"I see a lot more young people coming to meetings who are very interested in and passionate about food and food quality," he said. "It is somewhat like a back-to-the-land movement."
With a twist.
While young farmers are not short on idealism, devoted as many are to organic and sustainable methods, they tend to be more entrepreneurial than their hippie forbears.
"There's this economic opportunity to be a farmer again," Schahczenski said. "Whether they enter [the field] as a new kind of artisan butcher to supply fancy restaurants in New York or Seattle or back up and grow that food for those restaurants, they don't want to go to the middle of Nebraska and farm. They want to go to some cool urban center and farm."
Part of farming's new appeal stems from the emergence of food as a hot social cause. A generation of college students sometimes accused of being apathetic toward the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to have found its movement, and it's food.
Gardens as art
These students are against industrial agriculture and out-of-control consumption, and in favor of bringing fresh fruits and vegetables to urban neighborhoods devoid of anything but fast food, said MICA humanities chairman Firmin DeBrabander.
So they are planting rooftop gardens and community gardens and calling it art.
"This is an interesting form of rebellion," DeBrabander added.
"I think it's what Thoreau was doing, an experiment, a new way of living. There's a kind of social criticism in this. It's one thing to run out to the county and do it. But to do it in the middle of the city, that's really a statement - taking on urban decay and the demise of urban neighborhoods."
Pocock, the MICA professor who had a number of students go into agriculture, taught a class called Baltimore Urban Farming at the school this summer. Twenty students signed up, twice the number he'd expected.
"It's always been an art practice to look more closely," he said. "I've had students who want to go back and spin cotton, relearn how to butcher sheep. Because it's so foreign, it's become an art practice.
"They are one or two generations from these kind of very basic practices - self-sufficiency - and now they have a really strong urge to relearn them."
