Not getting a BA

My adventures this fall continued with the Exploring Our Regional Food System and the It Takes A Region Conference in October and November. I'm lumping these events together because I feel like they were part of the same lesson for me personally even though the two events were not connected.

Both events took place in Upstate New York (but not the North Country) and were billed as events that addressed the local food systems and agriculture. I thought that this would mean learning about how to produce food in innovative ways and how to get more people eating local food. It ended up being a lot of people from non-profit organizations talking about policy. There were definitely farmers in attendance at both events, but the focus was not on farmers or food. It was on grants, food deserts and telling low income people that they need to eat more vegetables. Their intentions were good and certainly someone needs to handle policy issues in agriculture, but this is not where my interests or expertise lie.

I am fairly certain that I was the only engineer present at either event. The people I met were generally enthusiastic about engineers getting involved in agriculture, but no one had any idea of what to do with me. My assigned mentor at the It Takes A Region Conference asked me if I was getting a BA or my master's. She hadn't even considered that I would be getting a BS -- no one I met had any sort of technical background. They weren't talking about production techniques, pest management or erosion even though I know this is part of every farmer's life.

What they did touch on that I found interesting is that farming on a local scale is always about being a small business. Farms face special challenges because they are capital intensive from the get-go because farmers need land, equipment and infrastructure to put out products with slim profit margins. Farmers also have a very difficult time getting the loans or credit they need for a variety of reasons. I helped with the survey for the National Young Farmers' Coalition report Building A Future With Farmers and they did a fantastic job presenting the difficulties that young and beginning farmers face in these areas. Grow NYC also put out an informative report on this issue called Farmers On The Edge.

Moral of the story: I need to learn more about business and entrepreneurship (specifically farm business) and I will need to look elsewhere for people handling the technical of sustainable agriculture.