a new generation of farmers emerges circle acres primer

From USA Today (July 14th edition):

It’s like being ‘a ninja’

The farmers often live very frugally, Philpott says. “You typically produce lots of food, and that cuts down on your food costs.”

Jennifer Belknap, 36, and her husband, Jim McGinn, 43, are old-timers. Their Rochester, Wash., farm, Rising River, dates to 1994. Belknap estimates they net $30,000 a year. They live off the land and keep other expenses to a minimum.

It’s like “being a ninja,” says Fleming, in Nevis, N.Y. You have to be fluid, flexible, an activist and an entrepreneur, she says. “We’re working against the odds. The educational system, the economic system, the subsidies, the tax structure for land owners,” none of them are focused on helping tiny organic farmers, she says.

Trace Ramsey, 35, one of five farmers at Circle Acres in Silk Hope, N.C., works a full-time job and devotes weekends and nights to the farm. “Having a steady paycheck really helps with upfront costs like buying feed or cover crop seed,” he says.

Ramsey worked as a technology manager for a small company for five years after graduating from the State University of New York-Genesee, where he majored in biology.

He met up with a group of like-minded friends and they decided to start a farm together. They spent six years saving and planning and looking for land to buy around the country. They finally settled on North Carolina because it had access to consumers wanting organic produce and there already was a strong organic farming community there. Their 2-year-old farm sells to CSAs, some restaurants and the local Whole Foods.

Ramsey stages what young farmers are calling “crop mobs.” A local farm puts out the word that it’s holding a crop mob to untangle drip irrigation lines or pick sweet potatoes. A crowd descends, works for the afternoon, gets fed a big dinner and then has a party and dances until dawn.

“You can do a week’s worth of work in five hours if you have 50 people,” he says. “It creates such a huge connection between everybody. Living in a rural area, you don’t often have much chance to see folks every day like our urban contemporaries.”

There are five of us at Circle Acres – four owners and an apprentice.  We bought our land two years ago, and we started our project in earnest this February.  We continue to improve new areas for planting.  We are currently growing produce on 1/4 of an acre.  Goats and pigs and chicken occupy another 1/4 acre.

We grow food for ourselves and the surrounding communities.  We do not ship to faraway places.

We live pretty simple lifestyles away from television, mass marketed products and wholesale appeal.  We feed ourselves with the food we grow as well as food we salvage from the trash.  We live apart from the mainstream and have no interest in it.  Email does not reach us at night or on the weekends, but we are available by phone if we can catch a signal.  However, we are not back-to-the-landers or hippies or gun nuts or dropouts.  We are idealistically anarchist, radical, punk  Do-It-Yourselfers interested in promoting systems and ways of life free from hierarchy and experts.

We consider ourselves an educational place rather than a farm, which is why we have omitted the word “farm” from our name.  We are educating ourselves on the diversity of tactics of sustaining ourselves and our neighbors.

We are guerrilla agrarians in the information age.

Oh, and I have never danced until dawn.  They totally made that up…