DURHAM, NC – April 2, 2026 – Lee Miller (Duke Law School) introduces research interviewing 30 Orange County farmers to understand why people become farmers and what support could make farming a viable livelihood as climate disruption worsens and farms consolidate. He highlights an archetype he calls the “post-capitalist entrepreneur,” farmers who redefine success beyond profit, turn transactions into relationships, collaborate rather than compete, and join broad knowledge networks, while still making tough business decisions. Panelists Vera Fabian of 10 Mothers Farm (a one-acre, year-round farm serving 325 CSA families) and rural development agent Mike Ortoski discuss the difficulty of farming, burnout, and the role of crises like COVID in revealing supply-chain fragility and boosting demand for local food. Vera explains how the CSA model reduces risk, builds loyalty, and enables financial transparency, and both discuss co-ops, aggregation, and institutional purchasing as paths forward, alongside questions about health insurance, training costs, and equity in access to local food, including subsidized CSA ideas via employer benefits.
Transcript
Lee Miller: So, thanks for being here. We’re going to try and keep this pretty informal. I think I have to talk a little bit about this research that we did, because that was the point of this gathering. But I should say my name is Lee Miller. I teach food law and policy at the Law school and the Nicholas School. I do want to thank Christina Ferrari from the Duke Campus Farm for organizing this event, and Mike Ortoski and Vera Fabian who are our panelists. We have a real-life farmer and like a real-life person who’s doing community economic development, rural development work who I’m a big fan of, and so this is like a great chance for you to get to ask them questions. I promise I won’t monopolize all their time.
If we know farms are so important, How do we get more farmers?
Let me start by just talking a little bit about this research project that we did over the past couple of years. It really came out of this idea that climate disruption is here. It’s only getting worse and that if communities that we are a part of, that we care about, are going to survive and even thrive, that local food systems – really robust, thriving local food systems – are going to be a key part of what it means to impact the world and be happy in the decades to come. And there’s lots of reasons for that, right? Those of you who are already in food, in farming know how important local food systems are for social security and for health; and the sort of growing recognition that food is medicine or food should replace medicine. It’s important from a climate resilience perspective, drought, and flood and all the ways that we manage land. Affect the ways that river floods or doesn’t flood in downtown Durham. And also, the stuff that that Mike is really committed to working on, which is just the role of especially small farms, small and midsize farms in knitting together rural communities. And all of the things that can come out of that. So that kind of led me and a couple other people to this very simple question, which is if we know farms are so important how do we get more farmers?
We need more farms. We need more farms, and then we need more farmers. That’s like actually not something that everyone agrees with, right? The trend in the United States and certainly globally is that we have fewer farmers farming on fewer farms, fewer smaller farms. We’re headed to where it’s just Vera sitting on a single tractor farming the entire landscape of the United States, right? Those are the policies that we’ve designed. That is the world that we live in. You know, we’ve lost a million farms in the past century, right? That’s the world we’re moving into. I don’t want to live in that world. I don’t think most of you want to live in that world. I want to live in a world that is, you drive through the rural areas around Durham and you see thriving farms and thriving communities. And they’re all sending their food to the farmer’s market and into the Duke dining Hall and into the grocery stores. And that’s going to require a lot more farms and a lot more farmers.
So, this research was like, okay, let’s start with what kind of nut job is who’s becoming a farmer in 2026, right? Who is setting out to actually do this work? And what can we understand about who those people are and what their motivations are? And then more importantly, like how can we make this a viable path for a lot more people? To realize sort of my vision of a thriving local food system, we probably need 10 times as many farmers as we have right now. We need a lot more people are doing the kind of care work that Vera wakes up and does every day.
Criteria for Farmer Interviews
Key Research Questions:
- What can we understand by talking to farmers about why they become farmers?
- And then what kind of support would actually enable this to be possible for more people?
I’m not totally naive. I don’t think you can flip the switch or I can do a research project. We know that the sort of structural issues that are consolidating American agriculture, that are consolidating the system, are very real and it has to be treated as such. But we can start with this question of where do we go from here? And so over the past year or so, we started in Orange County. Next door to where I lived, where Vera lived, where Mike works. Great local food scene like Durham, right? Lots of small local farms. And we said, okay, we’re going to try and interview as many of the farmers as we can in Orange County who meet some very basic criteria: they’re growing real food. Food that you can pick up and eat or slaughter and eat. Growing real food. Not growing commodity corn to put into a feed lot, right? Growing real food for the people of our community doesn’t, you know, you like ship some somewhere if you want, but a lot of the food is being eaten here. And who are trying to make a living. Trying to make a livelihood doing that. Maybe they’re succeeding, maybe they’re not. But their goal is not I’m a hobby farmer, right? I didn’t want to interview people like me who are doing it like as a lifestyle. We wanted to interview people who are doing it because this is what they wanted to do with their lives. Because if we’re going to get 10 times as many of them, we need them to be able to make a living doing it.
