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Collection: Betting the Farm

What Do Immigrant Farmers Need?

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Today, it’s almost impossible to imagine the Pike Place Market without stall after stall of flowers: tulips in spring, dahlias in summer, dried bouquets in winter. But three decades ago, that future was not assured. It drew only a few dozen farmers selling produce there on busy Saturdays.

Around that time, Seattle had become a destination for a growing number of Hmong refugees, who had provided intelligence and combat support to the US during the Vietnam War. Many had been farmers in the highlands of Southeast Asia. After American troops pulled out, Communist reprisals forced a mass exodus of Hmong families to refugee camps.

Those who were eventually resettled here needed to earn a living. And Steve Evans, who took a job as the Pike Place Market’s farm specialist in 1981, remembers the opportunity that presented:

We saw the Hmong farmers as being the next generation that would come to Pike Place and keep the farmer at the market, and that turned out to be the case.

Today, nearly 40 percent of the farm vendors who sell from the Pike Place Market’s busy tables are of Hmong descent. But the transformation didn’t happen organically. It took money, land, and sustained efforts to help those original families learn basic farm skills like operating mechanized farm equipment and making change with American money.

Today, agricultural experts are looking to other minority and immigrant groups—from Latino farmworkers to new refugee populations—to fill a looming void as aging farmers who now grow our food begin to retire in massive numbers. They’re frequently mentioned in conversations about the new “next generation” of farmers.

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Paving the Path to Farm Ownership

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Ten years ago, Salvador Morales tried to start a farm with his brother. Since they were boys, their family had earned a living from farm work. They’d picked everything from cauliflower to cucumbers to berries. At 17, he struck a deal to begin growing his own vegetables on another landowner’s property in Bow, Washington.

A lifetime of fieldwork may teach you how to grow monster tomatoes or cut hundreds of heads of lettuce. But it doesn’t necessarily prepare you for running a farm. Once it came time to harvest, the brothers realized they were missing an essential part of the business equation: paying customers.  As Morales remembers it:

Nothing really happened. I thought we would sell in big markets, but I didn’t really have any idea how to do it.

They assumed that local Mexican restaurants would buy their produce, but kitchen managers already had relationships with large and established distributors. The natives of Oaxaca, Mexico, spoke Mixtec as their first language and couldn’t communicate well with buyers who spoke English or even Spanish.  So Morales gave up on the dream of being his own boss, at least for the next few years.

He’s at the crux of a sticky problem: The average age of farm operators is 57 in the Northwest. The vast majority of them are white. Most of them plan to retire in the next two decades. And not that many of them have children who want to come home and run things. So who exactly are we counting on to become the next generation of farm owners?

One logical answer is the workers who already grow and process most of our food. The vast majority of them are Hispanic.  More would like the opportunity to go into business for themselves, but don’t have land, language, or business experience. Though the number of Latino farm operators is still small, they’re one of the fastest growing slices of new farmers in Washington State. Here’s how Sarita Schaffer, regional coordinator of Washington State University’s Latino farming program, describes it:

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Betting on a Farm

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Ali Isha used to work on a large family farm in Somalia, growing maize, rice, sweet potatoes, beans, bananas, onions, tobacco and livestock. Until the soldiers came.

They took the cows and the corn and everything else. The large food stocks on Somali Bantu farms had become valuable as war blew apart civil society. Rogue militias would rape and murder farming families as they robbed them. Isha’s family fled into the woods, cooking at night so the smoke wouldn’t give them away. It became clear they couldn’t return home. So Isha, about 20 years old at the time, began shuttling family members to refugee camps at the Kenyan border, a two-day walk each way.

“I came like this,” he said, holding up his outstretched palms. “Empty. We didn’t have anything.”

Isha, now 36, is now trying his hand at farming again, this time on a rocky farm east of Auburn run by Seattle Tilth. He has plenty to eat, but he’s not making enough money to support his family. Surrounded by head-high mustard greens that have gone to seed without finding a buyer, he’s learned hard lessons this summer about market realities.

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Who Farms?

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In the Northwest, the average age of our farmers is 57 and climbing. And the chances are pretty overwhelming that a person running a farm will be white.

It’s certainly not that white people are the only ones who know how to farm. The region’s agricultural economy runs on Latino/Hispanic farmworkers who can weed a row in a matter of minutes, fix an irrigation system with whatever is handy, or nurse ailing tomato plants back to health. A diverse set of refugees from farming communities in eastern Africa or the highlands of Asia may never have seen a beet, but give them some seeds and a few months, and they’ll have sizeable ones.

There are a number of reasons why the region’s farms tend to be run by white people. For starters, those are the families who tend to own farmland, and it’s much easier to own a farm if you inherit one. Working in fields or orchards may teach you a lot about how to grow crops but not the business and marketing skills to turn a profit. Start-up farms require capital for everything from seeds to greenhouses to packing infrastructure, and people of color have not had equal access to credit that can grow a business. USDA programs designed to help farmers have not historically been geared towards reaching minorities. (And in some cases, federal farming programs have demonstrably discriminated against them.) All of that adds up to this crazy lopsided chart:

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