Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] A Farmer�s Journey to the Frontiers of American Agriculture

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Michael Nevin <mikepnevin@yahoo.ca>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] A Farmers Journey to the Frontiers of American Agriculture
  • Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2006 21:27:41 -0400 (EDT)

Hi - at the heart of agricultural revival will be a spiritual revival;
I bet one could look at history and find confirmation of the claim that good agriculture requires good culture and good headspace, i.e., spirituality.
 It is more than plant-productivity technique.
Altho there might be lots wrong with Europeon-style ag, is it not true that the Benedictines - surely a spiritual movement - were instrumental in improving agriculture; that agricultural improvements spread out from the network of Benedictine monasteries? I wish I knew more about this history.
Cheers, Mike in Toronto

TradingPostPaul <tradingpost@riseup.net> wrote:
http://foodandfarming.bioneers.org/node/46

Field of Plenty
A Farmer’s Journey to the Frontiers of American Agriculture
by Michael Ableman

The only thing small scale about Fairview Gardens is the acreage it
occupies. On just twelve and a half acres, this organic farm produces over
one hundred different fruits and vegetables, feeds over 500 families,
employs more than 20 people, and hosts as many as 5,000 people per year for
tours, classes, festivals, and apprenticeships. Michael Ableman farmed at
Fairview Gardens from 1981 to 2001. Under his leadership the farm was saved
from development and was preserved under one of the earliest and most
unique active agricultural conservation easements of its type in the
country.

Michael Ableman:

Close to 35 years ago I joined a commune in southern California that was
based on agrarian principles. We had three different parcels of land
totaling some 4,000 acres on which we raised row crops, orchards, operated
a complete cow and goat dairy, and produced grain and fiber. Michael
AblemanWe supplied our own natural food stores, bakery, juice factory, and
restaurant, as well as feeding ourselves. We even made our own clothing,
backpacks and shoes. After only four months living in that community, I was
given the responsibility of managing the 100 acre pear and apple orchard
located in a high desert valley east of Ojai, California. At the time, this
was just one of a handful of commercial orchards in the country that was
farmed organically.

And here I was, at the age of 18, with no orcharding experience, having
never managed anything, directing a crew of 30 people, most of whom were
older than I. The orchard had been abandoned for 15 years. The branches
between the trees had become so intertwined that you couldn’t find the
alleys down the middles of the rows. I had a 1930s copy of Modern Fruit
Science, the journal from the guy who ran the place the year before and
gave up in frustration, and a copy of Goethe’s famous quote “Whatever
you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic
in it.” attached to the door of my 20-foot unheated trailer.

Now, this could have ended up really bad, and under most similar
situations, I probably would have ended up working in some high-rise office
building. But there was something that took place down those rows of apple
and pear trees, something very different than what is happening in most
agricultural fields and orchards in North America. I went to work each day
with 30 of my friends, and while we worked we joked, and we talked, and we
discussed our dreams. We tried out our latest theories and philosophies on
each other, speculated on the fate of the Earth, and ate our lunch together
under the shade of the trees. In the winter, we pruned every day for four
months straight. In the spring we thinned fruit. And in the fall it was a
ten-week harvest marathon. It was repetitive work, but at the end of each
day, instead of feeling I had been chained to some mind numbing drudgery, I
felt like I had attended an all day party.

The work got done, the orchard thrived, and those apples and pears gained a
reputation around the country. And while the cold nights and hot days of
that high desert provided ideal growing conditions, I am sure that that
fruit was equally infused with the energy of that group of people, and the
pleasure they found in each other and in that land. Now this was my
introduction to agriculture. This community experience has informed all of
my agricultural endeavors since. It demonstrated that good food is more
than just about the confluence of technique and fertile soil, that it is
the result of men and women who love their land, and who bring great
passion to working with it. That experience was my preview into the new
agrarian movement that is now sweeping the country.

It is a movement that I believe embodies many of the most critical and
crucial elements of a healthy society: reverence, mystery, humility,
ecology in its wider sense, and community. For a long time I wanted to pick
up the thread from where I worked on my first book, and visit and write
about and photograph this movement. Tell the good story.