Archetype: Post-capitalist Entrepreneur Farmers
We interviewed 30 farmers. And what I want to talk about a little bit is one of the archetypes that we identified. And I think Vera fits this archetype pretty well, which is the archetype of the post-capitalist entrepreneur. So these are people with what I would describe as post-capitalist values. They didn’t get into farming to make a lot of money. But they’re entrepreneurs in the sense that they are some of the most incredible business people that you have ever met. They have figured out how to make what should basically be an impossible business work. And have created a life and a livelihood around doing this thing that is caring for the land and growing food for their community. And being in a relationship with the animals that they depend on and that we all depend on. And we wanted to distinguish sort of the post capitalist entrepreneur. They’re not back-to-the-landers, right? Like nothing wrong with back-to-the-landers, but back-to-the-landers are removing themselves from society in some really fundamental way. They’re saying like, I’m not this shit. We’re making our commune, we’re doing our thing and we’re not going to participate in this society that you built that we don’t agree with. And it’s also not like the sort of triple bottom line social entrepreneur mentality either accepts capitalism and its premises at its face and then says, yeah, we can make money and do good at the same time, and we can do both of those things and there’s not really a conflict between them. I think that the post-capitalist entrepreneur, the farmers that we identified have this other idea. That they’re not opting out of the system. They’re trying to create a life within it, and to do so in a way that like really looks ahead at a different vision of what the world could look like. But still makes all of the hard-nosed decisions that are required to make a farm work in 2026, right?
The other professor who was here when we were doing this research is now at UNC-Chapel Hill. She’s a sociologist, Kerilyn Schewel, and we’re writing a paper based on this idea. If you’re interested, I can circulate. Just get in touch; I’ll send you a draft.
Characteristic – Redefining Success
But basically, what we found was that these folks are doing a couple of things, not doing all of them but for the most part they’re making a couple of key decisions. And the first is that they’re redefining success. This kinda has a triple bottom line feel to it. They’re not they’re defining success not simply by their ability to make money. Keeping your head above water is like obviously a precondition for continuing to farm. But it’s not the purpose of the business. Things like soil health and family wellbeing. Vera and I, on the way over here, were talking about this barn that they’re thinking about putting on the farm. And I was like, what are you going to do with the barn? And it’s not going to make us any more money, but it is going to make our lives easier in X, Y, Z way. It’s going to make us more comfortable. That’s the kind of thinking that a lot of these farmers are doing.
Characteristic – Relationship Focused
They turn a lot of transactions into relationships. I remember one of the first things that Mike told me was that good farming is at its core relational. It’s not about trying to extract the lowest price from the person who’s selling you the drip tape or the seeds or whatever. It’s about being in long-term relationships with the people both upstream and downstream. With your customers and with the other farmers who, in a capitalist system, you would certainly see yourself in competition with, but in this kind of farming you’re not necessarily. You’re collaborating instead of competing. And then you’re staying rooted, but in a cosmopolitan way. I think the best example of this is that a lot of these farmers participate in these sort of national knowledge networks, right? They’re online, they’re on the phone, they’re on Instagram. Whatever. They’re getting a lot of their information and they’re sharing a lot of information way beyond the cons, like the boundaries, the geographic boundaries in which they exist. Even if their market is Orange and Durham County, they’re participating in a much wider sort of knowledge network and community outside of that. And those are all things that together represent I think a different way of organizing economic life. Certainly, life on the farm compared to the paradigm that I think we’re all familiar with. Or if we’re not familiar with what I would call like the industrial paradigm.
Discussion
What else do I want to say about this? Basically, what was important, what I loved about this research, is that what emerged is a different way of doing farming which is happening, and it didn’t come from policy. These are seeds that are being planted by real people. But that there’s very obviously ways in which institutions like Duke University as like a major purchaser, essentially as a government entity in this region, right? And the actual institutions of local government: Orange County, the city of Chapel Hill, Durham. There’s a ton of things that they can do, and that Mike has been a real leader in making these kinds of farms more viable, making these lives more viable. The reality is that Vera is an exception. Vera and Gordon, who rent their farm 10 Mothers, they’re an exception to the rule that this kind of farming just can’t work. It can’t happen. It doesn’t pencil out. They’re an exception and the other farmers who we interviewed who have made it work, they’re rather extraordinary, right? It takes a pretty extraordinary person or group of people to be a post-capitalist entrepreneur. To really maintain the values of community health and reciprocity and kindness and relationship building. All of these things, and still to have a successful farm, which is never an easy thing to do. Even if you were just focused on making money.
