of farming before adolescence, before adult pressures impact them.

So, to summarize. A duality of on farm education – (1) deep land-specific passing on of knowledge to apprentices who will one day take over primary care-taking responsibilities (2) a commitment to introduce, even in a limited way, people, especially really young kids to the ethos of the small farm.

Farmland preservation – what can we do to this end? Every little bit helps, with the guidance of our attorney, we have put our 50 acre farm into a trust, a trust to ensure that successors of our choosing, or if we haven’t yet chosen at the time of our death, successors of the Small Farm Conservancy’s choosing will inherit caretaking responsibilities on this farm. This land will no longer be owned by individuals and so no individuals or other entities can turn it into non-farming land. But individuals can augment the farm land by purchasing adjoining parcels of property and adding them to the trust. There is every potential to grow. We are really lucky, there are no banks involved and no liens on the land. The trust is unqualified. Our successors will find this land has no other claimants. All they will need to do is to maintain the farm’s capacity to satisfy their hunger, their thirst, their need to work, their sense of self worth and community and their need for beauty and pleasure in life. And for a bit of the other reality, they will need to satisfy the tax collector of course, and the need to purchase off farm needs, olive oil for instance.

The Small Farms Conservancy will be a great help with tangibles, health insurance, for example and intangibles, a larger, supportive community, for example. We imagine untold thousands of similar farms across the earth, maintaining a succession of young farmers, coming on to superb farmland, free and clear of debt, getting better and better with each generation of manure and careful husbandry. The inevitable profits augmenting the farm with more land – each additional ten acres or so, depending on location, supporting another farming family, and we are happy to share the language of our trust document with anyone who is interested.

There are bumps in the road to this utopia, but perhaps the Small Farms Conservancy can mitigate some of these. An SOS program, for instance, where farmers can send out a distress signal to Small Farms Conservancy headquarters, sent out from there to the membership so able farmers can find skilled apprentices to help build a barn after a fire, or locate affordable hay after a flood, or assist with other such emergencies. Membership in such a community provides assurance that will go a long way toward ensuring that small farmers are able to preserve the farms that they steward through difficult, as well as bountiful times, when they might gain just as much by responding to an SOS sent by another farmer.

I agree with Larry in his president’s message of June 1st that access to land and equipment will be powerful incentives for new farmers to dare to realize their dreams and that they visualize a trust fund for purchasing land outright for these new farmers will greatly increase the number of small farms. We also need to come up with creative ways to help keep small farmers on their farms during tough times – that is essential to preserving farmland.

DREW CONROY (New Hampshire): I’m a professor at the University of New Hampshire – I’m a 100% teaching appointment and I work with students. I started my teaching career at Sterling College and one of the things I’ve always believed in is students working on the farm. That’s been part of my 22 years of teaching – students who work on the farm – students who have some kind of internship and on-farm working component. I’m also a small farmer and I’m very active in many agricultural circles.

I’ll talk specifically about students in accredited institutions and sometimes we offer students experiences for-credit in farm settings. It has great advantages – grades are a great motivator. If you have motivated students who want to graduate, you threaten them with the low grade and entice them to work hard for the high grade – you get amazing performance. For example, tonight, I have a class called Cream at the University of New Hampshire. I’ve been teaching the class for 12 years and we have 33 students who are responsible for every aspect of managing and maintaining our dairy farm. At the moment we have three shifts for milking, with students responsible 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the entire school year. They are part motivated by grades, by the letter of recommendation they might get at the other end, and they might be a little bit different from what you might think of as an apprentice, but they are highly motivated to learn skills. They enjoy the act of experiential education and most of the students that I have in Southern New Hampshire are from Massachusetts or Connecticut, a few from Vermont and from Maine, but a lot of them are suburban kids who want this agricultural hands-on experience. Do most of them go into farming? No. Most of them don’t.

Some of them leave with skills that will help them in their veterinary careers, or in education, or they might be employed at (places like) Sanborn Farm … But the majority of them aren’t making a lifetime of agriculture, but I believe every one of them leaves with an appreciation of ag. After 22 years, I’m fascinated to see that so many of them are still involved in ag in many ways, mostly not full-time farmers.

In terms of summer work – I teach in a program where every student is required to work on a farm or in an agricultural enterprise. One of the challenges we found with formal internships is that the people who are willing to work with you, the industry and farmers, get a little upset if we can’t send them an intern. It’s not that easy.

I taught in Africa last year and every single student in the program I taught there had to do a six month internship. I could send them an intern. It wasn’t America. One of the challenges that I’ve seen over the years is that we have farms and organizations that are very willing to partner and provide wonderful opportunities and we can’t find the students to do that. Some of the best internships, in a particular year where I have 30 or 35 students, I may not have someone who is interested in doing that. They are interested in something else. I love the persistency of some of the folks that call me up and remind me that they are looking for someone. And I feel terrible that I can’t send them someone every single year. Then that comes to compensation.

A lot of college students demand pay. In terms of an apprenticeship with room and board, a lot of my college students – and I’ve worked with Tillers Int’l for many years and their interns and I’ve become great friends with some of those folks. Tillers has a model that offers very low pay and that gives great experience over time. But I find that a lot of my college students are challenged by that. I paid my own way through school – I never could have afforded to do an apprenticeship for no pay, and pay my tuition for each year and pay my loans and all that. We still have college students that are like that despite the fact that we all think that every college student that goes to college has mom or dad ask, how much do you need? Maybe ½ or maybe 1/3 have a blank check and free education. It’s not the majority who have a blank check. They are generally very aware of the finances of education and needing to make money in the summer.

RICK THOMAS (Vermont): I’m the current Draft Horse Manager at Sterling College – I wrote something this morning at about 3:15 – speaking to the internship issue which is what drew me here today. Imagine a college where students are required to carry a sharp axe to class- where they are just as likely to be reading Thoreau and Rachel Carson as they are Lynn Miller and Drew Conroy. Where oxen and horses are considered teaching faculty . Where every student knows where their food comes from because they harvested it just last week. Where students question fossil fuel consumption and ask hard questions like, “what happens next” or “can we do this a different way?” During their 4 years at Sterling, students will be uncomfortable. They will be uncomfortable the first time they are faced with the reality of slaughtering an animal for our community nourishment, using a cross cut to fell a tree in the woods, or when the potatoes they worked so hard to grow are destroyed by blight. They will be uncomfortable the first time they take the lines and drive a horse or yoke an ox. They will certainly be uncomfortable when they winter camp for four days in late December with a tarp and sharp axe. Our curriculum at Sterling College is many things, but always student-centered : four connected strands weave together to form a student’s experience.

· The grass roots year

· Major requirements

· Internship

· A self-designed capstone experience

Sterling’s internship is a 3 semester process – students spend one semester acquiring necessary skills to apply for and ultimately get accepted to a 10 week, 400 hour learning experience.

These essential skills include, writing an effective cover letter, resume, searching for a good fit, and becoming an effective communicator. For many of today’s students, this will be a daunting task, guided skillfully by our career resource center director and staff. After acceptance, the sponsor is screened for appropriateness and made aware of multi-faceted requirements in order for the student to achieve their objectives.

During the 2nd semester – the actual internship – students complete weekly reports and their progress is monitored by the director of the program and three faculty sponsors. By week five, a faculty member will visit the intern for a day or two, spending time working closely with them and meeting privately with their sponsor. Upon completion, students enroll in a third course to formally reflect on the internship to present a 20 minute scripted presentation to the local and college community.

Students may start their academic career at Sterling College uncomfortable, but after their internship, they change. Their confidence in themselves either soars or is thoroughly shaken. Their paths are set or they backtrack to collect their ideas and try something else. Either way the internship serves as a powerful learning experience launching them into the next phase of their academic career. Thoreau said, “Education often made straight ditches out of meandering streams.” I think he would have found an exception at Sterling College.

In closing, I’m here really to be a voice for my students, to raise awareness that not all internships are created equally, to support the idea set forth in ‘coincidence of wants’ (editorial by LRM) and to participate in a national dialog that, I hope, will result in more students finding themselves deeply connected to their learning experience which can be taught no better than by the farmers and growers of today’s agricultural landscape.

PAUL FERRARI (Vermont): I stand on Rick’s shoulders and Drew’s shoulders at Sterling College as well. I just want to add that I was a student at Sterling and am now an alumnus, and teach and work there. But for my friends and peers and watching students going through the internship program over the years, I think that it’s a really big deal for students going through the program. I think that over 12 years of formal education, more happens in that summer, fall, or whenever they do that internship – I’ve seen it change people’s lives. I know that it really affected me as well and I know that it is something that I often go back to. It can also be a nightmare if the match isn’t right, or if things go wrong. I don’t know if there is a whole lot that can be done about that in certain situations. But more often than not it’s a powerful experience.

