Farmer Engagement with Regenerative Agriculture in New England: Understanding Barriers and Facilitators to Improve Services and Outreach

Lucy

[The previous farm owners] opted to try and conserve their farm. And they worked with the Vermont land trust…And then right after we transacted on the land, so $2 million piece of land here, then was sold to us for $225,000…

Quentin

We need more farms like our farm, small community farms to feed our communities. And if it's not financially viable to do so, it's not going to be possible…people aren't gonna be able to start farms…access to land for new farmers, it's like getting crazier and crazier. So the system as a whole has a lot of problems. And they kind of impact each other.

Doug

I’ve been struggling with land access for 20 years. And I didn't manage to get it until I met and teamed up with someone else [looks at wife/farm partner].

Killian

Yeah, it's the hardest question in farming in this area. You know, it's a hard question because land it near Boston is is just so damn expensive. I live in a, what's now a wealthy Boston suburb today, used to be a farming town 80 years ago, you know, nobody thought of moving to Sherborn if they had business in Boston…Don't think there is any practical way to make owning land near Boston accessible for young people who want to start out as farmers…if that's just a it's just a pipe dream that ever could really become viable on any scale.

Alice

I mean, access to farmland is a huge topic. [R]ight now we sit in what most farmers would consider an unsecure situation, because we are on land that we don't own. And we don't have a written agreement with the owners. We have a handshake agreement and that's all he will give us. As he says, ‘I don't sign anything.’ So right now you talk to any farmer and they're like, ‘Oh, I wouldn't do that’…but would we throw away this opportunity to farm land here? And it's been hard in some ways…[but] what is the difference between a written agreement and a handshake agreement in our mindset? Because…a written agreement can be broken too…pretty much it's just whoever can pay the lawyer and the judge more money…we don't really have that sort of money anyway. So if it came down to it…we had to move or we had to figure something else out. We don't own the land, we can't afford to own the land necessarily. Right now, we'd love to get our business to the point where it can buy land…but we don't have to own the land in order to farm it, and to make it a better piece of land. And that's our goal—is increasing biodiversity and building soil.

Annabel

…we don't have housing, so we can't really have an intern-style, you know, affordable labor, here…We've tossed around the idea of putting up a cabin…it's a cost, and it's just never on our top priority list. So it just hasn't gotten done yet. So it's, you know, we need to acquire some capital to make that happen.

Doug

That and access to funding for housing…because that's the other hurdle that we've faced—is zero financing for farm house construction. There’s all kinds of financing for farms, especially for businesses, but no domestic financing to actually give them good houses, much less efficient houses.

Lucy

…housing is a really challenging situation for us, our family, but also…we have a lot of people who work for us…a lot of the people that work here…are just starting their families, and we're trying to create a situation where they can actually live in a house and raise their family here and afford to do that. So that's a huge sort of hurdle and challenge for us, but one we're working on and committed to figuring out.

Ripley

…the first year we did one intern…two is kind of like our magic number, if we can find two really good ones…And it tends to be a lot of college kids who are looking for an experience for the summer. And we offer housing, because we've got this huge farm house, we have no kids. So it kind of works out good for us. And yeah, so we offer housing, and we just offer like a food stipend…tons of food.

Annabel

When we've researched a crimper, I think if we were serious about no till that might be the next step…but if we were gonna go e

ven further and say, stop using our tractor, we just need more labor, the other farms that do this have a ton of labor…your mulching…It's just not practical for two people to do and still make money.

Atlas

I probably [would] hire more men if I have those resources. I'm probably replace older equipment with newer equipment…

Nathaniel

Well, it's a really interesting question, because I think the answer is nothing. [Interviewer: Really?] Well, if if you dropped 100 grand in my lap, and you told me I had to spend it on the farm...[I would] hire a bunch of people to rip out quack grass and rid my farm of it so I never had to think about it again. It would probably be a waste of money, because the seeds would still be there and they'd have to come back three years later and do the whole thing again…But you know…I run my farm the way I like and so…I don't feel as though it feels the money is the issue. I tried to try to make I try to make minimum wage or a little bit better. I probably don't do much better than that. Like, spend my time doing what I want to do. And so, I mean, I suppose the other answer is if I had all the, you know, unlimited resources, I’d pay myself more...

Quentin

We would probably bring in more staff to do more enterprises on the farm. We don't have livestock on the farm, but the land is, would be great for livestock…we're currently working on like a whole long-term permaculture agroforestry plan requires like a ton of planting trees and shrubs, we [would] do all that real quick, rather than take like six years to do it. And…if we had endless resources, we'd probably stop selling to restaurants so we wouldn't be competitive with other farms. And we'd probably turn this into like some sort of like educational farm to just educate folks on how to do things. Well…we're like a research farm. We already do a work with a lot of partners on different research projects. And I think that would probably be where we put all our energy is trying to figure out how to do these practices better if we weren't constrained by the financial obligation of making money.

Murray

I'd pay off my debt. So yeah, we had a rough year last year…So but um, well, I would probably pay my workers better. I mean, even though we're doing we're at $15 an hour, it's like, that's not a—it's not really a sustainable wage. And it's not something that keeps people coming back. One of the hard things about labor is, you know, if you have to retrain every year, because you've gotten new people every year…time…getting people up to speed…So being able to pay your workers that's would be dependent well to keep them here, it'd be one thing…

Freya

Um, yeah, just going back, and thinking about regenerative. And in when we were like trying to figure out how to talk about our practices. One thing we were aware of, is that I think regenerative agriculture has sort of like become in-fashion but has roots in indigenous agricultural practices. And it felt like, kind of toeing the line of appropriation to say, like, we are doing these practices that are, you know, basing cultures that aren't my own on land that was stolen. And so we also kind of moved away from that, because of, like, part of the cultural history of it and feeling like, that has meaning that, like me, as, like, me as a white farmer is not the one to define. Um, and I don't know, like, I think regenerative is like so much in the mainstream now that it's removed from some of that history. But that was kind of like part of our initial thinking about what it means to call yourself regenerative and like, who gets to define it?

Wren

Um, so to me, the word in and of itself, I think means to take something that's kind of been depleted and regenerate or kind of bring it back, like in terms of the soil to good health. And I think on our farm, that means looking at where we started, and what the soil was like when we started farming. And then kind of monitoring what it looks like, as we apply what's known as regenerative practices…I know that there's kind of a lot of, I don't want to say political, but like, you know, we go back and forth between calling it regenerative or calling it sustainable are just calling it like no till. Because I also know that there's a lot of like indigenous practices that have kind of been call it borrowed or stolen or whatever, you know, whatever you want to call it. So we're definitely kind of trying to be conscious of that and not--if we share with our customers or market, like we're trying to just kind of emphasize the focus on the soil health and not necessarily calling it something like a buzzword. If that's, if that makes sense.