We went to see folks who are happily married to a place, many of them
master farmers and innovators, their farms incubators for the new
agriculture. Folks who are demonstrating that farming is not just some
lowly form of drudgery, but that it is an art and craft and an honorable
profession. I’d like to very briefly introduce you to just a few of these
folks. I’d like you to see their faces and to hear their story. And these
images and narrative are excerpted from my new book, Fields of Plenty

Richard Dewilde and his partner Linda farm a couple of hours outside of
Madison, Wisconsin. Richard drives us around in his Chevy pickup to check
out some of the 39 fields of vegetables that are scattered around the
valley. There is a case of 30-odd eight Springfield, silver-tipped rifle
cartridges sitting next to the four wheel drive shift, a bag of tobacco and
some rolling papers, and a single cipollini onion sitting on the seat. I
don’t normally get all gaga about kale, but the field we’re looking at
is as deep a green as anything I’ve ever seen. Not the kind of
artificially pumped up rank green that comes from too much ammonium nitrate
or urea. This one is deep, and blue, and forest like.

The plants are vibrant and well formed, with huge turgid leaves, each plant
standing up straight as if they’d been told to pose for my cameras.
Richard tells me he gets snapshots in the mail of someone’s kid eating a
piece of their squash, or corn, or a carrot. There is an enclosed note that
says, “This is Johnny’s first meal.” 18 years later and they’re
providing the food for Johnny’s wedding. At the market his customers will
introduce their kids to our farmer. There are these beaming kids standing
there that have been raised on his food.

Born in Idaho, raised in potato fields, Gene Theil comes from four
generations of root people. Ask any chef or farmer’s market regular in
Portland, Oregon where they get their potatoes, and they’ll tell you
matter-of-factly, “From the potato man.” Theil farms at 4,600 feet in
the mountains of eastern Oregon, taking advantage of a perfect convergence
of ideal potato conditions, a blend of high elevation, deep glacial soils,
clean and abundant fresh water and low humidity. “It’s rewarding to go
to restaurants and markets and find people who really appreciate what
you’re growing,” Gene reflects. It’s fundamental. We need that
sustenance, that connection, that completion. When you produce a product
and they see its value, it’s like searing truth. They taste that truth.
It’s the ultimate compliment.

Everything at Strafford Dairy in Vermont is run on gravity. The milk moves
downhill from the milking barn, to the cooling tanks, then on to the
bottling and ice cream rooms without the use of a single pump. When the
pasture was cleared, trees were left strategically so that as the shade
moves across the pasture, so will the cows. At first I marvel at these
simple innovations, then I realize it doesn’t exactly require a masters
degree in industrial design to figure out that using gravity is a good idea
or that trees provide shade and the cows will follow. It’s just that so
much of agriculture has lost any relationship to common sense. We’ve got
this idea that things need to be complicated to be any good—that simple
solutions can’t possibly as good as technological ones.

Earl Ransom runs the 30-cow Guernsey dairy herd, selling milk in glass
bottles, just like the milkman used to drop off at my house when I was
growing up. The farm also produces premium ice cream made with the eggs
from older brother Barry. “Of all the things I’d like to give my boys,
I want them to be able to die as old men on this land,” Earl’s wife Amy
tells me. “I also want them to be respectful. I want to make pickles. And
I want to personally eliminate all the flies from this farm with my
swatter.”

Jennifer Green farms alone, producing 30 different grains with a team of
horses. She does her own milling, and produces pancake mixes, and polentas,
and breakfast cereals, which she provides to the 200 families in San
Francisco who are members in her grain share program. We often agonize over
the quality of our vegetables or fruit, wax eloquently over cheese or wine,
but accept flowers, edible seeds and cereals that are rarely fresh and come
from a limited diversity of plants. Jennifer’s 30 acre canvas is filled
with one-third to one-half acre plots of amaranth, barely, millet, teff,
heirloom wheats, blue and yellow popcorns, garbanzos, lentils and fava
beans, pumpkins, sunflower, and poppy seeds, all merging and mingling
together.

In the spring before our visit, the pear and apple trees on Bob and Eileen
and Selena Lane’s place were loaded with fruit. Special attention was
paid to the orchard to pest and disease control, to summer pruning, and to
the very time consuming, expensive job of fruit thinning. By late July, the
Lanes were preparing for the largest crop they had ever had, and doing as
most of us would, quietly planning on what they would do with the much
needed extra income. Tuesday, July 26th, was clear and sunny and hot. Work
had wrapped up early and the small crew was hanging out talking near the
house. There was a distant rumbling and a mellow thunderstorm began. Then
the sky turned black, the temperature plummeted 30 degrees and lighting
came down in sheets. At 3:15 the hail came. Large hail. Hail up to a
half-inch in diameter. Exactly thirteen minutes later the hail stopped, the
sky cleared, the sun came out and the Lane’s fruit crop was destroyed.

