breckbill is the majority shareholder of humble hands harvest in decorah, a town in the northeast corner of iowa. everything about her and her farm are atypical for the state, which churns out 18% of the u.s.’s soybean and corn crops every year, according to the iowa official register. breckbill, 34, is a first-generation, queer, organic vegetable farmer on a 22 acre worker-owned farm.

when she retires, she said, she’ll sell her shares at the price she bought them, regardless of how much the price of the land increases. so, the only money she’ll be making over her career is from what food she grows and sells. the point of the farm, breckbill said, is to serve the community and protect the land.

“the reason we’re running this business is to grow food for people and to steward the land well,” she said. “the whole wealth-building element of agriculture is not part of our purpose.” 

“but, it happens anyway,” she said. “land accrues in value.”

wide lens globally, 10% of rural populations account for 60 percent of agricultural land value, according to the land equality initiative report.

she’ll be giving up plenty of money by refusing to hike up the price of the shares once she sells, since the price of farm real estate in the corn belt is valued at $6,110 per acre, almost twice the national average, according to a 2020 report from the united states department of agriculture, which records farmland value rising steadily since 1993. 

that’s precisely the problem, breckbill said. the traditional model of land acquisition in farming means that young farmers need to buy or be given land owned by their families, or have enough capital to compete with big businesses. that’s a heavy barrier of entry for first-generation farmers like her. 

“i definitely could not have done it as an individual person,” breckbill said. but humble hands harvest didn’t face the usual start-up costs of a young farm.

wide lens only 1% of farms operate more than 70 percent of the world’s farmland, according to a 2020 report from the land equality initiative, while the large majority, 80%, of farms around the world are less than 5 acres.

“not in my backyard”

when the 22 acres at the end of hidden falls road went up for auction, the neighbors made a mad dash to buy the land at asking price — $5,500 an acre. 

if an industrial farm moved in, “it would definitely ruin the neighborhood as well as the air and water around here,” said steve mccargar, who lives five minutes down the gravelly lane in a solar grid-tied home he built using recycled timber from crumbling farmhouses. 

wide lens agriculture is the main degrader of inland and coastal waters in high-income and emerging economies, according to a 2017 united nations food and agriculture organization report: “farms discharge large quantities of agrochemicals, organic matter, drug residues, sediments and saline drainage into water bodies.”

mccargar and his partner heidi swets moved to decorah in the ’80s from ann arbor, michigan, in search of a place to live environmentally responsibly, a calling stoked by years of environmental activism and observance of the writing of back-to-the-land gurus helen and scott nearing. 

several of the neighbors on hidden falls road made the same pilgrimage, partly from “serendipity and accident,” partly to join the growing community of alternative thinkers. with a robust food co-op, the northeast iowa peace & justice center, luther college, and self-proclaimed “hippies” like mccargar roaming around, this town of 7,500 in the heart of corn country is a stew of progressivism and traditional ag in the heart of corn country.

mccargar spearheaded the local operation to buy what became humble hands harvest land. 

it started with a story that got around about a farm at the other end of the road, said mccargar, gesturing over his shoulder from where he sits in a fold-out chair in his garden. he tells the story like a preface.

“i had just been made aware of an auction that had happened at the end of our road,” he said — not breckbill’s end, but northwest, where the blacktop meets unpaved lane. a hog confinement operator from ossian, iowa, showed up and put in his bid. out of concern that his land would be sold off to a confinement operation, the farmer stopped the sale, mccargar said.

“we were all extremely grateful for his choice to protect the neighborhood,” he said, “even if it cost him the ability to sell the land that he wanted to sell.”

a year later, the plot that became humble hands harvest went up for auction. to avoid what had happened at the other end of the road, mccargar convinced the neighborhood to scramble and scrimp to buy the land outright. fifteen families raised the $122,000 in six weeks, created hidden falls llc, and bought the property.

the land belonged to the neighborhood, and deed restrictions would keep the shares from being sold to confinement operations in the future. the next step, mccargar said: “what are we going to do with this now that we’ve bought it?”

wide lens 31% of farmland on the contiguous 48 states is rented out by non-operators, according to a 2016 study by the united states department of agriculture. less than 1% of that share is owned through estates, cooperatives, municipalities and non-profit organizations. the rest is rented out by individuals, partnerships, corporations or trusts.

starting humble hands harvest

breckbill had landed in decorah in 2010. she was working at another farm at the time, but had her own aspirations for a cooperative vegetable farm. first step — buying a hidden falls llc share. the land’s topsoil had been eroded from 30 years of “corn on corn,” she said, so the llc members agreed to plant hay and stop tilling in order to breathe some life into the spent soil and pick up a certified organic label.

breckbill borrowed some money from an uncle, emptied her savings and crowdfunded to buy up more shares and put in a well and electricity. she now has eight shares; her business partner emily fagan has another five and as a cooperative they intend to buy the remaining nine.

