permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Barbara Kingsolver Cheers on Young Farmers - The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/08/barbara-kingsolver-cheers-on-young-farmers.html?via=desktop&source=facebook
Excerpt
Barbara Kingsolver Cheers on Young Farmers

*Letters to a Young Farmer* is full of good counsel for the next generation
from the likes of Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, and the noted novelist
Barbara Kingsolver.
Barbara Kingsolver
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/barbara-kingsolver.html>
04.08.17 1:00 AM ET

Dear young farmer,

Let me speak to you as a familiar, because of all the years I’ve cherished
members of your tribe. Of course, I also know you’re only yourself, just as
I remember the uniqueness of every intern, WWOOFer <http://wwoof.net/>, and
summer weed-puller who has spent a season or two on our family’s farm. Some
preferred to work without shoes. Some were captivated by the science of
soils, botany, and pest management. Some listened to their iPods, or
meditated, or even sang as they hoed and weeded, while others found no
music among the bean bee­tles. A few confessed to finding this work too
hard, but many have gone on to manage other farms or buy places of their
own. In these exceptional souls I invest my hopes.

I don’t need to tell you what there is to love in this life; you’ve chosen
it. Maybe you’ve even had to defend that choice already against family or
academic advisers who don’t see the future in farming. Clearly you do, and
are moved by the daily rewards. You like early rising. You can’t wait to
get outside, cup of coffee in hand, to walk among seeded rows and take
stock of the new lives that have risen to meet the day. You’d stay late in
the barn with a ewe giving birth, just for the thrill of watching the
newborns emerge and make their wobbly first march to the teat, a new family
creating itself before your eyes. You’ll slog through a deep February snow
to enter the sum­mery hoop house, inhale a humid blast of kale-scented
oxygen, and smile like a fox, knowing you’ve mastered time travel here, at
least on a modest vegetable scale.

I expect you know you’ll have to navigate many kinds of relationships. It’s
tempting to think of farming as a hermitage, and it’s true you’ll sink
deeply into one place, learning by heart the insides and edges of its
weather and soils. Its pollinators and birdsongs will be the poetry and
music of your days. You’ll have a stormy, long-term relationship with a
troop of deer or a dynasty of groundhogs. You’ll need a good dog. But your
life will be full of people, too—so many as to drive you a little crazy—as
you foster your own tribe of interns who come to you with unformed agrarian
ideals. Give them enough work to sort out the able from the unsuited, and
whet their ambitions. Look around for mentors. Traditionally, farms passed
down through genera­tions, but at this point in history, that’s not likely
to be your case. It will be up to you to find your farming family, people
who can teach you how to make smart choices and forgive your own mistakes.
You’ll meet long-timers at con­ferences, and if you’re lucky, in your own
neighborhood. Even if some of these old-schoolers have approaches that
strike you as outmoded, they stayed on the land when everyone else was
leaving it, and for this they deserve respect.

Of course, the majority of people in your life won’t be producers but
con­sumers: the happy you-pick families and CSA subscribers, the
hard-to-please chefs and retailers, the farmers’ market patrons. Their
ignorance will alter­nately entertain and aggravate you. They won’t
understand what to do with your kohlrabi, or why you can’t hand over
turkeys in November that they didn’t order in April. They’ll want to know
why your tomatoes cost more than the ones they buy at the store—the ones
picked by exploited labor, grown on some faraway land that’s being poisoned
to death. Try to explain. Once will not be enough. Be patient, because you
need these hungry people as a musi­cian needs listeners, as a writer needs
readers. To them you owe the privilege of doing the work you love.

It probably goes without saying that you’ll need to study, keep good
records, keep your eyes open, and respect the complexities of your
profession. It’s a bold business in which you will partner with your
ecosystem in every­day acts of creation. People have been doing this for as
long as we’ve called our­selves civilized, and that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
That means your profession has a history, a philosophy, a body of science,
and whole libraries of accumu­lated wisdom. As the world changes, you’ll
have to learn not just the old ways but new ones, how to cope with new
kinds of droughts and floods, the critical importance of sequestering
carbon under your crops and grass-finished live­stock. You can read the
modern innovators—Eliot Coleman, Joel Salatin, Wes Jackson, among many—who
are rescuing your profession from decades of mis­takes that masqueraded as
modernity. And the scientist-philosophers whose wisdom exhorted us all
along to avoid those mistakes: Sir Albert Howard, Rudolf Steiner, Lady Eve
Balfour, Masanobu Fukuoka, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry.
You’ll have to work these into your curriculum between the more urgent
readings of veterinary manuals and tractor repair guides. I hope you didn’t
choose this job because you disliked school. You’re still a student, and
your homework will never end.

