In addition to the physical and financial challenges that our producers faced, all of the new producers we spoke with also described information barriers that they struggled to overcome when first starting out.

 

Some of the biggest challenges these new producers (P10, P13, and P14) faced was a lack of experiential, location-specific knowledge.

 

When first starting out, these new farmers had to consider many different issues like:

 

• what crops grow well in the area
• what the weather and growing season is like
• what the soil type is like, (e.g. soil testing to see if nutrient levels need adjusting via compost)
• how you will get water
• what equipment is available (e.g. consider if it will be a hand-scale operation or a size that warrants investing in tractors)
• where to get seeds
• what the market is like (e.g. as P14 said, “What is the competition in that area and how can you create a niche for yourself in growing food.”)

 

Lack of Experiential Knowledge

New farmers often lacked the experiential knowledge that older, seasoned farmers had.

 

As P10 said:

 

“In our circumstance, farmers who have under 10 years of experience, not from farm backgrounds, there are a lot of people out there who have that situation….so a lot of time there are questions that we have or information that would be useful to us that maybe we don’t have access to or we could ask the people we know but it’s not like necessarily that their going to have answers for us.”

 

Though new producers mentioned turning to books or seed catalogs, they stressed the limited utility of such resources. Much of the information they needed to be successful came over time and through direct experience.

 

P14 explained:

 

“As a new farmer you’re not going to really know how long it’s going to take, you can read in the seed catalog that it takes 60 days for maturity but you don’t know yield off the tomato plant, ‘how many pounds are you going to get?’ that’s all what you gather from experience, there’s not really a book you can turn it that’s going to tell you that."

 

P10 also mentioned similar questions he had about yield and the limited answers provided by seed catalogs:

 

“When I make my crop plan like how many you know eggplants does a plant usually yield? Seed catalogs kind of have some information but you never know if they’re [right] or if you have to buy their seeds or things like that. There’s all kinds of general information that could be super useful to have out there and that someone like me would definitely take advantage of if it was made more accessible.”

 

 

Benefits of a Mentor

We also saw a clear distinction in the information barriers faced by new producers starting from scratch compared to new producers who were working on the farm of a seasoned mentor.

 

Whereas P10, who had started out on his own, felt that there was a great deal of information he wished was more accessible to someone in his situation, P13 felt that he received all the information and guidance he needed from the producer he worked for.

 

P13 worked on the farm of a producer who had a great deal of experiential knowledge since he had been farming for close to 23 seasons. As P13 said, “[The farmer I work for] has a pretty good idea of what to plant and when... he has done it long enough so that he doesn’t have to have it written out in clear form.”

 

P13 purposely chose such a situation, “I have mentor,” he said, “I knew I wasn’t ready to just go and jump in and do it.” P13, and others in his situation, are not faced with the challenge of making critical decisions with limited knowledge like P10. “At this point [the farmer I work for] makes these types of changes,” P13 said, “for the most part he tells me how he wants it planted and that is what we do.”

 

Though P13 did not face the same information barriers as P10, he did recognize this benefit and his lack of experiential knowledge: “If I had a CSA I would keep closer track of what I’m doing because I haven’t been doing it as long,” he said, “At this point [the farmer I work for] kind of just knows. He just knows he has to order seeds and whatever he needs."

 

 

Lack of Location-Specific Knowledge

In addition to a lack of experiential knowledge, new producers also struggled to find appropriate information for their specific region, weather conditions, and soil type.

 

In order to combat this problem, one producer, P14, set up meetings with other local producers in the area when she was just starting out: 

 

“I met with 5 to 6 different growers in the area and just picked their brain and got a good sense of the soil type and the weather patterns and what works well and what doesn’t,” she said, “It’s great that I now have these connections and can call up these farmers that have more experience than I do and call them up for help.”

 

P10 also said he was often faced with location-specific questions like: “We have these cabbages in the field, it’s late fall, we want to hold on to them for as long as we can in the field because we don’t have room to store them. When is it too cold?“ Questions that he did not have the location-specific knowledge or adequate experience to yet answer.

 

Even P12, a seasoned producer, remembered struggling with this issue when he was just starting out in Marin County. He remembered how at that time one of his friends in the area “was a really good resource” because “he just had knowledge he didn’t even know he had from just growing up in and around it.”

 

 

Receiving Help:

When faced with these information barriers, all of our new producers received help from other producers whether it was P13 who had a mentor or P14 who reached out to the local ‘farming community.’ Our apprentices, like A3, also mentioned struggling with these issues and how “there’s a lot of small farms around here which is a great resource.”

 

Even established producers who had been farming for years reflected on the same types of difficulties and the help they received through communicating with other producers.

 

P12 reflected back on his time starting out, saying, “Initially I didn’t know anything about farming. I knew a little about horses….a bunch of my neighbors taught me about pigs, cows, the dairies that were here, a nice community that was really helpful.”

 

P6 also said, “I think, especially if you're starting out, there is lots you can learn from other people.”

 

P14 felt that "there’s a bit of camaraderie of really wanting to support new and young farmers since they are so needed right now.”

 

 

Possible Tools:

Even though communicating directly with other producers seemed to be a successful way for our new producers to gain assistance and move past some of these information barriers, we believe that this is an area where the creation of specific tools could be extremely beneficial. For example, farm journals, crop planning schedules (especially for starting a CSA), and pricing information/indexes were mentioned as important tools and resources for current producers. Developing ways to aggregate this information from producers in a specific location into a publicly available resource, possibly paired with other existing data like weather patterns, could be extremely useful for new producers. These tools would have to be be easy to use, integrate into producers’ current practices, and provide a strong value proposition showing immediate benefit and utility (e.g. focus their attention, provide alerts, etc.).

P10 believed very strongly in the benefit of moving these types of tools online into a shared space, explaining:

“Everyone is planting their own crops at their own schedule with their own weather conditions and having their results. If there were ways to get a hold of some of that information better and be able to share it and mine it for research and things like that, that could be really cool.”

Due to time constraints, we could not investigate the potential for these tools in as much depth as we had wanted. However, moving forward, we would like to explore this area by talking with more new producers, looking at various examples of farm journals and crop scheduling plans, and digging deeper into this space.