"Growing a new crop of farmers"

Chandler Briggs grew up in Southern California, where he spent his days surfing and playing volleyball.

Now, this earnest 26-year-old lives in a world apart — growing vegetables, raising pigs and participating in a burgeoning farm movement premised in a belief that small-scale, organic farms can reinvent the nation’s food production system.

Briggs runs Vashon’s Island Meadow Farm, and it’s tough work. Last year, he made $9,000 on the three-acre spread off of Cemetery Road. His parents, as a Christmas gift, have paid for his health insurance the last couple of years.

But like a growing cadre of young men and women — on Vashon and around the country — Briggs is deeply committed to a new kind of farming. And today, he’s something of an evangelist, hoping he and other young farmers will be able to shift the agricultural landscape away from an oil-intensive farm industry that he believes is unsustainable and ecologically harmful.

via www.pnwlocalnews.com