By Hallie Mauk
When Josh Ernst walks out the door of his two-story, white-paned farmhouse to the fields stretching 600 acres, he often reflects on the seven generations who came before him.
Ernst, a 27-year-old from Clear Spring, Maryland, is an eighth- generation family farmer, and he lives just a mile down the road from the original plot of land purchased nearly 200 years ago when the first generation arrived from Germany.
Ernst said he plans to be on the farm for the rest of his life, along with his children, but it will take adaptation and out-of-the-box thinking to compete with the sprawling 40,000-acre farms owned by corporations in the Midwest.
“My personal motto is you adapt, or die,” Ernst said. “I enjoy that challenge, thinking about where we’re going to be in five, 10 years, and how we’re going to implement the change to make that happen.”
The non-industrial, small-scale family farm has faced its share of changes over the past century. According to the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture, while the number of farms in the country has decreased over the past five years, 88 percent of what remains are small-scale and family-owned.
Mary Kathryn “MK” Barnet operates Open Book Farm in Middletown, Maryland, with her husband, Andrew. All of the vegetables they grow on the farm are either sold directly to the consumer or wholesale to grocery stores in the area. Barnet said that neither she nor her husband came from agricultural backgrounds; she grew up in Atlanta, and he is from New York City.
Barnet said that after a steep learning curve from operating both a farm and a business, they want to hire young people interested in starting farms of their own, something she noted that multiple past employees have gone on to do.
“We try to be very intentional about explaining what we’re doing to young people and providing as many opportunities as we can,” Barnet said.
Anne Geyer started her Hanover, Virginia LLC, Agriberry, as a woman-led fruit farm which has since expanded to include her husband and son, who is the primary manager. While they sell directly to consumers at farmers markets and have regular customers, Geyer said that her biggest challenge has been the weather.
Her crops are sensitive to temperature, and unpredictable weather patterns have caused freezes in the middle of spring when the weather is supposed to be warm enough to sustain them, she said. Regardless of looming challenges brought on by climate change, Geyer said she is very excited about the future.
“I’m totally optimistic about the next generation, very much so. They have a whole different paradigm to how they approach farming,” Geyer said. Even though there are parameters such as quality of life and the ability to make a living, “there are very much still positive possibilities.”
Emily Sutherland, 23, graduated with a business administration degree in 2018 with no intention of pursuing agriculture as a career.
“All I had really heard about farmers was the suicide rates, how messed up the industrial agriculture system is and that you can’t make a living farming, so it didn’t even cross my mind as a career I could go into,” Sutherland said.
In a career class, she remembered that she had a passion since childhood for growing things, playing outside and getting her hands in the dirt, Sutherland said. Small-scale farming, she learned, was not only good for the planet, but allowed her to have an intimate connection with the crops.
“I really believe that what I’m doing and what other small-scale, regenerative, organic farmers are doing, if that spread even more than it is now, it’s going to have a huge impact on climate change,” she said.
Sutherland said that pessimism about the uncertainty of the future is the antithesis of their productive work, and her pride in helping the environment keeps her going, something that Ernst agreed with.
“The key thing that we’ve done as farmers to be able to survive is getting out of the mindset that we should do the same thing every year, every generation,” Ernst said.
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