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Across the U.S., young people are heeding the call for a more just, sustainable, and healthy food system, and are heading to the fields to build it themselves. They are working on farms and starting their own small-scale farm businesses from scratch. But, as the National Young Farmers’ Coalition recently revealed, there are big obstacles getting in the way of these green entrepreneurs — and the change eaters want to see on their grocery store shelves. Last month, the Coalition released the results of a needs survey of 1,000 young and beginning farmers from across the nation. They also made recommendations for anyone looking to help these farmers succeed. Chief among these recommendations is a set of proposed laws, which would go into effect under the 2012 Farm Bill, called the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act of 2011 [PDF].

What exactly did the survey tell us? Not surprisingly, young farmers reported that capital and land access presented the biggest challenges, followed by lack of health insurance. On the flip side, they rated apprenticeships, local partnerships, and community supported agriculture (CSA) as the movement’s greatest assets.

The challenges

The challenge of getting capital into the hands of beginning farmers is closely tied to the types of businesses that they want to create. Lenders, from the USDA’s Farm Service Agency to the cooperative Farm Credit, are now faced with a very different customer. Instead of a few types of businesses with well-known outcomes — i.e. commodity corn or contained animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — these new farmers want to sell dozens of products directly to consumers. The lenders, who once merely had to multiply the price of a bushel of corn by the acreage, struggle to understand the economic possibilities inherent in farmers markets and CSAs. How do you predict a farm’s income, they ask, when it’s not based on the commodity market  — and the government guarantees that go with that market?