College graduates eschew city rat race for the farm life

PERKASIE, Pa. (AP) — Tom Murtha studied English at Penn. Tricia Borneman majored in journalism at Shippensburg University.

Like most college grads, they finished school with a good idea of where they wanted their career paths to lead. Unlike most college grads, it was a dirt path.

So on a recent summer day, instead of working in an air-conditioned office building 40 miles away in Philadelphia, the pair were tending to kale, collard greens and broccoli in Bucks County.

“It’s been so dry, we’re really hoping for rain soon,” said Borneman, squinting in the hot afternoon sun under a straw hat, weeding impossibly straight green rows with a long-handled stirrup hoe.

Several yards away, Murtha tilled new rows for more plantings on a temperamental red tractor. And before dusk, there would be drip tape to unroll for irrigating the soil, and yellow squash to harvest in an adjacent plot.

“We went to college, we were on track to have some sort of professional careers, but it just didn’t resonate,” Murtha said. “The thing about farming is it engages you on all levels, which doesn’t happen with a lot of jobs.”

Murtha, 34, and Borneman, 32, are among a new crop of farmers sprouting up around the country who weren’t raised on farms, have college degrees, and in some cases have left other careers behind.

“Agriculture has been so subsidized, corporatized and globalized,” Murtha said. “There’s definitely an interest and desire for younger folks to get involved in agriculture.”

Murtha and Borneman have been farming together for eight years, the last two at the 70-acre Blooming Glen Farm in Perkasie. Parents of a 2-year-old daughter, they did stints in Oregon and New Jersey before returning to Pennsylvania, where they do farmers markets and operate a community-supported agriculture program in which local families do four hours of farm work during the growing season and receive regular shares of produce from spring through fall.