DREW CONROY: I’ve seen both good and bad experiences and it is frustrating when I have a student get into a situation that becomes a bad experience. Oftentimes the business or farm owner almost blames the institution for a student’s failure – It’s often the individual. The farmers who call me up and want an employee to possibly become a partner, and I’ll say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if they insist that I persuade someone to work for them. The trouble often starts with that, if I don’t have an appropriate fit. I’m not the perfect match maker but I can often see … and it really gets frustrating, I hate the institution to get a bad name for one student and their poor performance, or a poor match because sometimes the student is a great performer and …

LARRY BREWER (Small Farms Conservancy): That makes a lot of sense. I’m trying to envision situations where the individual providing the internship is having successes and failures. We have gone to bat recently for a farm in Washington state because the State Department of Labor audited them and is filing suit for back taxes because they are not exempt and they are not educational. They claim that this couple was using the interns and apprentices just to save themselves money and on and on … which was not the case because we know the history of this farm. We’ve seen this happen in Washington and Oregon – it is now a threat to folks providing internships… These kinds of things are a problem. Do we have anything other obstacles that anybody can add here?

CARL RUSSELL (Vermont): I think about the apprenticeship situation – wasn’t that long ago that I was trying to get information and I realized that I spent most of my life tagging along behind farmers and working with people who were doing things I found interesting. It wouldn’t be classified as an apprenticeship in the terms of what we are talking about because I see it as this focused period of time when perhaps an urban youth is interested in getting up to speed in a lifetime enterprise. When people come to me and find out I use draft animals and practice earth-based skills, they want to have an apprenticeship – there is this real challenge for me to think of what skills these people have that can actually contribute to my enterprise so that I can actually pay them so that I don’t have to fall into this problem of whether or not I’m taking advantage of their willingness to learn. A couple of times, I’ve actually paid people at a low hourly rate – but then I have the problem of keeping them working at this rate and what they can actually do, and then at the same time educating them. I’m primarily in forestry and logging with horses and having a degree in forestry and having a clientele, I have more land under my management than I can get to. At the same time, it seems as though it would be an ideal situation to bring in individuals to learn – but I can’t bring in individuals who have the skills at the level that I need them at, so that I can fill in the gap, in the need for what I have to do. That’s the big quandary for me in terms of apprenticeship. Getting people in at a point where they realize that what is being offered to them is valuable enough so that they pay in a way, so that it is as if it is a curriculum, but then they move to another level where their skills that they’ve just acquired are then applicable – and this is where I would say it is an apprenticeship. So that they are actually skilled enough to defray a certain portion of their livelihood so that they can work in the situation and then be able to move to the next level so that they can take on the work – in my case, it would possibly be a franchise of a forestry enterprise, or in my personal situation, it’s the next step where these folks are capable of caring for you, the land and your community.

LYNN MILLER, (SFJ & SFC): I had somebody come to me many years ago and tell me that he had been an apprentice. He wanted to go to work for me for a year in exchange for his pick of two horses, $100/month and a place to live, and 4 acres of land. I asked him the nature of his experience, he said he had been an apprentice and had gone some place and watched for three days while somebody harnessed and unharnessed a horse and drove it. He felt qualified to come and offer that. There was an almost toxic impatience to his demand – it had to happen now and nothing less and “I’m not leaving until you say yes”. Which is part of the character of some of what Drew was talking about.

You said, few go on to farm, many don’t want to intern and they are talking about how much money they can get out of this. There is that quotient in this – ‘I need some help – I can get free labor if I can teach somebody’. There is no free labor and no free education. We are just trying to figure out a different way – a social quotient – of how to balance this out. Although I sent the guy packing, he had a good idea when he brought his list. He figured out what it was worth, he thought. But what he didn’t understand is that he didn’t have anything to offer me.

KATHY BERRY (New Hampshire): I’m the granddaughter of a farmer and I’m one of the founders of Slow Money and live on a small farm. What I think has happened is that we are becoming a non-agrarian society. People from the city look down on farmers and think that anyone can farm. But what they absolutely don’t understand is that when a farmer gets up in the morning, they walk out the door and they know what the weather is, they look at the sky, they can tell what’s going on around — all they’ve done is walk out the door. This is something that we have to relate to the farmers that there is an awareness that absolutely cannot be taught. It would be hard to distill the information that a farmer knows when they walk up to a horse with a harness. How are you going to distill what is actually going on when you try to put the harness on but it is so much more complicated than that. Asking the farmer to pay for an intern is ludicrous – the farmer is going to spend all their time just keeping them safe, and keeping the farm safe from them, at least the first month or so, and teaching them how to do it. They have no idea how to do stuff. I think this is really critical that there is a huge value in what the farmer has to teach you and that also has to be a huge social value that needs to be built into the students so that they are fully aware that no matter how much they know, they are absolutely brain dead when they walk on to that farm.

LISA MCCRORY (Vermont): I was just taking some notes and it’s really getting good, but I guess that maybe we should be thinking of what the outcome is. Once somebody goes through an internship or an apprenticeship, what are they hoping, what are they marketing that the outcome of this is going to be. But to backtrack a little bit, I’ll just say that I have worked at the University of Vermont for a number of years, then I worked for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont for another ten years in outreach and education to producers, farmers, young and experienced farmers trying to develop new skills – focused on livestock production and grazing management and organic production. When I did my undergraduate degree, half of my senior year was done through an impromptu apprenticeship. It was just me approaching my advisor saying that I was working on a beef production farm and I think it’s legitimate and I should get credits for this. With some creativity, we just created a strategy for it. It just made me think that one of the things that could be marketed with some sort of a program that gets developed here is opportunity for credit – if there is some sort of a structure to this which isn’t my sense from reading the documents – I think that I don’t want people to forget that a critical part to this is that once an apprentice or an intern has gone through an experience and gotten skills enough to start their own farm and get inspired, the learning doesn’t end there. There needs to be something that continues that learning process and that’s where I think that farmer mentoring can come into play. I’ve been involved in a couple of different grant projects that specifically go around and help us teach farmers and I’m hoping that farmers teaching farmers becomes a part of that broader plan. So that people can continue to learn new skills and continue to learn from each other as innovations are happening. So that they don’t, all of a sudden graduate, and are let loose and that’s where I think we could have disasters that are waiting to happen.

When Carl was talking, it made me think that there are lots of great opportunities for internships to happen on a lot of farms out there. But sometimes, those farms that have something to offer don’t really know where to start. We are doing so many things on our farm and people want to come learn about what Carl is doing, but also about a diversified off-grid farm. How would we get started off with something like that, and it’s almost like we would benefit from having somebody who understands the system and help us to objectively develop an internship program that fits our lifestyle and what we are doing – whether we’d be bringing someone in full-time or part-time. It seems like there would be some sort of an application for this program, for a farm wanting to have a willing worker – there are obviously great examples of how that can come into play.

LES BARDEN (New Hampshire): I guess you know, I’ve been there and done all this. At 8 years old I hired on as a chore boy – that’s all, I was a chore boy, I wasn’t no apprentice. I didn’t even know what those words were. And then – that was 75 years ago – then I bought my first farm in 1953 (56 years ago) – this morning as I was thinking about this session, I listed pretty near 40 young people who gravitated to my farm – and I didn’t call ‘em apprentice, or volunteers, or interns, they didn’t have a title for themselves. I just called ‘em farm help and I worked ‘em as if they were rented mules. There’s two of ‘em sitting in this audience by the way – of those pretty near 40 people who have come and gone through my place. They picked up a little with me and they went on somewhere else and they picked up a little – I didn’t have a whole program for ‘em.

Those who have gravitated to my farm are just more or less local people – who stayed for a long time – in one case a girl stayed for 12 years and in other cases, they stayed for a week or two. I guess what I’m trying to say is, let’s not get into levitation here – let’s not take a heavy object and expect it to be floating around in the air without some support under it. I’m looking at things from a long time ago under different circumstances. There are people out there who wanted to learn. I’ve had a lot of young people and I don’t want us to head in the direction of one farm is going to teach someone all they need to know.

I liked what you had to say, “you take care of the pupil and the pupil will take care of the mentor” – in very few circumstances will that ever happen. I think it’s an ongoing process where a farm worker is going to go from farm to farm and get a varied amount of experience until he decides what he wants to do.

JULIE CLEMONS (New Hampshire): I would like to see the Small Farms Conservancy promoting apprenticeships as a socially acceptable alternative to college.

I’m contrasting my apprentice year with Paul and Molly Birdsall – where they paid me $25/week and they fed me, which was the best educational deal of my life – versus my four years at the University of New Hampshire which was also an excellent experience in which I learned a lot, but I wasn’t ready for it and I think that most people, when they are 18, aren’t ready for college. I have worked at two different colleges running outdoor programs since then, and one of them, in New Hampshire, which shall remain nameless, with a 95% acceptance rate – I would say that more than half the students in my experience had no real interest in being in college at all. They needed something else to do, but their families, there is a certain socially acceptable thing to do after high school and for a lot of people, that’s college. Maybe, if you aren’t in college it looks like something is wrong, or that your family can’t afford it, but for a lot of people, their parents want them to be in college even if they don’t really want to be there. I’m thinking, could we promote this as something better or something alternatively useful to do, and would that then answer some of the money questions we are talking about and would people be persuaded to put some money they put into their college fund into this alternative form of education.

