Expert assistance is needed, I’d opine, to help us lesser minds figure out why part-time farming is so widely viewed with disdain or embarrassment by four categories of citizens: those who farm for a living, those who farm for a tax-loss, those who farm for image and/or entertainment, and everyone else.

The phrase “gentleman farmer”is meant (and taken) as a pejorative aimed at those who don’t actually get their hands dirty, while those who do are typically quick to deny or conceal that their real income derives from some urban source, anything from the spouse’s in-town job, to one’s own college classroom lectureship, to a providentially-acquired trust fund, to a real, profit-centered business balanced dexterously against an equally real profit-centered agricultural enterprise. You wouldn’t know, unless you labored considerably at the research, that the iconic part time farmers (PTFs) Helen and Scott Nearing of Vermont and later Maine, (their classic how-to-do-it book, Living the Good Life, came out in 1954) were actually New York City escapees who raised green beans, built stone fences, and wrote books while farming their mailbox for the monthly trust fund checks. That’s because they labored considerably at keeping their off-the-land origins and incomes secret, and it all came out only after their deaths and subsequent biographies.

Berkson Farms in Enosburg Falls. Photo courtesy of Leif Tillotson

The Gentlemen Farmer Myth

National figures ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Henry Ford have openly enthused over part-time farming, maybe partially because Jefferson was the quintessential “gentleman farmer” (“planter,” in the South), and Ford was the quintessential corporate urbanite who never quite escaped from the factory-floor environment on which he built his enormous wealth. It’s rumored (although I’ve researched laboriously and haven’t been able to find the specific reference) that Jefferson wrote extensively on the civic virtues of the yeoman’s life, one who owned and operated both a small farm and an in-town business, the two guaranteeing his continued independence through political and economic ups and downs. It is well-documented that Ford wrote and spoke extensively on his (somewhat self-serving) thesis that his labor force should each have a small subsistence farm off which the family could live while awaiting recall to a temporarily shut down assembly line, and not depart for a better paycheck elsewhere.

In my grandfather’s day (he was a Spanish-American War vet who returned home to an apartment in Clinton, Massachusetts with no yard for growing table crops and little enough free time to do so) a six-day-per-week mill job and an economy where the cost of food equated to nearly half a wage-earner’s disposable income. If he had access to a bit of land and if he had the time and if he had the energy he could have, profitably perhaps, grown some food for his own table; we don’t know for sure though and the usual economics and history sources don’t tell us. What they do tell us is that the first wide-spread enthusiasm for supplemental gardening by urbanites had to await the Great Depression, by which time the expanding suburbs were no longer enclaves of the no-food-budget-problem wealthy, but with their little yards were also home to a new and upwardly mobile middle class struggling through job loss, pay cuts, and mortgage obligations.

Urbanite food costs were down to 22 percent of disposable income by 1935, the USDA reports, but those with lawns were digging them up to grow table crops, and the homesteader bible Five Acres and Independence was in its first of many printings. Today, urbanite food costs are well below 10 percent of income, and 40 percent of that is spent at restaurants fast or slow, but those with lawns are increasingly plowing them for table crops, in response to a newly-perceived food-cost pressure which is real enough to convince suburbanites that their own little efforts at part-time (after-the-day-job, typically) farming actually pay off. Even at a much larger scale–exurbanites with city jobs raising beef cattle mostly by using their weekends to do their serious farming, for example—the real economies of scale aren’t there and so other justifications are deployed: organic beef, or the pleasure of outdoor work, or “keeping the land open” are perennial favorites. Even mid-scale grain-growers can be found among the non-farm job-holders, somehow balancing the field-time demands against the office or factory time-clock. And, of course, there are the inescapable USDA stats showing that some 90 percent of farm family income is earned off the farm, thus making the picture-book American farmer either a part-timer himself or one who can “keep on farming” only because a second family member brings home a town-based paycheck.

Trust Fund Resources

These sorts of efforts aren’t easy to carry off, and how they have come to be viewed cynically can be traced, not to the vast majority of part-time farmers who are quite transparent about their Jeffersonian notions (even if they don’t directly invoke ol’ TJ) but to the tiny minority of Nearing-types who pretend to “live the good life” farming while covertly harvesting the stock-dividend or book-royalty or college paycheck including, even, the not-widely known case of mid-19th century Henry David Thoreau of “Walden” fame. Thoreau was basically a talented writer and political activist who subsidized his brief (two-year, two-month, two-day) simple living demonstration with the annual cash dividend from his family’s pencil factory.

Such play-acting would be harmless if it didn’t encourage emulation by gullible non-trust-funders, who learn too late that a well-written book preaching adoption of a life style focused on the hand-cultivation and farmers’-market sales isn’t one which can pay the health insurance premium, or generate enough profit to fund even a modest 401K.

