Nov 5, 2007
Young growers ask: Should we open the door?

On any summer Saturday, you can find Sidney Kuhn at one of the farmers’ markets where the Kuhn family sells fruits and vegetables every week from May through October.

But come Monday morning, she’s back at her desk at the Land Conservancy of Adams County, doing a job she loves and believes in.

She also loves the market work – selling farm products, working with people.

Now 28, it wasn’t many years ago Sidney wasn’t as pleased at being a farmer’s daughter as she is today. She recalls coming home from school to work in the farm’s fruit packing shed – a not-so-pleasant task none of her friends were burdened with.

Since then, her attitude has changed – but so has the nature of the family’s Orrtanna, Pa., orchard. It has moved from wholesale to retail, from chilly packinghouse to warm personal relationships. Farming, in general, has changed, too. Income prospects are much better in retail, and the “buy local” movement, growing strongly along the East Coast, has bolstered spirits as producers and consumers are reconnecting.

Now, the question facing Sidney is, “Should I choose the farm as a full-time career for life?”

Sidney is not the only young farm person facing this choice. Two years ago, two Adams County Extension educators took the lead in forming the Mid-Atlantic Young Growers Alliance – which quickly blossomed into an organization of 70 members, all under age 35. Sidney became the first chairperson of the group.

The pent-up demand for contact within this younger generation was enormous – and surprising.

Most of the members are 20-something children of established orcharding families. Many of the fathers and grandfathers of these families knew each other well and were industry leaders and well-known public figures.

“We knew everybody in my father’s and grandfather’s generation,” Sidney said of the young growers. “But we didn’t know each other.”

The reason? She theorizes that many in her parents’ generation were discouraged with farming and hadn’t been encouraging their children to come into the business. Suddenly, when the young grower organization began to come together, the young people came together like a bag of magnets.

No doubt about it, times had been hard for fruit growers in Adams County, Pa., for some years. For one thing, there was plum pox. For apple growers, it was imported processed products.

As John Rice, vice president of Rice Fruit Co. in Gardners, Pa., put it during a meeting in Chicago recently, “I represent a part of the country that is unusual and where growers actually grow apples for processing.”

Once proud that they grew York Imperials, Romes and Golden Delicious for the big fruit processing cooperative Knouse Foods, the market for processing apples took a big hit from imported apple juice concentrate.

“Our family was mainly processing and wholesale,” Sidney Kuhn said. “But several years ago, my dad started to see it might not remain profitable.”

Her parents, David and Mary Margaret Kuhn, saw the growth in direct marketing that was taking place around Washington, D.C., and decided to give it a try.

“Things have really changed. Now 50 percent of our business comes from farmers’ markets. I like meeting with the people who buy our food. It’s much more rewarding,” she said.

“Growing up, I often resented that I had to work on the farm. Working in the packinghouse, I asked myself, ‘What kind of life is this?’

“But while I was in college, in the middle of a city, I began to realize what I’d learned about independence, hard work and being a steward of the land. My attitude has definitely changed, and I value my upbringing in the orchard.”

After graduating in landscape architecture from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, she moved back to the home area and rents a house a stone’s throw from the farm.

The farm is about 300 acres in size, with about half of it in fruit – 48 acres of apples, 70 acres of peaches and nectarines, plus small acreages of strawberries, asparagus, red raspberries, blueberries and tomatoes. Some of the apples, peaches and strawberries are still sold wholesale, but most go to five tailgate farmers’ markets in Fairfax County, Va., and one in Washington, D.C.

One market operates Tuesday, two on Wednesday and three on Saturday. The farm hires five full-time employees and about 10 seasonal workers.

They have three 14- or 16-foot box trucks that need to be loaded the night before market days – and Sidney does one Saturday market every week.

The farm has diversified, and changed the varieties of fruit it grows and how it grows them. Instead of a mindset where most of the fruit was one or two varieties and “everything was picked in a week,” varieties have been chosen to extend the marketing season.

“It’s been a challenge to learn new things, like how to grow raspberries and tomatoes,” she said. “But my father enjoys it.”

Her full-time job hints at some of the questions in her life. She works for the Land Conservancy of Adams County, a nonprofit organization that accepts and monitors easements of development rights either purchased or donated by farmers who want to keep their land in agriculture and forgo the development pressures that go with it.