“ideal world is that our farm, as a worker-owned co-op, will make just a seamless transition from one generation to another,” breckbill said. it works like this: one member retires, another farm worker buys their shares, and so “the same business will stick with this land for a long time,” she said.

a replicable model?

breckbill thinks the worker-owned cooperative model can be duplicated outside decorah.
“the only hope of young farmers is figuring out a different way to access land, and having people with wealth, even small amounts of wealth, being able to help that happen,” she said.

as for mccargar, he references wendell berry, who came to speak in decorah in 1994. berry’s idea, said mccargar, is that if the economy is a forest then the tallest trees that eat up the sunshine are the biggest industries. once they fall, smaller plants will have space to grow.

“if we imagine what alternative agriculture practitioners and theorists and gardeners and small-scale farmers and organic producers are all trying to do, it’s to create that vibrant understory,” mccargar said.

but it takes money, he said: “it’s not something you can do on a shoestring. you have to be able to leverage capital for this purpose.”

humble hands harvest is crowdfunding to build a permanent house on the farm, but meanwhile breckbill lives in a yurt by the garden patch, where rows of radishes, turnips and napa cabbages poke their green heads out of the earth.

breckbill talks animatedly about the generational model of farming and her vision for a greener future while her orange cat, apricat, snoozes in a chair to her right. land acquisition is a huge problem, said breckbill, but it’s not insurmountable.

“people caring about what’s happening on the landscape around them — wherever that happens, i think that can be replicated in some way.”

—

about this series: the planet forward-fao summer storytelling fellows work was sponsored by the north america office of the food and agriculture organization of the united nations (fao), and the fellows were mentored by lisa palmer, gw’s national geographic professor of science communication and author of “hot, hungry planet.”

the average age of u.s. farmers is 57, but the number of farmers under 35 grew 11% from 2012 to 2017, according to the latest census from the united states department of agriculture (usda). young farmers made up 9% of u.s. farm producers as of 2017.

sustainable farming practices are on the rise as well. farmers are turning away from tilling practices that chop up and erode nutritious topsoil. the amount of heavily tilled land decreased nearly a quarter from 2012 to 2017 while no-till acreage increased 8%. cover crops, which help farmers reduce erosion and increase biodiversity on their soil, doubled in acreage in the same period.

land use for certified organic products is also up by 9% from 2016 to 2019, and people are eating it up — sales rose 31%.

despite the numbers, sustainability is still a huge term. melissa kenney, director of research and knowledge initiatives at the university of minnesota’s institute on the environment, tackles it in two parts: “sustainability is not just an environmental concept. it is a concept that involves both the environment and society interwoven together,” she said.

environmentally, sustainability means minimizing or eliminating pollution and leaving the planet in better condition for future generations. sustainability also means providing people with basic necessary resources, kenney said.

“you can’t have solutions that are good for the environment if they don’t also benefit people right now.”

farmers are trying new things like cover cropping, no-till, and organic farming to preserve and regenerate the land. none of these methods is a catch-all, and their effectiveness can vary depending on any one farm’s geography, said paul west, co-director and lead scientist of the global landscapes initiative at the university of minnesota’s institute on the environment.

“but certainly, having a bundle or a suite of these approaches all at once certainly can lead to healthier soils and fields,” he said.

to get to the point of experimentation, though, young farmers need resources. the obstacles they face are varied, but they need at least three things to get their foot in the door: land, income, and community support.

—

about this series: the planet forward-fao summer storytelling fellows work was sponsored by the north america office of the food and agriculture organization of the united nations (fao), and the fellows were mentored by lisa palmer, gw’s national geographic professor of science communication and author of “hot, hungry planet.”

“profitability and economic sustainability is the biggest challenge we have,” said steve verett, the executive vice president for plains cotton growers, with strategic environmental action playing a key role in overcoming those economic challenges.

one area that needs further action? education on sustainable practices, as a lack of it in the past has taken an environmental toll with an aquifer quickly drying up.

