Growing up in the 1970s, Steve Smith was made to feel defensive about having chosen to be a farmer. He recalls a high school teacher telling him, “Farming is for people who can’t do anything else.” He recollects the embarrassment he felt even among his Future Farmers of America peers, who tended to have newer farm equipment at home to brag about.
“I was buying into it. I was dreaming about shiny tractors,” he says with a rueful laugh. “I said, ‘You just wait! I’m gonna farm big!’ So I went into debt in 1986 and proceeded to farm as big as I could. I had payments, and the more payments I had the bigger I needed to farm, and the bigger the farm, the more payments.”
But as the debt and the farm got bigger, Smith realized that the rewards were diminishing. “I was wearing out the farm, myself, the equipment.”
His was not an uncommon fate. Small farms across the country were folding. Farmer-philosopher-poet Wendell Berry, who lives not far from the Smiths, in Henry County, called it “a farmer-killing and land-killing economy.” Faced with the prospect of having to take on more debt in order to expand, many small farmers opted for the second half of the “Get big or get out” equation.
But a life disconnected from the land that he’d grown up on was impossible for Smith to contemplate. His grandparents, who came to Kentucky during the Great Depression and managed to raise ten children there despite the economic desperation of the era, had used draft horses to plow the land. His parents modernized somewhat with the times, but they remained what Smith describes as “good small-farm advocates.” He has strong, positive memories of the harvests of his childhood, when kin would gather to bring in the crops and put up the produce for the winter. He, his cousins, and his siblings groused about the work. But, he says, “we liked feeling useful, we liked the security of being together, of being united by important work. And we liked the tomato fights.”
Seeing no answers in the future, Smith began to look to the past, to consider how it was that his grandparents had made the same farm work in an earlier era of hard times. Crop diversity, rotation, sustainable practices—these all made sense to Smith and were methods he knew he could replicate. But he also saw that his grandparents’ success had been due to more than good agricultural practices. As he thought about the kin who had pitched in to plant and harvest, as he recalled the system of barter with neighbors and townsfolk that allowed farmers to trade the crops they had in abundance for things they might lack, he realized that it wasn’t fertilizer or big tractors that had made his grandparents’ farm thrive, it was community.
These days, you can find Smith’s community any Thursday from late April to the end of November in the parking lot of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, in a bustling Louisville neighborhood. There, some of the 85 families who are shareholders in Smith’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) cooperative gather to swap recipes and stories and meander along rows of fresh produce, filling a half-bushel basket each.
Although it is Smith and his wife, Karen, who actually plant the seeds and tend the fields at Ewingsford Farm, 40 minutes away in Trimble County, the CSA members provide the literal seed money and pay a portion of the farm’s operating expenses. Each member household pays $425 a year and receives fresh, organic vegetables for 30 weeks.
Members also have the pleasure of knowing that their equity is invested in land that is cultivated organically and sustainably for the long haul. And for many, their investment is in something they perceive to be a valuable but endangered species: the small family farmer.
Smith cautions against the common tendency to romanticize the small farm or CSA. He recognizes that there is a risk for the members, just as there has always been a risk for farmers, who must cope with the unpredictability of nature. The reality of the farmer’s job, he says, is simply “a whole, whole lot of hard work.”
But hard work alone, as Smith knows, doesn’t guarantee anything. He first tried his luck at commercial vegetable farming back in 1981, when he planted a two-acre truck farm along with his tobacco, hoping that vegetables might provide not only a way back to the farm of his childhood but a source of income when the bottom fell out of tobacco.
The first summer, he sold vegetables from a roadside stand and enjoyed the interaction with his customers—but made no money. The next few summers, he trucked cantaloupes and tomatoes to stores and wholesalers in Louisville, where he had to compete with corporate produce—a doomed proposition. In the winter of 1989 he had a revelation that changed everything: “I was in the process of failing miserably at farming, and a friend who had been watching me flounder gave me Eliot Coleman’s first book, The New Organic Grower.”
“His ideas on farming resonated,” Smith says, “but what caught me was a chapter on marketing.” Smith believes that because Coleman’s background was not in farming, he was able to think about marketing produce in unconventional ways. “As soon as I read that chapter, I called him up and told him about my situation. He was very encouraging, very helpful. He was the person who mentioned the idea of a CSA, although he wasn’t doing it himself.”
Smith spent the rest of that winter planning a cooperative like the ones Coleman described. By early 1990, he had built a greenhouse and a root cellar and had planted three and a half acres with 30 varieties of vegetables. It was enough to feed 40 families, but word of mouth had garnered not one. So he sent a letter explaining his concept to The Courier-Journal in Louisville. The following Sunday, a story appeared in the paper with his phone number in it. By day’s end, he had his 40 families and 100 more on a waiting list.
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