We are the 2% - Farmers

So, I quit my job on Monday. Starting April 28, I will be a full time farmer!!!!

I love it when blog articles have the courtesy to come to my attention when I make such life-changing decisions.

We Are the 2 Percent: Occupy Our Land, Occupy Our Food

But talk is cheap and while there is an overwhelming embrace of local food and agriculture, there is an enormous chasm between those who eat well and locally and can afford to do so, and those who cannot. The nutritional divide has never been greater, the number of hungry people in the world growing at staggering rates.

How is it possible that there is such an uprising of people who are passionate and enthusiastic and inspired by the new food movement and yet so few whose hands are actually in the soil doing the work?

In the end there is not so much a food crisis as there is a crisis in participation.

The real shift we need cannot take place when only two percent of us is doing the work to grow the food for the rest, while everyone else is cheering us on. We love the attention, but farming is not a spectator sport.

I found this article from this post, which further emboldens me:

even if we didn't have energy and environmental issues to contend with, we have a gigantic demographic crisis in agriculture - the average farmer is nearly 60 years old, and their children and grandchildren have already left the land to do other work. Who will grow our food in the future? For the very first time in human history, it will be grown by people not raised to the work.

Bring on spring!!! I'm ready.