Think Small

At an apprentice program in eastern Pennsylvania, one woman helps cultivate the next crop of sustainable farmers

Dan Packel

On a breezy hillside in eastern Pennsylvania, five apprentice farmers were unfurling a roll of synthetic fabric, working to cover a recently planted row of peas and radishes.

“Sara,” Christopher Akinwuntan, an apprentice, paused, “Why do we lay this cover over plastic hoops, while that cover,” he said, gesturing toward a parallel row, “rests flat on top of the fava beans?”

Sara Runkel, executive director of the pick-and-plant academy in the fields known as the Seed Farm, spends a lot of time answering such queries. “With the fava beans, we’re just trying to warm the soil until the seeds germinate. The peas and radishes are going to grow further, and we want to keep them from touching the fabric.”

It was a chilly and damp early April morning, but the weather was more obliging for working in the fields than it had been in recent weeks. The apprentices had traveled from as near as five minutes down the road, and as far as New Jersey and Maryland, to put in their first of two days on the farm for the week.

They were participants in the new-farmer training program at the Seed Farm, which had recently started its second year. A collaboration between Lehigh County and the Penn State Extension’s Start Farming initiative, the farm — situated on land owned by the county — serves as a training program for aspiring farmers. As executive director, Runkel was putting her many years of vegetable-farming knowledge to work, aiming to groom a new crop of small-scale farmers.

“It’s the only publicly funded incubator farm that I know of in the country,” noted Runkel.

Are You Experienced?

“It’s geared toward people who already have some farm experience,” said Runkel, explaining the structure of the apprenticeship program. “But to succeed as farmers, they’ll need instruction with business and marketing, along with day-to-day practical skills.”

Beginning farmers face a litany of challenges, including high costs of land, tight credit markets, and a US Department of Agriculture policy that seems tilted toward the big boys. And analysts at the USDA have reported that small farms have a relatively high failure rate, with nine to 10 percent of farmers opting to exit the profession each year.

Yet Runkel’s own personal history of working on and running small farms across the US shows that success is possible.

Runkel started her farming career after high school, taking a one-year apprenticeship at a small, family-owned vegetable farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. But the inclination towards farming was there even earlier, nurtured by spending time on her grandmother’s farm in western Pennsylvania and attending farm camp in the Pocono Mountains in the eastern part of the state.

“When I was a kid in the DC suburbs, I tried to persuade my parents to dig up their front yard for a vegetable garden,” said Runkel.

During her sophomore year of college, when she realized that she was spending more time reading Eliot Coleman’s New Organic Grower than studying organic chemistry, she decided to take some time off and headed out to Eugene, Oregon.

There, she split her time apprenticing on two farms. For 35 hours a week, she was at one organic farm, which operated with a strict prohibition on fossil fuels. Growing a range of crops for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, farm workers even had to deliver all produce by bike.

Then Runkel would head across the street to another small farm (one with a less restrictive philosophy) that grew spinach and other braising greens and sold them directly to local restaurants.

These contrasting experiences, relatively early in her career, remain useful for Runkel’s role as an instructor and mentor at the Seed Farm, where some of the apprentices have expressed interest in growing produce for restaurants, while others aim to start their own CSAs, and one looks to grow vegetables for food banks.

Back to School Days

Bowing to pressure from her parents, Runkel returned to finish her college degree at North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College. Here, the school’s work requirement allowed her to work in the market garden, which grows food for the school and surrounding community, while she completed a degree in environmental studies.

After a stint working as the landscaper at the Penland School of Crafts, she started her own CSA in western North Carolina on two acres of land that she had leased from a friend.

“I occasionally felt overwhelmed,” she said, describing the process of growing vegetables for 30 CSA members, along with two small farmers’ markets. “But I’d had eight seasons of growing experience at the time.”

Of the 300 acres of rolling farmland owned by Lehigh County for the goal of preserving green space, a manageable 25 acres have been set aside for the Seed Farm. While the entire farm is in the process of being certified as organic, only two acres will be cultivated by the apprentices, with the output to be sold at a local farmers’ market and wholesale to the food service at a local publishing conglomerate.

“We only lease out two acres so that folks don’t get in over their heads,” she noted. “We don’t want any crying out in the field.”

Stewards of the Soil

The rest of the land doesn’t sit fallow. Graduates of the apprenticeship program can apply for the stewardship program, through which they can rent land and equipment at reduced rates and start their own initiatives, while meeting with Runkel on a weekly basis. This year, one steward is growing garlic, while two others partnered to start a CSA that they hope will grow to 70 members. The goal is to allow them to begin making a profit, so they have capital to put a down payment on land of their own.

Runkel herself felt the challenge of finding land to farm when she and her husband moved to western Pennsylvania, hoping to take over her aging grandmother’s farm. She enrolled in a graduate program in sustainable systems at Slippery Rock University, but ultimately family politics stood in the way of taking over the farm.

Instead, she discovered the opening at the Seed Farm and headed across the state, diving in shortly before the beginning of the growing season in January 2010.

With Philadelphia 60 miles away, New York City 90 miles away, and the cities of Allentown and Bethlehem close by, Runkel hopes participants will stay nearby, and through succeeding on their small farms, create a more sustainable food system for Lehigh Valley and the surrounding area.

“I doubt anyone will have any trouble selling anything, as long as they have a solid business plan,” she said. “There are so many markets nearby.”

“When I was a kid in the DC suburbs, I tried to persuade my parents to dig up their front yard for a vegetable garden.”