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

Sweaty season began last week.  I’m not talking beads on the forehead or a slight dampness on the lower back; I’m talking full-on streams running down from under your straw hat and a big ‘ol wet patch in the center of your back, sticky jeans and humidity so intense you can’t bear to keep your Wellies on your feet.  For farmers, sweaty season begins not when the temperatures reach up into the high eighties and everyone’s sitting out on their shaded porches sipping cold drinks, but instead when the spring surprises you with an unusually warm day in the mid-seventies and you’re overdressed and working your tail off.

For century upon century, farmers have racked their brains to come up with labor- and time-saving tools.  Farming means long, hard, sweaty days regardless of how you do it, but minimizing the necessary output of energy can help preserve some semblance of farmers’ energy and, on blazing hot days in the height of the season, their sanity.

Last week, it was time to plant potatoes.  Ben and Oona had borrowed a tractor implement from a farmer friend of theirs, a tool which creates a trench in which to plant seed potatoes. But, after fiddling with the hitch for a while, Ben declared that the implement wasn’t going to fit onto our tractor, and we were just going to have to do the work by hand.  Drat.  It was mid-afternoon, the temperature had climbed into the high seventies, and the sun was blazing down on the crew, all of us overdressed for the unseasonably warm day.

We took turns chopping seed potatoes, careful to preserve at least one eye on each chunk so that the seed could germinate.  While some of us chopped, the rest carried heavy-duty garden hoes out into the freshly tilled rows to dig our 4-6 inch deep trench.  Now, anyone who’s ever used a hoe in a garden knows that if you’re trying to work efficiently, it doesn’t take much for your back to start aching and your shoulders to burn with lactic acid buildup.  Now, try envisioning that feeling as you hack and pull the earth down two 240’ rows.  All of us, my veteran farmer bosses included, had to stop every ten to twenty feet to stretch out their backs and catch their breath.  We were all sweating profusely. I was barefoot, the waterproof high boots I had been wearing to ward off the morning’s dew suddenly too hot to bear.  In my glee at the beginning of the farming season, I had forgotten how icky and uncomfortable farming can get at times. “This kind of work is the reason why the Russian peasants rebelled against the Bolsheviks under their agrarian reform policies,” I thought to myself, one of my courses during my final semester of college flooding back to me.  Especially when those darned implements, the very tools that were designed to make farmers’ lives easier, fail to do just that.

At the end of the day, after we had scrambled to get the last of the potatoes in before quitting time, I stood and looked at the fields, noticing how our slightly-crooked rows dipped towards the back of the field towards the muddy brook in the woods.  Those rows, I thought, were deceptively long.  They had fooled me into thinking they were shorter and that the work would be easier to complete.  Indeed, some farm tasks always feel longer than you think they will, the beds seeming to stretch on endlessly.  But there’s an overwhelming pride in knowing that you can do it, in knowing that you’ve done it, as you stand there after a day’s work, sweaty and exhausted as anything, but with a tangible task well done as proof of your time and effort.

by Sara Franklin

May 1, 2008
This past Friday, we at NoHo Town Farm were handed a reminder that farm life is unpredictable and can be awfully disappointing. Last Friday, my co-apprentices and I arrived at work to the news that the second of my bosses’ goats set to kid this spring had gone into labor.  Things were progressing slowly, but Ben, my boss, promised that he would call us over to the goat shed when the action began to develop.

After a couple hours of site work, Ben called.  Flannery, the goat in labor, seemed to be getting closer.  My two coworkers and I rushed over to Ben and Oona’s house, a quick half-mile from the farm, and raced down their sloping backyard to the goat pasture.  Flannery was on the ground breathing heavily, clearly uncomfortable, Ben sitting patiently beside her.  False alarm.  After nearly two hours of waiting and watching, Flannery’s state still seemed stagnant. So the other apprentices and I were sent back to the farm to get some work done, again with the promise that we’d get a call when the time came.

Less than half an hour into our afternoon’s tasks, Ben called again. I quickly switched off the hose I was using to water the newly transplanted blueberries and hearty kiwis and we all zipped over to the house again.  By the time we arrived, it was too late- Flannery had finished kidding, and the news wasn’t good. Her first, a male, had been stillborn, and her second, also a boy, didn’t seem to be doing well.  We sat and waited anxiously as Flannery tried to nibble at her kid’s umbilical cord, and watched in wonder as he gingerly tried his luck at the teat.  None of us wanted to think about or acknowledge the stillborn kid.  After a short stint, Ben sent us back to the farm once again, eager to get the onion and leek starts transplanted into the beds before the weekend’s predicted rain arrived.