And so, when we talk about needing so many more people who are able to be called to this, to farming as a vocation, we can’t say, well, what we need is to find 10 times as many Veras and Gordons, because those people don’t exist. There aren’t 10 times as many of them. What we need is to create a world in which ordinary people can be called to farm and who can make a livelihood doing it in a way that is good for the land and is good for the rest of us. And is able to rebuild the fabric of rural communities that we all depend on, even as people who may never step outside of our urban bubble.
Okay, so I’m going to get off my soapbox. But that is what a lot of our research has been about. On the one hand, it was going out talking to farmers and finding out who they are and why they do this crazy thing, and learning as much as we could about who they are and their motivations. And then this other part, which is the public policy part, which is really saying what are the policies that local governments and local institutions can put into practice that make this a viable path for more people?
I used to spend all my time working on federal farm policy. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s like a cluster fuck, right? It’s certainly not meant to help the kinds of farms or farmers that that this project was interested in. I mean, you can’t even get crop insurance, right? It’s an insanity. But local institutions and local governments absolutely can do things. It’s our local institutions and local governments that stand to benefit from a thriving local food system. A lot of our research you can check on the website that we set up for this project is really about what can local government do.
Website link: https://wfpc.sanford.duke.edu/resilient-communities-built-on-farmer-flourishing/
Panelist Vera Fabian, Ten Mothers Farm
I’m Vera and my husband and I run Ten Mothers Farm, along with a team of awesome farmers who are employees. We’re in Cedar Grove, which is like half an hour from here, north of Hillsborough. And we farm. I’m trying to think of what is most useful for you all. We farm on a very, very small scale, and we produce a lot of food in that small scale. So, we grow on essentially one acre of land. For this year we have 325 CSA families that we are packing these in boxes for starting next week. And we grow year-round which is challenge in this climate under the best of circumstances and getting harder. This is our 11th year in business and neither of us grew up on farms. We both got into farming at our universities in situations like this and like fell in love with food and cooking. And then we met each other, and our first conversation was about how we wanted to learn. But had no idea how we were going to do it and how we were both sort of terrified. And then we like spent five years building our relationship and like working up the courage to leave our city jobs and work for other farms and yeah. The rest of history. And it’s fun. It’s always fun to like to come and speak to students. I mean, we have a lot of students reach out to the farm. I know some of you have done that. It just feels full circle because, Yeah, I got into this as a student. So, it feels like important to give back.
Panelist Mike Ortoski, Orange County, NC, Assistant Extension Agent
My name’s Mike Ortoski. I’m actually native of Durham. Ortoski is a Southern name. Mom and dad moved down here before I was born. But my background is in environmental science, agriculture. I double majored at NC State in Ag and animal science. Worked for USDA for a while, had my federal employment, went back to the College of Design, got a degree in landscape architecture. Started the company. Not about ornamental design. It was about stream restoration, equipment, litigation, that sort of thing. And we built that up to a number of years. 2008 crash happened. I downsized it from 60 people in five offices to 20 people in one office. I made a lot of friends during that time. But it’s still a business. I sold out a few years ago and kind of went back to my passion of agriculture. Sort of all the worn out terms of sustainability and resilience and all that sort of thing that current administration, listen like, but that’s another story. So right now, I am working with NC State Property Extension as a Community Rural Development Agent in Orange County. And, late in life and I’m finishing a Doctor of Design program. Be doing my defense in about three weeks. But my passion has been about the land and the relationship we have with it. And agriculture is probably the most intimate and direct relationship we have with the earth. Like the terrestrial part of the planet, whether it’s industrial or small scale. And the changes I’ve seen in my life is like when I was a kid, the thing that got me into this world was I grew up in a 900 square foot house. Three-bedroom, one bath, no air conditioning. So, when you want to be punished, you stayed inside and rest of the time you were outside. I think it’s kind of reversed today; this connection that we have with the landscape was sort of innate in those days. And probably half the kids I went to high school with were farmer kids that grew on the farm. But over the years I’ve seen that disconnection grow and whether it’s political or physical or in a car or social media or whatever, we’ve become disconnected from the planet and ourselves. I’ll be retiring in about three months, so part of what I’m going to do is a podcast, and some people will be guests on chat show. But to talk about what I call the actual… people talk about the environment of nature. It’s like, eh, we’ve externalized it. It’s the actual world. One of the things that keeps me grounded is no matter what’s happening here or on in MCNBC or CNN, Fox, whatever, the actual world out there is the one that’s still functioning. And it happens to me, it’s about who we are when we are and where we’re. And most of us are a little uncomfortable with that, who we are. I’m a heterotroph. I don’t know how many of you know what that is, but… it’s everybody in here is. And so it’s about being an actual human, which is an animal and a heterotroph. There are two basic trophic levels: autotroph, heterotroph. And Autotrophs are plants that grow, and they produce their own energy of their own self, and there’s trees and their corn plants. An autotroph consumes its energy and pushes entropy away by consuming things that heterotrophs eat. And that’s the reality of who we are. And I was just fascinated. We launched four people going to the moon and I was like, really? Going to the moon? Who’s going to go around and come back? I’m like, don’t just park it and took a shot of down here. We did a 1969, but it’s where we are is like five miles up, five miles down, you’re not going to survive. It is like just kind of a realization in the real system that we’re realizing where we are, who we are, when we are, and sort of going from there.