The idea of a 13th year program is really starting to gain traction in my other world, which is experiential education. That’s the year between high school and college where you go and do something else.

JIM CORNISH (Maine): I think the 2nd part of an apprenticeship as a socially acceptable form of education is that we have to ask whether it is socially acceptable to send a kid to college and not pay for an apprenticeship education. There is a lot of line between that where people cannot seem to break the difference between where it is perfectly acceptable to pay a college professor a decent wage to educate their child, but not a farmer with 30, 40, or 50 years of experience.

PAUL FERRARI: That was a really profound point. In my background, I graduated from high school and I didn’t want to go to college although there was a lot of pressure to do so, and I left the first semester, not at Sterling College, but elsewhere. Then I went to Sterling, College, graduated, and started working in admissions trying to get young people to go to college, specifically Sterling College. This is an industry that ties into banking; there’s a lot of debt, a lot of money, as well as a social norm to go to college: “this is the way you become successful” – I see a lot of young people coming to Sterling College who want an apprenticeship – not necessarily a degree, but the experience, even if they may not be interested in a degree – this is a socially acceptable way for them to combine the two. Dare I say that I feel like my exploration at Sterling College as an alum, as an employee and getting to use some of the facilities in my off time, I almost feel like I’ve learned more afterwards through my own exploration, working with Rick and other people there – my point is that it would be a great direction, making agricultural apprenticeships of any kind – I mean that’s how it used to be, people would apprentice with the butcher, the baker or the candlestick maker when we had a craft-based economy – but I think that we are sort of living through our debt based economy which is slowly imploding and moving on to something else that isn’t necessarily a new idea, but a different approach to the same thing. I’ve worked in college admissions for three and a half years and it is basically a lot of young people getting suckered into taking on a lot of debt that isn’t necessarily in their best interest.

ELIZABETH HENDRIX : I think we can take advantage of the fact that everyone who drives through farmland, every passer-by, every tourist who is deliberate about it, loves seeing small farms – they already appreciate them on some level – our job as farmers, as well as the Small Farms Conservancy is to take them to the next step and to articulate why they love it and why they know on some really profound level that it is good- in the very deepest sense of that work – if we can say “it’s good because it keeps the earth going and there is nothing more noble than that” then we can make it a socially acceptable after high school activity or even ‘during high school’ future. A serious future for people to promote that goodness – it’s already in people.

GALEN BEAL (New Hampshire): As I see the conversation move from trying to attract university students to talking about who exactly is an apprentice, and do you need a college education to do this. I’d like to see some collaboration with outdoor living history museums, the overlap here is huge – they are all over the United States – they all teach skills that you value – blacksmithing, spinning, weaving, dying, these might be people who could come to a farm and help work out a process to add value to whatever you are doing. You might need someone to help milk the goats but there are other things you might need an apprentice for. Many museums own large tracts of land that they can’t manage – that is a place for small farmers to collaborate with them – and you are getting this educational component by hooking up with some of these institutions – I have not seen an example of this working well but I think it could – the museum community which really wants to stay relevant would welcome it – there are places like the Sturbridge Villages, that have a whole lot of land.

TOBY BASHAW (Vermont): I have a couple of publications from the New England Small Farm Institute – Miranda Smith put this guide together “The On Farm Mentorship Guide” – for prospective farm apprentices and prospective farmers looking for apprentices, she goes into lots of details, there are training forms as well, and she goes into the legalities in Vermont where the State tells us that if we have anyone working for us, we are legally bound to compensate and carry insurance. Our accountant said that in truth, most Vermont farmers don’t adhere to this, but the way the law reads, over a certain amount of money which is pitifully small, must be recorded —What did Will Roger’s say, “It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for, it’s already plenty.” Miranda goes into a fair bit of detail about various regulations, about what is and isn’t required.

LARRY BREWER: What we finally got out of the state of Washington is that if there is an organization that is recognized as an educational functioning organization that provides you with an intern, then it’s tax exempt. Let’s have an actual nonprofit educational organization so that the clearinghouse can provide the interns to the farms – we think the Washington Dept. of Labor and Industry would accept that.

JIM CORNISH : I wonder if there is a way for their farm to be a satellite of the Small Farms Conservancy so that they wouldn’t have to register as a 501(c)3 all on their own.

LARRY BREWER : It could happen precisely that way if we could even have, at various levels of agriculture – we could have a certification that says “yes, this person knows what he is doing” …. The farmer wouldn’t have to change what he does. He would just have to become familiar with what the framework is so that we could place the right person on that farm and have a certifiable situation.

LYNN MILLER: Small Farms Conservancy would contract the apprentice, a legal contract, and the obligation and the liability would lie with the Small Farms Conservancy.

LARRY BREWER: This whole program would be set up regionally, because each region would have its own requirements, so we might have to eventually have a program in every state.

ANDREW MARSHALL (Maine): I’m here to represent the Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association – I was part of the working group that put that document together over several agonizing years. I also wanted to put a plug in for NESFI – they started looking at the legal issues and the larger harrier issues about “what does on farm apprenticeship and mentorship actually mean? And how can we help people do a better job?” NESFI stands for the New England Small Farm Institute – As we move forward, at least in the Northeast, they would be a great ally to include in these discussions. They have done a lot of work already and laid some important groundwork – I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t seen this book to get a hold of it and study it. There is important stuff in the book.

Farmers start asking questions and they get different answers from different accountants, lawyers or regulatory people and they just sort of get confused and give up and go back to what they were doing before. In Maine, we are apparently in a lenient state because we don’t have to deal with an agricultural minimum wage and we don’t have a state occupational safety and health regulatory body — the legal requirements aren’t that burdensome – and I don’t want to get bogged down in legal details, but I do want to say that as these apprenticeships or interns become more popular or higher profile, they are going to attract more attention and I think that we, as a community, need to be ready to deal with that.

DREW CONROY: I’d just like to go back to the comments about apprenticeships versus internships. I feel like in any setting there are skills that people need to learn and skills that people are willing to pay for – and the people who are teaching, it is a cost to them. And I believe that whether it is an institution, like a college or a university, or if it’s a farm. And I believe there are students who would be willing to pay for this 13th year – where they are actually paying as opposed to being paid, where they are working for you in order to learn this skill. If there is a skill that is being taught or that needs to be taught, there is a cost. Furthermore, I feel strongly that if someone is providing just labor, they ought to be compensated – in my experience, here’s what’s going to happen today at the University of New Hampshire. I have 30 students involved in this Cream class, students who run the dairy farm 7 days a week 24 hours per day all year – students who are paying to help make decisions. At the same farm, we also have students who are paid for their labor. They get to shovel manure, they don’t get to participate in the decision making or learn about it or business management – they get paid to tie up cows, shovel manure, move sawdust around – an institution like the University of New Hampshire has both – people who pay to learn skills and we pay people to provide labor. I’ve often had the labor students, who sometimes think they have the skills, realize they are missing out, and then they are willing to come around and pay. People are willing to pay if we give them this intensive learning experience because I’ve wasted a lot of time scuffling along behind a team of oxen, eating their dirt, trying to get a couple of words out of somebody. A lot of days, a lot of hours. I think that for me as a professor, I see both as happening and both as valuable and anybody that offers their services with teaching skills has a cost.

CARL RUSSELL: Yes, there are skills, but I really see farming as an art – the comments before about going outside and having an instantaneous appreciation for the situation you are involved in that day, that’s an art that is learned over time. And Drew, I don’t think you wasted a minute walking behind a pair of cattle with dirt in your mouth because that’s where the art comes from. We really learn farming by exposure. It’s important as we talk about this issue to ask ourselves – Are we trying to sell apprenticeships, or are we trying to sell and share knowledge? I feel like on my own farm that I could use labor, but I’m not out looking for someone to work on my farm, but I’m constantly entertaining people who are coming to me to share knowledge with them. For me, the apprenticeship quandary is not about compensation – it’s not about how I determine what my skill or my art is so that I can attract a person to the farm – it is more about how I facilitate or how I bring that person to my farm in a way in which I can spend the time with them to teach them what they need so they can then turn around and be effective labor – a lot of what I see in apprenticeship programs is finessing the line between labor and education – that’s where like … ‘what’s the product’ – we’ve been talking about it being an alternative to college – now there’s this patent concept of an education product. You are going to spend a certain amount of time and come out with a certain number of skills, or a certain number of credits. And I think, yeah, there is a certain level, like the chainsaw safety course – where you can learn some skills and demonstrate the capability, but at the same time, there is an art, there is a balloon around the process that has to be about 18 or 20 years, not 18 or 20 months.

