Chandler Briggs grew up in Southern California, where he spent his days surfing and playing volleyball.

Now, this earnest 26-year-old lives in a world apart — growing vegetables, raising pigs and participating in a burgeoning farm movement premised in a belief that small-scale, organic farms can reinvent the nation’s food production system.

Briggs runs Vashon’s Island Meadow Farm, and it’s tough work. Last year, he made $9,000 on the three-acre spread off of Cemetery Road. His parents, as a Christmas gift, have paid for his health insurance the last couple of years.

But like a growing cadre of young men and women — on Vashon and around the country — Briggs is deeply committed to a new kind of farming. And today, he’s something of an evangelist, hoping he and other young farmers will be able to shift the agricultural landscape away from an oil-intensive farm industry that he believes is unsustainable and ecologically harmful.

“There are so many benefits to a regional food network,” he said as he sat at a picnic table surrounded by rows of beans, tomatoes and cucumbers, his calico-colored cat rolling in the grass nearby.

Across the country, he noted, farmers are getting older, threatening to create an even more industrialized and distant agricultural system, one where the nation’s corn production — like much else — could become an off-shore commodity.

“I’ve called it a peak farmer crisis because all of that farmland needs farmers, and we know that the industrial food complex is failing,” he said.

As part of the effort, Briggs is helping to organize what’s called a “young farmers’ mixer” on Vashon next Monday night, where some 150 young farmers from across Western Washington are expected to gather at Vashon’s Grange Hall on the north end for a dinner of fresh vegetables and roasted pig and to network, compare notes and find inspiration.

The effort is sponsored by The Greenhorns, a new nonprofit formed to support and recruit young farmers and that is garnering media and political attention nationwide. In the past few years, it has held dozens of mixers across the country, bringing some 3,000 young farmers together. It has also become a lobbying force in the country, working, for instance, to shape the mega Farm Bill — a piece of legislation that provides price supports and other programs that bolster corporate farming — into a measure that also supports the young farmer movement.

Briggs, the local contact for the mixer, said he has high hopes for next week’s event.

“I want to use it as an opportunity for people to network, to meet other farmers, to get some ideas and to find people they might want to date,” he said, smiling.

“We’re trying to grow farmers,” he added. “We’re trying to encourage people my age to farm.”

Briggs and others in this movement site sobering statistics when they discuss the urgent need for a new crop of farmers.

The average age of the nation’s farmers is 57 and growing, statistics collected annually by the U.S. Department of Agriculture show. What’s more, over the next 20 years, the majority of the nation’s farmland is expected to change hands — becoming strip malls and housing developments or even larger corporate farms if small-scale farming doesn’t take hold.

Other numbers, however, suggest a different demographic shift is beginning to take place in some parts of the country, according to The Greenhorns. Washington state, for instance, experienced a 32 percent increase between 2002 and 2007 in the number of principal farm operators age 34 and younger. And during this same period, according to The Greenhorns, the number of all farmers under age 25 more than tripled nationally.

Ben Scott-Killian, like Briggs, is another young farmer who has entered the profession because of a deep belief that small-scale farming — despite the long hours and low pay — can result in a meaningful life.

Scott-Killian, 23, graduated from Cornell with a degree in agro-ecology. Today, he works full-time — or about 60 hours a week, he acknowledged — for Vashon’s Sea Breeze Farm, a job he’s happy to have.

“This is just an incredible deal,” he said, pausing to take a reporter’s call from his work at the bustling north-end farm. He’s learning not only how to milk cows, he said, but how to bottle milk, make cheese, manage small pastures and market the high-quality foods See Breeze produces.

Some of his college friends found farm positions where they’re working as interns or supported only by stipends, he noted. “I’m making a living, and I think that says a lot,” he said. “I’m able to make friends, eat well and manage my school debt.”

Scott-Killian was raised in Stony Brook, N.Y., on Long Island, where food, he said, “was an abstraction” — something that came in packages from the grocery store. In college, he began studying ecological science and working a few hours a week at Dilmun Hill Student Farm, a student-run operation where sustainable agriculture has been practiced for more than a decade.

He had an epiphany, he said, “the moment I got my hands in the dirt.” Food, he began to realize, “is the most important thing. … It’s the main way we interface with the natural world.”

Scott-Killian describes himself as an ecologist, a social justice advocate and a bit of a geek, drawn to chemistry and biology. Once he got a taste of what small-scale farming entailed and the way it appealed to the many facets of his personality, he said, “I could not turn down the challenge to try to do it myself.”

At the mixer, he said, he plans to ask other young farmers where they see themselves in a decade and how they hope to get there. “That’s the big question for me: What am I looking at? What’s my 10-year plan?”

The latest trend in young men and women consciously choosing the hard work of farming is not new. Mark Musick, now 62, was also one such pioneer, inspired by Wendell Berry and the organic farming movement some 40 years ago — enough so that he founded Tilth and began marketing a new suite of organic foods he and his colleagues produced.

But Musick says he believes it’s different this time. For one, there’s a stronger infrastructure in place. When he started out, there was one farmers market in Washington; now, he guesses, there are easily 100.

“The level of community and public policy support and the infrastructure has just gone to a whole new level,” he said.

At the same time, he added, he believes the need for small-scale, sustainable farming is greater, the situation more dire.

“We really are in the economic collapse that we feared and foresaw 30-plus years ago,” he said.

The movement of young new farmers, he said, is inspiring: “It’s definitely encouraging. It’s a real yeasty time of creativity and invention.” It’s also imperative, he said. “The stakes are so much higher now.”

Briggs, for his part, also feels a sense of urgency. But he also feels deeply hopeful. From groups like The Greenhorns to friends and neighbors who frequent his farm stand, he feels bolstered by a budding sense of community and camaraderie.

His parents, he acknowledged, worry about his financial security, but he thinks they needn’t.

“What is real security?” he asked, looking around his farm.

Finding a way to make small-scale farming economically feasible is a real issue, he added. He’s able to farm at Island Meadow only because others — including pioneer organic farmers Bob and Bonnie Gregson, who started the farm — put significant pieces in place. At the same time, he added, he’s not complaining about the long hours or low pay.

“I have a sense of richness,” he said.