Fertile Ground USA...Celebrating the people behind the plow

July 7
    I’ve been thinking lately about what it is that draws me to farming, what makes me believe I’m suited for it.  There are societal reasons of course, but I’m not the sort to make a lifestyle choice based around a strong philosophical conviction.  What I’ve come to love is farming’s ability to give you space.  Space to think, space to breathe, space to move and be restless and be restful.  Space.
    Let’s backtrack. I didn’t wake up one day and decide I wanted to farm.  In fact, the first farm job I had terrified me. I had been drawn to the farm because of the non-profit that owned and directed their mission.  Hunger relief and community health were at the center of this farm’s workings, and I gravitated towards the combination of public service and physical work.  But mostly, I thought, the physical work of farming would just give me the credibility to call myself part of the non-profit side of the operation. I applied to many other jobs, actually, thinking that working at a farm might be a bit too laborious and a bit too socially isolating (I would be a member of a very small farm crew, after all) for my taste.  But all my other options fell through, and upon arriving back from a stint in South Africa, I began at the farm.
    Although I had believed I would be very involved with the office workings of the farm, it quickly became evident to me that I was going to be in the fields all day every day.  More surprising was that I realized just as quickly that I had no desire to be in the office, and loved my time outside. I was sweaty and grimy, making more mistakes than I’d like to admit, and really connecting with my handful of co-workers.
    Idealism, you say.  It’ll never last.  Listen, I’ve tried having office jobs. No, to be fair, I’ve tried office internships (I’ve never lasted longer than a few months).  It doesn’t take long for me to feel my life energy draining out of me and into the isolation of only communicating with a computer for hours on end.  It just doesn’t jive.  Everything that I love about farming is absolutely absent in the other jobs I’ve tried.
    On the farm, you have to be self-directed. No one can make you hoe faster or harvest more quickly except yourself.  There are no promotions to entice you to put in longer hours. It’s just you and the plants and the open air.
    People-wise, farming is a wonderful synthesis of group work and solitary time.  I find I do my best thinking at work. Something about having my hands busy in the soil or splashing around in the water after harvest liberates my mind.  I’ve had thoughts that border on revelation at work after long, lonely hours. And yet I’ve had some of the most thought-provoking and personal conversations of my life while harvesting, seeding, and washing.  
    This is true even within the larger farming community. There is a sort of camaraderie that emerges from sharing in the kind of work that really demands of you your energy and strength, a work that is at once tedious and immensely gratifying, humble and remarkably beautiful.
    If I wake up restless one morning, full of agitation and energy, I can harness that sensation into my day’s work. There’s nothing like hauling bales of hay for mulch or pounding tomato stakes into compacted earth to rid you of your antsiness.  Or if I come to work emotionally fried, needing to rest, I find solace in the rhythms and repetition of the work.  There’s no need to impress, just to go through the motions, to care for the plants, be outdoors.  To some manual work may not seem like rest, but to anyone who’s ever taken comfort in gardening, a hike, or a swim, they understand. There’s a sense of holistic rejuvenation in the work on a farm, a sense of cycle and rebirth, of need and fulfillment, of simplicity.
    And then there are the more obvious perks.   I get to distribute and eat beautiful food that I’ve helped to nurture, from seed to harvest. There is no pretense to my work- I wake up every morning and throw on yesterday’s dirty tank top and dust-encrusted hiking pants.  And the concept of needing to set aside time for exercise is foreign to me during the season; I spend my day physically exhausting myself rather than restlessly toe-tapping under my desk.
I am awake to see the sun climb up over the trees to pain their tops fiery pink.  I breathe fresh air. The weather dictates my work.  I feel the rain on my back while I crawl along weeding and the mid-afternoon sun as my workdays near their end.  
    I may not be able to sustain a lifetime of full-time farming, I’ve already admitted that to myself. But until I figure out if any other career can afford me the sense of freedom and space that farming offers, I’ll wake with the work of the fields in my hands and my head, reveling in the life it allows me to live.

June 23, 2008

    The dry season should be looming.  As the weather heats up, new farmers scramble to make sure they have a watering system in place in preparation for the summer, the time of year when the crops come on fast and furious but demand a tremendous amount of water given the beating sun and long hours of daylight.  We’ve had our drip lines set up for irrigation for close to a month now, flat black plastic tubing dotted with tiny holes which permit water to drip right onto the roots of the plants, a much more water efficient way to irrigate than sprinklers, which water beds and pathways indiscriminately.  But our drip has been off for the past few weeks due to unusually wet weather.
    In many ways, the heavy rains that have settled into the Pioneer Valley in recent weeks are a blessing.  Surrounding a wretched heat wave, the storms have prevented the plants from becoming parched or stunted and the soil from becoming dust under our boots.  But holds on our plans to get into the fields during this busy time of year have arisen as a result of this unseasonably wet weather.
    There are few jobs in this day and age that revolve around the weather.  Sure, the schoolteacher in the colder parts of the country gets an occasional snowday. And I suppose the opposite is true, that plow drivers kick into high gear during snow season.  But for the most part, careers and work schedules are unaffected by temperature and precipitations.  Farming is not such a profession.
    The ground is soaking wet.  Pick up a handful of soil today and it will form, almost without coaxing, a dense ball of mud.  This means that many of the farm tasks that demand attention between the set days of harvests and markets cannot be done.  Hoeing, for example, comes to a standstill when the ground is wet.  Try running a scuffle hoe through muddy soil, and you’ll have little luck cutting and upturning the lambs quarter and pursulane growing among the crops.  But more importantly, try to do any sort of weed-controlling farm work when the ground is wet and you’ll create a worse weed problem.  You see, the concept of handweeding and hoeing is threefold- to aerate the soil, to remove the weeds from around the crops, and to upturn their roots so the sun shrivels them up and prevents the little buggers from re-rooting in the beds.  But when there’s excessive moisture in the dirt, little uprooted weeds lying on the soil have a good chance of wheedling their way back into the ground before the soil dries out.
    I was reminded this week of how rain is just one more factor that makes farming an unusual occupation.  Farmers have to work around the weather, often working longer days when the weather is prime, and impatiently (although sometimes gratefully, for the unexpected day of rest) waiting until the soil dries out enough to let the hoes, plows, and tillers to get back in action.
    A mixed summer blessing, this rain seems to be.  Mother nature is flexing her annual muscle, proving to farmers that there will always be climatic constraints to how fast and how efficiently they can work, and reminding them that setting a fixed schedule is merely a silly notion (clearly created by the non-farming majority).  In a few weeks, we may be crying out for rain amid a drought or heat wave. But for now, our agendas have been thwarted.  It must’ve been farmers who coined that famous “The best laid plans…” quote.