Work of hands and land: My farming story

One night last month I dreamt that I was in a “go-round” at the beginning of a meeting and the person who was leading it invited us to talk about our association with herbs and plants. The first two people who went, my colleague Julie and someone else, talked about growing up on farms. Then it was my turn, and I started to cry, and said something like this:

I grew up somewhat disconnected from the land, and very disconnected from agriculture. My dad and our housemate Ann each had brief spurts of gardening, but it wasn’t an ongoing thing, and spending time on a farm was a strange, exotic thing, akin to a visit to a zoo. There was one farm in our extended family: My mother’s brother’s wife had a family farm in upstate New York. This was very rare for Jews; most European Jews were forbidden to own land in Europe, so didn’t have agricultural traditions (and see this fascinating 2003 Slate article suggesting other reasons why Jews don’t tend to be farmers). I still remember when I was around 3 years old, and we visited Aunt Miriam’s family farm in Rhinebeck. I think this was the first and only time I was there, for Joe and Miriam’s wedding, where my sister and I were flower girls.

I remember being a flower girl, carefully dropping the petals, and being very upset and concerned when another child picked some up --- since people were making such a big deal of our role, I thought it must be important for them to remain on the grassy aisle! And, I remember the cows. Just that – that there were cows. We visited them in a barn. It made a huge impression on me. I also remember, now that I’m writing about this, my dad’s ecstasy over the sweet corn we ate that day – fresh-picked, and cooked right away, before the sugars had a chance to turn to starch.

When I was a little older, we had a baby-sitter, Ina, who was some kind of hippie – maybe she was a person of color, I’m not sure, but she wore her hair in an afro, and she did ceramics. I think she probably mostly came to our house, but a few times we went to hers, and she had a big vegetable garden. I remember this because one day she urged us to taste peas picked fresh from the garden. I refused at first – “ew, peas!” I definitely didn’t like peas! But she somehow knew that my only experience of them to-date were the pale, mushy, from-a-can variety. “These are different” she said, and I didn’t believe her, but tried them anyway, and loved the firm, bright, sweet sensation. I was amazed that growing something yourself could make it taste so different.

When I was 19, my sister and I travelled around Europe one summer on that crazy Interrail adventure that seemed a rite of passage for people in our socioeconomic milieu. We mostly visited cities, but our dad had an old friend who lived in a semi-rural area in the south of France. Arlette welcomed us like long-lost family, and had us sample homemade wine in strange flavors like pea-pod and raspberry. And the most magical thing happened when she invited us to help in the yard and I found myself digging potatoes for the first time. I must have had no idea what was involved, and was astonished to discover the little golden orbs beneath the loose soil. Each time I unearthed another pomme de terre, it felt like a miracle.

At about this point in my story in my dream, the facilitator warned me that my time was nearly up (!), and when I tried to continue, two men interrupted me with some witty repartee. I was screaming mad at them and that was pretty much the end of the dream. That is interesting in itself especially given that it I am usually hyper-conscious about never taking too much time in a go-round….and I could digress at length here about gender dynamics in meetings….

But there is more to the story of me and farming. The miracle of the potatoes stuck with me, and had a big influence on my decision to seek out more agricultural experience. The other influence was my interest in environmentalism, and my concern about the effects of our “Technological Society”—the name of an obscure and somewhat difficult book written by a French sociologist and philosopher, Jacques Ellul, which someone gave me while I was still in high school after I told them how moved I was by the film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance.

One semester in college at the University of Chicago, I did an independent study on the history of the scientific and industrial revolutions, trying to figure out how, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. that were emblazoned on my favorite t-shirt of the period, “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” I still remember the day when, reading deep in the stacks in the Regenstein library, I thought, “we have to get back to a more natural way of living, in tune with the cycles of nature, instead of always expecting more and more progress.”

In the next moment, I thought, “before I go out and preach this, I’d better try it for myself.” And then I thought of the harshness of homesteading (perhaps I thought of “Pa” in the tales of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or hippies I’d heard about…?) and realized I didn’t want to, or feel capable of, doing it alone. Then, I remembered a friend of a friend who’d been to some agricultural commune somewhere… and I was off, on a search for what I came to find out was the modern “Intentional Communities” movement.

