Milton’s Local Helps Farmers and Raises Incomes
It’s not unusual for people to change careers. James Faison did, although five years ago, he didn’t imagine he would. With a law degree from Harvard, he was well into a career as a corporate lawyer in Miami, Florida. Then, in 2012, he quit his job and returned to Virginia to run his family’s farms.
“My grandparents, Milton and Winnie Faison, were second generation farmers. And my grandfather passed away and left the farms to my siblings and me,” he explained. “So that started the process of sort of trying to figure out what we were going to do with the farms.”
Gradually, Faison learned about the economic challenges facing small farmers.
“A lot of small farmers are struggling,” he observed. “They are working very hard, but they’re not able to derive an income from farming to sort of making it economically viable. The issue with agriculture in America is we only spend 6.8 percent of our income on food, which is the lowest of any industrial country. So, since we spend so little on food, we expect food to be inexpensive, which means in order to make a living doing it, you have to have really big volumes. Having big volumes of anything can be very expensive in terms of having enough cattle, having enough hog or having enough infrastructure to support those animals.”
