“Welcome! Buenas noches! Nice to see you!”
That’s what I say every Monday night as I greet the good folks participating in our Get Farming! business planning classes.
Every time the door opens in our Michigan Works classroom, a rush of blustery air shepherds a group of snow-covered students into the room. More than 40 people from as far away as Grand Rapids and Ellsworth are taking our classes, and it’s quite a group— young and old, farm owners and farm workers, speaking English, Spanish, and Spanglish, my second language. They’re diverse, but they are unified in their shared dreams for farming.
Hearing these farm dreams every week in a class on marketing or labor management or other business matters renews my hope for the future of agriculture. Our classes confirm what many in agriculture say: There is a new generation of farmers out there. Hopefully, our Get Farming! program will, as we advertise, help “get their dreams out their heads and into the fields.”
The students are on the right track. There’s Herberto, who worked as a farm laborer for years and recently bought land in Antrim County, where he wants to start his own beef farm. Then there’s Judy, a baby boomer who wants to restore her family’s dormant Leelanau County orchard to its former glory. Cristin and Brian have their master’s degrees in agriculture and want to start their own winery on Old Mission Peninsula. The list of farm plans goes on and on.
This week’s class on financial planning featured local banker John Hyatt of Fifth Third Bank. He talked about what banks look for in a loan application and business plan. He was joined by Dr. Rob Sirrine, the Michigan State University Extension Educator for Leelanau County.
Dr. Sirrine provided students with extensive information on government loans, grants, and alternative funding sources that help farmers execute their business plans. Hands went up throughout the evening with questions about collateral, payment plans, grant writing, and a topic that may not have been a concern for other generations of farmers— student loan debt. Like many other Monday night classes, it was after 10 p.m. when the students walked back out into the wintry night, by now considerably colder, still talking with each other about their farm plans.
It’s inspiring to watch these farmers get support from…and learn from…each other. It gives me hope that, despite the encroaching development I see through out the region where I grew up, there are new farmers who want to cultivate the land and keep the region’s agricultural tradition alive.
Even though Leelanau County soundly defeated a farmland preservation ballot measure in 2006, over a quarter of the students in these classes want to start their farms in that very place. And despite the high cost of entry to farming, with farmland running $7,000-$15,000 an acre in this region, students are cobbling together money through grants, land leases, and fulltime off-the-farm work in order to get on the land and provide me and the rest of the region with fresh local food.
All of the talk about fruits and vegetables has me ready for spring and thinking about what faces from these classes will one day have booths at the farmers’ market across the street. Maybe I’ll be able to buy beef from Herberto and heirloom apples from Judy—to be complimented with a glass of wine made by Cristin and Brian.
In the meantime I’ll just settle for spring.