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Subject: Market Farming

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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: market-farming Leaving
  • Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 08:27:47 -0400


This is a probable goodbye to my friends here, and to farming.

I am putting my farm on the market today and making arrangements to surrender my animals to a humane society adoption program as soon as I receive an offer on the house. In case anybody's interested, it's $80,000 for the house and barn and five acres, $15,000 for the adjacent 15 acres. Nobody will lose money -- I'm being surrounded by $400,000 Stik-Bilts.

Against all better judgement and past experience, I opened my home to one more "hardworking but no money" housemate. She arrived on Sunday almost two hours late without a phone call and hardly made any small talk before admitting that the place was not what she had expected and she would be leaving the next day.

Turns out she had some sort of strange expectation of a Disneyland bed and breakfast place where she would be an instant intimate friend and full partner. Instead she found the reality for which I had posted pictures and detailed explanations about the help I needed here, and I guess I was not the towering Amazon goddess she had envisioned. I did not apologize for not matching her fantasies!

When a housemate pays the officially-required first and last month's rent plus security deposit, I hire a $100 cleaning crew to make sure that we start off squeaky clean. When they come with nothing, they have to make do with what I can do and if I can't afford new vacuum cleaner bags that week it might just be the best I can do with a broom and mop. My all-day-Sunday-though-worn-out-from-Saturday-market housekeeping efforts didn't meet her standards either, this announcement after grand proclamations in her correspondence that oh yes she was ready to pitch in and work for her room and board, I should put her to work. Oopsie, yes there was work for her to do, what a shock.

I'm very glad that I stayed polite but firmly packed her immediately off to a motel -- she was not staying for one more minute, certainly not for a free meal and bed-and-breakfast stay.

I just can't get it across to anybody that just one more pair of hands, just a few additional dollars, would make such a huge difference over what can be done by one person.

For two days' effort in harvesting and schlepping, plus a full week of hauling water in 100-degree heat, I made $40 at market on Saturday. And sprang a leak in my gas line on the way there.

I might still accept housemates and potential partners if they have a contribution to make and aren't so stupid that they think I'll accept criticism from them before they've put in that contribution. There are a couple of people I'm talking to now but if I have an offer before they make up their minds, oh well.

I am completely ready to sell this place, probably ten minutes before the bank would take it and for maybe five thousand dollars more than I owe on it. I tried for ten years, with my inheritance and life's savings and income and effort. All gone now thanks to the cruel dishonesty of that "build it and they will come" nonsense.

They will come, all right. And say "wow what a great idea, wow what great work you're doing, hang in there." But they will not help for even one hour and they will not pay even five dollars toward that work.

I have been out of off-farm work for six months and there is nothing on the horizon. I composted 1,000 grown-from-seed heirloom tomato plants because nobody helped me get them in the ground when I tore the cartilage in my knee, so I don't have a big tomato cash crop. I tried crawling along the rows but it just didn't work.

My mortgage bank has arbitrarily refigured my escrow retroactive to 1997 and issued a demand letter for $6,000.

The question has come right down to "and hang on to just exactly what?"

I am so ready to be outta this business and wake up from this nightmare that started out as a dream.

Dori Green
Corning, NY


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