Today, Veterans Farm is one of the largest producers of Datil peppers – a very hot pepper, akin to a habanero, but with a sweeter flavor – in the Southeast. Their bottled hot sauces are available at Wal-Mart. “We’ve got blueberries, poultry, fish – you name it,” said Burke.

 

Curing the Epidemic

Burke isn’t the only Iraq or Afghanistan veteran to return to the land – and according to U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan, he couldn’t have picked a better time to do it. In the spring of 2012, Merrigan launched a tour of American college campuses and announced that the nation’s farmland was suffering an epidemic, one that had nothing to do with drought or disease: Its farmers, quite simply, were disappearing. Recent censuses had revealed that the fastest-growing group of farmers in the United States were those older than 65. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has warned that two-thirds of American growers are reaching retirement age.

It’s an alarming trend, Merrigan pointed out, precisely because a growing world population is estimated by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nationsto require 70 percent more food production by 2050. “We’re not graduating enough qualified aggies,” Merrigan said at an April appearance in New Mexico, “to fill the jobs that are out there in American agriculture.” In a country where Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer a higher unemployment rate than other Americans, such a discrepancy is regretful.

Michael O’Gorman, a veteran specialty crop producer in California, noticed another alarming trend when the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute released a study in 2006, revealing that rural service members accounted for a disproportionate share of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It kind of made me think: Man, those are all the farm kids,” said O’Gorman. “I thought maybe there was a link between the fact that our farms needed more farmers, and that these were the guys who were going off to the wars because they didn’t see a future there.”

O’Gorman hosted a meeting at his strawberry farm overlooking the ocean north of Santa Cruz, to ask several of his farming friends what they could do to return veterans to the nation’s farms. The meeting was attended by several farmers and, interestingly, three mothers who had lost their sons in the wars – including Mary Tillman, whose son, Pat, an Army Ranger and former NFL safety, was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004. “Their sons were not coming home,” O’Gorman said. “They were there to support farming as an occupation for the other soldiers to come home to.”

The organization resulting from this meeting was the nonprofit Farmer Veteran Coalition (FVC), founded in 2009 and based in the California agricultural capital of Davis, but reaching out to veteran farmers all over the country – it was the FVC, in fact, that helped Burke to purchase his first blueberry bushes in Florida, and it recently donated a four-wheel ATV to help disabled veterans navigate his 13 acres. FVC hosts career fairs and educational retreats, matches individual veterans with mentors in their areas of interest, and sponsors a fellowship program to help launch the food and farming careers of veterans.

The number of veterans who are working with the FVC is growing, and shows no sign of slowing down. The coalition’s fundraising efforts have doubled in each of its first three years, reaching $2 million in 2012. O’Gorman recently added several new staff members, one of them a former Marine judge advocate who returned home and, in his work as an attorney, dealt with several nonprofit veteran groups. “He told me: ‘These are all great groups,’” recalled O’Gorman. “‘The only thing is that all their solutions are temporary.’ Ours is a lifelong solution. This is something that, if you get into it, it will change your life. It could actually become your new life.”

In recent years, other organizations, public and private, have joined the effort to try to bring service members back to rural America and a career on the land. At the University of Nebraska’s College of Technical Agriculture (NCTA) in Curtis, Neb., a new program, Combat Boots to Cowboy Boots, was launched in 2010 to counsel and recruit members of the military in owning their own farm. The program was inspired by Marine infantryman Garrett Dwyer, who returned from his tour of duty in Iraq with the desire to take over his family’s cattle business. Dwyer enrolled in the NCTA’s 100 Beef Cow Ownership Advantage Program, which helps young farmers compose a business plan and launch a ranching enterprise with coursework and low-interest loans. Students graduate with a business partnership and an associate degree.

Weldon Sleight, the recently retired dean of the NCTA, explains that veterans and agriculture are a perfect fit: “Our ranchers are getting older and older, and it’s really hard to find good, quality labor to work on ranches anymore. So I tell my rancher friends: ‘Don’t look for labor, look for partners.’” Veterans, Sleight explained, bring two important qualities to livestock and crop production: discipline and an ability to command and follow protocols.

The emphasis of NCTA’s programs – the 100 Beef Cow Ownership Advantage Program, the 100 Acre Farm Advantage Program, and the Business Builder Program – is ownership. “We’d love to have more veterans here,” Sleight said.

“Veterans are just very, very unique people. They have a sense of ownership already, because they’ve been fighting for our freedoms and our ownership of rural communities. They have a sense about them that they really want to own something. And we’ve got it figured out as to how we can help them own that farm or ranch or Main Street business.”