Antonio Nissi.
At 19, he's commited his life to farming.
There’s a preordained path of education in our country.
It goes something like this:
After day care and pre-school indoors, spend 8am-3pm- Monday-Friday- nine months a year- from age 5 through age 22- in school. That’s seventeen years. Or put another way- about 65,000 hours. This time is also inside, being force-fed history, english, math, spanish, french, science and social studies. You’re not learning what you want to learn, what you’re passionate about- you’re focused on what the folks in academia think you should learn. What books you’re supposed to read. You’re not learning any practical skills like how to grow food, build a house or manage money. To make it even worse, you’re not with your family, and the only time you see them is at the end of the day, when everyone is worn out. So the default activity in many homes is to decompress into screens on couches or behind locked doors. Let’s be honest, the system sucks, and is largely broken.
Antonio is not a young man who just follows along the well-worn path because that’s what you’re supposed to do. At ten, he got an internship at Natick Farm in Natick, MA and loved it. Soon, his younger brother Marcello joined too. After a few years of this, his parents Jenn and Dan decided to go all in and buy a farm in Vermont to pursue their kids dreams.
They started Rocca di Cambio Farm and have not looked back. Every day Antonio and his brother Marcello get up early and work all day. The passion is contagious. New ideas with the silo, successes with new paddock sizes, surprises, miscalculating with the turkey sizes. Adjustment, recallibration, perseverance. This, my friends, is a real education. A focus on what you are passionate about and a relentless effort towards success in spirit, and in life.
It is an honor to know the Nissi family and to document what they’re doing because frankly, America needs many more young people like Antonio and Marcello. We need many more young people to choose an unconventional path and strike out into one of the most rewarding and challenging jobs in the world.
Below the paywall is the first draft of our short portrait of Antonio which will be included in our multi-part documentary Farming. It is for our paid subscribers. Kudos to Jasmin for the edit. Enjoy!