Eli Zabar is not a farmer, he is a successful baker and retailer with
several stores in Manhattan that feature products from his own kitchens,
bakeries, and now from over half an acre of their own rooftop gardens.
These gardens aren’t just some passing novelty trial experience. Zabar
invested in installing steel beam reinforcements for the rooftops above his
bakeries, where pipes carry the spent heat from the ovens into the
greenhouses. Winter tomatoes and salad greens are produced by two full-time
rooftop farmers.

Ask anyone in northern Wisconsin what to grow and they’ll likely tell you
milk cows or corn. No one would ever suggest sheep, and if they did it most
certainly would not be for milk or cheese. So when Mary and David Falk
launched their sheep dairy operation, their neighbors though they had lost
their minds. This ain’t no high tech, heavily capitalized dairy
operation. From the Orv’s pizza truck-turned cooler, to the homemade
milking platform, everything has been patched and pieced and thrown
together. The cheese is truly adventurous, wrapped in vodka soaked nettles,
aged on cedar boughs. If you’ve been raised in white-bred America, eating
individually wrapped, sliced Swiss and orange cheddar singles, you’ll
probably think twice if you saw the Falk’s cheese. Brown and crusty, with
ruts and holes, blue and white with brown streaks, covered in leaves, they
look like some bad experiment gone awry. Mary’s own mother told her they
looked like moldy horse turds. But their customers seek out their classic
homely and ugly look, and the cheeses have won numerous national awards.

Farmer John Thurman chuckles as he tells me, “We’re sure not keeping up
with the Jones,” nodding towards the three rusting 20 foot trailers that
house him and his wife Ida and their 7 children. At night we gather outside
to talk. I take out one of my harmonicas to entertain the kids and begin to
blow a slow blues in the key of G. Ida rolls her eyes with pleasure when I
play the final note. She tells me it reminds her of her roots in
Mississippi, when the old timers used to sit around telling stories and
playing music. Considering the poverty that exists here, I am amazed to
discover how much of John and Ida’s time and energy goes into community
projects. Teaching local youth how to grow food, providing fresh vegetables
to seniors, organizing a black farmers cooperative. John describes the farm
as “nothing special,” just a group of hard working people trying to
make something beautiful. Each week, John and Ida and their kids trek into
Chicago to sell collards, and sweet potatoes, and beans, and melons, and
pasture raised chicken to the all black Austin farmers market, in a
neighborhood that does not have a single grocery store.

Ken Dunn farms in the city of Chicago in the shadow of Cabrini Green, the
16-story, prison styled, wired covered housing project, built in the ‘50s
to warehouse the city’s poor and unemployed. Dunn’s two one-acre plots
boast 30 varieties of heirloom tomatoes striped German, brandywine, green
zebra, black Russian—growing in the composted remains of rejected apple
and cherry pie filling, and the uneaten arugula salads and filet mignons
from local, high end restaurants. Five tons of compost made from
Chicago’s waste has been laid down over this site—just a fraction of
the 15,000 tons of urban waste that is disposed of in this city each and
every day. The ground feels like a sponge, and if I close my eyes and plug
my ears it would feel as if I was walking on the floor of some virgin
forest. The tomatoes don’t seem to mind the constant noise or bad air, or
the poverty that surrounds their little island. The plants are tall, and
robust, and absolutely loaded. Their world is rich in nutrients, reflected
warmth and light from pavement and buildings, and the attentions given to
them by local chefs who are thrilled to tell their clientele that the
tomatoes on the menu were harvested down the street.

Elario Álvarez slipped over the border into the U.S. 20 years ago to work
in America’s fields. He had nothing. Now he owns his own farm and employs
over 100 people. Álvarez’s pepper field is like an out of control block
party. Eighty-five varieties, many of his own selections, are thrown
together in an 8-acre burlesque of color and shape. There is humor in this
field—a former migrant statesman on the ultra-linear, mono-cultural,
totally predictable fields of America’s industrial agriculture. I tell
Elario he is crazy, that I’ve never seen anything like this before; that
he should quit harvesting peppers and open the field up as a seasonal
museum. I imagine docents giving tours, stopping along the rows to discuss
the history and culture and use of certain varieties; the arrangement of
color and shape; what the farmer was going through in his life when he
planted this section or that; as if they are standing at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art analyzing a Matisse or a Van Gogh.

