Time was, not long ago, that most people in the United States had a direct relationship to farming.

Just three generations ago, at least one-third of the population was living on farms. Most of the rest had grandparents or a relative that farmed, and they bought directly from or spent time on a working farm during some part of their lives.

Not so, today. A steady decline in the number of people on farms - an average of half a million people a year for more than forty years - has meant that, now, less than 2 percent of the U.S. population is engaged in farming. With that decline in numbers has come an increase in the average age of U.S. farmers - 56 years old - with fewer young people entering farming as an occupation.

What's more stunning is that most Americans today will never set foot on a farm during their lives, even though most of them will eat three meals a day made up of farm products. The closest they'll ever get to where their food comes from may be the produce section where they shop.

The rise of community-based farming in the last 20 years has begun to reverse these trends, and also has given rise to a new breed of farmers. These new farmers may be young but not necessarily so, and they are not typically following a traditional path, such as attending an ag school or taking over the family farm. They may never have participated in 4-H or joined the Farm Bureau, and may never have driven a tractor in their lives.

What distinguishes these farmers is that they are growing almost exclusively for local markets, and they have developed a strong community ethic that roots them in their hometowns in a way that hasn't been seen in this country for a long, long time.

Rather than selling to distant markets and being subject to the vagaries of price and demand fluctuations that can spell boom one year and bust the next, they are finding a stable niche selling high-quality, often organically grown produce to their neighbors.

Farmstands, Farmers' Markets, and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms have proliferated, bringing fresh, locally grown food to communities all across the country. These new markets mean the difference between success and failure for most small farms.

Nevada County is following this trend. In the past five years, several new farms have been established, and a vital new interest in locally grown food has fueled a rising demand for the county's farm-grown products that hardly existed a few years ago.

My wife, Jo McProud, and I are not traditional farmers in any sense of the term. Neither of us attended ag school, and neither of us inherited a working farm complete with all the infrastructure needed to grow our crops. I did have the good fortune of working on a large organic farm for three years many years ago, an experience that had everything to do with my decision to farm on my own at Riverhill Farm in 2001 at the age of 44.

Today, we grow up to 50 different crops in a season on 5 acres. Rather than traveling the average of 1,500 miles that most produce in this country travels to reach its market, most of our products sell at the farm and at Grass Valley's Thursday night Mill Street Market.

Best of all, the folks who buy our produce are neighbors we pass on the road, shopkeepers we buy from in town, teachers who've taught our children, librarians from the county library, and even the young barista who serves us coffee where we stop after we've delivered a load of produce to the locally owned grocery store.

We employ as many as eight people, mostly young, who help with the work. In a season, several of these are interns who are considering whether they want to farm on their own. There's a tremendous enthusiasm nationwide among young people for community-based farming, and they're spending their summers working on farms to gain experience.

This season, one of our interns is a recent graduate from Smith College in Massachusetts, another recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and a third is an owner of a collective bakery in the Bay Area.

All three of them are women. In quite a few areas of the country, almost 50 percent of new farmers are women.

Our experience of farming in Nevada County and selling locally is a hugely positive one, and we're encouraged that we can make a modest living farming and that the community has embraced our farm. Our hope is that the interest in local food will develop and mature into an abiding feature of the local economy that will last for generations and preserve the important farmlands that still exist in Nevada County.

Next month's article will feature the work going on this spring at Riverhill Farm as we prepare for this farm season.



Alan Haight farms with his wife, Jo McProud, at Riverhill Farm in Nevada City. For more information about Riverhill Farm, go to riverhillfarm.com. For more information about Nevada County farms, go to localfoodcoalition.org.