As I buried the delicate green stalks of the alliums into the freshly tilled soil that afternoon, I found myself thinking about the rhythms, or lack thereof, of farming.  So much of the farm life is built upon repetition, what you know, what you can predict, and good planning.  But then there are the curveballs. Whether it’s a drought, a blight, or a joyous event turned sour like the stillborn kid, farmers face great unpredictability.  In trying to harness the elements of the natural world to work to our advantage, to raise domestic animals and grow food, we as farmers must learn to compromise, to let go of control.  The poet May Sarton wisely noted, “I am, I think, more of a poet… if to be a poet means allowing life to flow through one rather than forcing it to a mold the will has shaped; if it means learning to let the day shape the work, not the work, the day, and so live towards essence as naturally as a bird or a flower”.  A good farmer works with the unexpected detours from the well thought out plan, constantly being reminded that we cannot exercise our power over nature, we can only coax her to be gentle and kind with us as we attempt to reap her gifts in order to sustain ourselves.

Early Sunday morning I found an email from Ben to the apprentices in our inbox.  The new kid was doing well, nursing like a champ, and it seemed like he was going to make it after all.  They had named him “Maybe” in light of his feeble first forty eight hours of life.  Despite the uncertainty, the sadness, and the frustration at thwarted plans, “Maybe” things on the farm will work out just as they should, even if it’s not the way we thought they would.

April 18, 2008
Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, the growing season suddenly arrived.  Perhaps the blending of the days and weeks into one another had something to do with the tumult in my life since the New Year began.  Since January 1, I spent two weeks exploring a new part of the country with my best friend, said goodbye to my longtime boyfriend who was going to farm in Italy for three months, quit my last semester of college to move home to take care of my ailing mother, held her hand as she died, reunited with my boyfriend, and then moved up here with him to Amherst, Massachusetts, our home for the 2008 growing season.  

Finally catching my breath after the move, I knew I needed to get back into the earth, to turn soil and plant seeds. For what better way to ground oneself and celebrate the passing of loved one than to midwife new lives into the world?  So I began to dig up the patch of overgrown garden in our new backyard, planted peas, and began a new farming season working at the brand spanking new NoHo Town Farm, owned and run by Ben James and Oona Coy, in Northampton, MA. 

Now this is only my second season farming, and my first full season that I’ll see through from seeding to storing squash and potatoes in the root cellar for the winter. Although I grew up in the suburbs, buying all my food at a supermarket, my mother had rural roots and always planted a small garden in our backyard.  The first peas of June, bursting July tomatoes, and crisp August cucumbers were always heaped, unadorned, at table in place of more complex side dishes.  Despite the joy of eating the beautiful produce my mother so proudly grew, I resisted working in the garden as a child.  My turn at farming didn’t come until I had lived for three years in urban Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. I had developed a knack for pantry cooking and an appreciation of fine food, but felt little connection with the world of agriculture beyond my love of open space and quiet.  What drew me back to farming was academic study of community health and nutrition and a passion for promoting health and preventing disease.  I began an internship farming at a community farm in Waltham, MA immediately after a three-month stint in South Africa where I was deeply moved by the irony of such poverty in a land blessed with such rich arable land.  And so, upon returning to the States, I dove into action, believing that the best way to promote justice and better health for the community, individuals, and the land was to participate in sustainable farming.  My idealism, like that of many first time farmers, was soon shattered when I began to live the day-to-day life of a farmer, dropping to sleep before dark many nights and waking with the first glimpse of the sun.  What I learned as a novice last summer was that as a farmer, you will work harder, sweat more, and make more mistakes than you ever thought possible; that no amount of schooling you have received will teach you to be a good grower; and that the earth is remarkably forgiving and fruitful, despite our human blunders. 

Planting brassicas (the family of plants containing cabbage, kale, pac choi and the like) last week, with dirt working its way under my cropped fingernails, I felt a deep sense of peace come over me.  The April morning was edged with frost and all the crew members wore hats and heavy sweaters, but the perfect blue sky promised a warm afternoon and ample sunshine.  The familiar soreness and ache in my shoulders and lower back, reminiscent of the harvest days of August, had reappeared, reminding me how unfamiliar my body has become with the work over the winter.  But in that dull pain and the lingering strangeness of being in a new place was the comfort of knowing that I’m back with my hands in the dirt, doing real work, building community around food, and growing the plants I love to cook with and nibble right out of the ground in the heat of summer days. 

So stay with me as I reconnect, a new farmer in a new place in a new chapter of her life.

Sara

Sara can be reached at sara.b.franklin@gmail.com