TIM HUPPE (New Hampshire): One of the concerns I’ve had, we’ve had a few interns here. I’d like to see the Small Farms Conservancy take a position and maybe sort of have, for lack of a better term, a sort of boot camp. To bring young people in who may want to be interns or apprentices. We’ve had both good and bad experiences and it is very awkward to say to a young person, or a person of any age, that this isn’t going to work out. And at what point do you say that to that young person? So, feelings aren’t hurt … We recently had a young man who really had no business being here and it was very awkward for us and we wanted to make it a positive experience, but before that person came to us, it would have been nice to have known that this person at least had the desire and the fire, and that he had some basic knowledge. I’d like to go back to what Les [Barden] was saying earlier about the slip and the grab hook, that’s just one example, but if there was a regional center where those people could go and they could be looked upon by a better person than me who could say, “Hey, you know, they would fit in Carl Russell’s program if he were looking for someone.” You could then have a conversation with Carl where you could say, “Carl, this is where that person is at.” I find it very difficult on a farm that doesn’t have a large staff – and that’s the same as every farm – the point is, how much of your day can you babysit? If I know the person has the basic skills and knows enough not to walk in front of a moving tractor, I’ll feel a lot more comfortable and I’ll end there – that’s what I’d be looking for.

JON FISHMAN (Maine): There has been a lot of different ideas that have sort of gone around here and they are starting to collect in my head. I’m starting to see a bigger picture. It started with talking about accreditation for apprenticeships and then going to it being a socially accepted replacement for college and then, you mentioned, why wouldn’t it be worth a parent’s hard-earned money to pay a farmer to teach their children something if it is worth paying a professor to teach them something … and then Carl’s point about the gap between the work that needs to be done – at what point is their skill level worth paying for …

So, going back to the idea of it being a socially acceptable replacement for college – I know when I got out of high school, I had no idea … I majored in engineering because I liked trains and it was really that stupid. I was better at math and science than I was at reading and writing. So I went to engineering school and I knew what I wanted to do since I was 5 years old, I wanted to play drums … I play drums for a living now and it wasn’t until I failed in college and because I joined a rock band that I’m still in today, that I ended up getting to do what I wanted to do. I think that a lot of my formative years in high school and middle school, I spent all of my summers in outdoor camps (Adirondack Woodcraft Camp for Boys) learning outdoor living skills. You were in camp long enough to clean the pots and dry out the tents and then you were back out on the trail learning how to start fires without matches – sort of like boy scout and eagle scout stuff. And then later, I did a lot of extensive backpacking in the northwest and Alaska and along the way, I did a little bit of work on farms with relatives and friends and family. If someone had said to me at the time that I got out of high school … I would have still joined a rock band given the opportunity, but if I knew there was a chance to just go work on a farm and learn some skills that… well, to back up a second. I still, to this day, value the outdoor skills that I learned at these camps, though they weren’t farming skills in particular. But if somebody said, you have the opportunity to go work somewhere and learn these other skills, if I could get credit to go work somewhere to learn other skills that might or might not prove useful in life later on, while you figure out what else you want to do with your life – At 44 years old, and because my wife has a passion for farming, we moved to a farm in Maine and I’m learning this stuff now and discovering that I like it now – maybe I would have discovered something like that much earlier in life and gotten a little credit for it. The person I worked for might have gotten a little money from a third party – my parents or some scholarship through the Small Farms Conservancy – and all of these various ideas that have been talked about here would have been satisfied.

One of the other points that was raised here is that a lot of the people who go through the internship at Sterling don’t actually become farmers. But, so what? At some point in your life, you might actually help out a farm. Another point that was made was the beauty of farms that we all appreciate – you’d get in touch with what it was that they in that unspoken way appreciate in a small farm when they drive by – they don’t even know why they are attracted to that – but in that 17, 18, 19 year old space where the world is saying, “you need to major in something – you need to start making some decisions about what you are going to do with your life” – some people might know when they were little kids, but some people are really still … but even if you know at a really young age, during that period of your life you are still a little confused. If you could just go over here and sort of, work for a year, in a healthy place where you know but you don’t know why you like it. You are using your body and you’re using your mind … It’s amazing to me that at that point in my life that wasn’t an option – it seems like such an obvious thing sitting here and talking about it today – but if I had known that then I could have gone and worked on a farm for a year, I may still have gone and done what I do today, but all these other things would have been helped along the way and I would be another member of society for whom it didn’t take until I was 44 years old to appreciate a farm in a more conscious way.

GALEN BEAL: The word apprenticeship to me goes back to craft apprenticeship where you were apprenticed to someone for x amount of time to learn a very specific skill and the expectation was that you would pay that back and that you would probably go out on your own and keep that craft going. I’m not sure if the word apprenticeship as used here is the right word.

LYNN MILLER: Well, certainly, the word apprenticeship has that sense of indenture and servitude …

GALEN BEAL: It is! I’ve done several apprenticeships and it is hard and grueling and those are the expectations and that is what you do – or they have a very quick and easy way to get rid of you. But I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation for farming.

CARL RUSSELL: I have a different appreciation for that. You used two different words for what they would learn. You said they came to learn a craft and a very specific skill…. It’s either one or the other. You can learn a specific skill very quickly, in a weekend, but you learn a craft over a longer period of time. You take the craft and you go on with it. There is a certain period of time that is required to learn the craft. It is possible that that period of time was abused and it was turned into indentured-ness. But you can’t learn a craft in a weekend – the art of an enterprise. But you can a skill. That’s where the art of applying the skill is the apprenticeship.

GALEN BEAL: And that would take years. Would you not agree?

CARL RUSSELL: Yes, absolutely.

GALEN BEAL: And what’s the average retention of an apprentice intern?

CARL RUSSELL: I have no idea. Why I’ve been saying what I’ve been saying is because I don’t know that it can be a neatly packaged product. Part of this has to be done with the idea that it takes some level of time expansion.

GALEN BEAL: Yeah, it needs time. But how much time are we going to put into this?

CHARLES CAPALDI (Vermont): As the saying goes: The true call of a vocation is a love of the drudgery which it entails…

LARRY BREWER: I think we are actually talking about all of this. There are people who want to be there for a long while and there are people who may just want to be there for a summer who may not be apprentices, and some people want to take the whole thing. Those are the ones that we would know who they were because we would have identified them and we could pass them along, pass that information along to the landowner. You may have apprenticeships and internships and something else.

LISA MCCRORY: I wanted to chime in on the apprenticeship/internship – a lot of different facets are being covered here and I think that certain program descriptions and outcomes could be part of multiple things offered through the Small Farms Conservancy that can meet the needs of people who just want to get their feet wet and those who want to commit to a lifestyle change.

Also, I liked what Jon (Fishman) was talking about – who is the target audience, that needs to be defined as well, but it can be very broad. There can be thousands of people who take advantage of an internship and maybe 10% of them go off and find a farm. And it’s how you market it. If there are different ways to offer credit, give an alternative to college – I think we are moving into an age where university education may not necessarily be the norm. This could be one of the ways where you can get practical life learning. When people come and learn these skills, they might go away and become an accountant, but they had an experience that is going to make them look at a farm in a different way. They might have a backyard garden, or buy into a CSA, or if they are on a planning commission, they’ll have a better understanding of the agricultural land in their community so that they can be advocates for small farms no matter what. So, we have to get as many people into this program as possible. Not with the expectation that they are all going to be small farmers. But they are all going to be investing in our farmlands and in the planet. So, I think if that is part of a broader mission statement to pull people in, then everybody is going to have a heightened awareness – so I just want to touch on that to illustrate that it could be a future educational tool, it doesn’t have to be accredited, but it could be. It could be offered in so many different ways. I hope that within this we can be facilitating opportunities so that once folks have gotten inspired to do farming, there can be some business planning opportunity – educational outlets once they have gotten inspired to do farming in one way or another – so people can get themselves involved in an appropriate and sustainable way.

I’ve been involved in VHCB/Vermont Housing – it gets a certain amount of grant funding that funds different technical support people to help farmers with business plans – if they are in an existing enterprise, things may not be working that well, or they want to just do a change, they can work one-on-one with a team of experts from different perspectives that can help them come up with the cash flow and a full written business plan so they are going into something with their eyes open instead of just going with a dream and then crashing. I’ve been involved as a consultant on a few different farms with that kind of stuff. I’ve found it to be really rewarding for me personally, but also, I’ve seen the development of how that helps those people involved. I think it’s just a really important part that shouldn’t be forgotten.

RON WILSON (South Carolina): I think apprenticeship/internship is a great idea, but we need to start even younger – if we had a youth camp for younger kids who are in middle school or before they get to high school – have them regionally, around the country – a lot of kids don’t want to farm because they’ve heard the idea that you’ve got to have a thousand acres and the biggest John Deere you can get. They can’t visualize it – and they say it’s too much money. The Carolina Farms Stewardship program that I’m involved with in the Carolina’s – I go to their meeting and I’m practically one of the oldest farmers in the room, and you go to the Farm Bureau and I’m the youngest guy in the room – it’s that sort of thing. What we are doing is a youth movement. It’s headed hard in our direction and if we work at getting our message out … We have farms in South Carolina that are doing very well with five to twenty acres – but we have to get beyond some of this mindset that’s pretty well out there. It’s what I grew up with. I grew up on a small farm in West Tennessee. I can remember them talking about, we need to either get bigger or get out. Unfortunately, my father got out, but I never got away from it. I always liked the idea of farming. We’ve got a lot of agribusinesses and things we’ve got to deal with delicately, but we’ve got to get our story out to the masses as effectively as we can. And I don’t think we do that. But the younger we start, the more success we’ll have.