George and Anna Zebroff are Russian Doukhobor fruit farmers in British
Columbia. As we are preparing to leave, George pulls me aside. “You have
eaten our apricots fresh and dried. You drank our apricot nectar, and even
tried the kernels, but there is one thing left.” There is a slightly
mischievous tone in his voice as he guides me to the front of the house.
There on the stump of a cherry tree, now used as a table, is a bucket of
fresh, warm goat’s milk, a small container of amber honey, a few spoons
and glasses, and a tall glass bottle filled with a clear liquid. This, he
tells me, is apricot elixir. There is ritual to all of this. In Russian, he
asks his young grandson to demonstrate. With a spoonful of honey in one
hand, and a glass of warm milk in another, the young boy alternates back
and forth. Then comes the elixir. George mixes it with goats’ milk and we
toast. It is a powerful drink, but it goes down easy. He pours another and
we drink again. I protest when he offers me a shot without the milk.

John Thurman, who you met in these slides, told me, “If you have farmed
you can run the world.” I thought about that and about what it means to
be a leader, and I realized how few leaders there really are. We’ve got
plenty of managers and legislators, actors and dictators, and manipulators,
but I’m talking about leaders. Folks that have compassion, respect for
diversity, creative vision, and understanding of our true place in nature.
I wonder how it happened that lies, and deception, and obfuscation, greed
and thievery and murder, could have become the dominant characteristics
required for government office.

So who are we going to be able to seek out to guide a society that has
become so completely disconnected from the natural world, from the most
fundamental necessities such as food and water? What will happen if there
are more Katrina’s? What will happen when the oil runs out? I think John
Thurman may be right. In a time when our primary connection tools are the
computer and the cell phone, those who have maintained an intimate
connection with the land, whose daily work is inextricably connected to
biology and botany and animal husbandry—those who know how to restore and
nurture soil, care for animals, coax food from the earth—may become very
important to all of us.

The hysteria over arugula or heirloom tomatoes, the explosion of farmer’s
markets, the desire to meet face to face each week with the person who grew
your nourishment, goes deeper than the food. It may just be part of a
desperate longing to have some connection to the real world. And I’ve
watched chefs receive mythical rock and roll status. I think its time that
farmers receive that same attention. So I strongly encourage each of you to
make friends with a farmer. You’re going to need them. For I am certain,
as the current global industrial experiment—and that it is—comes apart,
our society will once again have agriculture at its center.

This past spring I took my three-year-old son Benjamin out to a friend’s
cabin located on the west coast of Vancouver Island. We left the farm and
hopped on the ferry in good spirits, the guys out for a little three-day
adventure. What I didn’t realize was that to get there required driving
through a huge, relatively fresh, clear cut. Now, I’ve seen a lot of
ecological devastation, but there is nothing quite so exemplary of
human’s most destructive ways as a rich, diverse, life giving, oxygen
producing forest, reduced to vast fields of stumps, brush, and eroding
soil. The emotional impact of being in the middle of such a thing for an
extended period of time is overwhelming. And little Benjamin was glued to
the scene, looking out the windows of the truck with the most heartbreaking
look of horror and dismay. I felt like I had just unknowingly taken my
young son to see a really violent film. And when it came time to drive home
after our little retreat, he cried, he pleaded with me, not to drive back
the same way we had come. Now “why” is a word that you hear a lot with
a three-year-old, but there was a new persistence to Benjamin’s “why”
after our experience that day, and my responses could not satisfy. I find
myself asking “why” a lot these days as well, but I cannot find answers
when my questions stray too far beyond my own land and the community in
which I live. “Why” is a word we should all be asking of ourselves and
of those who claim to be our leaders.

What if after the events of 9-11, America had asked “why” instead of
“who?” What if we could ask “why” in regards to the recent
hurricane? As we bear witness to the disappearance of nature and the
disconnection of the society from it, we also see an increase in confusion,
and extreme lack of compassion and understanding for how to take care of
each other and for our world, a loss of understanding in regards to cause
and effect. It takes a real conscious effort to rise above the propaganda
and the lies, the litany of misdirected questions. Step out of the
confusion, and be like little Benjamin. Come back into our beginner’s
mind, to our sense of childlike wonder, and start asking “why” as
honestly, freshly and as persistently as a three-year-old.

I believe that to deal with the great unraveling that is taking place
around us, we’ve got to come back home, immerse ourselves in that which
goes on in our own back yards, and in our own communities, and on the land
that we farm. We can feel paralyzed by the broader world scene, but we have

=== message truncated ===


Now you can have a huge leap forward in email: get the new Yahoo! Mail.


Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page