Jordan Hepburn lives with his wife and five children in East Calais. One day last fall, he was cutting up a tree for producer Erica Heilman, and they ended up talking about his plans to start a farm.
In this installment of "What Class Are You?", a series about class and cultural divides in Vermont, Hepburn shares the challenges of getting a farming operation off the ground without any capital.
This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Jordan Hepburn: You know, my friends were ten or twenty years older than me.
Erica Heilman: Why were your friends ten years older than you?
Jordan Hepburn: Raising yourself a lot of that time, and just skipping over some of that high school drama, I just found connection with old time Vermonters. And my dad disciplined us to see our great, great aunts. There's just a lot to hear, a lot of stories that interested me and gave me things to ponder when I chose to walk out in the woods after school until dark.
I loved making maple syrup, so I found an apprenticeship. I made maple syrup with an old-timer, who is also now passed. He was off-grid. He ran his blower and his vacuum pump on an '80s Tacoma jacked up with pulleys and wheels — a brilliant engineer. Built his own house. We pulled logs with horses. He was just quiet and humble and just let me observe so much of him.
Erica Heilman: Was he instrumental in your thinking about what was going to happen in your life, or what you wanted?
Jordan Hepburn: I had decided I wanted to be a farmer going into graduation. I had a teacher there senior year, and that teacher said, "If you really want to be a farmer, and you're willing to go and work and find apprenticeships, you don't really need to go to college."
But it’s something I fell in love with because the ingenuity of farmers is so creative. From irrigation lines to microhydroelectric, fixing old tractors. You get a mechanic to look at how a farmer put back their wiring on a tractor and they have no idea how it works. I love it. There's a craft to that way, and the only way I can explain it is that you have to listen and hear it.
Erica Heilman: So you were an apprentice to the sugar maker. You've done a lot of different jobs. You still now want to be a farmer. What is the path to that in Vermont right now?
Jordan Hepburn: Farming doesn't require land ownership, but the authority to choose to do what you want to do as a farmer kind of does. Very seldom are you going to get the freedom to handle a farm that's not yours. I'm not saying it's not possible.
Erica Heilman: You're saying that the rules and regulations make that hard?
Jordan Hepburn: The rules and regulations, and sometimes those come from the state of Vermont, and sometimes those come from somebody that might own a farm. I'm in a position where I need a tractor and some plows, and I got to work a job to try to get to that.
Erica Heilman: You have to work in order to do the work that you want to do.
Jordan Hepburn: Yeah, I have to juggle income to farm. I can't go into my parents’ trust fund. It doesn't exist.
Erica Heilman: How many jobs do you have right now?
Jordan Hepburn: I'm self-employed, but I timber frame, I have a bulldozer, I have a sawmill —
Erica Heilman: Those are like, three or four things. I mean, you're here at my house to look at cutting up a tree, so there's that.
Jordan Hepburn: Yeah, I can run a chainsaw. I can put in a toilet for somebody. I can just move wood around.
Erica Heilman: So you're doing all of this. You have to do all of this to pay your bills, but you're also trying to gain on it so that you can actually be farming.
Jordan Hepburn: Yeah, the process of actually acquiring the land is taking longer, and it's hard to go borrow a loan when your income of trying to be a farmer doesn't support a loan! Maybe you've worked and worked and worked, and your skill of applications isn't the greatest for a grant. On paper, you may not look like a qualified applicant of a working lands grant. But I've been told my knowledge base is greater than my vocabulary, so I obviously don't sound as smart as I am.
To farm on this land in a secure manner where my sweat equity is going to be handed to my children, I have to go through subdivision and ask to do a survey, $7,000. I have to do the septic permits, $3,000. I need a tractor at $10,000, if you're lucky, for a decent one you're not fixing all the time. I need the implements at $1,000 a pop. The overwhelming burden of learning the hoops, permitting processes, Act 250 laws, water quality, to raise five kids — to fund that from the ground up is near impossible.
