Young farmers planting the seeds of a renaissance

At 29, Christy Raymond has launched White Barn Farm on land in Wrentham that has been in her family for five generations. (Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)

If there are ghosts that walk the Raymond home - if they roam the rooms of this 18th-century farmhouse in Wrentham, or its barn and fields - perhaps they approve of the change that has come to its acres.

In rows of earth, tucked back from the busy hum of South Street, the 29-year-old great-great-granddaughter of a Union soldier who purchased the land when he returned from the Civil War has revived a family legacy.

Christy Raymond is turning the soil again.

The Raymond land has seen asparagus and apple trees, gardens large and small, and horses over the course of five generations. But in the past year, starting with a quarter-acre vegetable field, Raymond has turned more than 3 acres of the property where her grandmother lives into an organic farm, renaming it White Barn.

She is part of what Doug Petersen, the state's commissioner of agricultural resources, described as a resurgence of the young farmer and a revitalized relationship between growers and buyers.

While his office does not keep statistics on the ages of farmers, Petersen said he sees young faces at farmers' association meetings in unprecedented numb1ers.

"The average farmer on the larger farm is in their late 50s," he said. "I grew up in the 1960s with the ethic of getting back to the land. These kids look like some of my cohorts from back then."

Eighty percent of the state's farmers, including Raymond, now sell directly to their customers at farmers markets and roadside stands, Petersen said, while a decade ago, it was 20 percent. "It feels to me like the beginning of an agricultural renaissance in Massachusetts."

It has not been easy. Financing her first season on credit cards, Raymond raised zucchini, summer squash, and cucumbers. She hauled loads twice a week to a farmers market in Franklin, keeping heads of lettuce fresh in buckets and bundling bunches of pea tendrils.

She sold basil tips to Whole Foods in Bellingham and supplied ingredients to chefs in Providence - all while waiting tables three nights a week.

As Raymond finished this year's harvest, she prepared 3 acres of newly cultivated land for next year's plantings. Fifty customers have purchased produce subscriptions based on the promise of those rows. As the crop comes up next year, the subscribers will pick up boxes of produce from the farm each week.

Raymond pictures White Barn Farm gradually converting to perennial crops, such as blueberries, hops, lavender, and raspberries. And she also has an eye on some family land across South Street, or Route 1A.

"A perfect place for a farm stand," she said.

Enter 25-year-old Christian Kantlehner. As Raymond's new farming partner, he is a proponent of her vision for expanding the business, as well as a believer in farms serving customers directly.

"It is a way for your consumer, which I have a pretty large passion for, to understand your farm," he said.

Kantlehner has helped bring meat to next year's customers, networking with a 25-year-old Vermont agriculturalist, James Elworthy.

"If we're really going to be a part of this - I see it as a revolution of young farmers getting into this - we have to support each other," Kantlehner said.

Supporting a movement of young farmers also takes documentation, says Severine von Tscharner Fleming, 27, a farmer and filmmaker from Nevis, N.Y., who is working on a documentary, "The Greenhorns," about young farmers in the United States.

In her research she found Raymond, and has identified more than 1,200 "activated, thoughtful agrarians who are motivated to engage with their bodies in the restoration of the American landscape."

Raymond characterized her role in local agriculture another way.

"It just seems like every single other piece of open space near here has been developed," she said. "A personal goal of mine is to make Wrentham a place I want to live in."

Support also comes from volunteers like Suzanne Nasuti.

A restaurateur for 20 years, Nasuti spent the last decade doing financial work for high-concept restaurants. This summer, after moving to the suburbs with two children, she found White Barn Farm. Volunteering in its fields is an offshoot of the fund-raising she used to do, she said.

Raymond is "working this whole organic thing," Nasuti explained. "This is totally in my blood."

At the edge of White Barn's inaugural quarter-acre, at dusk one day early this month, stood a single feathery fan of Raymond's great-grandfather's asparagus. It is part of an ancestral stamp on this piece of Wrentham, a link between what was and what Raymond intends.

Inside the farmhouse, Christy's father, Eliot, watched his daughter, Kantlehner, and Nasuti hustle homemade pizzas into the oven and mix salads of greens from the fields out back.

The dining room was set for a score of Christy's friends, family, and volunteers; a party for a successful first harvest.

"My grandfather farmed here in the early 1900s," he said. "A lot of people worked out there. An awful lot of people would be really proud of her."