Choosing to Farm: New Generation Stories

“For people who get into extension and especially stick with it, there's this compulsive need to make those connections. Now I consider myself a bit of a subject matter expert on goats, but as an extension agent, I wasn't the subject matter expert on pretty much anything. Especially since it was a crops county, and I'm a livestock person, but I was the connection finder.  I was the one who wo...

“For a long time, it's been just like struggling to get my farm to the bare minimum of what I would consider acceptable in my head. There was no pride, no accomplishment, because before that I was failing. So I was simply not failing now that I've done this thing. I'm trying really hard to be able to take accomplishment in the improvement, and the continuous improvement.” Margaret Chamas fell in l...

“Since coming back, it's been sort of this really challenging and interesting evolution to understand how a working mother who is not farming with her partner can take over an operation that has traditionally been run by four to six people. “ Abbie Corse grew up hating cows. She went to school for journalism and got involved with arts administration. Then she realized what a lack of seasonal work...

“The jobs that I worked were a pickle factory and a spinnery and an apple orchard, All of those were learning how to operate in a system watching how other people create systems and deal with the logistics of production. I think now that's made me a pretty strong systems thinker. I'm good at being strategic and good at looking at the entire large moving sort of juggernaut of the farm and identifyi...

“It feels scary to work with a dangerous animal, but it's within our wheelhouse. To do something that is unknown--to reach out, to ask for help, to admit we don't know--to go into that sort of dark place outside of our circle of control and our circle of knowledge into some nebulous “out there”, so that we can make that circle bigger--THAT’s scary. I gotta tell you, once you open that door, once y...

“I think that climate change, and the collapse of so many of our ecological systems is the pressure that's going to push human evolution into a new phase. And I think that has to be the story. “ Part 2 of my conversation with Vermont farmer Jesse McDougall ranged a little more widely than just the choice to farm, but that choice shouldn’t be something made within a vacuum. Processing, marketing, a...

“It was the next generation for the farm…and so it came to [my wife] Cally or nobody. And we thought, well, hell, we might be better than nobody. So we raised our hand and said, “Let us give it a shot.” Jesse McDougall had never farmed. His wife Cally had grown up adjacent to her four-generation-family’s farm, but neither had any idea what might happen when they decided to shift from coding web si...

“I think part of the reason that I have pursued a career in real estate development in addition to being involved with my family’s [ranch] business is because there’s so much overlap…if you don’t understand the land piece, then you’re missing a big piece of the picture. Christian Wiedemann is the 5th generation on his family’s ranch, located near San Francisco. He grew up hosting school field trip...

“So I went around on the farm tour and I went to check out all their barns and I spent like eight weeks almost every day going to visit somebody, talking about their sheep. Going from barn to barn I realized, ‘Oh, everybody does this really differently.’ Kristen Judkins didn’t expect to become a farmer, in fact, she’s not even sure she’s comfortable with the term, but she moved to Vermont and fell...

“Rangeland science is this crazy complex combination of living and non-living things and people. It’s not simple at all.” While the Art of Range host Tip Hudson is an experienced rangeland ecologist on the technical side, I was deeply interested in his take on the value and importance of “long form conversation”. We chatted about brain science, new and old(er) ranchers, who should be listening to...

“I think for me, my pre-farming life had little experience in farming, but I think the way my parents raised me, it’s just being honest. It’s working hard and trying to build something bigger than you.”—Austin Troyer Austin and Maggie Troyer of Crossroads Land + Livestock in Ohio figured out pretty early in life what they didn’t want to do, which led them to farming right out of high school. Austi...

“Problem solvers make the best farmers. If you’re not a problem solver, it makes your farming life so much harder.”  I’ve known Jinny Cleland of Four Springs Farm in Royalton, Vermont for more than 20 years, which is about half of the time she’s been farming. We’ve had great long talks about farming, business, faith (she is a Christian Scientist), and much more while processing turkeys togeth...

On first thinking about ranching bison, Matt said he thought “I’m a kid from suburban Chicago, I could never do that.” And then he went on with his day. As he describes it, “I didn’t entertain the thought of it, really. But then months later, it was still there.”  Matt Skoglund didn’t start as a ranch kid or even a kid from the country. He had a couple of different careers before deciding in...

“People who don’t farm don’t realize how much it really governs what you can and can not do with the construct of your lives. Unless you’ve got the systems in place to manage that stuff.”—Chris Sargent When I had the idea to start this podcast, my husband Chris Sargent was fully on board and very supportive of my goal to share the stories of first-generation and other farmers making the conscious...

“Yeah, neither Lisa or I grew up on a farm. So this is all new. This was not in our plans. I was chasing the corporate ladder. She was a public-school teacher. Then we started to look into food, which is a spiral. A downward spiral, if you start to do that, because you discover that so much of the food in a supermarket—that’s not really food, and it's probably not healthy for you. And so our solut...

“I would say the overarching of all of this is actually understanding that this is a business. Right? It’s great, it’s farming, it’s pastoral. It’s all these things., but at the end of the day, this is a business and a business needs certain things to exist and function.”—Cheryl Cesario Thanks for joining our inaugural episode, featuring Marc and Cheryl Cesario of Meetingplace Pastures in Cornwall...

When we do physical work, lots of us think deep thoughts. I recorded this mini episode as an experiment...what sort of deep thoughts come out on the topic of setting intentions, in the middle pf chores?  Let me know if you like this format...and I would love to hear your thoughts about other topics for a Chore Chat! For more than 25 years, I’ve been working with farmers on all kinds of produc...

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about why I even wanted to do this podcast. (Why I think this is even a good idea, I mean.) What I have come to realize is that I want there to be more farmers and ranchers in the world. I want there to be more people managing livestock on the land, in responsible and regenerative ways. I want there to be more livestock farmers who actually make a living m...

Are you a first- or returning-generation farmer or rancher? Maybe you want to hear the stories of those who’ve made the leap? Join us weekly starting January 1, as we dive into the large and small moments that make us choose to farm.