Nearing’s Web Of Lies

Those who bought in, to their subsequent regret, to the enticing image in such sales messages as Five Acres and Independence have fairly penetrating comments to make about their observations or experiences. Consider these writings from one Jean Hay Bright in Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life published in 2003. Jean and Keith, we learn, were among those “pilgrims who [came] to Harborside (the Nearing farmette in Maine) to touch the hems of the Nearing robes…” and stayed on to buy 30 acres from them. “This was the chance of a lifetime, to get back to the land on a plot next to the guru of homesteading,” writes Emmet Meara, reporter/book reviewer for the Bangor Daily News. “Only after their (Nearings’) deaths,” Meara continues, “did Hay fully realize that the Nearings were trust-funders, whose [passive] income allowed the Nearings to live their ‘good life’ with such ease.” In her own book, Jean Hay is even more on point and perhaps just a bit auto-biographical. “I do have sympathy for people who believe everything they read in a book and then go out and try to live their lives by it.” She failed and went into politics, much like a well-known self-defined Socialist politician who migrated from the gritty streets of NYC’s Brooklyn to grow veggies in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, failed, and re-invented himself in governance, a far more profitable niche.

Hippie Homesteaders

In a vein similar to, but harsher than those of Hays are the comments of one Jigs Gardner, now a work-at-home writer (you can see his commentaries in The St. Croix Review) in Upstate New York but in past years a Vermont resident close by the Nearings’ domain. “The trust-funders (I always call them country fakes) are an old story,” he writes. “We lived in Vermont from 1962-71, a period that saw the rise and sudden disappearance of the hippie homesteaders, all fakes who played poor, as well as the appearance of the first yuppies, most of whom were country fakes, all the traits and attitudes now common in Vermont were common to them then.” He goes on to describe “Howard and Edith, a nice middle-aged couple who had been taken in by the Nearings and were bitter about it. They were civil servants in Washington in the ‘30’s…and moved to Jamaica, VT, where the Nearings were settled in a circle of their admirers, hoping to live on pennies a day. It didn’t take them long to discover that they were surrounded by fakes pretending to make a living by selling zucchinis and radishes while pocketing checks from various non-rustic sources…” and so on.

The Profit Myth

As you read (or maybe hear, first-hand) such commentaries you doubtless note that it isn’t the part-time nature of small-scale farming (indeed, unless you’re cultivating a high-value botanical with five large and two small leaves, your efforts are extremely unlikely to generate adequate household income, and therefore, almost inescapably, demand some sort of non-farm subsidy) which excites such antipathy; it’s the pretense of an ecologically pure full-time profitability which, presumably, if you were as gifted as they, you could emulate. In harsh economic fact, there’s nothing to emulate because the numbers in small- and medium-scale agriculture just don’t work unless you’re growing a super-high-value (probably illegal) crop; marketing, probably direct, to an up-scale consumer base able and willing to furnish their own harvest labor and pay premium prices to boot; exploiting a newly-opened niche during that brief time interval before it becomes over crowded (think emu-ranching); or engaging in the high-stakes but occasionally profitable pursuit of genetic advancement in registered breeding stock producing a few very high-value offspring.

There was, of course, resentment of the few “gentleman farmers;” 19th century railroad industrialists like the Billings’ in Woodstock and the Webb’s in Shelburne and Charlotte, whose Vermont neighbors, while farming profitably, couldn’t afford the showplace barns and lavish labor invested in cutting-edge livestock operations they couldn’t possibly match.

And there was equally similar resentment of the industrialists of the early 20th century, who spent urban corporate profits on similar showplace operations through the Roaring Twenties, only to close them down during the succeeding Great Depression, which explains how Goddard College in Plainfield arose from the abandonment of an earlier dairy operation which bequeathed even its silos for (circular) office space. But none of these entrepreneurs, most of them speculating on the auction value of registered dairy stock in a highly sophisticated tax-loss economic environment, made any pretense at being either full-timers or poor. No fakes, to use the succinct Gardner label; and therefore, from what I can read (I wasn’t around at the time to observe and record) none of the visceral dislike which the Nearings and their peers seem to have stirred up.

In Contempt

And what about the concept of part-time farming itself? It’s somewhat unusual in the spectrum of occupational opportunities: you certainly don’t read of part-time railroad magnates, stockbrokers, or dentists working overtime at other jobs so they afford to play at any of the above roles. But you certainly do read, if you follow the vast quantity of available statistics, of the historically large numbers of part-timers in one niche of agriculture or another, typically subsidizing their chosen avocation with revenues from elsewhere, because most part-time farming can’t be economically self-sustaining no matter how well executed. So the answer to the “PTF stand-up” question is probably imagined as larger-than-ever-before numbers of folks determined to give it their best shot.

In other words, what’s coming to pass on a larger scale than either of them could have envisioned, is the Jefferson or Ford part-timer notion. In Henry’s words, a citizenry with “one foot in industry and the other on the land.” And, with such trends as the growth of the information and communication sectors and self-employment, are even more widespread now than when he first spoke of it.

Martins Harris is an architect, columnist, and former “Part Time Farmer.”