The last thing I would talk about is one of the questions was about how do you change things? And in my lifetime, change in before my lifetime comes from, I think, two things. One is a really powerful story or a crisis. And how old were most of y’all during COVID? Like middle school, junior high, whatever, high school, whatever. So, COVID was a crisis that upended the food system and there were two basic supply chains. One that Sysco and others that said food to restaurants and all sorts of, and the other were Harris Teeter and Food Lions and had their own trucks and they were grocery. So, what happened was when COVID came, politically and institutionally, we shut down a lot of the public places. So that kind of stopped. And then everybody ran to the grocery stores and over shopped, and they were not able to meet the demand. And the other folks did not have demand, and they were out of business temporarily. And for us, we have a grant account we got so couple weeks ago we had about 150 grant recipients. People like that were overwhelmed with demand for food didn’t matter if was local or anything else. They wanted to buy, they couldn’t find it in Harris Teeter or Food Lion. But the good news of that is those streams kind of overlapped and helped one another to move forward beyond that, instead of the two distinct supply chains. One for instance was Food Lion for a while. It’s like we need get regional food. So, maybe still, Food Lion was the number one regional buyer of food in North Carolina. Walmart’s been replaced by Costco is the number one retailer of organic fruits and vegetables, whatever that might mean. But the truth is, that supply chain and that market and that demand, our values drive demand and demand drives response. People like Gordon and Vera, who are exemplary farmers at that scale, are able to supply some of that. They can’t supply food from everybody in Orange County or the Triangle, obviously. But the truth is, during COVID during the crisis, people immediately recognized the value of somebody producing it right down the road on two or three acres or whatever. We have not managed the pretty farm, which is in Greater Farm Hillsborough. We have two or three farmers out there, one of which grows on two acres, and they grow all the lot on two acres of production. They grow year-round in high tunnel greenhouse. But it’s huge intense production on a very small piece. So, the difference between the polarity between a farm at that size and a five-thousand-acre corn/soybean farm in Sampson County, that’s sort of the industrial scale is where I find it fascinating. Because when I was growing up in Durham, it was tobacco. Now downtown Durham was all Liggett & Myers, American tobacco, blah, blah blah. So, trying to go to American Tobacco Campus’ benches say no smoking the whole place was built around some tobacco one time. But I guess what I’m saying is coming back to the reality of what it takes for us to eat and be alive is a real thing. And whether it comes from Costco, where it comes from a series of local farms that gets food way better, there is where we’re at. And how do we make that happen? Which is really appreciate Lee’s initiative in all this. It’s like what does that mean and how does that change, and can we change? Or is it just a slow, your progression of values changing, demand change, response change.
Lee Miller: Vera, in my opening remarks, I made a lot of claims about how you care about more than making money. And maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. But is it true? And if you care about other things, how do you think about like what is profitability and tension, but in your own mind?