“there’s going to be a lot of things we need to be looking at, but the fact of the matter is we are transitioning into dryland agriculture,” verett said.

however, verett and other farmers are hopeful that new developments in seed production can allow them to continue with their levels of production.

janice person, the online engagement director for bayer, the multinational pharmaceutical company that just acquired monsanto last year, says less water-dependent cotton is something her company has been focusing heavily on. “our breeders have been working on that stuff for 20 years.”

past the issue of water scarcity, farmers are also facing the rise of weeds resistant to roundup—a popular herbicide produced by bayer, according to a report in the new york times in 2010.

herbicide-resistant weeds are a factor that have led to a reduction in more environmentally friendly practices like no-till farming. once resistant weeds move into a field, farmers often have to resort to more toxic chemicals or tilling, which leads to increased run off and erosion.

farmers “want to be economically viable, but leave what they have in as good or better shape than how they found it,” verett said.

they have everything at whole foods, so much so that i cannot stop myself from buying much more than i need. of course i need my kale salad, walnuts, and stuffed grape leaves, but what about those coconut covered dates for dessert, and a synergy kombucha to top it all off; don’t i need a smoothie from their café in case i’m still hungry when i’m done with all this? the answer is always yes, yet even with all these exotic products at the slightest whim, i hardly stop to wonder where they’ve all come from.

beautiful marketing, organic labeling, and a seemingly local vibes at this national chain function the way they are supposed to, to sell a particular story. the bag of coffee i bought for $12.99 is fair trade, organic, and features a nicely painted picture of a dark-skinned woman with a woven basket on her head; i feel glad that my dollars are going to the local people in a less developed country who picked these coffee beans.

in her book, “from modern production to imagined primitive,” paige west outlines the truth behind this pretty picture. that bag of coffee might have beans from at least five different countries: maybe some from papua new guinea or brazil, or vietnam, columbia, indonesia, perhaps ethiopia. and these workers? they are getting paid 16 cents an hour. a wage, which, according to west makes one bag of coffee worth about $1.40 in papua new guinea. so where does that extra $11.59 cost come from?

of course there’s the impact of the distances these beans have traveled. the umbrella figure for this fact is that our food travels, on average, between 1,500 and 2,500 miles before reaching our plate. while this figure is an oversimplification, being an exaggeration for some foods yet an underestimate for others, it rightly displays the incredible distances that our food travels in order to reach our plates. the carbon footprint is immense. moreover, according to waterfootprint.org, the water footprint is for global coffee consumption is 1.5 times the annual runoff of the rhine river – 110 billion cubic meters of water per year.

why has our food system developed this way if it is unsustainable, inequitable, and economically only profitable to large monopoly organizations? the answer is that it has developed organically according to the capitalist, colonialist model to which it belongs.

but just because something develops organically does not mean it is the best model, and it especially does not mean that it cannot be changed to work within the same system.

in fact, changing the model has the capacity to change the flawed system. that makes it our responsibility to change both.

the company freight farms is doing just that: by providing a scalable, local agricultural solution in the form of the leafy green machine. the leafy green machine features a series of vertical panels that hold hydroponic peat moss growing pods in which lettuce, hearty greens, herbs, flowers, and root vegetables will thrive.

these panels find their home in a re-used shipping container, insulated in order to complement the container’s advanced climate control system, and equipped with blue and red led light strips, using only the light frequencies that the plants need. accordingly, each container uses only about 125 kilowatt-hours per day. it also is highly conservative in its water use: due to the vertical nature of the hydroponic operation, the pods use only about 5 gallons of water per day — 90% less water than traditional farming techniques.

each leafy green machine is capable of producing between 60 and 100 pounds of greens per week and between 35 and 85 pounds of herbs for only 15 to 20 hours of labor per week. this yield is the rough equivalent of one acre’s worth of lettuce in traditional agriculture, according to the company. all of the systems controls are directly available through an app at all hours of the day and from all locations. the enclosed environment of the system protects it from pests and disease, so it produces a nearly perfect yield without the use of pesticides or herbicides.

the containers can be situated in a backyard, on a rooftop, or in a parking lot, offering an “acre in a box” that is accessible to anyone in any location, providing the freshest, most local produce possible.

the containers are in use in 30 different states and nine countries, supplying food to universities, restaurants, and local farmers’ markets.

in fact, nick pagan from clark university said, “on harvest days i deliver the lettuce around 10:30, lunch service starts at 11, so students are getting produce that was harvested just a half an hour ago.”

imagine regularly eating food that had been harvested 30 minutes before you ate it, as opposed to the average of 5-14 days during which your food is transported and stored post harvest. imagine having the choice to eat produce that did not travel 1,500 miles and contribute massive amounts of greenhouse gases in order to reach your plate. image supporting your local economy instead of exporting that extra $11.59 to large, inequitable corporations.

the leafy green machine provides a market solution to our flawed food system, and its success can inspire similar creative thinking and new businesses that will open up this market space and begin shifting the entire system in this sustainable, equitable, and economically beneficial direction.