This is getting at the heart of what I want to tell you: however calloused
your hands, however grimy the uniform, however your back may sometimes
ache, you are a professional. Your vocation is creative, necessary, and
intellec­tually demanding. Unfortunately, you’ll run into a lot of people
who won’t see you that way. You’re the offspring of a generation—mine—that
largely turned its back on the land and its benefaction. We, in our turn,
were raised by a gen­eration that set itself hard to the project of
escaping from agriculture. For the latter half of the 20th century, the
official story was that modern ingenu­ity could mechanize farming so
efficiently, a handful of folks could oversee the process while everyone
else fled the tyrannies of farm life and rural stulti­fication. Legions
believed that story, trained their sights on the city lights, and never
looked back. Or they were heartbroken at the prospect of forsaking their
family livelihood, but still were forced by poverty to leave the farm for
the fac­tory. In any case, they counseled us, their children, to stay in
school and study hard so we could score a respectable life sitting at a desk
<https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=desk>
indoors and never get dirt under our fingernails at all.

The subtext of this message is that manual labor is degrading and that soil
is, well, dirty. Some people will see your coveralls and presume, at best,
a coun­trified backwardness, and, at worst, a deficit of smarts or
ambition. It’s a hate­ful bigotry, as wrong as equating those deficits with
dark skin, or femaleness, or a Southern accent. (And I’ll add here, if you
are a female Southern farmer of color, I dearly hope you’ve found an online
support group.) Prejudice runs around unchecked in surprising quarters. I
know kind, well-educated peo­ple who happily patronize their farmers’
market but recoil at the idea of their offspring becoming farmers. It will
take time for your profession to recover from decades of bad press. Whether
you like this agenda or not, your career is going to be a sort of public
relations event, in which you will surprise your market customers not only
with your flawless eggplants but also with your intelligence, industry, and
good grammar. This might be just the mother in me talking, but if you show
up clean, it will help.

In exchange for your efforts, we will learn to respect the art and science
of your work. We’ll be grateful for your courage and your vision. Prepare
to rectify one of the most ridiculous, sustained oversights in all of human
exis­tence. When we told our youth that farming was a lowly aim compared
with becoming teachers, doctors, or lawyers, what were we thinking? We need
teachers for just a few of life’s decades. If we’re lucky, we’ll see a
doctor only a few times a year, and a lawyer even less. But we need farmers
every single day of our lives, beginning to end, no exceptions. We forgot
about that for a while, and the price was immense. Slowly, we’re coming
back to our senses. Be patient with us. We need you.

>From Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future
<http://www.letterstoayoungfarmer.org/> *by Stone Barns Center for Food &
Agriculture. Martha Hodgkins, editor. © 2017 Princeton Architectural Press.
Reprinted with permission*.

*Barbara Kingsolver’s 13 books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction
include the novels* The Bean Trees*, *The Poisonwood Bible*, and* The Lacuna*,
winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. Translated into more than 20
languages, her work has won a devoted worldwide readership and many awards,
including the National Humanities Medal. Many of her books have been
incorporated into the core English literature curriculum of colleges
throughout the country*.
About the book:

Letters to a Young Farmer*, a project of the Stone Barns Center, is for
everyone who appreciates good food grown with respect for the earth,
people, animals, and community. Three dozen esteemed writers, farmers,
chefs, activists, and visionaries address the highs and lows of farming
life as well as larger questions of how our food is produced and consumed
in vivid and personal detail*.

*About Stone Barns Center*

*Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture
<http://www.stonebarnscenter.org/give/index.html?gclid=Cj0KEQjwzpfHBRC1iIaL78Ol-eIBEiQAdZPVKj1lHcm3UbHf-5dMywd32XhzXXBGtarQk3nDXdq9iEgaAvff8P8HAQ>
is on a mission to create a healthy and sustainable food system that
benefits us all. A nonprofit organization, Stone Barns Center works to
develop a culture of eating based on what farms need to grow to build
healthy soil and a resilient ecosystem. In its quest to transform the way
America eats and farms, the organization trains farmers, educates food
citizens, develops agro-ecological farming practices, and convenes change
makers. Stone Barns Center, 25 miles north of New York City, is home to the
celebrated Blue Hill at Stone Barns, under the direction of chef and
co-owner Dan Barber, a multiple James Beard award winner*.