“I negotiate the easements and write the grants,” she said.

Her parents participated in the program. They donated an easement to their wooded land and sold development rights to some additional acreage – but kept other land outside the program.

If Sidney doesn’t choose to move into the family farm business, “nobody else is coming back,” she said. She has one sister who is supportive of the business but is not interested in farming.

Sidney has found kindred spirits in the Mid-Atlantic Young Growers Alliance.

“Our generation is a little more hopeful about the future of farming,” she said. “And they’re more open to new ideas. They realize they need to do things differently and may have to make several transitions in their lives.”

In its short existence, the group has taken numerous tours, including an extended one to Washington and one to Cornell’s Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y. It’s all about networking, comparing notes with other young people trying to figure out how – and whether – to get into the orcharding business.

“Being part of a group encourages us,” Sidney said. “Previous generations seemed more protective and less sharing of their ideas. We are very open about that.”

Waiting in the wings

Tara Baugher, the Adams County Extension tree fruit educator and part of the family that owns Adams County Nursery, noticed a couple years ago that a number of young fruit growers were hovering around the edges of the fruit business.

Were they waiting in the wings? Many of them had college degrees, usually not in horticulture, but perhaps in business or a profession.

Matt Harsh, an agricultural economist in the Adams County Extension office, also had been thinking about the potential of these growers. Together, they decided to see if they could bring these young folks together.

It started during a session at the Mid-Atlantic Fruit and Vegetable conference in December 2005.

“We heard a lot of common concerns,” Baugher said, “ranging from developing farm transitioning plans to investigating new technologies for remaining competitive.”

The Mid-Atlantic Young Growers Alliance was set up, and immediately attracted members from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey and West Virginia. It was organized as a committee of the State Horticultural Association of Pennsylvania (SHAP), and Sidney Kuhn become its chairperson and representative on the SHAP board.

What Baugher and Harsh saw was “the next generation starting to come back to the farm,” Harsh said. “But they were milling around the edges and there was no mechanism to pull them in.”

Like Sidney Kuhn. She could come in, or she could stay out.

Revival in farming

The attraction, Harsh believes, is in a renaissance taking place in farming, “at least in our area. We have consumers here begging for fresh, local products.”

That’s a big change.

“For many of these young peoples’ parents, farming was a trap. But it’s no longer a trap, it’s an opportunity. But it’s a challenge, too.

“For the generation on the farm now, if you did what your dad did, you’d be fine. Now, the same old formula won’t cut it. It’s a more complicated picture, but potentially much more profitable.”

The young farmers need to – and want to – “break out of the commodity mentality,” Harsh said.

They need to emphasize marketing, but they also need to diversify, to produce a larger number of high-value niche crops and fit them all – production and marketing – into as long a season as the climate permits.

Farming, Harsh said, has endured a 50-year slump, in which farmer parents “ran the best off the farm, and a lot of them would love to be back.”

The attractions remain what they’ve always been – the opportunity to work outdoors, to be your own boss, to work with family. And the challenges are much the same, too – the need to provide adequate income for another family on the farm.

Harsh is convinced that change is coming, and that opportunities in fruit and vegetable production are luring the younger generation back to the farm.

Old Adams County

Sidney Kuhn and her advisers at the Adams County Extension office were somewhat surprised to find how quickly and widely the young grower alliance idea spread. They weren’t sure whether Adams County was a unique microcosm, or somehow part of a regional desire by East Coast consumers to buy food locally from farmers they could reach out and touch, or even a national revival spurred on by new consumer interest in fruits and vegetables as healthy foods.

On their trip to Cornell, young New York growers played host to them and showed great interest in the concept of a young grower organization, Sidney said. And on the trip West, young Washington growers showed equal enthusiasm.

Certainly, there’s a revival of interest in fruit in Adams County. There’s been much discussion – and a lot of Extension meetings – devoted to retooling orchards: planting modern fresh-market varieties on closer spacings, rebuilding the stone fruit industry in the wake of the plum pox disaster, designing peach and apple orchards for better productivity and mechanization, using orchard platforms for pruning, thinning and harvesting.

While there is considerable pressure on land from urban sprawl and lots of orchards being pulled out and replaced by houses, new orchards are going in – more trees on less land providing better yields and as much fruit as before.

But no doubt, the industry is being reshaped, and young people are interested in it and are coming to it.




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