March 18, 2008
Hipster Farmers
So we were wondering through Union Square’s farmer’s market on Sunday with the thousands of others and were left wondering about the people manning the stands. Often, these men and women weren’t your usual rural looking folks - they appeared fairly metropolitan, as if they lived in the city and were farming off their roofs. Returning with apples, because oddly it seemed to be apple week at the market (they store them somehow and then roll them out) we found an article about these new farmer types in the NY Times. They paper says that the growing market for organic and locally grown produce is making it possible for well-run small farms to thrive and this makes farming attractive:
Until three years ago, Benjamin Shute was living in Williamsburg, where he kept Brooklyn Lager in his refrigerator and played darts in a league.
Raised on the Upper East Side by a father who is a foundation executive and a mother who writes about criminal justice, Mr. Shute graduated from Amherst and worked for an antihunger charity. But something nagged at him. To learn about food production, he had volunteered at a farm in Massachusetts. He liked the dirt, the work and the coaxing of land long fallow into producing eggplant and garlic.
He tried growing strawberries on his roof in Brooklyn, but it didn’t scratch his growing itch.
And so last week, Mr. Shute could be found here, elbow-deep in wet compost two hours north of New York City, filling greenhouse trays for onion seeds. Along with a partner, Miriam Latzer, he runs Hearty Roots, a 25-acre organic farm.
“I never thought I wanted to farm,” Mr. Shute said. “But it feels like an honest living.”
His partner, Ms. Latzer (the two are not a couple) is 33 and a former urban planner. Her parents, a professor and a librarian, “think its crazy that I’m a farmer,” she said. “They wonder what planet I came from.”
…Ms. Wimbish grew up in Tulsa, Okla., a child of the suburbs, and it wasn’t until she moved to New York that she discovered farmers’ markets and the politics of food. She worked the last two summers at Hearty Roots and became hooked on the agrarian life. “Moving to New York City,” she said, “was what first got me interested in food and farming.”
The Times has an ‘interactive’ feature on this trend here.
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