Here are ours:
Amy's Reflection:
My first friends were farm animals. Cows, mostly, because my parents
were dairy farmers and so I was surrounded by them. We had chickens too,
but they pecked me when I tried to collect their eggs and the roosters
flew at my head with their dusty wings and sharp talons whenever I
entered the chicken yard. I preferred the cows. I remember one old cow
who always chose the same stall in the middle of the barn. I liked to
sit next to her and stroke the soft underside of her neck as she calmly
chewed her cud and waited her turn to be milked. I was pretty young
then, too young to be of much help in the barn, but I loved being around
the cows, touching them and smelling their sweet breath.
As soon as I was tall and strong enough, I was given chores. My first responsibilities were feeding the cows and young calves, then cleaning stalls and milking. In the summer there was field work as we grew and harvested the crops that would feed the cows through the winter. It was hard, physical work but I enjoyed it. I loved being outside, working with my family. We were a team, working together to take care of the cows, who in turn took care of us by giving us milk, meat, and money. Neither of my parents had off-farm jobs, so everything we had came from those cows. If they flourished, we flourished.
No childhood is perfect, but my first ten years were pretty satisfying. I determined that I wanted to live on a farm forever and planned to marry a farmer when I grew up. (That it didn’t occur to me that I could be a farmer myself should give you an indication of the gender dynamics in my family.) It was when I was about twelve that I started to realize that something was amiss in the world of agriculture.
In the mid-80s, a decade after former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz (you can read about his legacy here: http://grist.org/article/the-butz-stops-here/) extorted farmers to “get big or get out,” the dairy industry hit a crisis. Production, bolstered in part by government price-supports and buy-ups of surplus product, rose to unsustainable levels. As part of an attempt to reduce the surplus milk flooding the market, the federal Dairy Termination Program offered a buyout option which paid farmers to stop milk production.
I imagine that a conversation similar
to the one my family had one February evening took place across many
farmhouse kitchen tables that year. My father explained the terms of
program. We’d have to sell the cows and agree not to produce milk for a
certain number of years, which meant we’d be done dairying, since it
wasn’t feasible to get back into the business after being out for
several years.
“Well, family, what do you think?” my father asked, looking from my mother to my brother to me. “Should we take it?”
“No!” I yelled, shaking my head vigorously, eyes wide, shocked that we would even consider such a thing. I couldn’t imagine life without the cows, without the farm. What would we do?
I don’t know how much my reaction actually figured into my father’s decision not to take the buyout. Many of the small dairies in our county did. And though my parents didn’t stop farming when I was a kid, they determined that they would be the last generation of my family to farm. “Go to college,” they told my brother and me. “Get a good job off the farm. You can’t make a living doing this on a small scale—it’s too hard.”
The agricultural policies promoted by Butz and others who shared his interests (and the fallout from these policies) have changed the landscape and ecosystem in which I live. Once my township and those surrounding it were dotted with small, diverse farms. My father remembers the days when every family had a garden, a pig, a cow, and some chickens. Now a few large farms dominate the area with corn, soybeans, and dairy herds which contain thousands of cattle (at its biggest, my parents’ herd was a couple of hundred).
“Plant fencerow to fencerow,” Butz said. Today, even the fencerows have been cut and plowed, destroying precious buffer zones and ecologically diverse habitats. In the effort to get maximum yields per acre, erodible land is tilled and soil washes into our rivers and streams. Chemical fertilizers and herbicides have destroyed the life in our soil and they also wash into our watershed, wreaking havoc in our aquatic ecosystems. Livestock, also, are pushed to the limits of production through breeding, feeding, and confinement practices that leave them with shortened and unpleasant lives. And farm workers share that same fate as they put in exhausting workdays which frequently include dangerous working conditions and exposures to toxic substances.
My re-entry into farming as a small-scale vegetable grower in 2010 was
motivated by a desire to enter into a more intimate, conscious, and
conscientious relationship with my local community. Over the past seven years of developing and working this business, I've
experienced deep satisfactions and deep grief. I've moved from hope to
discouragement and back to hope again. I've pulled myself back from the
edge of burnout and bitterness, dug deep to recover the joy I find in
working with the earth, and learned (am learning!) how to be
increasingly honest about what I need in
order to sustain this work.
I suspect that in order to create a truly sustainable and resilient agricultural system, we have to change some of our fundamental cultural beliefs about who we are in relationship to the other beings of this earth and to the earth itself. My farming practices are an exploration of the possibilities for those changes in my own life and being.
