August 1st, 2008
The Greenhorns: Young Urbanites Turn to Organic Farming
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Turning our backs on buying things is not the only reaction to the excesses of our hyper-consumerist culture. Some urban youngsters in the US are turning to organic farming (New York Times) –
Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms, the perils of relying on petroleum to deliver food over long distances and the beauty of greenmarkets, some young urbanites are starting to put their muscles where their pro-environment, antiglobalization mouths are. They are creating small-scale farms near urban areas hungry for quality produce and willing to pay a premium.
Severine von Tscharner Fleming, director of ‘The Greenhorns’, a film about young farmers, says that young farmers are an emergent social movement –
We want to reclaim place. We want to steward. We want to feed, and we want to access the generosity of photosynthesis directly—with our hands touching the soil.
Everyone finds a different way into farming. Some start as romantics, some as ecologists, some as tree-sitters, and some as gourmands. Some are lucky enough to be born into farming.
Our job in this generation is to rethink, recycle, retrofit and restore our land and our community; the Greenhorns have come to this revelation and taken action. This film is a way to convene a movement that is for now quite thinly spread out on the ground. Population density of young farmers might be as low as 1-2 per county in America. Yet, once seen as a whole in the film, you will find it an attractive and coherent sub-culture: proud, strong, tough, and a little bit nuts.
It’s really ironic that the young farmers at the forefront of the movement are the almost universally hated hipsters (New York Times) –
Their Carhartts are no longer ironic. Now they have real dirt on them.
Just a few years ago the prevailing style statement in Williamsburg featured metrosexually groomed urbanites wearing trucker hats and pristine Carhartt jackets and quaffing Pabst beer. Now some are choosing the real life behind the pose.
At a recent fund-raising party for Ms. Fleming’s film, in a warehouse next to the Williamsburg Bridge, men in shaggy beards and women in thick sandals sipped Sixpoint Lager from mason jars and snacked on Crane Mountain chèvre.
Watch ‘The Greenhorns’ trailer on YouTube –
– and read more about these young farmers on ‘The Greenhorns Blog’.
