On a practical level, farmers have been involved in Occupy Wall Street almost since the movement’s emergence. As soon as tent cities sprung up in parks and plazas across the nation this past September, small farmers in the Northeast, California, and elsewhere were making donations, trucking in excess produce to keep protesters fed.

It was only recently, though, that their involvement became political. On Sunday, December 4th, farmers from throughout the country descended on lower Manhattan and joined Occupiers to protest what they view as an excess of consolidation and corporate control in American agriculture. More than 500 farmers, foodies, chefs, and activists who took part protested things as varied as natural gas drilling and genetically modified organisms, but their overarching message was clear: the U.S. farming and ranching industries are stacked to benefit the largest and wealthiest corporations at the expense of most food producers.

“Corporate abusers are harming us all,” said David Murphy, founder and president of the nonprofit group Food Democracy Now, who organized the Farmers March in partnership with Occupy Wall Street members. “The control of policy by agribusiness is the main thing impoverishing small farmers. Wall Street has Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, both of which have bent the laws in their favor. Agriculture has Monsanto, Cargill, and Smithfield. They write the regulations to benefit themselves.”

The march was the most significant attempt yet by OWS to ally itself with the so-called “good food movement,” and it raised questions about whether food activists and small farmers will use Occupy Wall Street to advance their causes as they head into a fierce battle over the next Farm Bill early next year. That bill, which is the nation’s largest piece of agricultural legislation, governs crop subsidies, farmland conservation, school lunch programs, and more. It is due to be amended in 2012, and sustainable agriculture advocates are already lobbying hard to reinstate poorly funded conservation programs, limit subsidies to the largest producers, and insert provisions to help young and beginning farmers get started in an industry dominated by large corporate farms and food processors.

To date, no future collaboration between farmers and OWS has been made public, perhaps because food activists are fighting for concrete policy proposals while the broad-based OWS remains characterized more by discussion than narrow political demands. Nevertheless, farmers and activists across the country predicted further partnership between the two groups. “Right now, we are focusing on things that can be easily solved,” said Lindsey Lusher Shute, head of the National Young Farmers Coalition and the lead author of a recent report detailing the challenges facing the next generation of agrarians in the U.S. “Farmers haven’t totally fleshed out how we could merge together [with OWS] but we have a lot of solidarity with groups like that.”

Shute’s group recently helped author new legislation aimed at assisting young and beginning farmers, which she hopes to work into the revised Farm Bill next year. One of her principal collaborators is Severine Von Tscharner Fleming, a farmer, filmmaker and activist from upstate New York who was a speaker at the Farmer’s March on Dec. 4th. To Fleming, it seems clear that farmers and OWS protestors ought to be natural allies. “A lot of us have gotten involved in agriculture because we see it as a kind of activism where you are walking your talk,” she said. “Farmers have economic self-determination, which is what Occupy Wall Street protestors want.”

For his part, Farmer’s March organizer Dave Murphy has continued to engage with OWS–on a personal level. Reached in Oakland a week after the New York event, Murphy had just attended a conference on genetically modified organisms, but shortly thereafter he joined protestors with Occupy Oakland on their mission to shut down the city’s ports. Just as farmers who have learned to engage directly with urban consumers are faring better economically, Murphy believes that farmers who want their voices heard must now engage politically with urban dwellers. “[OWS] is really an organic movement, so it’s hard to predict what will happen, but we’re not going to win unless we take to the streets,” he said.

I am a 25-year-old college graduate with a degree from a fairly prestigious eastern university, and I pull weeds for a living. At first blush, you might think I’m overqualified, and after four hours of weeding the squash beds, when the stiffness begins to set in, that’s what I start to believe, too. In fact, nothing in college prepared me for this. My only credentials are the past two summers, spent learning by doing: planting, thinning, trellising, fertilizing, tilling, harvesting, washing, packing and, of course, weeding.

I am a farm intern, and to me, the only thing more remarkable than the fact that I have spent much of the past three summers happily stooping over vegetable rows (I am 6’4’’) is that I am not alone. Across the country, college students and graduates like myself, many with little or no farming background, have been flocking to small farms in droves, shacking up in old farmhouses, trailers and tents, and working for free or for peanuts, all in exchange for a little instruction in the fine art of running a farm.

