DURANGO Linley Dixon is thrilled about the solar-powered greenhouse she built this April on her farm, Adobe House Farms. It doesnt use propane and should be warm enough to grow plants year-round.
But Dixon wouldnt have been able to build the greenhouse, or start a farm for that matter, had she not had a friend who was willing to let Dixon use her quarter-acre yard free.
If we would have bought land, we wouldnt have had money to farm, said Dixon, who started the farm last fall. There are startup costs for everything, and add on top of that mortgage for land, its not obtainable.
First-time farmers looking to get into the business here face a mountain of challenges, beginning with the task of finding affordable land with access to water. But a new generation of farmers, aided by organizations working to support them, has begun to find creative ways to get access to land that allows them to stop worrying about breaking the bank and to get on with their work of growing food.
A few have worked out arrangements to use the backyards of friends, neighbors and other willing homeowners. In most arrangements, residents loan their backyards to farmers in exchange for a share of produce and the knowledge that their yard is producing more than grass, flowers and weeds.
Brooke Frazer is in her first year farming in the backyards of four Durango residents. She always dreamed of being a farmer, but when she quit her consulting job, it wasnt feasible to buy farmland, Frazer said.
So she looked to backyards.
Her venture is called Backyard Harvest, and so far, the gardens have produced enough for her to sell at the Durango Farmers Market and provide produce for her six Community Supported Agriculture members who are guaranteed weekly shares of her harvest for an upfront cost.
Without such a land arrangement, the whole venture wouldnt have been feasible, Frazer said.
Chris Brussat is just beginning a backyard farming situation similar to Frazers called TerraNova Urban Farms. Farming is a way for him to put his beliefs about local food and food security into practice, he said, but he could never afford the land, equipment and irrigation to own his own farm. Farming in other peoples yards spreads his message and allows him access to land sheltered by trees, with available water and the warmer temperatures of the city.
In Dixons case, the $30,000 she has spent on irrigation, plants and infrastructure would have been impossible to afford had she purchased land. Also, land parcels in her price range would have been at least 30 minutes from town, she said. Instead, she is farming in a neighborhood just north of Durango on County Road 254.
When it comes to agricultural property, prices vary depending on location and availability of water, said Justin Osborn of the Wells Group. Dry land (without water rights) on the edge of the county can run as low as $900 per acre. But good farmland with dependable water in the Animas or Pine river valleys can run into the thousands.
Its next to impossible to find it less than $5,000 an acre, and in the valleys, youre looking at up to $10,000, Osborn said.
The difficulty such prices pose to farmers, especially first-timers, is no secret, said Darrin Parmenter, Colorado State University extension agent in Durango.
There are some well-defined challenges for farming because of price of water and price of land, Parmenter said. If you can find land that is farmable, then it has to have water, and sometimes water is a hard-to-come-by and expensive commodity.
To address this, the extension office teamed with the nonprofit Healthy Community Food Systems to develop a land links program. The project acts like a bulletin board that connects people who want to farm with available land, said Jim Dyer, who works with Healthy Community Food Systems and helped create the project.
Often it takes the form of older farmers who are well-established and getting older in years making some of their land available to someone who doesnt have land, typically a young person, Dyer said.
Sometimes people want to lease or sell their land, and other times, they just want a share of the produce. The idea is to provide ways for new farmers to get into the profession without a cloud of debt hanging over their heads, he said.
The extension office also wants to start a farmer-incubation program on the Old Fort Lewis property near Hesperus. Start-up farmers would be able to lease small plots of land and water for a lesser price than the going rate, said Beth LaShell, educational coordinator for the Old Fort site and a teacher with Fort Lewis Colleges agriculture program. The program would have an educational component and would aim to be a stepping stone for farmers to buy or lease land, LaShell said.
The two agencies will propose the project to the FLC steering committee in charge of developing a plan for the land this fall, she said.
If farmers can get over the initial barriers and become established, they certainly have access to a voracious group of consumers, Parmenter said.
There are a lot of places that have land and water at affordable prices and dont have a market, he said. But within 100 miles of Mesa Verde, farmers have the support of restaurants and the support of a community thats willing to look local for their produce.
