In New York City you might find Williamsburg hipsters moving out to the suburbs for their own plots of land, transforming trucker hats and work boots from ironic to just plain practical. In San Francisco, neo-hippies and former tech workers buy a plot outside of town to get closer to the land, the ultimate expression of the locavore movement. Here on Florida’s Gulf Coast, the move from suburb to rural can be more a quest for jobs than a philosophical expression.
But farming, it turns out, is more than just tossing seeds into ground and waiting for food. The learning curve is steep and the cost of entry is high. What’s a young farm entrepreneur to do?
Enter the Florida West Coast Resource, Conservation & Development Council. Last year, this non-profit opened Geraldson Farm, a Manatee County-funded Community Supported Agriculture project. With one project under its belt, the RC&D is looking to get back to the basics by encouraging other local farming wannabes to get into the act.
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2009.