New farmers: Hipsters and an ex-NFL player

Two stories about the future of farming. One comes from Pew Charitable Trusts, headlined, "Are Hipster Farmers the Future of Farming?" Meanwhile, here's one of a handful of reports about former NFL center Jason Brown, who left his lucrative football career to begin farming.

New York Times report: "Boys in the Bunkhouse"

This is a riveting account of several mentally challenged men who were living in squalor and neglect. The article is here, and the accompanying video is here. UPDATE Here are some additional links, in the wake of the second showing of this film to my Rural Issues class. This answers some questions, or maybe just raises them. Their federal disability money went directly to the processing company: The bunkhouse was torn down last August. Read about it here. Here’s City-Data’s view of the community (everything you ever wanted to know, including, perhaps surprisingly it is, in, political terms, a blue town, the region having voted for mostly the Democrat in the last five elections):

Appalachia, etc.

The National Review takes a look at Appalachia. I expect we will see a lot of these types of articles, given that it is the 50th anniversary of the so-called War on Poverty and that President Obama has designated a portion of rural Kentucky as a so-called promise zone.