I’ve seen surveys of FFA members – less than 10% want to be farmers – why? It’s because they think they can make more money working with a veterinarian or working in agribusiness than you can actually producing a product. I think things are shifting in our direction to where people are concerned about where there food comes from, they are concerned about how it is harvested, cleaned, everything. If we get out in front of that right, we can be a large factor in turning things. I think that Small Farms Conservancy is essential – not only in preserving the farmland but also as a catalyst to small farmers emerging everywhere.

I want to get back to this conversation about the camps. I don’t really visualize a camp where they are doing a lot of work. I’m talking about one of educational background where Lynn knows the people that come in and give the talks and it’s done. And it’ll work. You can have other types of camps or meetings where you get into the physical labor and teaching them how to do certain things. I’m involved in a couple of youth camps and I’ve had people come in and say, “My gosh, how do y’all do this. You go from 8 o’clock in the morning to 2 in the afternoon, non-stop lectures, you only give them two hours to swim …” Then we have three more hours at night and then we put ‘em to bed. And the guy I’m talking to says, “You are doing too much.” And I say, “Look, this is like throwing mud against a chicken wire fence – this is how you do it and see what sticks. When those weeks are over, then the kids are just changed. They are amazingly changed in how they view things.” We have to work on the younger group – and when they get to college – well I want to see change. I don’t want to see some survey from the FFA that says that 8% are going to be farmers. Everybody isn’t going to be a farmer and I know that. But I think it is the way that people view farming.

JIM CORNISH: And I agree with you and there was a good example of it up home. There was an article in the paper, they interviewed, I think, six farmers who were all doing CSAs and farm stands, and that sort of thing. And to the letter, all of them had a huge amount of college debt from studying engineering, or whatever they studied, but they are carrying it to the farm and it is holding them back from actually doing what they wanted or needed to do on the farm.

LARRY BREWER : We are now going to change topics to Farmland Preservation – if we are successful in getting a large number of people who want to farm and they are capable of farming, the next critical step is where are they going to farm. We need to preserve the farmland – just like education issues, they vary region by region … have at it.

ELIZABETH HENDRIX: There should be a bumper sticker for Small Farms Conservancy that says – FARMS: Get Small or Get Out! with the SFC address underneath.

I used to be involved in the archaeological world and a lot of the conferences I went to had something called poster sessions. There are a lot of non-farming folks who go to fairs and other venues like that. If members of the Small Farms Conservancy got a poster together, coordinated through headquarters, that said: Making a Profit on the Farm Example #___ : and then it showed pictures of their small farm, that was very kid friendly, with a lot of pictures and a little bit of text – and then at the bottom of the poster, if it consistently said: Profiting the Soil and Our Future — so getting back to the original word profit and reclaiming it – if there was that message wherever we were going to fairs that showed pictorially how small farms profit everyone, with the address of Small Farms Conservancy , I think that would be a way to get young kids and teenagers to realize that it isn’t out of the range of possibility for them to farm. It would also end up preserving more farmland because more people could pursue that as a vocation.

LYNN MILLER: The Small Farms Conservancy could work to come up with some textbooks – alternative textbooks. At school board levels, what is currently available is unattractive, boring, archaic – if we had a textbook dealing not with the politics but explaining that there are other breeds of cattle, other ways to do this, other reasons to do this – it could have a profound effect in the public educational setting. It would be much easier to talk about this.

CARL RUSSELL: Want to pull a thread out of what Elizabeth was saying about profiting – one of the things I have an issue with and around – the product of knowledge from the farm is an evasive product. Profit for me is during the 1st half hour in the morning before I’ve even harnessed my horses and gone to work – I have profit from the time I spend with my kids on the farm, profit from looking at the crops that I have raised and my experiences outdoors. Those kinds of profits don’t pay mortgages – but that’s a huge part of what I want to teach to those people who come to my farm. These aren’t skills you can necessarily plug into a business plan that you can only afford to spend $1500 for 3 months of apprenticeship, or whatever it is, because you are expecting to be able to earn a certain amount of money from those skills. As much as we want to separate these issues, they absolutely play into each other. We have to be not just teaching people how to grow veggies or slaughter, but teaching them how to be farmers – how to be of the land in a way that brings them more than they could get paid for. That isn’t going to help them pay a big mortgage – and it’s gonna’ help them have an appreciation for being unable to pay for an iPod for their kid, or whatever – but the next step in terms of conservation is learning how to have an appreciation for the enterprise, for the land that goes beyond the absolute value of it.

LISA MCCRORY: With past experience I had working with University of Vermont in our pasture management outreach program, we were working with producers to develop skills in grazing management so that they could have a cash flow and make their farms continue to be successful, so we started to partner with the Vermont Land Trust who was purchasing development rights from these farms. The land trust was working with a farm that was going in the red, but they would come in and purchase their development rights so that they could be in the black. But they wouldn’t change any skills, so that they would continue sinking down – so we started working with some of these farms so they could learn new skills so they would be successful on their farm – to me, it heightened my awareness of the relationship that needs to happen between land preservation and good farming practices. Sometimes those relationships are not intertwined, but I think they should always be intertwined.

The other things I see as a challenge – sometimes – farms that became conserved became highly attractive to people with lots of money. So, all of a sudden, the conserved properties with its development rights sold, you’d get into a bidding war and it goes beyond the affordability of an actual farmer wanting to run it as a farm, and it goes to some wealthy land owner who just wants to have open farmland and doesn’t want any manure spread because it stinks. All of sudden, that land gets lost because it is not affordable, even though the intention was for it to be affordable. I know that in Vermont there is a caveat that allows for conserved land – the person selling the development rights can also request that if the farm gets sold, it has to be at an affordable rate that is affordable for someone going into agricultural production. It puts a cap on how high the price can go, so it doesn’t get outbid to whoever can afford it.

JIM CORNISH: That’s exactly what we are up against now. Larry commented that we can’t make more farmland – the farm we have leased for 10 years was sold last year. We’ve had an opportunity. Other pieces were sold off in previous years, but we had the opportunity to gather all four pieces and create a real ‘salt water’ farm again. But we were slow on the draw to pull the money together and once the main part of the farm was sold, there was nothing left to add it to. We have approached the owners of several other farms with conservation easements, but the folks involved with them aren’t interested in farming – they are interested in selling the development rights so that they can get the tax break on their income taxes and have income without selling the farm. They weren’t farming before either. Now there are only three farms left in town large enough to do what we need to do, but nobody is interested in selling them. There are a couple of them who may enter into a negotiation to let us farm them and then we’d be entering into a landlord situation like what we all left behind in Europe, like why we came over here in the first place. We are in Harpswell, Maine, a coastal town. We dealt with the Maine Farmland Trust and the Maine Coast Heritage Trust to try and get some sort of a coalition going with our local land trust. They don’t even want to talk to us anymore. The feeling is that we have this goal of conserving farmland, but we don’t really care what happens to it, we just want to make sure it gets conserved. Down there on the coast – these salt water farms, they’ve got million dollar price tags on them – one of them that a friend of mine owned – his farm sold for $6.2 million after he died. He never would sell it. It’s a crazy thing – the Maine Heritage Trust and the Maine Farmland Trust, when I approached them, had the attitude that they weren’t going to put some money into preserving some small piece of salt water farm here when they can preserve another thousand acres somewhere else. So they’ve pretty much cut it off – a small salt water farm is not even worth saving. We’ll just cast it to the wolves and get down the road.

KATHY BERRY: What we are really up against is that people have stopped believing that farming is essential to our survival. There isn’t a recognition that we need a farmer nearby so that we can eat. That kind of thinking has only been good in the past century because we have had a very quiet period in terms of natural disasters – everyone says, “We’ll just order from Chile” — if the local coops, groceries and food banks are not contracting with farmers who are surrounding the towns, then we have a crisis building on our hands if anything happens. It could be as simple as if a grid goes out – where are you going to get your food? Most towns – when this is brought to the attention of towns – people are starting to listen.

You need a farm nearby because you are going to starve if it isn’t there. It’s a matter of national security. But it is starting to change …

JIM CORNISH: If we don’t find a farm in our town, in a year, we are going somewhere where we will be supported and accepted. And a lot of these people who own these farms and are giving money to the land trust to make the world safer for their Volvos, are going to be left behind in the dirt. And I see them every week at the farmer’s market that I go to in Brunswick to sell my wares. They will go one town over and buy from me, but they will not sell me a piece of land in their town because I might put pig manure on it and I might stink up the town a little bit and make it not so pleasant for them to go on their little hiking trails down to the shore.

