Choosing to Farm: New Generation Stories

"New Mexico in general is very agricultural, especially where we are here in Northern New Mexico. And so mostly unless you're in the city, most communities are acequia-based irrigation. It's a beautiful thing that since living here, I've just become so grateful to have. There's a lot of cultural significance to it in history and these systems are maintained every year or a few...

" I'm so grateful with people that really like our place.  Because you can find a freedom here so nowadays that you are in not [doing] desk work or a job or something. That's harder sometimes. You need someplace to get away. I think that's what people love [about] here. [This is a little bit of a getaway.]" Capilla Ambar Facebook Page   Thanks to On Pasture for their unwaveri...

Nadia Milleron is an independent mother, farmer, attorney, and successful advocate who will fight for you.   In 2019, Nadia’s daughter was a passenger on a Boeing 737 MAX that crashed in Ethiopia killing all on board. After 2 deadly crashes, instead of taking Boeing’s and the FAA’s word that nothing was wrong and a crash would not happen again, Nadia got involved to hold all involved groups accoun...

NewGrass Farmstead raises registered and commercial Clun Forest and Coopworth sheep, for breeding stock, meat, wool, and pasture improvement. We sell raw milk seasonally, and a variety of meats. Sheepskins, hand-dyed yarns, and lamb, mutton, beef, pork, and chicken are available for pre-order or in our self-serve farmstand. Livestock on the farm include thesheep, working border collies (with the o...

Baylee Rose Drown, is a queer woman farmer, educator and community builder. Baylee believes in good food for all people.   For Baylee, this starts with caring for soil and extends into seeking justice in our land and food system. Sliding scale CSA, working with meal centers and acknowledging colonial land theft (our land is the home of Nehantic people) are all part working of towards an equitable...

My hope is that these journeys we share cause the person to take that next step. Whether that next step is buying a roll of poly braid and moving your cows twice if that's oh I need to try and do this for grass fed and go direct to consumer. Wherever you are, I'm hoping the journey helps you take that next step. And for that to happen, I can hear the same thing hundreds of times. But for some reas...

It was in the middle of high school that I really started to carve out an interest for myself in and seek experiences in agricultural production of some fruit and veg, some small livestock. I remember having a conversation with my college counselor about “I'm interested in this, like, where should I look?” She mentioned some of the top agricultural schools in the Northeast, like UVM and UNH, b...

I remember…doing some chores one day with the pigs and thinking, “I don't need anything other than this.  Everything is whole and complete as I do this work here with these animals. –Carrie   You start with lambing and move through into lactation and then we start processing and so being able to manage the farm in that integrated way. Being able to really understand the performance of the anim...

We might not see the payoff of the things that we're doing here…but the legacy we're leaving for someone to walk in behind us, that's really important. —Sarah   For me, especially having a job for so many years where there were a lot of days when you wake up and you go, “Man, I really don't want to go to work today”… that really doesn't happen anymore. I wake up every day ready...

“I think a lot of people seek out farm and food jobs because they're looking for something profound and they don't even know what it's going to be until they get there.”—Rose   “Every year on the farm is so different. It really is. It feels every year we have different bandwidth for different things and we're improving all the time and making more bandwidth in some areas and losing...

“Raising animals is heavy. Even when it goes really well, it's heavy. And when you have losses, like we have had in the last couple of years, it changes the math -- even the finances of it. Okay, yeah, we lost money because we lost so many hens, but what we also lost sleep and tears and to wake up and go out and have a hundred chickens killed in one night--that happened to us once--and it just...

I came into farming really, as I got into it, being like--I'm a grower. That's where I want to grow my expertise; how to be a better caretaker for these animals, how to be more efficient with my time, with the land that we're using. To lean on people who are in processing, lean on them because their resources, their expertise are in processing or on the kosher side, lean on those peopl...

The occasional summer I would go to Arkansas for a few nights when my family would make the trip out there from Dallas, Texas, they would only stay for a short period  it was my aunt and uncle's Chicken farm. They were conventional growers for Tyson.  It was a fun time out there, but I do remember thinking  this is an enormous amount of hard work. My aunt and uncle never get to leave this farm...

It feels good that we're providing this product for people's nutrition, for their families. They keep coming back to us and appreciating that. We are who we are; we're the face, we talk to them, we have them to our farm for tours. That's what people are looking for .—Beth   We both have a full time job figuring out how to move this business forward that that you can't get done...

I describe farming as really just one long extended expedition. It's very much like a mountaineering expedition where you wake up every day, you're working outside. You have problems, often new problems that crop up at least weekly. It's very much like being in a big mountain expedition where you're constantly working with the weather. You're working with the people on your tea...

Watching them [kids] come to the farm; at first, it can be quite challenging. There is definitely an arc of sort of comfortableness just with being outside doing chores, hard manual labor. That takes a minute for a lot of kids to adjust to.  But as they adjust, it's so cool to watch them come out of their shells.-- Haley   Hello my name is Haley Goulet, I am a livestock manager at a community...

I remember being seven or eight years old and drawing… having construction paper, big rolls of paper all over the living room floor, drawing pictures of where my cows and my sheep and my chickens would go on my future farm.— Melissa   You pick and choose your battles for sure…do we want to focus on cleaning up all of our  step-in fence for the sheep and  do all the outdoor stuff or are we going to...

We had bought this house in Brattleboro. We'd bought the truck. We bought the sheep. We bought dogs. We did all of this long before COVID hit, but then we were like, okay, this is our pandemic project.—Kimberly Kimberly and Zan Walker-Gonҫalves were both kids exposed to animals but not raised on farms. As parents, they circled back to growing food and raising the maximum number of livestock th...

I've wanted to quit about a hundred gazillion times, a lot- a lot. But I want to do what I love. So that is the key, right? To do what we love. And this is what I love to do.  It comes with difficulties and it comes with rewards. I have to be able to handle both and know both.   Nicolle Ferrier and family moved from Southern California to central Vermont to experience a more relaxed lifestyle,...

There is a legacy throughout my family of having at least one member who served in all major conflicts back to the Revolutionary War. The other side of that coin is they were all farmers, homesteaders and innovators of their time from Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky.    In 2009, my wife and I kept grew our first garden in a community growing space in northern Vermont.  There was a moment of clarity...

Your humble host has been through some stuff the last few years. At a recent food system gathering event this fall, the call went out inviting folks to tell their stories of transition and transformation. How we went from the old to the new. What we overcame, and what we learned. How our world view changed.  I’m still very much a farmer and will continue to be, but the last few years have shown me...

We could actually look into the animal, the live animal, see intramuscular fat and tenderness. We also had these tools, linear measurement tools that we could actually physically measure the animals and began to find almost in any group of cattle the right kind of cattle that would make a delicious piece of meat.   Ridge Shinn is the Executive Director of the Northeast Grass-fed Beef Initiative (N...

I'm excited that the pandemic--for all its negativity--also said, “Hey, wait a minute. We need to concentrate on food resiliency”.  We need to encourage these small diverse farms because the big operations, the five huge companies that sell 99 % of the meat in this country, failed us. For what reason? The structure, this food system structure failed us.   John Roberts was appointed by the Bide...

We'd rebuilt the milking parlor, which hadn't been operating. We've done all of this sort of stuff. When we came to close the sale we had two years of numbers to show that we actually knew-vaguely knew--what we were doing. We were off and running. We were here from 1977. We’re still here. We sold the farm, and we kept 10 acres, but we farmed until 2012. John Roberts was appointed by th...