Pocket Farms Thrive on Smallness, Direct Sales

These are not wheat-to-the-horizon farms. Not ranches penning in hundreds of cattle. They are small plots--two acres, maybe five--where seeds are planted by hand and weed control depends on nothing more high-tech than a sturdy pair of gardening gloves.

But they are, nonetheless, farms.

Family farms.

And against the odds--against the devastating collapse of independent growers, against the incredible consolidation of American agriculture--they are thriving.

Thriving precisely because they’re small, because they work the margins of the agricultural economy.

They cannot replace the family farms that once checkered the heartland: the vast stretches of corn and beans, the noisy pens of hogs and cattle. Those farms could support a family. These can’t. They bring in money for a new computer or a big vacation or maybe a secondhand car. Not more.

Still, for all their limitations, these vest-pocket farms are being hailed as a rare bright sign for U.S. agriculture.

Nearly 15,700 small farms sprang up last year, according to a recent agricultural census. The boom was so dramatic that it more than offset the continued sag in the number of medium and large farms.

But more important than their numbers is their novel approach to agriculture. Small-scale farmers are making it by shunning the traditional commodities markets, by passing up the grain elevators and feedlots increasingly controlled by major agribusiness. They are selling their wares instead directly to consumers, through farmers’ markets or roadside stands or neighborhood co-ops, through fliers advertising fresh, hormone-free beef in half-a-cow-size slabs.

Although they sell, by definition, less than $10,000 worth of goods a year, small farms have provided a significant boost to rural economies. And they have a psychological effect as well: They prove that despite year after gloomy year of ag failures in the heartland, “people still want to farm,” said Lynn Byczynski, who tracks the trend through her “Growing for Market” newsletter.

Rita and Daniel Rash hope she’s right.

They both have “real” jobs--sit-at-a-desk-with-clean-finger-nails jobs--with regular hours and regular paychecks. She’s a tax consultant; he’s a computer programmer. But both love the messy, sunburned, muscle-aching work of coaxing food from the soil. So three years ago, they started what they call a “market garden”--a small farm on a half-acre of land they own in Excelsior Springs, in northwest Missouri.

The first two years, the Rashes earned less than $500 selling their organic squash and cucumbers to a local health food store.

This spring, however, they were confident enough to expand: They have 300 tomato plants, 200 lettuce seedlings, peppers and eggplant and even some flowers. Their spare bedroom has become a makeshift greenhouse. Lettuce carpets their basement. Starter plants huddle under heating blankets on an old bunk bed strung with fluorescent lights.

It’s a shoestring operation, but 28-year-old Rita Rash proudly calls herself a farmer.

And she fully expects to be tending the garden full time one day soon.

“Sure, we’re not going to feed the state of Missouri,” she said. “But get enough of us going, and we’ll supply a lot of the population with good, healthy food. And we’ll support the local economy.”

In the meantime, adds Nebraska farmhand Bill Henkel, who has launched a small-scale poultry business that nets him maybe $3,000 a year, “it gives a person hope that the big firms won’t take over agriculture completely.”

Such optimism, however, is far from universal.

Although some experts say anecdotal evidence bears out the census figures showing an explosive growth in small farms, others dispute the statistics.

They point out that landowners who receive federal payments to convert their fields into wildlife habitat are included in the farm count, even though they do no cultivation. The census also tabs as a farm any property that supports at least $1,000 worth of agricultural commodity--be it a few horses in the stable or a dozen fruit trees in the backyard.

So it’s impossible to tell how many of the 1.2 million small farms reported in February’s census are actual agricultural operations.

“It bothers me that people are holding up these statistics as if somehow this reflects that there’s something right going on out here in agriculture,” said John Ikerd, a retired ag professor at the University of Missouri. “They use it as an excuse for not addressing the real problem, which is that independently owned family farms are still going out of business at an unprecedented rate.”

Certainly, American agriculture is wrenching through an agonizing transition.

More and more family farmers, unable to make it on their own, are giving up their independence to work on contract for big corporations. They may still raise hogs, but a distant boss tells them how to go about it. They may still harvest grain, but their contract spells out exactly what type, down to the oil content expected in a given ear of corn.

Those who stick it out alone find they have fewer and fewer options come market time: When the same multinational firm owns hogs, a slaughterhouse, the packing plant and shipping barges, the independent pig farmer has little leverage to bargain for a good price.

Rita Rash, raising squash for the local health food store, is no antidote to this tremendous consolidation in American agriculture.

Neither is Henkel, butchering 1,300 chickens a year for his neighbors.

Yet many rural analysts cite this backyard ag as a model for the family farm of the future. True, no one can make a living on less than $10,000 in annual sales--and it is only this category of farm that shows growth. But by forging ties directly with consumers, these “hobby farms” are opening ever-bigger niches for independent growers. And they can, with time, grow to be profitable.

Take Dave Mikus, whose family has grown grain in central Missouri for more than half a century.

A dozen years ago, the Mikus family started a pumpkin patch for extra pocket money. They sold one pickup load the first year, a few more the second. They went to Disney World on the profits. Then they expanded. Did a little local advertising. And the pumpkin patch that brought in just $400 the first year now yields up to $20,000.

“You have the potential to get more profit out of 20 or 30 acres dealing directly with the consumer than you did with several hundred acres” on the traditional commodities market, said Charles Ellis, an ag outreach advisor for the University of Missouri.

That’s been Ron Turnbull’s experience.

His eastern Missouri farm--in the family for seven generations--grosses about $250,000 a year. Still, he has to work a full-time plumbing job to survive.

He ticks off the grim numbers: He grows 300 acres each of corn, beans and wheat. Has a hundred head of cattle. And “absolutely zero profit comes off all that,” he says. “In fact, the last two years, I actually lost cash.”

Fearing for his farm, Turnbull last year experimented with direct marketing of some of his beef. He sold it, in 150-pound chunks, to some neighbors whose septic tank he had installed. And he found he could make a much better profit than he could by auctioning it to feedlots. His beef sideline earned him $10,000 last year. He hopes to triple that profit.

“If our kids were going to be able to stay on the farm, I knew we would have to do something different,” Turnbull said. Without such innovation, he predicted, “in five or 10 years the family farm is going to be gone, and you’re going to be working for a few big companies. My kids, they don’t want to do that.”