At that point in history, the late 1980s, there wasn’t much public face of the movement. As I later found out, Communities Magazine and its occasional Directory of Intentional Communities were in a printing hiatus trying to recover from overreliance on one person. And, some readers may recall, there was no Internet yet. I tracked down that friend of a friend, Neal Loevinger, and he told me about the community he’d visited, Koinonia Farm in Georgia. Since my mother had recently moved to Atlanta, this was relatively easy for me to visit, and I did.

It reminded me some of the Israeli kibbutz I’d lived on for 6 weeks in 1981. As I wrote about earlier, my fantasy that I’d get to work in the fields on the kibbutz was unfulfilled, because they thought I was too young or too American or something… but during my brief visit to Koinonia I got to work in the orchards for an afternoon! I was part of a crew of other volunteers, and our job was to pick up the sticks that had fallen from the trees (perhaps they were almonds or pecans, where you shake the trees to harvest them? I don’t remember – didn’t see the fruit or nuts, just the sticks). It was hard work, and my first lesson in the less glamorous aspects of farming (that is, everything besides the harvesting!) It was also an opportunity to practice my newly emerging awareness of gender dynamics; the one male volunteer, talking a bombastically about whatever it was that was important to him, went around picking up the big exciting branches, leaving the boring and painstaking work of the smaller branches and twigs to the rest of us.

Koinonia was a Christian community, and though I admired their history of interracial living in the face of deep prejudice in the South (and the Habitat for Humanity movement that grew out of their work), their orchards were not organic and I was Jewish and it didn’t seem like a fit. However, their guest-house had a type-written list of about 7 or 8 other intentional communities, and I copied down the addresses and wrote to them for more information.

Gradually in this way I compiled a short list of communities, and arranged to visit the ones that seemed to be producing the highest percentage of their own food. During my last couple of years of college (supported and often accompanied by Gene, who I wrote about in my last post), I visited several rural intentional communities during vacations, and selected two to try out at greater length after graduation. I did a 3-month internship at Springtree Community in Scottsville VA, and then a similar-length initial stay at Sandhill Farm in Rutledge, MO.

Springtree was small (at the time I was there it was 5 middle-aged adults whose children had grown and moved away), and included two professors, who saw part of their role as teaching young people like me farming skills. I learned a lot there, including how to persevere in the face of a seemingly endless row of weeding by focusing on the present and not looking too far ahead or too far back along the row, or at the rows to come; and how to spin wool and use natural dyes, which was an interest of mine. I also developed back pain!

Since there were no longer-term residents close to my age, I felt it wouldn’t be a sustainable lifestyle long-term for me, and that was, above all, what I wanted to experience. I really wanted to challenge myself to get out of my head and my training in intellectual labor and see if I could get to a point where I could see myself living there long-term. The nearby Twin Oaks, a much larger income-sharing, kibbutz-inspired community with many people near my age, was very attractive to me (especially some of the young men there!), but I was on a mission to learn to grow my own food, and experience a more natural lifestyle, and most of Twin Oaks’ income came from their cottage industries of making hammocks and rope sandals.

So, I chose to become a member of Sandhill, where there were also only 5 adults, but where one of them was close to my age, and another one was Jewish (making me one of 3 Jews in the county, which later became 2, since unfortunately Elke left Sandhill shortly after I became a member). My stay at Sandhill lasted 2 ½ years and is probably worth several book chapters. My time there was by far one of the most challenging periods of my life, for many reasons, and shaped me in many important ways. I did learn a lot about farming, as well as how to hammer nails, lay bricks, make cheese and tempeh; how to cook from scratch in large quantities with only what is on hand; and how to reduce my use of fossil fuels, laundry soap, deodorant, and razor blades… and, the skill I’ve used most since leaving there, how to facilitate consensus decision-making.