This one fellah wrote in the newspaper when I questioned, “Who are you saving the land for and what are you saving it for?” He wrote back this little letter that said that this was a great place to stop and decompress on his way home from the rat race. And I wrote him back a little letter and told him what Bette Midler said: The problem with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you are still a rat. [Laughter] That was the end of the conversation.

PAUL FERRARI: From a young person’s perspective – it is essential to preserve farmland from development, but what are we preserving it for? My wife and I have been on farms all over New England – with caretaker positions, so forth and so on – basically preserved farmland and easement, and so on. But there’s a lot of heartbreak – these are places that basically get mowed, fields are kept open. Family farms, most of them – either still in the family, or once removed. I guess kind of hitting that wall of – for what purposes are we preserving these farms. I don’t know what the back story is. And I can understand with not wanting to get involved with people and families and that’s a lot to take on – we’ve been around quite a bit to quite a few places and there’s land that’s in easement and there is trusts and so forth, set up – but there isn’t a lot being done with the land in terms of raising food. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to negotiate and it’s a lot for both parties to digest and figure through. I think it is kind of a relatively new thing to have land in easement and trust funds and a board of directors and it’s a lot and I think we’ve gotten to that point, but it is kind of where do we go from there to make this land more productive. To really tie that culture back together where younger people can have that opportunity – let’s face it – if you have $30k or more in educational debt, could you even get a mortgage for a farm. How are you going to afford the equipment – it’s astronomical and especially with real estate valuations being what they are – it’s very difficult. More land should be in easement and so forth – but what’s that next step in forming a human connection, not just a legal/real estate/special/financial – how are we going to value a farmer, a prospective farmer, bringing our young people to these places to be productive and have a chance.

TIM HUPPE: The Small Farms Conservancy can just be there for young people – the way the Small Farmers Journal has just been there for a lot of years – hats off to you, Lynn, and your family – but to just be there for those who need to be supported. Maybe just to read it and feel good about what you are doing. I think part of this is to just cut to the chase – stop whining. Go to your neighbor who has half an acre and say, “Can I use half an acre?” You get this little snowball thing going when you show that you want to put the hard work in and you get the product out. I’m lucky to live on a road that is still very agricultural – Les is my neighbor and we have small farms up and down the road. Les’ old dairy farm, a piece of it sold to a wonderful hard working couple that were retired. And they turned it into one of the most flourishing small food operations in all of New England. What happened there? They didn’t ask anybody to come over there and help them do all the work – the point is, they just put out the sweat. They built this beautiful food operation – and if you go down the road during the weekend, or in the middle of the week, you have to go around the farm because it is just full of customers. So, land starts to become available around them and we are worried, is this going to start to get developed? So, a developer buys a 90 acre farm right next door – when he sees what they are doing, he says, no way am I developing it and he’s gone ahead and offered a lifetime lease to this young couple. They are showing it. They are getting it done and this is what Small Farms Conservancy will do for young people. They are saying, “Pick yourself up. Don’t buy 30 acres and all that goes with it. Instead, get yourself one of those European tractors that will till and mow and do all of those things and go after it.” So, the Small Farms Conservancy has a great opportunity which I’m sure they will take advantage of, saying: This is where you can start without being too lofty and without being too concerned about cost. $1000 can start a person farming. My daughter has a little garden out behind the farm. She raises organic vegetables. She puts ‘em out on a little table out by the road and they are just disappearing and she’s having a ball. 16 years old and she’s walking around saying: I’m going to refill that table … I’m going to refill that table. Now, she’s already expanding her garden.

Isn’t this what it’s about?

JON FISHMAN : If she was in California, they’d shut her down.

TIM HUPPE : Live Free or Die – [Laughter] – we live in New Hampshire, Jon.

LYNN MILLER: A couple approached us about having the Small Farms Conservancy take over the farm – they want to farm organically, they want to bring in horses, but they want to stay on their farm until they die. The question that they are asking – would the Small Farms Conservancy allow them to stay on the farm for the rest of their life and see if we could help them find somebody who would bring in some horses. They’d like to see it done a certain way. They want to farm organically, they want to do it with horses. Maybe the people they are bringing in would have enough money that they can build a house for themselves. They are going to stay in their own house. But the real question he is asking is something suggested by Elizabeth and other people – why does anyone have to own this? Why does anyone have to own this? Why can’t they farm this? The Small Farms Conservancy ought to be able to find a way to make that happen. What of the concept that the Small Farms Conservancy could go about encouraging the forgiveness of ownership as a concept?

HAYES STAGNER (New Hampshire): I’ve got a couple of general observations – relating back to serfdom in Europe – when wealthy people owned farms, even to the extent that they had tenant farmers. The question is how do those tenant farmers provide for their families – I had a friend who said, “I’m a small farmer, I don’t want to be preserved, I want to prosper like other people.” In the context of not owning farmland, I would suggest a thought process of retirement or estate planning.

I’ve found it useful to talk about two kinds of agricultural compensation – financial and psychic. Most of the successful farmers I know would have been successful at whatever they chose to do, only they’d have made more money doing it. There truly is psychic compensation that you can hardly put a price on – getting back to the idea of how do we … it’s a nice idea to go on the land and simply work it when you are 20, 30, 40 — I find I can’t do nearly as much as I used to be able to do – it could be an important role for the Small Farms Conservancy to deal with that very difficult and important problem. If young folks are not signed on to the concept that a great deal of their compensation will go uncompensated – then they shouldn’t be a candidate. But it’s still a reality that children grow up and they need to go to the doctor or the dentist and the days of trading a bushel of corn for a doctor’s visit are over.

COLIN CABOT (New Hampshire): When Paula and I bought this place, it was already in conservation – and the easement is actually owned by the State of New Hampshire. It’s the LCIP, not LCHIP. Of the 434 acres on this farm – there is 150 sq ft and 11 acres over by the mills where you can have a dwelling on this land right now. If we wanted to have a lot of people doing a lot of crop work on this land, they wouldn’t be allowed to live here because only a single family dwelling applies. The easement we have is quite restrictive for farming – it was sold by the farmers that were here without really thinking through what the consequences and the conservation issues would really be.

The idea of taking the property ownership off the land so that it could somehow be farmed – I think there is a lot of merit in that as an idea – if the Small Farms Conservancy owned all of this farm, it could parcel it out in leases without dividing the ownership. It would work here – but it probably took 20 people, before they used tractors to farm and log – it probably took 20 people to do everything that needed to be done here on farm and forest — and they were able to reside here. As you go into conservation easement discussions – this happened to me at the Daniel Webster farm, where we saved several hundred acres of alluvial farmland on the floodplain of the Merrimack – prime farmland of which there is not a lot – saved it from 136 houses – the farmer who farmed that land made absolutely sure that he could build himself a house later on, the property is in two pieces – but as we were negotiating the easement, we discovered that one man’s drainage ditch is another man’s riparian habitat – the conservation forces themselves are totally in conflict with one another and it’s hard to reconcile that. You know, somebody was saying that maybe we would have to import olive oil and I was thinking, with global warming, maybe this would just be the perfect climate for raising olives. I’ll just cycle back – I’m so glad that Tim’s first grandson is going to be a neighbor because Allison and Jake swapped us a piece of property that we had put in conservation and they are able to build a house down there. Because that to me is the future continuity. Because Paula and my kids aren’t going to come back here. The succession plan ought to be started by people who lived on this land as kids – people who actually know it and are actually logging it – so that’s where internships should start – with your grandchildren (pointing at Tim).

We wanted to talk about becoming a sustainable farm, but the guys at University of New Hampshire said that sustainability was fine, but you had to describe what sustainability is in our community. We can’t define it here, right now, yet … we haven’t got that far. It’s fragmented so much, we don’t have a concept of the food supply …. Whether or not we could call ourselves part of Concord and whether or not if we had a CSA out here that would work or not. And how much petrochemicals you’d have to use to get from here to there because we are in the middle of a 2000 acre conserved track where hardly anybody can live. So, it’s all neither here nor there.

CARL RUSSELL: In 1938 my grandfather bought the property we are on right now for $1500 – the land is debt free (my mother and brother and I are co-owners) and we are digging into the process of estate planning. I’d never have been able to do what I’ve done for the past 30 years with draft animals and living the type of farming enterprise that I’ve put together. I’m in the process of clearing 30 acres that were open farmland when my grandfather bought the place. He had planted it to timber and now I’m clearing it and returning it to the land. But I’m looking at my kids and on beyond, I’m looking at the possibility of interpersonal conflict, the issues of the foresight of my grandfather and parents … they had foresight to contribute to the upkeep of the land, they exposed us to the land and to the community around the land. Lisa and I have put together a low input plan for an on-farm land enterprise – so that in later years, up to 50 years, 5 families could reside on the land. I’m not interested in being an owner – but my ideal is to create an entity that is the ownership of the land – and not just for one generation, but some way in which family or community members could become part of the entity that owns the land. And to be able to make some financial contributions in ways that are necessary in terms of infrastructure, but to be able to take advantage of an opportunity for land that is sustainable and sustaining … and be able to perpetuate that without this cash in the chips mentality.

