According to a trend piece in the Fashion & Styles section of today's New York Times, an increasing number of young people (the word "hipster" is not used, but certainly implied) are ditching Williamsburg for the farming life, raising free range chickens and organic spinach on rural farms.
"Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms," twenty- and thirty-something urbanites are getting some real dirt on their trendy Carhartts, the article says.
I guess this doesn't seem particularly new to me. Coming from the more rural environs of Chapel Hill, NC, hip young people working on organic farms is nothing new - my 22-year-old brother, for example, used to work part time in a nightclub and part time on a humane, hormone-free hog farm, and delighted in the fact that he sometimes got paid in pork shoulder. Plus, how many Baby Boomers don't have a story about working on an organic farm in the 1960s?
3-17-2008 @9:45AM Baron said... I'm not sure how many "organic" farms there were in the 1960's. Coming from a family very involved with farming, not to mention the ag-chem business, the 60's saw people using some of the worst possible chemicals. The stuff we use today doesn't hold a candle to some of that junk. That aside, I'm very glad to see these "hipsters" running "organic" farms of their own; one less hipster to have to deal with in the city. :) I can see why the comm, I mean democrats, national health care plans are so popular now. Hard to get health care on the farm (I know I sure didn't have any when I was putting my 80-100 hours a week in while working on one)
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