Vera Fabian – I mean, yes, obviously we would’ve gotten other jobs if we just wanted to make money. And yes, there is like definitely a lot of tension. I mean, I would say especially more in our startup. Between what our values were and we need to make the numbers work. I feel like now we’ve worked through a lot of those problems, and we’re also making tension. Like I think if the tension was just like overwhelming, we probably would’ve quit and done something easier. I think that like we’re, and I think that all of the people that work for us too, like this is something we talk about while we’re harvesting. We’re all interested in like alternatives to capitalism and sort of like what’s going to happen in the future. You know, it’s fascinating to think about sort of like, okay, how do we run this business within the system that we’re in and make a living doing it and not totally compromise our values? And so, I think it’s a challenge that is interesting to us. And then the other thing I would say is like the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model has also really helped with that tension because, do y’all know about CSAs? It is like, sort of, an alternative economic structure. I mean, basically 25 families who all signed up in January for the main season CSA. We won’t go into the nuts and bolts of it, but basically, they became members of the farm and they pay to receive a box of vegetables from us every week. So instead of going to the farmer’s market where like you work all week and bring all these things and you have no idea, it might, maybe it rains and people don’t show up and you don’t sell everything. We have like a guaranteed market for our vegetables every single week. We know at the beginning of the year how much money we’re going to make. We know we can pay our employees this much. So it removes a lot of the risk from what is a very risky business. And it also changes the relationship between us and the customer. So instead of somebody just coming and you know, spending $10 with us, it’s more of a commitment. Most of our CSA members have been with us, some of ’em have been with us for 11 years. And a lot of them have stuck with us for years. And I feel, it’s funny because we don’t necessarily even meet all of our CSA members in person the way we do it, but I feel like a connection to them because of their loyalty to us. And because of yeah, I don’t know, it’s a special relationship. And so, I think and also just like the economics of it, you know, every year we kind of like put together a budget for the coming year and we look at what a living wage is for the next year and what are seed costs going to be and that sort of thing. And we put together the budget, we set the price for the CSA, and then we share our budget with our members as a way of sort of like letting them know like, Hey, we’re not just like getting rich off of your membership. And I think that it’s pretty inspiring. I mean, it continues to be inspiring to me that like we can have that kind of economic relationship with our farm.
Mike Ortoski – Yeah, and I would say that’s a rare thing and that creates trust and relationship. Because Costco’s not going to share their books with you, you know? So anyway, point is that is an amazing thing.
Lee Miller – On your retirement, like, how’s it all going?
Mike Ortoski – How’s it all going? I have moments of extraordinary optimism and then moments of like we’re not going to make it a species, to be honest with you.
Lee Miller – Let’s talk about the optimistic side.
Mike Ortoski – I think that, again, it comes back to who we are. I think people desire the relationship, to know where the food comes from. I know that organic has been a big thing for a long time, and I’m not beating up on organic with a lot of administrativia that goes along with that. But I think when somebody sees a family and they know they can trust them, they say, well, we’re not we’re getting certified.
Vera Fabian – We’re not. You don’t need to be because of that.
Mike Ortoski – But because they say we’re doing an organic fashion and they know. So local, I would say, is trumping with organic. And it’s not that organic’s a bad thing, it’s all good. But people are doing it anyway. But you don’t have to go through all USDA. So, the optimism for me is that. We have 150 grant recipients that are also on farms in Orange County, and all of them are doing… and I will say this we have a couple folks and I did a small farm in Saxahapaw, NC, so that basically it as a model. Farming is a way of life, not a lifestyle. It’s a way of life. It’s not a job. You go to three to five, you’re in it. And if anybody has ever known anybody in dairy as an example, you ask, you didn’t take any vacations, you know. It’s like that’s what you did every day, every night, every, every day. And not ever, not ever do you do take vacations. But not everyone wants that or can do that, frankly. At the Breeze Farm we have for example, three and four incubator farmers and I would say four out of five want to lease or buy land and so forth and leave there. Which is great. But the other 20%, somewhere along July or August, they’re like, I’m not doing farming. You know, and that’s just as valuable for them to understand that. But I have to say, and not because Vera is here, but the people of the land that do this as a way of life. Raising a child that’s going to grow up in that. That’s huge for, getting back… it’s not back to the land, like, you know, we’re just going to plan a cabin here and do things. But it’s the reality of connecting with the earth and one another and yourself that I think all of us inherently, we desire. And we’ve come so far away from it. Social media, our houses, our cars. We’re running, working back and forth. I live in Wake Forest and traveling to Hillsborough a few more months. And people are crazy between here and there, in fact. But we’re [shell in our, what I call exoskeletons, a bug in our armor of our car. We dunno each other, we dunno each other on this. We have this distance, and I think we’re coming to a, I think, it’s a dark side, but we’re coming to a transition where again, it’s crisis or story. When I say story, I’m thinking of things like Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac or Rachel Carson, Silent Springs. Not that that book just changes the world, but it was at the time after World War II and they’re like, there’s land. They are poisoning everything. DT and that sort of stuff. So, every now and then somebody does something that sort of throws the switch a little bit. And the other thing is like COVID. We go, oh, where does our food really come from? You know, we’re all sitting in line over in Chapel Hill restaurants. Get together and you buy something. Go through the line and pick it up. That I liked that outcome from COVID because it’s like, wow, now I know that here’s something I know whose stuff is grown. Big parks were overrun in Orange County, you know, River State Park. They were just trampled by people getting out on the land. I think that we’re coming to a crisis or story and a lot of you here will be a part of that in a positive way that can help turn that corner. Because I honestly think, I shouldn’t say this, but I think the American dream, that was like World War II. Everybody’s going to house bigger house you can’t sustain. And so having a life that you back into that it’s enough, you know, I think it’s, it’s probably where we’re headed. But I think honestly, the life sufficiency and that sort of stuff is going to be much more connected. I think between crisis and story, that’s what we’re at.
