Collaborations between young farmers and land-owners are common in major metropolitan areas, but they usually come with caveats. Often, the landowner has final say over decisions best left to the people doing the farming: what to grow, what to buy, and (most commonly) how the farm should look.

“It’s dysfunctional because the farmers in those situations are financially disempowered. They’re not really farming on their own,” Dennis argues.

He sees this as a challenge for his generation. How can a first-timer convince someone to yield absolute control over their land and (often) money? It’s not impossible, with organizations like the Columbia Land Conservancy offering matchmaking services between parties. Still, he admits, “I got really lucky.”

Dennis graduated from college in 2011 with a degree in Film Studies and no sense that he might own a farm a few years later. A fortuitous series of accidents lead to a farmstay on an organic olive farm in the bountiful Provence region of France. After three months of wine and olives, he started looking for ways to continue farming in the United States.

Stone Barns, a mecca for sustainable agriculture just north of Manhattan, was a natural fit. “I was there doing physical work and it was great. I was outside, eating amazing food, hanging out with people I really liked,” he recalls. Halfway through his first apprenticeship, Dennis was convinced.

“I realized [farming] was what I wanted to do and I saw an opportunity to do it in the way I wanted.” Shortly after, he started the project that would become Alewife Farm.

Not that it came together so easily. Dennis estimates that he’s invested just over $100,000 in his farm, cobbled together in “every way you can finance a farm.” From foam insulation for a walk-in cooler, to bird-proof netting and used tractors financed by bank loans, farms have staggering upfront costs.

He advises young farmers to prepare by working or apprenticing on for-profit farms, in addition to organizations like Stone Barns and nearby Glynwood Farm (which run primarily on donations, not sales). Non-profit farms are an exceptional way to learn to grow vegetables, but simply “can’t teach much about marketing or decision-making on a for-profit farm.”

So Dennis has been balancing the budget on his own farm, using Google for research and some knowledgeable friends to guide him.

“I’m far from profitability right now,” he allows, but he’s already selling to buyers around the region, most notably the restaurant attached to the Stone Barns farm, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Chef Dan Barber’s shrine to über-local ingredients.

And more sales, more markets, more pea shoots are on the way; part of the daily grind of a young farmer trying to change the food system.

It’s a stressful, arduous task. Or as he puts it, “the best job in the world.”