The other part of the puzzle is that we are taking care of my mother who is 86. She isn’t going to be going to a nursing home and she’s having some issues associated with her age. That’s all part of the profit – her investment in the land is providing her with the ability to live where she wants to live and yet we need to do something. We are at that tipping point. My brother and I and Lisa have been trying to develop this conversation over the last couple of years – what legal structure is it that gives a group of people an opportunity to reside on land that they don’t own in a way that they can use it.

KATHY BERRY: In the state of New Hampshire, if your land is in Ag, you may build farm laborer’s quarters – so I think that what we really have to think about when we are setting up conservation, it can end-run the problem – but in New Hampshire conservation is defined for forestry, not the farm industry, in this state – but as we set up easements, we have to allow for farm laborers (this goes back to the old ag rules that are current in the state) to have a building near the land.

JIM CORNISH: Would there be any advantages to setting time limits on conservation easements so that they could be revisited every so many years? Cause I don’t think any of us has the ability to look down the road 100 years and know what is going to be needed.

TOBY BASHAW (Vermont): The way Elizabeth and I set up the trust with an attorney’s help, we are the trustees of the 50 acres – but there is also a corporate trustee, The Trust Company of Vermont, that when we die, it is their responsibility to see that the farm carries on the way that we want it to, and that’s out 99 years from right now. We’ll choose to have some successor farmers to come on and work with us and essentially help take care of us when we are too old to do any more of the farm work, so that we can die there, essentially. And so that they, in turn can choose to continue on the farm – at some point, there will be Elizabeth and myself, our successors and their successors all on the farm at the same time. The trust for us was the best vehicle. Even more than a conservation easement. A conservation trust means that it is not going to be developed – it does also open the land to the public, as I understand it – so, this trust agreement seemed the best solution to do what we wanted to do with the land. We are happy to share the work we put into the trust agreement at no cost – we did not copyright it as our lawyer suggested. It is very specific as to what will be on the farm in terms of energy sources, animals and gardens.

LYNN MILLER: As we suggested with the background documents we provided, conservation easements vary in terms of how they are understood and applied – region to region, state to state, county to county. One of the things that the Small Farms Conservancy needs to understand is that it has a role to try to standardize some of that, especially if we have a future as some kind of collaborative umbrella. The liability questions inherent in these conservation easements have many non profits saying they don’t want to get involved with this. We need to be looking at some seminal cases that would establish some federal precedents on the definition of conservation easements and farm trust so that an organization like the Small Farms Conservancy could be helpful.

CARL RUSSELL: There are pitfalls with different legal structures – conserving the land is not our objective – we have to be able to have the land to farm. But if there is no stewardship, if nothing makes that farm “farm land” –if it’s an appropriate soil type to grow vegetables in, that doesn’t make it farmland. It has to have a culture associated with it that is actually using it for that land use practice. Conservation easements touch on that but they don’t guarantee that the owner is practicing that. A trust has some more specific orientation but it’s a fairly gnarly issue to figure out how — I would think an admirable vehicle for the Small Farms Conservancy to create would deal with that whole nut.

LARRY BREWER: Could we get back to a point where we could count on political process – at one point, zoning was supposed to do that – somebody always finds some way to corrupt those – if you want to develop something and you have a lot of money, you just pay what it costs to get the right county commissioners elected. Can we do anything to strengthen or guarantee some type of municipality process?

COLIN CABOT: At Farm and Forest, our Sanborn Mills Farm booth is right next to the FFA booth. The lady who is in charge of it, says “wouldn’t you like to be a sponsor for our booth?” The million dollar sponsors are always Cargill, Monsanto, etc. If you are going to compete head on with the people who are running or manipulating the municipalities, you have to compete head on. There is no back door. You need access to the money that pays for the people to get elected, county officials. The only way to fight it is to join it. I personally would never want to take money from Cargill, but the answer is if we could find somebody who would champion it – this is the best time in our lifetimes … there are alternatives to the agribusiness thing.

DREW CONROY: We have models in other parts of the world that are different than the American model of land tenure. I’m not an expert on land tenure, but I have worked in other countries on land tenure issues. First I’d comment that communally owned land is a real challenge – we’ve been talking about giving land access to other generations and counting on the fact that they will take care of your land the way you did and it almost inevitably becomes a challenge that you are never going to have the kind of stewardship that you might hope for.

I was a renter last year in another country and I couldn’t wait to come home and take care of my own house. But I didn’t take care of that rental house. It was a really interesting phenomenon because I hadn’t lived in a rental house ever. Furthermore, I’ve just asked, in Canada or Europe, they have a very different idea about allowing suburbanization and protecting good farming.

COLIN CABOT: Switzerland is approximately the same size as the state of New Hampshire. And Switzerland produces 60% of its own food for a population of 6,500,000. We in New Hampshire produce 5% of the food for a population of 1,400,000. What’s wrong with this picture? It has to do with a 100 years of being up against the maximum utilization of the land. It’s crowded. They have a lot of mountains in Switzerland. Canada, where I have some experience, Canada is always on the brink of nationalization – it’s such a socialist country that you think that you can’t – there is no such thing as the equivalent of a conservation easement in Canada – they are about 30 years behind us.

TOBY BASHAW : We have friends in Stanbridge East, Quebec. They have a 400 acre farm and sugar bush and sawmill and they are in what’s called a green zone. They can pass on land only to their direct family descendants, they cannot sell any of their farm.

DREW CONROY: Unless the government mandates that land is allowed to be changed, through the nationalization of conservation easements, right?

TOBY BASHAW: I guess that’s true, but for now that land is a Quebec green zone and so they can only continue to farm it and log it and do the sugaring and pass it on to their descendents.

DREW CONROY: I think it’s fascinating that just three hours north of here, there are places that are green zones, that will not have all of the challenges that we are talking about. Not that our particular process will allow us to become them. But they have green zones only three hours from here where only farming is allowed.

TIM HUPPE: Small Farms Conservancy can take a very strong role in public relations and information to people who represent the towns. Maybe even some people who represent the Small Farms Conservancy can come to the Towns. In our town, on the west side, they decided about ten years ago, they decided to call us — we have the Berry Brook that runs through our property and many properties. Our local conservation committee decided to take control of what can be done on those properties – we couldn’t even build a fence within 1,360 feet of that brook. We couldn’t cut wood without asking permission. Now, my folks bought that farm 50 years ago and my father is not going to ask permission to cut wood, so there is a little stir started. So we are trying to encourage people to keep these farms going – it goes back to what Carl said, “Let’s farm ‘em, whether it’s wood or vegetables.” But let’s not discourage that – you kind of feel like the town’s against you. This thing was just snowballing. There was a huge list of people written down who supported it. So we, on the west side, we had a little meeting and we went over to the planning board session. One night, in two hours, we had it licked. But people didn’t know what the people who were farming were up against, all they heard was from a particular group of people – so we called upon our agricultural secretary and he supported us, but that’s the situation where if the Small Farms Conservancy had a person or people who really were used to coming up against this – I could call and say that I’d like to talk to this person to see how can I approach this person and the conservation committee. So I think that a public relations arm and information arm are critical.

CARL RUSSEL: We have a state-administered use value program superimposed on the normal tax – you have to demonstrate that you are actively farming and that your forest is being managed according to a management plan and it is appraised at its use value rather than at its development value. It makes me think about easements – what makes them attractive, there is an assumption that the value of the development rights are somehow purchased from the owner. The land is valued based on its capacity to be developed and an equal compensation is given to the property owner to defray the value lost otherwise. A lot of emphasis is placed on ag land. Typically, rarely, if ever, is woodland purchased under this program. If land is capable of being purchased from a landowner – then a conservation easement should be just as valuable and attractive. From my standpoint, I’m not looking for the purchase of development rights to secure an easement or to secure some kind of perpetual use of the land, but I know that is a stumbling block for a lot of land trusts trying to actively secure land that is in jeopardy of being developed, or they are being approached by land owners who want to be compensated for the value of their land in exchange for not developing it. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of mechanisms can be developed for that.

HAYES STAGNER: One of the cases I’ve been an outside part of – where a farmer and his wife were intent on staying on the farm and in the family. Of the children, one of them was going to stay on the farm. Because they were able to sell the development rights, that became the inheritance for the children who were not going to stay on the farm.

JIM CORNISH: In the town where I live, they do have an agricultural exemption where your property is valued at ½ the value it would be in Harpswell. But in the case of my friend Clem Dumming – his farm was valued at $1.2 million, instead of $2.4 million, and his tax bill was $10,000 per year instead of $20,000. Take a man on a retirement income, having to pay $10,000 per year in taxes was still a pretty heavy burden. All it did was help him get poked with not quite as sharp a stick, but he still got poked with a stick.

