We all know the story of industrial agriculture swallowing up small family farms across the United States. Little by little our rural landscape is turning into one big factory of cheap corn, which is turned into cheap meat, which makes companies rich and bankrupts the little guys.
Well, this is a story about the little guy winning out after all. The New York Times reports that Marty Travis and his family lost the central Illinois farm that had been passed down for 179 years when Travis’s grandmother sold the land to developers. The family realized that they had lost an important piece of American history, and bought the property back to create an outdoor agricultural educational center.
With a grant to to educate kids about the history of farming in hand and bus-loads of kids coming to see what a “real” farm is like, Marty and his wife Kris realized that they would need to create a viable, working farm to demonstrate the lessons they were teaching.
They started to market obscure and, in some cases, nearly extinct produce to Chicago’s restaurants, making the ends meet with white Iroquois corn, ramps, Galápagos tomatoes and radish-seed pods. Now the family has founded a group called Stewards of the Land, that works through the Travises’ connections to sell the produce of 25 farm families to grocery stores and restaurants. Many of the members of the group are teenagers, some of whom are making a tidy sum in this business. Will a new generation of small farmers put big ag in its place?
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