4 The Journal
Cover • November 2, 2010
Photo by Katherine Luck
Left: The entire Rausch family works on their 5-acre urban farm in Renton. Above: Fall vegetables just harvested at Chinook Farms in Snohomish. Photo courtesy of Kathy Rausch
Your neighborhood farmer By Katherine Luck
They tweet. They Facebook. They work long hours in the city. They’re the new generation of urban farmers, and they’re bringing the farm back home.
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n a period of economic uncertainty and job loss, a number of highly educated professionals are turning to a life of small scale agriculture in the Puget Sound region. But these 21st century farmers aren’t like their predecessors. With backgrounds in high-tech industries, training in marketing and a desire to stay close to the city center, today’s urban farmers are equipped with business plans, mission statements and feasibility studies. Above all, they’re businesspeople. “You’d never think there’s a farm here and we’re doing what we’re doing. We’re surrounded by neighborhoods,” said Kathy Rausch, an urban farmer whose 5-acre spread is located in the city of Renton. A former music teacher married to an electrical engineer, Rausch always dreamed of living on a few acres ... someday. But trying to make a living off a small farm, in this day and age? It all started when she milked a neighbor’s goat. To alleviate her children’s chronic health conditions, Rausch decided to try feeding them fresh, organic goat’s milk. Soon she and her husband decided to raise a goat
or two of their own. By September 2005, they found themselves moving one and a half miles up the road to establish a fully fledged urban farm, complete with ducks, geese and of course goats. Neither Rausch nor her husband had any experience as professional farmers. “My grandpa was a dairy farmer, so I grew up being on his farm, but not farming myself,” she said. “We read books and dove in. It was challenging but very, very rewarding.” There was a great deal of trial and error involved, but today she works full time on the farm and is developing it into a viable source of income that will support the entire family. “It’s been a huge benefit to us, but especially to the kids. They have real responsibilities. It’s not a made up chore list,” she said. Her 6-year-old son has been in charge of the chickens since age 3. “His
first purchase in life was baby chicks.” Her daughter is in charge of milking the goats. “You can see the next day if there’s no milk because you didn’t feed them — they have a great work ethic.” Now that it has finally started to reach the break-even point, Rausch’s husband is planning to leave his Seattle telecommunications company to work full time on the family farm. Within the next year or two, they plan to begin selling their farm products to the public. The dream of a family business that offers a self-sustaining, independent income has been appealing to generations of small farmers, and the Rausch family is no exception. From Seattle’s bustling year-round farmers markets to Puget Sound Fresh’s annual “Eat Local for Thanksgiving” campaign, it’s clear that in the Puget Sound region, the consumer base for this new “old business” is not just in place, but growing. The Rausches are already grooming their future customers. On Fridays, the family holds weekly apple pressings and a farm tour, and they’ve started a blog, culturedhome.com.
Still, the challenges are daunting. Rausch said the farm work typically runs from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. “We take one day a week off as a rest day, and that’s it.” But even on the “rest day,” there are still regular farm chores that must be done, such as feeding the animals, milking the goats and gathering eggs. Though the modern urban farmer benefits from the amenities of a city, they lack many resources their rural counterparts may take for granted. For Rausch, one of the biggest is the absence of a real life social network. “In rural areas, you have neighbors who are doing similar things, so they can ‘spell’ you for a while,” she said. But for her family, it’s almost impossible for them to get away from the farm, even for a day.
Red barn, white picket fence
For the Rausch family, their introduction to farming was something of a trial by fire. Other would-be farmers head back to school before they buy their first seed. One of the most popular programs is Washington State University’s Cultivating Success. The introductory course, Sustainable Small
The Journal • Cover
November 2, 2010 5
Photo by Katherine Luck
Acreage Farming & Ranching, mixes classroom learning with field trips to working farms, and even encourages bona fide internships at local agricultural operations. “[It] offers people that think they have a dream of farming the opportunity to learn what it takes,” said Holly N. Thompson, instructor for Cultivating Success. “A lot of students come into the course with rose colored glasses about the agriculture business. ... That it’s the red barn, a white picket fence.” Instead, 65 percent of today’s farms rely on the income of someone, often a spouse, who works at a job off the farm to support the operation. And unlike the average career, farming is cyclical, with low earning and low activity periods in the winter and backbreaking 60 to 100 hour workweeks from spring to fall, according to Thompson. “That’s a big lifestyle change for people,” she said. “The business of farming really is a business.” It’s a business that is growing. According to the latest data from the United States Department of Agriculture, nearly 300,000 new farms have begun operation since 2002. These new farms tend to have more diversified production, fewer acres, smaller yields and are run by younger farmers. In fact, today the majority of farms in the U.S. — an astonishing 91 percent — are small and account for the majority of direct-toconsumer sales. For small-scale, urban farmers, “There are two venues that will allow for their success. One is selling directly to the consumer. … The other is diversification. What I see particularly in small production is [the need] for it to be a 12 month source of income,” said Thompson. In spite of the culture shock, today’s newcomer to small acreage farming has an advantage over their predecessors: “They get to determine the feasibility of the enterprise before they jump in, which histori-
cally wasn’t case,” said Thompson. “I think first and foremost [a successful farmer] is a business person, and that’s why they’re still in business.”