“It’s almost like a third education after college,” said Kelly Coffman, 30, a second-year apprentice at Rain Crow Farm in Paonia, CO. Coffman studied at Prescott College in Arizona and Naropa University in Boulder, CO, and worked in the California state park system and as a kindergarten teacher, before deciding to work on farms. “When you have [a liberal arts] education, you get to a point where you realize wait, I need to have a more basic fundamental education about being human. Food, water, shelter…these things are important,” she said.

Although their numbers are hard to pin down, odds are that if you’re reading this, you probably know someone who has followed such a path. John English, website manager for the National Agriculture Information Service farm internship bulletin board, a job clearinghouse, said through a spokesperson that postings there have jumped by around 500 per year for the last 5 years, as more small farms spring up and seek the cheap and eager labor that interns provide.  “If you talk to any really good farmer they’ll tell you that they’ve had a doubling and tripling of their applicant pool over the last few years,” said Severine Von Tscharner Fleming, an upstate New York farmer, activist and the director of the new film The Greenhorns, which profiles young farmers across the country and explores their motivations. In 2009, Fleming helped found the National Young Farmers Coalition, an advocacy group for those whose taste of farm life has enticed them to take up farming as a profession.

Farming is relentless: it saddles you with endless chores, pins you in one place, and works you to the bone. For much of the 20th century, most Americans tried to escape such a life by fleeing to the city, all of which begs the obvious question: Why would we want to go back to the farm?

The reasons, of course, are as varied as the aspiring farmers themselves. “I realized that I never wanted to work for anyone ever again, and I didn’t want anyone to have to work for me, said Benjamin Capron, a 27-year old apprentice in the three-year farm school program at The Living Farm in Paonia, Colorado.  “I wanted to work independently and work with people.” Capron, a Denver, CO, native who studied German in college before spending several years working at a brewery and bouncing back and forth between Germany and the U.S., fell in love with farming when he lived on a commune during one European stint. He told me that his motivation to farm comes largely from an aversion to participating in a capitalist economy that he views as exploitative. “Socially, wherever you go and whatever you buy, it supports this slavery in different parts of the world,” he said. “The tomatoes you eat come from an indentured servant in California, and my jeans come from a sweatshop in Honduras. So I see [farming] as a way of not allowing for slavery and not being accountable for slavery.”

Kelly Coffman of Rain Crow Farm agrees. “I feel like the best thing to do with my time in the system that we have set up is to learn how to not be dependent on it,” she said. “This money that’s going through the farm that’s coming to me and I’m spending on gas, its still very much a part of the culture, but I have a lot less conflicts with this than I do with many other jobs.”

This is a common trait among farm interns: a concern for social justice and the environment, coupled with a lack of faith that mainstream political structures can or will address those issues. “[The politicians] are broke, they can’t agree on anything, and they’re controlled by the corporations,” said Fleming, characterizing this attitude. “So if you’re interested in changing the world, change a little piece of it, and change it a lot.”

Whatever they might think about “changing the world,” many other farm interns are drawn to farm work right now by a much simpler need: paying the rent. With interest in farmer’s markets and weekly “community supported agriculture” produce shares at an all time high, a farm can look like a strong business opportunity to many young people, particularly those who have foundered in unfulfilling post-college jobs, or endured long spells of unemployment.

Certainly, demand for local food is on the rise, as fancy urban restaurants aim to satisfy their locavore clientele, supermarkets strive to highlight local options in the produce section, and more people catch on to the social and nutritional benefits of farmer’s markets. All of this is fueling an increase in farming in the urban hinterlands and within cities themselves, and specialty vegetable operations are a popular choice for first-time farmers, since their startup requires little capital compared to a ranch or a diary farm.

Interns interested in someday entering these growing markets confront the fact that, when starting out, they will probably earn very (very) little. Kirk Wilson, 27, a single-season intern at The Living Farm, earns $80 per week plus room and board for his work, which is more than many farms can offer. But he said he likes working outdoors, getting dirty, and seeing things grow, and is learning the skills to run a small farm of his own someday. Having spent endless hours job surfing on Craig’s List, Wilson also knows what he’s not missing.

