For Strella, who manages the city schools' farm, the artist-to-farmer transformation started germinating in his sophomore year, when he took DeBrabander's course on the environment. It opened his eyes to how food is produced. So instead of spending a semester abroad - studying, say, Michelangelo in Florence, Italy - Strella lent a hand to City Farm Chicago, a group that farms vacant blocks in that city.
When he returned, he helped create a garden in East Baltimore, apprenticed at a farm and grew microgreens and herbs in the window of his Mount Vernon apartment.
"It's just so romantic to come to understand how simple it is growing food and cooking food," he said.
Mike Hobbs, 27, a songwriter, rock musician and Towson University graduate who grew up in a suburb, works at Pennypack Farm in Horsham, Pa., toiling in the fields and teaching school kids about farming.
He makes $14 an hour - pretty good for a farmhand, but less than his mother thinks a college graduate ought to earn.
He couldn't be happier.
"I love working with my hands," he said. "When you finish a job, you can look and say, 'Hey - done.' ... When I go out in the garden with the kids, it's delightful. It's really magical, actually.
"I have a whole plan worked out, but I can't really plan for when a bee flies by and lands on a flower or one of the kids finds something in the garden and points it out."
Some longtime farmers see nothing romantic in a line of work that can break a back before it turns a profit. Agriculture can be especially challenging for this new crop of farmers, experts say, because they lack the advantage of inherited farmland and tend to favor organic practices.
Not lucrative
"I don't mean to discourage people from the strict rules of organic, but you've got to get a lot more [money] for your tomatoes," said Henry Holloway, who has four feed stores in Harford and Baltimore counties. "You could easily go out there and plant 1,000 tomato plants and not get a single tomato because of a blight or some type of a disease or insects. Whoever does this, you're not going to be making six figures. You'd be lucky to make five."
Some artists say they're dabbling in agriculture as a form of artistic expression, even if, by all appearances, they've become farmers. Among them: three recent MICA grads who recently won the $25,000 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize for their East Baltimore community garden.
