Emily Best

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Emily Best grew up in Butler Township, surrounded by farmland and wanting to live in the big city. But years after getting that chance she found herself back in the country — this time working on a farm.

Best, who now lives in south Central Pennsylvania as an apprentice farmer, wasn’t out in the fields on Monday. Rather, she was testifying before Congress at a U.S. Senate committee hearing on student debt.

Best’s message to the committee: Student debt is a problem for many young Americans, but it can hamstring young farmers in especially damaging ways — limiting their ability to get loans for startup costs like land, seeds, equipment and other capital investments.

Best said that a survey by the National Young Farmers Coalition, which is an advocacy group in which she is involved, found that 50 percent of young farmers were either unable to obtain credit to start their operations or hadn’t even been able to seek loans at all.

“They report that their student loans are delaying or preventing them from entering farming,” Best said.

It’s a problem she knows firsthand.

Best accrued about $70,000 in school debt while financing her education in American University’s graduate program for environmental policy. Using an income-based repayment program, she’s able to defer repayment on the loans, but interest on her debt continues to accrue at rates that can spike as high as 8.25 percent.

“I sometimes envision them (my loans) as a dark cloud hovering over me, pursuing me, telling me that I cannot get married, buy a house, or take financial risks like investing in or purchasing my own farm,” Best said.

Best’s path to farming surprised both her and her parents, Ellen Garbuny and Don Best.

The former Butler resident earned her undergraduate degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh and spent several years abroad, teaching in places like France and Guinea, West Africa. Those experiences left her fascinated with agricultural issues and she enrolled at American, deciding upon farming after she completed her graduate degree in 2010 and entered a floundering job market.

“I’ve always known I wanted to do something where I knew I could make a difference, and something I knew was a positive, social good,” Best said.

She said agriculture and food policy became her passion, but she found employers looking for people with hands-on experience. Best joined New Morning Farm, an organic vegetable farm, in 2012 and now manages greenhouses and the farm’s market at Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C.

She said she worries that issues like educational opportunities and shrinking numbers of small businesses are fraying rural communities, while student debt and rising land prices often conspire to keep young people from reinvesting in agricultural endeavors.

“Our rural communities are not how they were 50-some years ago,” Best said. “I worry for the future of the rural communities when that is the trend.”

The problem of student debt is especially pertinent in farming because of the long-term implications of the career’s rapidly aging demographics.

The average age of an American farmer is 58, and for every farmer under the age of 35 there are six over the age of 65, Best said.

“Thousands of other young people are facing the same choice I am,” Best said. “I’m worried that too many of them will leave farming as a result.”

She said lawmakers should consider adding farmers to the federal government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. The program forgives the loans of some government and nonprofit employees after a 10-year repayment period.

A bill introduced in the U.S. House by Rep. Chris Gibson, R-N.Y., and Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., seeks to do just that. The bill’s stated goal is to recruit at least 100,000 new farmers to replace farmers nearing retirement age.

Best’s testimony came before the Senate’s Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, which held the forum “College Affordability and the Student Debt Crisis.”

The committee is chaired by Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Massachusets Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Best said she was selected to testify before the lawmakers in part because of her work with the young farmers coalition, and also because she lives near Washington, D.C.