“Before I came here I was working at a [self-storage] place called StorQuest,” which was basically the worst job in the world,” said Wilson. “I got that job because I was unemployed for five-and-a-half months, ended up doing it for three months, and then was about to shoot myself in the head if I didn’t do something else,” he said. Wilson, who like Capron is a native of Denver, has a degree in Visual Effects and Motion Graphics and had worked for a post-production house on TV commercials after college. He said he was fired when an ad containing error he had made wound up on the air.  After competing with 400 other applicants for the storage job, only to quit a short time later, he began to feel that he had nothing to lose.

“I mean, am I gonna make $10 an hour for the rest of my life?” he asked. “If that’s the case, then coming here and having no rent, room and board, and making $16 a day…I’m completely fine with that.”

If the flood of applications that show up in farmer’s mailboxes each winter are any guide, a surprising number of Wilson’s contemporaries share his willingness to do farm work for almost nothing.  The result is a sometimes fierce competition for farm jobs, and a sort of “race to the bottom” where wages are concerned. “The farmer I work for is always saying ‘did you hear about such-and-such farm? They work this hard, this much, and they don’t even get paid!” said Kelly Coffman. “It’s like, am I supposed to feel bad about that?” (Coffman earns $250 per week plus room and board, a relatively high wage that stems, in part, from her three years of farm experience).

“As I’ve watched in the last 4 years, I get on the farm job websites, and there’s less and less availability,” she said. “I was just talking to a friend in [organic farming mecca] Ashville, North Carolina, who was saying that she almost feels like you have to have a Master’s degree to get a job on a farm there.”

Increased competition for such low pay raises a troubling possibility, one that has plagued other attractive but low-paying fields, like journalism: those with bills to pay or families to support, who cannot afford to accept farm wages, may be squeezed out, leaving the best farm jobs to those whose financial safety net (parents, trust fund, etc) allows them the luxury of working for nothing.

The thought of young, idealistic and educated people fleeing to farm in the countryside might evoke, for many, the 1970’s “Back to the Land” movement. Indeed, today’s farming revival is strongest in areas– upstate New York, Vermont, northern California – that were first seeded with ecologically-minded farmers during the back-to-the-land era, but there are important differences between the two movements. While many back-to-the-landers eschewed technology, farm interns of today are plugged in, skimming for their next job online in their off hours and downloading political podcasts for listening while they pick peas. Organic farming today is bigger business than it was 40 years ago, when organic growers catered mainly to the counterculture movement. Today, organic food is everywhere from Whole Foods to the corner deli, and modern aspiring farmers are more comfortable than their hippie forebears treating their farm like a business, one that is designed to serve these growing markets.

And yet, just as so many “Back to the Landers” eventually left the woods and returned to the lives they had left behind, it’s likely that many of today’s interns will opt to exit farming, going back to school or taking city jobs, carrying a small piece of the farm with them. The obstacles to becoming a proficient farmer are tremendous: along with the many seasons of experience (complete with all the heat exhaustion, monotony, and backache that those entail), one must also endure razor thin profit margins, unpredictable and increasingly strange weather, and the reality that, if the numbers speak truth, making a living on a small farm is as hard today as it has ever been.

USDA data suggests that the number of hobby farms–those earning less than $10,000 per year–increased slightly in 2010, while the number of midsized farms–those which earn between $10,000 and $100,000, and account for most people who make a living off the land–decreased. And yet, the formation of groups like the National Young Farmers Coalition suggests that there is a contingent planning to stick it out. Their goal seems less about getting rich than simply getting by, and perhaps changing a sliver of the world in the process. “I don’t see myself doing anything else from here on out,” Kirk Wilson said.

Additional photo courtesy of Caroline Glover.

One day during the mid-1960′s, early in his career as a successful New York writer, the author Wendell Berry sat in the Manhattan office of his editor at the New Yorker, telling him why he planned to leave New York for good and return to his home in Kentucky. Whenever he considered a global problem, he explained–be it population growth, environmental damage, or otherwise–his first thought was what it would mean for the riverside Kentucky hill that his family called home. To write honestly, he said, he had to write in the context of his native place. The editor scoffed at him, told him he was making a career-killing decision, and politely ushered him out of his office. Wendell Berry’s career had just begun.

