“Being a farmer was the most radical vocation I could choose,” says a Columbia graduate now running a sheep and garlic farm in Vermont and quoted in “The New Farmers” in Orion magazine. Author Lauren Markham writes about “a growing demographic of young, beginning farmers – farmers by choice, not by heritage – who have committed themselves to small-scale agriculture. Often with strong educational backgrounds and urban or suburban upbringings, these young people have chosen their vocation over many other options… largely out of a deep environmental ethic.”
Farming is as first-hand way to exercise stewardship of resources, say farmers in the Orion article. One of them says “the small farming movement is a populist approach to this problem.” The Internet and farmers markets make it easier to find customers.