Lauren Markham on the New Farmers’ Movement

Orion editor Scott Gast speaks with author Lauren Markham about the recent surge of interest from young people in small-scale agriculture. Markham discusses her article “The New Farmers” from the November/December 2014 issue of Orion, recounts the stories of friends who’ve turned to farming, and speculates on the impact of this hopeful new movement.

Lauren Markham  is a fiction writer, essayist and journalist. Her work most often concerns issues related to youth, migration, the environment and her home state of California. Markham is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (Crown, September 2017). The Far Away Brothers was the winner of the 2018 Ridenhour Book Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and a California Book Award Silver Prize. It was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Selection, a New York Times Book Critics’ Top Book of 2017, and was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the L.A. Times Book Award and longlisted for a Pen America Literary Award in Biography.