It takes organization and diligence to locate, recruit, instruct and monitor farm workers. The hardest to organize are those slippery agents of post-modernity, young American students. Most have parents who pay all bills. They don't need work. They want experience. They lack programs.

Those city youth who don't have provident parents, and really need to make some money, have little knowledge or emotional response to farming. There is almost no chance later that they will communicate to their own offspring a loving regard for the farming tradition.

That brings me to the point. America needs to preserve the farmland on its urban fringe. We simultaneously need young people to reconnect to the soil and its legacy of work and rewards. It's nice to pursue an environmentalism in which one campaigns for the reform of other people. But much better is stewardship of nature that is practical and personal.

Contemporary philanthropy seems deficient in this regard. For many foundations land is an abstraction or merely serves an ideology. Money goes to educational projects that lack real-world application. Youth who just need something to do that provides some cash--and maybe some learning--are left out. So are kids who think that "green" is a political attitude rather than a consequence of chlorophyll.

Our Jeffersonian agrarian heritage is at risk, and yet it also beckons invitingly. At age 18 I had the chance (my only chance) to work on a farm for a summer; it meant a lot to me. It made a city boy want to see the fruitful land preserved in its plenty.

In the 1970s the Pea-Patch program in Seattle provided urban dwellers with small, rentable lots for vegetable planting and spurred an interest in fresh grown produce. The rescue of Seattle's Pike Place Market in 1971 and the rise of Green Grocer markets in the East helped revive farmers markets in America at large. My friend Gus Schumacher, as State Agriculture Secretary in Massachusetts and then as an Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in Washington, helped spread the word for farmers markets nationwide.

Such community enterprises have done a lot to encourage small farms. Their numbers actually have been going up in the decades that followed. Their owners are inventive and resourceful.

Today, it seems that every town and almost every neighborhood of every city has its "farmers" market. All that is lacking in farmers. One sees dewy-eyed Baby Boomers selling their cheese, jam and radishes on Vashon Island, WA or Boca Raton, Florida, but about to faint from the stoop labor. Some offer home-grown orchids or home-made pies. It's usually a hobby they lovingly subsidize. They form associations to encourage better husbandry of the land. But hardly anyone can make a living on a small farm.

What to do? The last thing small farm owners need is more government regulation. They might benefit from favorable tax treatment, and the advice of the Extension Service, but not the unintentional stranglehold of bureaucracy. What they can use instead is some philanthropic interest in bringing the landowners who want to be of service to the community together with young people who will benefit from a farming experience.

The labor market for summer work is just too happenstance to make these connections by itself. A bit of an assist by philanthropy to introduce the small farmers to the summer students, and maybe provide some educational instruction (no propaganda, please), might make all the difference. I've seen some modest efforts in this regard, but nothing that is widely applicable.

We need to resurrect the small farm for the benefit of a balanced society and the future of local fresh food, and we need to revive the serious regard of young people for productive farming. Surely those two worthy aims can be conjoined.