Audience Q&A
Question: I have been farming on a 30-year vegetable farm in the past five. And then the reason I came to Duke is because I was so frustrated with this idea of everyone talking about sustainable farming, regenerative farming, but like farming that way isn’t sustainable if you don’t have people that want to do the work. And it’s not sustainable if the lifestyle isn’t sustainable. And I looked around and I was like, no one who’s doing this. Living a life where I feel like I can do that. There’s no health insurance, there’s no retirement fund in New York, that minimum wage doesn’t apply to farmers. And no one was talking about it. And so, I came here because I was like, well, I want to work on these issues. And then, you know, there was like one standby fellowship around like Ag policy. I didn’t even get an interview. I have five years farming in New York. And I was like, what is it going to take for farmers to be at the table? And even in the next school, I feel like people talk about, oh, a farmer only knew about like cover crops and no-till. And it’s like, we know, but like it’s fucking hard. And my friend worked for you last season, like she couldn’t even finish the season because of what it was doing to her body. Yeah. And like, thank God she’s not 26 yet. She was able to be on her parents’ insurance. But so many of my friends like don’t have that. And then they like hurt themselves and it’s pretty dangerous. And even when I had to go to like urgent care, like when I’m smart. And I got handed a 6,000 bill. It was like, what, what am I supposed to do now? Because when you take your body out and you can’t do the work anymore either. And so I’m just like… so, you know, I came here because I wanted to like work on that. And yet I feel like no one’s talking about like the sustainability of farming for people who want to do regenerative Ag. And on top of that it’s like, how do you train these people? Because I worked in a farm that’s like training farmers and I felt like I was setting them up for this lifestyle that I was like, I don’t even see how I’m going to do this. And it’s so expensive to train people to farm. Like, I don’t know how you ask, you know, we were a non-profit farm and it cost us, I mean, our budget said it’s like $80,000 per person per year. And we weren’t paying them that much, but we were paying them well for like being a participant farmer. So, I just, I don’t know if there’s a question there as much as just like I’m just like frustrated and I feel like we’re not talking about it enough. So yeah.
Mike Ortoski – I would say that it’s a great point because you look at data, EPA data, USDA data, CDA data, even big farms, most farms, the household income’s not coming from farming. Doesn’t matter, 5,000 acres or small. And from like this, it does come in from farming. And that should be a great T-shirt- she put that out – it’s fucking hard. It is. But, and that’s where the general population doesn’t understands and how important it’s because, and if there’s demand for food appears. You can make a living doing that. That’s a model that can expand from there. I still think we’re in for some reality that people haven’t seen that I guess is the way to put it. And even everything that happening in the world, fuel costs, fertilizer going way up, fuel costs are going way up. That just can’t keep happening.