In the United States, the stigma against moving home is as long-standing as it is intense. This is particularly true for college graduates, whose financial outlays and years of work at school are supposed to catapult them into the fast lane toward a great job and financial independence. And yet, reality interferes. This year, some 85 percent of graduates were forced to move back home after college, up from just 67% in 2007. As a recent sobering article in the Huffington Post illustrates, the dual demons of record student-loan debt and a dismal job market are changing the way college graduates live.

Surprisingly, the stigma may be changing too. “It used to be that people thought something was wrong with the child when they moved home, or with the parents,” said Dr. Susan Newman, a former professor of psychology at Rutgers University and the author of the 2010 book Under One Roof Again: All Grown Up and (Re)learning to Live Together Happily.  “Today, people are realistic: the job hunt is dismal, students have loans and bills.” And dreadful though it may seem to share a bathroom with Mom and Dad, or rehash the job hunt with them at the end of a long day, the return to your stomping grounds offers many hidden–and non-financial–benefits. Here are 5 reasons why moving home isn’t a bad idea.

1. Be there for your family: After four years of focusing on yourself and your own education, moving home allows you to reconnect with the people closest to you. For years your distance from home or preoccupation with school has likely caused you to miss much of what’s happening in your family, be it siblings’ sporting events, a parent’s successes or struggles at work, or your grandmother’s birthday. Being home is a chance to make up for lost time. A 2011 survey of U.S.16-24-year-olds by the Harvard Institute of Politics suggested that one of the top priorities for this age group over the next five to seven years is staying in close touch with family and friends.
2. Get to know your parents as fellow adults: The teenager who appreciates the way their parents raised them is about as rare as snow in Las Vegas. Odds are that when you last left home, you viewed your parents as at least somewhat uptight and paternalistic, the makers and enforcers of rules that you were obliged to follow. But four years of relative independence, and the habits it instills, can give you a new perspective on their lifestyle, and their sacrifices. “When you move back, you’re a bit older, and you can actually appreciate what your parents do for you–and have done for you   –while you’re living there,” said Dr. Susan Newman, a psychologist. “And you can discover things about your parents that you wouldn’t know if you weren’t living together.” It’s also “an opportunity for parents to see how you’ve matured and changed.”
3. Have a stake in the future of your place: College students rarely have time to get involved in politics, and even if they did, their status as transients in their college town would preclude them from caring much about its future. Returning home, you stand a chance of shaping the place you live. A friend of mine recently went to a city council meeting in my small Colorado hometown, intending to register his opposition to an ordinance that would have outlawed noise in public after 7 pm. Arriving, he was shocked to find himself among a small handful of attendees. The proposed law would have restricted every citizen in town, but its fate would be decided by the few who cared enough to show up. This is often the case in politics, particularly the small town variety. And your roots in your town give some weight to your opinion. That noise ordinance, by the way? It was defeated.
4. Take time to reflect and plan:  What, exactly, did you learn in college? What was the point? Did it change the way you look at your hometown? Did it change the direction you aim to go in your life? The relief from economic pressures that comes with being home can create much needed space to ponder questions like these.
5. Land the Right Job, Not Just Any Job: Whatever your reasons for going to college, you probably expected that your diploma could land you a decent first job after graduation. On that front, this year’s college graduates face long odds. Nationwide, the unemployment rate hovers between 9 and 10 percent, while 6.4 percent of college graduates between the ages of 20 and 24 are unemployed, a figure that has more than doubled since 2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s partly because so many of the jobs today are out of the college labor market, meaning they don’t require a college degree. And tempting though it may be to nab that job behind the deli counter, research shows that the pay at a graduate’s first job often has long-term implications. For college graduates who take jobs below their education level, it could take 7-9 years before their salaries are comparable to the starting salary of their peers who take jobs that require a degree, according to Dr. Susan Newman. The result? “It’s going to take a lot of kids today longer to provide for their own kids,” she said.