It’s been just over one year since I worked a full season at Pork Hill Farm in the great Northeast. I remember arriving in mid-April, snow still on the ground, a nest of baby woodcocks just outside the cabin I would soon live in. Now, I’m in California, the days are hot but wonderful, and I can’t help but come back to the deep sense of community and place surrounding the White Mountains.

One farm I keep coming back to, even though I spent very little time with the farmers, is Hosac Farm, a 20-acre property in Cornish, Maine. I met Natalie and Kyle at a potluck at Hancock Family Farm (the subject of next week’s blog post!). Their easy conversation and connection to the other farmers was palpable—it was clear they all adored and supported each other. Farming is getting harder and harder, both as a profession to enter but also one to maintain. Last year alone, the number of U.S. farms shrank by 15,000. The challenges facing farmers are ever growing, from global warming to soil erosion, from the US Department of Agriculture cutting funding to fertilizer prices increasing as a result of the Iran War. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the doom and gloom of it all. My conversation with Natalie was a stark and powerful reminder of what tends to draw people into this difficult profession in the first place: the lifestyle and community.

Kyle and Natalie met working in the Appalachian Mountain Club and decided to go WWOOFing afterwards, as many of their friends had. Neither had farmed before (although Natalie had studied agriculture) and ended up working at Ronniger’s Farm in Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho, coincidentally the same exact farm that I had first WWOOFed at! In 2014, they moved onto their current land and stewarded their land on what Natalie describes as a “slow model.”

They started the farm out as almost just a garden: She was serving for five nights a week while Kyle worked in flower landscaping. “I can’t let it go, I still have one shift a week,” she added. Instead of opting to take on overhead debt for big equipment, Natalie and Kyle operate only with their cash on hand. “I remember going to the hardware store and trying to decide if we could buy a hoe or if that was out of budget,” Natalie noted, laughing. This conversation of overhead and off-farm income always comes up when I’m talking with farmers. In 2019, 96% of farms had off-farm income, and on average that income accounted for 82% of total income. And over 20 % of small farms operate with an average debt of a little under $300,000. This slow model is different than what I’ve seen before, and I can see the appeal.

In a small Maine town that “can be skeptical of outsiders,” putting in time with their community—including that single remaining shift—has proven essential, not just to the business, but to the fullness and joy of their lives and farm. Natalie mentioned the coterie of volunteers who help out, from directly working on the farm to providing childcare while others work. “We had a ton of ash trees we took down . . . and I just started giving away wood, like ‘come get it,’ with no strings attached, but many of those people said ‘we want to come and volunteer, we want to thank you.’ It wasn’t expected at all, just sort of full-circle community support felt really incredible . . . A lot of the volunteers just love being here. People reach out, and then they stay.” Farming is hard, but a strong community can make it easier. To sum it up perfectly, in a blog post from harvest season last year, Natalie writes, “People often ask us how we do it all, and the answer is it’s hard and with a lot of help.”

That ‘help’ extends far beyond the confines of Cornish, Maine. The Foothill Farms Alliance (FFA) consists of four small farms spanning New Hampshire and Maine. It’s a multi-farm collaborative winter Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Using either food stored earlier in the year or through winter growing in high-tunnel greenhouses, the FFA brings fresh vegetables to over a hundred people through the winter. It’s not just the fact that this program helps these farmers to have income all year round, but that the community and support network is absolutely essential. “Sometimes you just feel crazy farming. It’s like, ‘Were you out digging rocks all day? Did you accidentally murder a woodchuck with a hoe today?’ You just don’t feel like such a psycho.” The FFA helps Natalie to feel less “like a nut,” but also is a way for farmers to directly support each other through their knowledge. They can reach out to ask that simple but vital question: Have you seen this before? If one farm happens to experience a new blight on their kale or any of the infinite number of things that can go wrong in a season, a support network already exists for farmers to share their specific expertise.

As I’ve gotten to know more and more farmers, I’ve seen firsthand the competitive nature that can so easily emerge in market settings. One farmer I talked to said that they would be happy to share their methods of growing corn, as long as the person they’re sharing with lived at least 300 miles away. “We’re all always a little worried about the health or fiscal stability of our business. You can be at a market and look across the way and see that another farm is tallying and be wondering ‘Why do they have a line and I don’t?’” It’s easy to get wrapped up in that mindset, but Natalie notes that she finds so much value in having other farmers as resources or friends—even if that’s not always the easier option. She mentioned that Geof from Hancock Family Farms consistently encouraged her to join markets he was already in, always of the mindset of “more farms, more people, the better.” And although that fiscal stability is a real concern, Natalie finds that much more value comes from being able to ask another farmer for help, whether that’s to borrow a water-wheel transplant, ask about something new and unusual going on with a crop, or just to go on a hike.

There’s a sort of simple adage I’ve seen strewn across the internet: “you don’t need a hut in the woods.” It’s a response to the pastoral dream I see so well and alive in my generation. Whether it’s daydreams of pulling off a Chris McCandless-style retreat into the wilderness or just moving to a more rural place, I see no shortage of headlines like “Why Gen Z Wants to Move to the Countryside.” “You don’t need a hut in the woods” views that kind of response as an escapist family. That rural dream, working on a farm, being isolated, having time alone to work on yourself, might be just that: a dream.

I’d still echo that sentiment. The answer is not a hut in the woods; the grass is always greener. But the answer might be a community in the woods. Natalie told me that, unlike other farmers she had met, she and Kyle “weren’t there originally because we liked food all that much.” It was for the work. It was for the community, the freedom. To me, Hosac Farms is a timely reminder of that: Everything we do, we don’t really do alone. “It does feel like we’re really doing something good for the earth and for other people,” she said, and I could hear her daughter running around on the other side of the phone, laughing.