Vera Fabian – I thank you so much for saying that and yeah, I mean I definitely was like, oh, someone who gets it. And we could talk for like the next hour about that alone. I mean, I feel like what is useful to say Gordon and I definitely were very aware going into farming of the risk of burnout, of just like how fucking hard it is. And so, I think we went into it very clearheaded and spent a lot of time talking to farmers about what they did to prevent the collapse for now. And I think we like started our farm with a lot of intention around how to make it actually financially. Yeah, I hate using the word sustainable because it feels like a false term at this point, but like financially sustainable. Sustainable for like, essentially like what was going to lead to a life that felt like, okay, we can actually keep doing this for the rest of our lives. And I feel like it took, oh, it took years to get there. I think I mean also I could talk a lot about the impact of having a child. If people are interested in this, I could go into a lot of detail about the goals, what that looked like for us. But by year five there was a big turning point in terms of how much we were able to pay ourselves, how much we would pay our employees, how many hours we were working. The first five years were really hard. And then it definitely got dramatically easier after that. And then I think, I’m trying to remember, maybe it was year six, like we had a little bit of easiness and we had a child and that was like a whole step back. But I feel like, I mean, it’s hard for me to even hear myself saying this, but I do feel like now it’s sustainable. And I think for our employees it’s, I mean, more as an interesting example. But I think overall it’s somewhat sustainable for our employees. Like we pay them a living wage. I’d like to be able to pay them more. But I do think, and this is another discussion, I think like many people would look at how much Gordon and I make and be like, how are you surviving? But we’re fine. Our quality of life is great. We don’t need to make more money. I think a lot of people’s ideas are how much money they have to make are maybe based on too much. You have to figure out what’s enough for you and make that work. And if it matters to you, you’ll figure it out. But anyway, the point is I do think it’s possible to get there. I think most people would not be willing to go through the years of like hardship to get there. And also I do think like maybe we’re a little bit extraordinary, like I’m not saying that as a bragging, I say it more as like a sadness. I wish it was more ordinary. Like we’ve been lucky in certain ways. We have some privileges. And I’m like happy to be very transparent. Again, if anyone wants to go into more detail about this, I share all of our finances so freely because I think we need to talk about this. Like anytime we have groups out to the farm. You need to talk about the numbers, and you need to talk about like the things people don’t talk about because otherwise, young people who are interested in farming are going to be like, no, not for me. I do think, yes, we all need to be talking about it more. I think that unfortunately for people who are interested in farming, definitely need to talk about it. Most people don’t care about farming and are just like not thinking about it and won’t think about it until there’s a reason that they have to think about it. So, you know, people who are in our CSA are special and in a minority. People who choose to think about these things and care about it and put their money there. Most people are just like, I just want the cheapest food. Until there’s a crisis where suddenly they’re like, oh shit, where does my food come from? I mean we have so much demand for our CSA we have a wait list. Like I do feel hope that like the story and people wanting connection and wanting food to taste good. I feel hopeful about that. But I feel like on a bigger scale, I do think it’s going to take like a crisis to make more people care about these things and like sort of policy. Ultimately policy’s going to have to change if we want more people to actually be able to farm and have it be sustainable and not like so hard to get started.
Mike Ortoski – So, can I ask you a question? Like Brian, Anna, other people like that saying who are 30, 40, 50, 60, whatever, what are your thoughts on vertical integration? Because people like in Italy and Ireland and other places, a lot of co-ops that are now built. Geez and everything else, and that has solved everything. But we’re not there yet.
Vera Fabian – Oh, I think that’s definitely where we have to go.
Mike Ortoski – That way ultimately when y’all are 20 years older, then you already have your businesspeople and you have the experience and you’ve got a pyramid scheme.
Vera Fabian – Starting out, we were like romantic about growing everything. We liked to eat. It was ridiculous. And quickly we were like, we can’t grow all of these things. And we asked Ross and Jillian, whose farm is like just down the road from us, if they would grow sweet potatoes for us because we don’t have enough land and we also don’t have a tractor. It didn’t make sense to grow sweet potatoes. So, they were like, sure we’ll produce sweet potatoes. And over the last four or five years of working with them, we have expanded that relationship to where they now grow a number of crops for us. And we pay them a better price than they would get selling wholesale. Our CSA members get a wider variety of things to eat. We can expand our membership. Jillian and Ross don’t want to run a CSA, it’s not their strength. So, it’s kind of like this sweet mutual relationship with a neighboring farm that has allowed them to stay in business and thrive and reach some of their goals. It’s allowed us to stay in business and thrive. And I do think that like the future is definitely more farms working together in various ways. And if you look at, yeah, there are great examples of this in other places of co-ops and I think there are ways that local government and federal government and institutions can like help with that. The formation of those co-ops… I think it’s a lot, it puts a lot on farmer. You know, farmers are like stretched thin and luckily we were able to build this relationship with Ross and Jillian. But it would be awesome if somebody else was helping to make those partnerships happen and doing some of the legwork. So yeah, I do think that that is the future.
Mike Ortoski – Are you guys part of the equipment co-op collective?
Vera Fabian – We’re not. I mean we have borrowed, it’s somewhat… but it’s cool.
Mike Ortoski – But there is a share sort of organically grown some business and blah, blah blah. But it’s like several pieces so that everybody’s in that buy with one thing. And you can share that around. I just feel like there’s future in that, because from my perspective, it’s like getting food from point A to point B. That aggregation distribution is key. CSAs are great. It’s the farmer’s market, but it’s limited. And if you could say, we do that, but we can also supply 40% of what we do to a wholesale market. There are140 farmers in Orange County that could do that. Yield’s a little more and there’s like huge potential for institute, like for Duke to be like, oh we need, 300 pounds of arugula. Okay. List here. This person, this another person is going to like to go organize 300 pounds of arugula.
