The New Marketeers
By: Ben Brown; Source: AARP Bulletin Date Posted: 2006-06-13 09:51:00-04:00
Ron Poitras, 62, retired early after a 30-year career in energy conservation and land-use planning. Now he's raising chickens and growing organic fruits, flowers and other produce to sell to restaurants and at a farmers' market not far from Acadia National Park in Maine.
"If the summer goes by and I don't have my fingers in the dirt," says Poitras, "I just don't feel right."
Three years ago, Norm McCoy, 50, left his career as a systems engineer and enrolled in a new MBA program in sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames. Last year he became the program's first graduate and returned to his family's 40-acre organic farm near Des Moines.
"One of my goals when I started," says McCoy, "was to take our farm and make it an example" of how to take advantage of a small but growing trend toward healthy, locally grown food.
In an age of industrial agriculture on a global scale, the business of growing and selling food locally seems an unlikely second career. But a confluence of market forces and social trends is luring boomers anxious to connect with the soil later in life.
"This is the generation that read Rachel Carson [Silent Spring, 1962] and began looking for alternatives to pesticides," says Elaine Marie Lipson, author of The Organic Foods Sourcebook (McGraw-Hill Contemporary Books). "They wanted to change the world, and they did. They're economically powerful, and they're interested in having healthy, energetic lives. And they always will be."
Celebrity chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and other professional foodies tapped into the trend in the 1970s and helped accelerate it. They hooked a segment of boomers on the taste and health advantages of fresh-from-the-farm food over products packaged and then shipped across continents before they reach supermarket aisles.
Demand spurred supply, creating opportunities for new approaches to old ideas about community agriculture. Instead of having to ramp up production to achieve economies of scale to compete in a global commodities market, even relatively small-scale farmers can make a go of it by thinking local.
That's reflected by an uptick in small farms—10 to 49 acres—according to the federal government's latest Census of Agriculture. And among farmers in their jobs four years or less, 27 percent are age 55 or older.
Meanwhile, from 1994, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture began keeping track of farmers' markets, through 2004, their number has more than doubled, from 1,755 to 3,706. Since 2000 alone, the number of markets has grown by 29 percent.
Something similar is happening with food-buying clubs called CSAs, for Community-Supported Agriculture, in which farmers contract directly with consumers for shares of their season's crops. More than 1,000 farms in the nation offer CSA-style contracts, according to Local Harvest, a monitoring organization in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Farmers' markets and CSAs have both become so mainstream that the federal government incorporates them into nutrition programs for older low-income Americans.
As food-conscious boomers age and become even more concerned about healthy eating, and as concerns about environmental responsibility and food security increasingly influence shopping decisions, Americans are likely to deepen their relationships with local farmers. In a 2004 Roper poll for a national organic farmers' cooperative, 85 percent of a national sample of Americans said they "trust smaller-scale family farms to produce safe, nutritious food." And 69 percent said these kinds of farms "are more likely than large-scale industrial farms to use techniques that won't harm the environment."
For communities with farmable land, there's an economic development incentive in local food. In 2004 farmers' markets in Iowa generated some $31.5 million in sales and indirectly supported 146 jobs, reports the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State, where Norm McCoy got his MBA.
In Burlington, Vt., which has achieved a 10-year goal of producing 10 percent of its food locally, former Mayor Peter Clavelle says, "The result is we're eating fresher food, most of it organically grown, and we're helping our economy. When we started this, we had no one farming in Burlington. Now we have something like 50 local farms."
Why is this new kind of farming made to order for retirees?
For those eager to put their hands in the dirt, it helps to have the resources workers accumulate over time, including financial reserves. To start his Bainbridge Islands Vineyards & Winery across Puget Sound from Seattle, Gerard Bentryn, 66, cashed in part of his U.S. Park Service pension.
He was able to repay his retirement nest egg. But Bentryn, who is proud that he also grows the grapes that go into his wines and that he's part of a community of local food producers, says profit is not his main motivation.
"If you can see where your food comes from," he says, "you can live in beauty. I decided to live in beauty rather than to make a lot of money."
You hear that a lot from second-career farmers. The agriculture-related opportunities aren't limited to working the soil. And as new networks evolve, there will be demand for business types—like Iowa State's new MBAs—and specialists in everything from used-tractor sales to teaching.
In New Mexico, Le Adams, 56, draws on her own 15 years working in small-scale agriculture to teach schoolchildren about farms and farmers in their region. Some of the motivation for running a small farm, Adams says, "is wrapped around working in the natural environment, being in control, making our own decisions, then being able to hold up something tangible and say, 'Look what I made.'
"Maybe one of the reasons older folks are choosing farming is that it provides a spiritual connection that we don't get in a fast-paced American society."
Spiritual reward may be the bottom line for many boomers who demand from their second career a sense of fulfillment that they didn't always get from their first.
Ben Brown is a freelance writer living in Franklin, N.C.
Additional Related Links
The Skinny on Organic Food (May 2006)
Your're the Boss (Segunda Juventud)
Rise of the Farmers' Market (AARP Prime Time Radio)
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