The much-anticipated documentary The Greenhorns makes its New York City premiere this Wednesday evening at the Anthology Film Archives, and it couldn't hit the screens at a better time. The Greenhorns aims to do for farming what All The President's Men did for journalism: make it look so cool that it becomes a hot vocation.
Kids thrilled by the Deep Throated exploits of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- rendered sexy and cinematic by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman -- dreamed of becoming the next hotshot investigative reporter. Registration went through the roof at journalism schools all over the country.
Will The Greenhorns set off a similar stampede of fired-up youths? We can only hope so, because, once again, we've got an awful lot of dirt in need of digging. Greenhorns director Severine von Tscharner Fleming has spent the past several years filming young farmers all over the country who are proudly employing their brain and brawn to grow real food for their fellow citizens, and make a decent living in the process.
But The Greenhorns is so much more than just a movie, it's a movement -- specifically, a national grassroots nonprofit organization of young farmers. And Wednesday's premiere of The Greenhorns is a benefit for The National Young Farmers Coalition, which fights for federal policies to help young people succeed in a farming career, facilitates peer-to- peer learning through Farm Hack, and strengthens young farmers' social networks through regional organizing.
This is no small thing. The rise of the young farmer movement has the power to address some of our greatest problems as a nation: it creates the jobs we so desperately need, at a time when there are reportedly five unemployed folks for every available job opening; it produces fresh, wholesome food at a time when diet-related disease is skyrocketing; it reduces our dependence on fossil-fuel intensive factory farming; it offers young people an alternative career path to being cooped up in a cubicle or tethered to a laptop (not that there's anything wrong with that -- oh, wait, there is! Turns out it just might be killing you!)
The Greenhorns remain undaunted by land-access limitations, capricious weather and the unrelenting 24/7 nature of farm work. Nor are they swayed from their mission by hostility from the entrenched commodity crop cabal that views these cultivators of wholesome fruits and veggies as radical upstarts looking to upset industrial ag's pesticide-laden apple cart.
These idealistic neophytes are reinventing the vocation of farming to fit our current ecological and economic realities. They need our support, and that's why Severine, a young farmer/activist herself, has thrown herself into this project with all her heart and soul.
Severine's eloquence and exuberance inspired Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA, to dub her the "Oscar Wilde of the good food movement." But I'd like to suggest another nickname for Severine: Janey Appleseed. Because she's tirelessly traversing the country sowing the seeds for the next generation of farmers, who only want to serve our country well.
So if you're in NYC, won't you please step up to the plate and help them hit a home run? Come to the premiere, and stay for a discussion with the folks from the National Young Farmers' Coalition. I promise you'll dig it!
Follow Kerry Trueman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kerrytrueman
Loading comments… 