CARL RUSSELL (Vermont): Use value taxes in Vermont are actually taxed at a ceiling rate of $200/acre – so regardless of its development value, it’s use value is based on how the land is actually used.

Julie Clemons?: I think that all the really nice farm land in New Hampshire has been translated into a lot of really nice towns in the state of New Hampshire – and it is being conserved in a lot of these towns. Nice land is in nice towns with higher educational levels. There is a real recognition that you have to grab farm land in New Hampshire because we don’t have a lot of it. We actually have a lot of farmland conserved that is owned by the town. Our conservation commission at this point has a lot of good ag land that they are not using and the crime to me is that you cannot find a farm. So it is underutilized and I think it is possible to negotiate with towns to talk to them about trying to work out a lease of this land – there is no better time than now.

One of things we see coming is that there is a legislative initiative called “fair share” – in New Hampshire with very few big cities, when we decide to disband our prison, or let everybody out of a mental institution, they all go to the big cities because that’s where the services are and there is no transportation in New Hampshire – so our big cities have worked on this issue and say that it’s not fair that they have to support this population that has fallen to them. That will now impact our zoning next year – every town will have to take its fair share of low-income zoning – it is going to be a real struggle to continue to preserve land – Fair Share is a good idea, it could actually solve some farm housing problems – but being active in your state’s legislation is really important.

LARRY BREWER: We see ourselves as an organization that will provide factual info and direction – we don’t plan to ignore political issues, but we plan to provide the info that is critical to those organizations that can bring that fight to the table.

LES BARDEN: Throughout this discussion, we started out trying to figure out what we can do about apprenticeships and the novices – I see an opportunity for the Small Farms Conservancy to be a clearinghouse for those young people who need to find the farms on which to work and also a clearinghouse for those who are ready to start farming to find land that is available.

About the youth – the kids that are born on a farm and raised there don’t have to be told that death and life are important on the farm. You’ve got to accept it, sometimes administer it, handle it – sex education for my kids was irrelevant –they had rabbits, pigeons, they were in the barn, there was no such thing as sex education. But kids have to get involved – it’s quite a step for a teenager to work on a farm for a first time – I’m in favor of starting out as early as possible to prepare them for the apprenticeships. I don’t know how that’s to be done because that’s something that needs to be done.

PAUL FERRARI: I was talking to a fellow who was going to hire some guy from a developing country who actually knows how to work – some people get on the farm at Sterling and they are complete machines – and you can put one or two people on a task and they’ll complete it in two hours, or you can put 5 people on a task and they’ll get 25% done in a day – not to take it for granted, but most of the folks in this room know how to work a long day in the cold, or the heat, or whatever. But let’s not forget that knowing how to work is an acquired skill. I’d like to think I’m a hard worker and I’d like to think that has something to do with the way I was raised, but I think that aspect of educating our young people can’t be ignored.

LYNN MILLER: Reminds us that there is such a thing as prison farms – and actually quite a few subscribers are inmates in prison and value the magazine and talk to us about the experience they have on prison farms.

COLIN CABOT: I wished that Alex Ray would have been here today. The Story of the Common Man Restaurant – Alex Ray was the guy who made a fortune for himself opening up the Common Man Restaurant all up and down I-93, and they all are somewhat tied to local food. He was the savior for the Danny Webster Farm in Franken that I talked about earlier. He ended up buying for nothing – he ended up taking from me, 80,000 sq. ft. of buildings that had been not only Daniel Webster’s home, but also the New Hampshire Orphan’s Home for 90 years and then it was a Catholic Nunnery. In 2000, it went on the market and a developer bought it and we bought it from the developer. He took the buildings and turned them into an alcohol rehab center – it’s not a detox center – it’s a place people come after they are out of their first stage of crisis and they come there and farm. Monty Roberts is this guy who came out of England and who had the idea of getting people who are in trouble to connect to the land. It’s amazing, he said that you can bring in people who are in crisis – when they come and they have their DTs and they are planting rows of carrots, you can see that they are shaking. And then, three weeks later, they plant another row and it’s straighter. They can see their progress in the ground and they can eat the carrots.

LARRY BREWER: I wanted to make one comment about starting education at a young level – while we didn’t choose that topic for today, we have just as much intention and energy focused on an educational program that starts at primary grades.

CARL RUSSELL: We have two houses on our farm on a single piece of property which breaks a development law and I have grey water systems that aren’t legal. But they are legal because I went and got variances. The point is that many times, when people come up against regulatory bodies, it is an adversarial situation where the applicant tends to see the regulatory board as restrictive of their interest. I approached the board as having the authority to grant me what I wanted and I got it. Most regulations have the clause in which the board has the authority to determine based on the merits of the situation.

As for the affordability of land that is conserved, land that is conserved is still taxed at its development potential. In states where there is a property tax, if the development rights have been sold, the land is still worth $6.2 million and it is taxed as such. Initial purchase price of the land is removed, but you still have the so called unreasonable taxation.

What follows is a change of topic which occured spontaneously at the end of the discussion.

LYNN MILLER: Jon and Briar Fishman are on our founder’s board. Jon’s a drummer for the band, Phish, if you don’t know him. They are very big supporters of what we do. – Briar put us on Facebook. The band uses it very successfully – it’s an important thing to marketing, sales, etc. Has it blown up on you in ways you haven’t expected?

JON FISHMAN: Other than the fact that our website stinks – the band has been discussing how bad our actual band website is. It’s a way to sell tickets, advertise things, a lot of creative ways you can present your shows and festivals.

LYNN MILLER: Do you think the internet is essential or peripheral? Do we belong on the internet?

JON FISHMAN: My impulse is to say that it is essential going forward. If for no other reason, there are so many things now that – if I hear a great interview about an author who wrote a book that I was interested in – the fact that I can just go buy the book on the computer and have it sent to my house – the ability to disseminate or access information about anything whatsoever.

For example, at our concert you are going to have a Small Farms Conservancy table at a concert, and we’ll have Journals available for free. But you are at a concert. Do you really want to lug that thing around. Maybe you are just going to write down www.SmallFarmsConservancy.org – and that’s enough information for later. Without the internet, you’d go home and maybe look it up somewhere – but with the availability of the internet, it’s that much easier to find the info and delve into a lot quicker.

We do actually strategically place tables in the path of people going to the bathroom. We’ve learned that’s the way to go. The efficiency of information gathering is multiplied, I don’t know how many times, by the internet.

ELIZABETH HENDRIX: I’ve got to talk. [Laughter] There is a difference between info and knowledge – that’s all you have to keep in mind with the internet. Give people a lot of information, you can’t give them knowledge …. Don’t do the 3 year or 5 year rotation. Tell them … It’s a mistake to give them knowledge. Have people be the resources – have information on how to contact people that you can talk to and visit, and learn from face-to-face, not with schemes and star explosions. Put information out there. No one can attain knowledge by reading that – you have to go to the farm, you can say that Carl, or Lisa can do such and such a thing with her gardens on a particular kind of soil. If that’s of interest to you, talk to Lisa. Have the points of the diagrams be people.

PAUL FERRARI: The internet is an amazing tool for networking – but it’s a tool that some people know how to use, and some don’t. But the people who all know how to use it are young people. By not having an internet presence, you miss the younger generation.

CARL RUSSELL: The fact of the matter is that they can read it online. It’s virtual reality is what they are getting addicted to. And they love that. It’s incredibly stimulating and they can go from this topic, to this topic, to this topic, and they don’t have to go to the farm. And they won’t. If you give that to them, then you just facilitate exactly what you don’t want to have happen.

JULIE CLEMONS : ‘Kids these days?’ — we have to be careful about what they say they will and won’t do. I don’t think we’d appreciate anyone saying that because we are 40, 40 year olds are all the same. We aren’t all the same. We met a young man at Common Ground fair this weekend who is closing on a 400 acre farm on Thursday. When I worked at Dartmouth College, they did this thing on the website called: Ask An Expert. So they asked all the faculty to make a list of all the things you were expert in. You could go and you could type in something like: crop rotations and the people who had experience in that would come up. I can imagine you typing in crop rotations and Randolph Vermont – and the diagram being physical proximity – so people would have the option to sign up and say, yes, please, I know something about X and they could be the expert. There is too many moving parts to it.

JON FISHMAN You do run the risk of Yahoos crawling out of the woodwork … You might have someone who gathers all the information – I’m limited in my capacity to read too many paragraphs about too many topics. There’s something about staring at the screen for that long – If I really wanted to finish an article, I’d print it out, buy the book, or contact the person — I do think the networking is essential for people to know the Small Farms Conservancy is there, but offering too much info could be counterproductive.

JIM CORNISH: When we do workshops at Stone Soup, there is a form that we always ask people to fill out. One of the questions is, how did you hear about us? After three years, we finally went down the list and 2% said they heard about us from the internet. 60% came by word of mouth. 20% came from brochures. 10-12% came from newspaper advertisements …

End of Discussion