I had serious questions, though, about whether this lifestyle really could lead to the social changes I’d imagined. Despite the deep commitment to a more environmentally friendly lifestyle, we still used gasoline-powered tractors, and were still on the power grid, and had to drive long distances to get to a city to buy things we couldn’t grow or make. Though we had a nearly constant stream of visitors from all over the country and several other countries as well, the potential for impact seemed to me to be relatively small. My physical pain during some of the hard labor also limited my commitment. And, though I made every effort to settle into it as a sustainable, long-term lifestyle, I was just too young to settle down; I was still discovering who I was and wanted to become.

When I moved to Madison in 1992 and began looking for a job, I went to the huge Saturday farmers’ market on the Capitol Square and asked at each booth whether they were hiring help. In this way I got a job working at Fantome Farm, a gourmet goat-cheese operation. While I enjoyed the work and the relationship with the wonderful farmers (Anne Topham, who has recently retired from cheesemaking, and her then partner Judy Boree), the farm was a significant commute from Madison. I had, after all, decided to move back to a city and wanted to be fully engaged there, so I didn’t end up staying at the job after the first year or so.

I did join the early Community Supported Agriculture (subscription farming) movement, having a worker-share at one of the first CSAs in Madison, Zephyr Farm, until I threw my back seriously out of whack. Later, when the main farmer’s back also gave out, I used my consensus facilitation skills to help them create the cooperative Zephyr Group Garden instead of a CSA. Though I maintained a CSA membership, over the years I got less involved in actual farming. Though I usually grow some potted herbs, I have never gotten into being a serious gardener, partly due to fact that I always seem to develop severe back or hip pain when I do too much of it.

When Don and I first began our courtship in 2003, a decade after I quit farming, we spent a very long walk telling each other some of our life stories. We were both equally astonished, amused, and deeply touched that day to find out that we shared very similar experiences of youthful excursions into farming. Usually when I tell people about my farming experience – “I know how to milk a cow by hand” – they are amazed. Don, on the other hand, said, “Me, too!”  Turns out he did a stint at a homesteading school in Michigan in the early 1970s!  I began to realize in that moment that I had met my soulmate!

A few years ago I finally decided it was time to accept the fact that I am not a gardener, rather than continue to feel like I should do more of it. Though I had maintained membership in a CSA every year for many years, I eventually stopped a couple years ago when Don was on a restrictive anti-inflammatory diet that precluded tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and other nightshade plants. Fortunately, after a year or so of being without a CSA, a small weekly Farmers’ Market opened at Edgewood High School last year, a block from our house! This year I bought us a long-dreamt of freezer and have been buying a bit extra to freeze. I haven’t tackled canning so far, though last night listening to the amazing and incredibly hopeful stories, poems, and music of Carrie Newcomer, I thought, maybe I still will.

I recently learned from my Uncle Joe that the family farm in Rhinebeck NY is now beginning to be gradually sold off -- following the sad national trend. But the simple miracle of food grown and prepared close to home – what Newcomer sings so beautifully about, “the work of our hands”  – and a deep connection to the land – will continue to call me.

[See this link for Carrie’s poem “Saturday Morning Market,” in which she celebrates her “…deep abiding love /For shiny purple eggplants,/Real and rounded in such womanly ways./ I am beside myself with wonder/ At the many shapes and hues/Of crook-necked squash and new potatoes… This is real abundance/ Of the senses and spirit, A true kind of church,/ With its arms open wide/To the eaters and eaten, / The growers and grown, / To all who come looking/For what is common and earthly,/Luminous and lasting…” (Really, go here and read the whole poem)].

Laid out on the counter

Pulled up out of hot water

The work of our hands so faithful and true

I make something barely there, music is a little more than air.

So now every year I’ll put by tomatoes and pears

Boil the lids and wipe the lip with a calloused fingertip

And I swear by the winter ground

We’ll open one and pass the thing around

Let the light catch the jar, amber-gold as a falling star

So humble and physical, it’s only love made visible

Well, now I understand, it’s just the work of our hands.

     --“The Work of our Hands” by Carrie Newcomer (Watch a YouTube video of her performing the whole song here).