The businessman farmer
“My dad was always described as a frustrated farmer,” said local businessman turned farmer Eric Fritch. His parents had a farm-worthy family of five kids. They had acreage. And in the 1950s, before Fritch was born, they tried to make a go of farming on a small scale, but they just couldn’t make money. “[It] was at the time that there was a transition away from small farms. It was a transition period when farms were becoming more corporate,” he said. “Now, we’re on the opposite swing of the pendulum. People are more concerned about where their food is coming from.” Linda Neunzig, agricultural project coordinator for Snohomish County, knows all about Fritch. A graduate of last year’s Cultivating Success program, he opened a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) venture that has rapidly become both successful and popular with his urban neighbors, who live just a few minutes away from his Snohomish farm. “It goes to show that it’s a viable industry to get into, to jump into something like that,” said Neunzig. Fridays are CSA produce pick-up day at Fritch’s Chinook Farms. Under the CSA model, customers buy a share in the farm’s growing season up front, then receive a box filled with the farm’s bounty each week. On a recent fall day, a Mill Creek area customer, Zoe, arrived with her two young children to collect her box. She found out about the CSA through a friend. “I had never heard about a CSA before, but I had my degree in nutrition, so I said, ‘I’m doing it!’” Her husband is a Boeing engineer — Continued ON page 6 >
6 The Journal
Neighborhood Farmer < Continued from page 5
just like Fritch used to be. This is Fritch’s new office, as he calls it: a sprawling 132 acres that has been parceled up in three smaller components. Four acres are devoted to growing food for the CSA, 100 acres are occupied by wheat and rye, and the rest is in development for a future grass-fed beef enterprise. “That’s the third leg of the stool, to keep things diverse and sustainable,” he said. Following college, Fritch went to work in Boeing’s aerospace and defense division. “I worked on things that don’t exist,” he recalled. “It was a big company and it wasn’t for me.” Fritch took over the family lumber business for a time, then bought Chinook Farms two years ago. At the time, it was covered with poplar trees that had been planted for paper, but had been neglected for 12 years. Since they hadn’t been sprayed or fertilized in over a decade, “we were able to become certified organic our first year,” he explained. “One of the arguments against organic farming is ‘That’s all well and good, but you’ll never feed the world that way.’ Somewhere in the middle, there has to be a happy medium.” “The demand for locally grown food is growing,” said Neunzig, adding that food
that isn’t locally grown travels, on average, 1,500 miles from farm to table. “People want to know the farmer who grows their food — to know where it comes from, to know that it’s safe.” Clearly the 50 families in Chinook Farm’s CSA program do want to know their neighborhood farmer. Though their weekly produce boxes can be picked up from a variety of drop-locations, “Most people pick up at the farm. That’s been one of the attractions. People are looking for the experience, not just the produce,” he said. “A lot of times they’re bringing their kids out. They’re going into the field and collecting a pumpkin, or gathering flowers or picking some fresh herbs.” Sure enough, a woman dressed very smartly appeared, lugging two pumpkins still muddy from the field, and added them to her weekly box of produce. “The CSA has been quite successful for the first year and the growing season we’ve had. ... We’ve actually been turning people away the last half of the year,” Fritch continued. Next year, he plans to expand the CSA program. “We’ll probably take this up to 80 to 100 members in the next year. I think we can scale up to that size without losing the feel of it.” His customers tend to discover his farm in the most modern ways. “Most of it is Internet presence. There are several websites that feed people into our website,” he said. “It’s a whole different world than just put-
ting a sign out on the road.” “Farming is evolving, like any other business. ... I think one of the biggest challenges is marketing,” said Neunzig. Herself a farmer operating under the CSA model, she’s found that today’s urban farmer benefits from being fully plugged in to the social network. “I Facebook from my tractor,” she said. “I don’t tweet, though. That’s just too much. You’ve got farmers with iPhones, Droids, everything. ... In order for me to communicate with my customers, I need to know what works best for them. It’s e-mail, it’s Facebook — that’s how you do it any more. ... It’s about being on top of social media.” No matter how plugged in a farmer is, agriculture remains a natural gamble. And the small scale farmer typically can’t count on handouts. “The economic model is still a struggle. There’s a lot of money spent in the U.S. on agriculture [subsidies]. Most are concentrated on commodity crops — corn, wheat, soybeans,” said Fritch. However, many small urban farmers are actively capitalizing on their unique status as their neighborhood’s source for ultra-local food. A senior woman who arrived with her husband laughingly inquired of Fritch, “Would you say your typical customer is a very atypical customer — except they like good food?” It all comes down to the food.
Cover • November 2, 2010
Photo by Katherine Luck
A week’s worth of fresh produce from Chinook Farms’ Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program.
“When you’re buying from your local farmer … you feel good about supporting your neighbor,” said Neunzig. “I think we are becoming more conscious about how farmers are the best stewards of the land, and we need to support those stewards. ... It’s a phenomenal career to be in right now. Its time has come.”