Commusings: How to Grow an Agrivillage by Jake Laub

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Close your eyes and imagine the picture-perfect American family farm. 

As the health-conscious, earth-loving person you are, when you bite into that forkful of salad from your local, premium-priced, organic café, this is the farm you hope grew the lettuce and cucumbers currently crunching away in your mouth.

It’s a place where rich soil grows orderly rows of pesticide-free vegetables to the lively buzz of native pollinators. At sunset, a fresh-faced young couple looks over their land with the satisfaction of feeding the local community, a couple of kids chasing chickens in the yard.

That’s a sweet thought. At least it justifies a $20 salad.

Now some hard questions.

How did this happy couple obtain this land? Was it already organic-certified? Did it have the appropriate equipment and infrastructure in place? Who taught them to farm? How much of your $20 salad ends up in their pocket? How’s it going with a few kids and no close neighbors?

Films like Kiss the Ground or The Biggest Little Farm offer a new vision of agriculture that feeds the world while also storing carbon, healing our soil and water systems, and improving biodiversity. They are inspiring consumers to seek higher quality food produced with eco-friendly methods.

Wonderful. I, too, am passionate about regenerative agriculture. It has proven potential to increase yields and farm profitability with only positive upsides. 

The question is: Who is going to do it?

This type of farming is not easily done on 1,000-acre+ megafarms (which account for nearly 60% of all U.S. farmland). “The best fertilizer is the farmer’s shadow,” as the saying goes. 

If in the future we hope to feed the world with regeneratively grown food, we will need existing farms to transition and new farmers to join this grand project.

The good news is that many are eager to jump in.

While the average farmer has been getting older – rising to more than 58 years old in 2022 – the last farm census saw a 7% increase in farmers under 44 and a 10% increase in “beginning farmers.”

The bad news is that unless you are inheriting a farm with existing crops and infrastructure (and the know-how to operate that farm), it’s really, really hard. And, honestly, even if you are inheriting a farm, it’s still ridiculously hard, though to excavate why would deserve its own essay. 

Let’s say you are ready to start a career as a new farmer, whether right out of school in your 20s or as a career pivot later in life.

If you want to buy farmland, you are competing with deep-pocketed investors and housing developments. This combination has doubled farmland values over the past two decades. 

Priced out of purchasing, many new farmers rent parcels from property owners with spare acreage. This can work until it doesn’t. I have met many farmers who, after years of investing in the land to create a local business, suddenly received a note that the property sold and they have to move.

But let’s say you do manage to buy some land. Farming has high start-up and equipment costs, especially taking into account the time and risk required to develop and refine a regenerative system. Is the bank really going to finance that on top of your land loan?

You also need to figure out how to get your products to market. How to navigate regulations and paperwork (organic certification alone takes years and costs money to obtain and renew). How to handle vastly varying needs for labor depending on the time of year and the harvest. How to problem-solve a broken tractor or a mysterious pest … And much more. 

All on your own, making maybe $20,000 to $40,000 per year. 

The past two essays in this series (Part 1 / Part 2) have been about “rebuilding the village,” bending our societal standard of the single-family home back in line with our communal ancestry.

We weren’t designed as humans to live in little boxes inside tall fences. Similarly misguided is our go-to vision of a lone farm surrounded by rolling fields stretching to the horizon. 

For thousands upon thousands of years, the village and the farm went together — a residential hub surrounded by many small farms. But as cities sprawled and farms consolidated, that pattern fell apart. Bringing it back can have a lot of benefits. 

In 2020, two families – Dave & Yuko and Elina & Ed – came together and purchased their dream property, 240 acres of gently south-sloping farmland in Arlington, Washington. For the past 100 years, this land had been farmed for hay and corn as part of a dairy, but now the owner was in his 80s and ready to downsize.

But while this had always been farmland, it was also zoned R-5, meaning it could be chopped into 5-acre residential parcels. As the news of the sale spread through the local community, there was an upwelling of unease. What nefarious developer had purchased the Tillman farm and what were their plans?

Dave and Ed met with county leaders to explain: “Yes, we hope to develop this land, but not in the way you fear. We want to take all 70 residential development rights and cluster them into two tight-knit villages, thus preserving more than 85% of the land. With the residential rights used up, the remaining land will be preserved in perpetuity.”

“Great,” said the county leadership. “We love the concept, but there’s one small problem… it’s not legal under rural county code.” 

These days developers are mainly building two types of homes in the U.S.: dense urban apartment buildings and sprawling single-family subdivisions. Lost in the “middle” is the type of village layout that would feel familiar in a quaint European countryside — a cluster of townhomes connected by human-scale walkways, surrounded by agriculture. 

Not to be deterred, the founding households – now joined by a growing number of other families (including mine) – began to work with the county to change the law. After three years and a crash course in the well-meaning but slow-moving bureaucracy of local government, the county passed the Rural Village Housing Demonstration Program ordinance, or RVHDP if you love a good acronym. As of July 2023, it is now legal in Snohomish County, Washington to combine a village with farmland.

In the meantime, we had been making our land more welcoming to small-scale farmers. 

We invested in a modular irrigation system and shared equipment such as a communal tractor (affectionately known as “Dug”). We built a veggie wash-pack station and a greenhouse. We received a grant for a refrigerated truck and held work parties to clear noxious weeds.

Slowly but surely, the farms sprouted and grew. First a CSA-style vegetable farm. Then a culinary and medicinal herbs farm. A u-pick blueberry coop. A brother-sister team who rotate pigs, chickens, and vegetables in a virtuous cycle. A young couple growing vegetables and mushrooms. A woman finally starting her dream flower farm. An experimental agroforest. All putting down roots where they won’t get pulled up in 5 years, or 50.

Just like living in community is both more efficient and supportive for all humans involved, so is farming. I’m on the farmer Slack channel and it’s a mix of dirty carrot jokes, celebrating small wins, and “can you help me find my pigs.” I dream of the day when the village is finally built next to this growing patchwork of farms so farmers can drop their kids off to play, ask for last-minute helping hands, or stop by the common house dining room for an evening meal after a long day.

Between 2017 and 2022, the U.S. lost 141,000 farms, or about 78 farms per day. There are many reasons why, and many solutions are required. But let’s not overlook something fundamental: A farm doesn’t have to sit alone on a prairie, and neither do our homes. When we combine the two, we rediscover something old and true.

P.S. If this vision is as inspiring to you as it is to me, we are looking for more households and farmers to join our agrivillage project, Rooted Northwest. You don’t have to be a farmer to own a home, and you don’t have to buy a home to farm the land. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions at [email protected].