Question: I really appreciate what you shared. I really appreciated what you shared how it is to be entrepreneurial in a specific way and capitalism. I was a lifestyle farmer, hobby farmer, for the last five years while working remotely for Walmart and Kroger on sustainability. And so I feel, you know, and going, pulling weeds in my garden was like my therapy at the end of the day in the field. And so I don’t think I would ever have the guts to tie my income to that work. And I feel ashamed to say that, but that’s just the truth of a chicken. And it feels so hard because…
Lee – No but it’s, that’s the whole point. That’s a policy failure.
Vera Fabian – Yeah. We have to make it so that, because I was you. Like honestly, I definitely was you. And that’s so many people. We need all those people to be like, it can’t require as much courage as it does.
Question continues – But also, we live in this of short term gratification where you could learn, learn, jump jobs. You know, not just about like acquiring money, but like acquiring knowledge and being in a sphere where you feel this kind of, I don’t know, like real intellectual excitement making change right? And like, maybe in some ways a lot of that is a sham and we kid ourselves. But at least for me, I know there’s an [00:42:00] eternal tension between being able to commit and the way that you have, right? Like it seems like starting your firm is like raising a child. You’re making this, you know, decades long commitment and it’s beautiful and it’s wild. But then also like the call of being in the shit storm, a little bit. The call of wanting to be in the policy space, maybe the idea space, on this higher, less grounded level. And so trying to understand like where we make our meeting. And, and the commitment to a specific place, a specific paper, land versus this you know, less grounded way of impact making. So anyways, no question there. Just y’all share.
Question: Oh, I love that. Thank you for sharing. I guess I was thinking about like the CSA model and I think that’s really cool you can plan out. For a primarily impoverished community where people don’t know how or have the means to commute to get a CSA, I guess I’m just kind of curious, like y’all’s thoughts. And I know it probably comes down to policy, but realistically, like how do you make that kind of style of farming actually accessible to more people besides just a lot of white people in a really rich rural area.
Vera Fabian – I feel like that’s a great example of starting out. I thought about that a lot because I, before farming, was a school garden and cooking teacher and worked in public schools and poor communities and thought a lot about if we start a farm, like will our food be accessible. Like I definitely thought a lot about it. And then the crush of pressure to like, make a living farming just fairly quickly, forced me to stop thinking about it as much. Because you’re just like, gotta figure out how to make this work, gotta figure out how to make this work. And there’s only so much time and energy in the day. So, I would say I like, sadly, I definitely still think about it. But it’s not as like present as it was when we were starting out. I mean we have a program in our CSA where we call it the sliding scale fund. And basically, CSA members can, if they can afford to, can pitch in a little bit more for than the full price of their share. And then that goes into a pool of money and if anyone needs help paying for their share, we pull from that pool. And we have five families out of the 325 who ask for a sliding scale share. And it’s awesome. It feels really nice to be able to like, help folks out in that way. But it feels like a drop in a much bigger bucket.
Lee Miller – And it’s a systemic issue, right?
Vera Fabian – It’s huge. But I think at this point I’m like, it’s not up to farmers to figure that out. We can barely make things work, and so yeah, it’s discouraging. I mean, it’s super discouraging because you’re like, no one’s going to figure that out. Like who’s figuring that out? But then I do see example, like there are stories of people who are figuring it out. And I, yeah, I would say hopefully there are people who are taking the success stories and figuring out how to scale them. But it is such a huge and complicated thing.
Lee Miller – Scott, do you want to just mention briefly the, as someone who is implementing, I, that’s what I would call a policy solution at a very small scale around subsidizing CSAs.
Scott Brummell – Sure. So, this is in reference to an idea that was brought to the campus farm from the University of Kentucky, which like Duke has with the university and a hospital system attached to it. A few years ago they received some USDA funding to develop a program where they were offering to employees of the university and the hospital CSAs that were subsidized as a benefit through the HR system similar to how Duke currently has benefits for subsidized gym memberships. Seems like a pretty cool idea. I think ticks a lot of boxes in terms of being able to support local economies, local agricultural sustainability. I think also supporting employees and kind of helping address the health issues that were experienced there at University of Kentucky and also here at Duke as well. It’s a really great idea. One that I think we’re trying to advocate for at Duke. I work in the Office of Community Health here, which is a partnership between the university and the hospital system. And we’re trying to get it off the ground.
Lee Miller – That is helpful. And I’m just so glad that you guys came out and I really appreciate it. And can we give a round of applause for Mike and Vera.