In your comments, I would like to hear your own reflections about your relationships to food, farming, and community.
John's Reflection:
I have grown old in a society that promotes competition and condones violence in myriad forms. Much of my work and play in this life has been focused on restoring balance by encouraging and attempting to live in support of these principles:
Cooperation and Collaboration
Respect for diversity
Justice, Justice, Justice
Nonviolence
After 40+ years of gardening and farming, I feel like a child again. Much of what I always "sensed" about these two potentially noble adventures are being confirmed. In the larger scheme of things, all parts of an ecosystem--animals, trees and plants, fungi, microbes, etc., are collaborating and cooperating to maintain balance and health. The greater the diversity present in all realms, the more healthy the system. In my love and affection for gardening and farming, the more I collaborate and cooperate with this process, the healthier I, we, become.
Having shared my experience, I'm interested in what you "sense" and experience in relationship to the Earth.
Questions for you:
What beliefs and knowledge about food and farming did you absorb through the circumstances of your childhoods and early adulthoods? When did you first begin to be aware that something was amiss within our agricultural systems? How have you responded to this awareness?
Have you ever found yourself in a landscape, ecosystem, or any place where you felt a sense inside yourself of "essential aliveness"? If so, what were the elements of that place that contributed to and sustained those feelings?
Having shared my experience, I'm interested in what you "sense" and experience in relationship to the Earth.
Questions for you:
What beliefs and knowledge about food and farming did you absorb through the circumstances of your childhoods and early adulthoods? When did you first begin to be aware that something was amiss within our agricultural systems? How have you responded to this awareness?
Have you ever found yourself in a landscape, ecosystem, or any place where you felt a sense inside yourself of "essential aliveness"? If so, what were the elements of that place that contributed to and sustained those feelings?
Growing up I had no knowledge about food and farming. We got our food from the supermarket and that was about the extent to me knowledge about food. However as I entered college and throughout my college experience I began to see problems in the agricultural system. How these mass productions of food is harming the Eco system and hurting small farms. I also began to see how brutal animals were being treated which in the end is one of the factors that lead me to becoming a vegetarian.
ReplyDeleteIt was during study abroad while in Capri that the landscape took by breath away. I had never seen such a beautiful site before. It made me fell alive and lucky to be there. The water and all the beautiful flowers that were there were amazing.
Early in my childhood, my aunt sustained a small garden in our backyard. She grew carrots, squash, and chili peppers; she would occasionally use them to make one of her delicious meals. My aunt had to leave for a time. During her absence, the garden withered away as my parents lacked the time and energy to maintain it. During this time, I was introduced to fast food and became accustomed to having it in my diet. My parents worked long hours and were unable to prepare food for the family on a daily basis. Fast food became a quick and accessible way to feed the family. My early experiences with food came mainly from grocery stores, fast food restaurants, and liquor stores. I began to realize that things were wrong with our agriculture system when I entered high school. I learned about the mega-farms and the factorization of farms. I realized that we were living in an age of great disconnect between us and our food. It became even more apparent when I would visit my family in Mexico. I felt as though I got a glimpse into a completely other world in which people relied on the food that they grew to sustain themselves and their neighbors. My aunts and Uncles would often exchange food that they grew with other people in the community.
ReplyDeleteThe one place I have ever felt a sense of essential aliveness was when I was visiting a friend in Oregon. We stayed in a cabin that resided in a small community embedded in the forest. We spent the majority of the trip away from what I would consider modern civilization. It was peaceful, listening to the sounds of the forest, undisturbed by human civilization. It was almost like time didn’t exist in that place. It was as if nothing mattered except for what was happening in that instance.
Growing up in Maine meant that I spent most of my childhood outdoors, however, very little of that time was ever spent in a garden. A lot of people in my community lived and worked on farms, or they managed their own small gardens, but because I grew up in a townhouse/apartment we did not have the space to garden. However, during the summer time one of our favorite activities was to go strawberry picking, and then apple picking in the fall; we would make home-made apple cider, apple sauce, and jams. I later experienced "real" farming in elementary and middle school when our classrooms built gardens and grew vegetables together. Although my family bought most of our groceries from the supermarket year round, I still became very familiar with farming and orchards. Overall, I was not too aware of the problems with our agriculture system while growing up, however I was aware of the animal cruelty that can occur on large farms with mass production. In response my family and I started paying more attention to where the food we were buying was coming from; we tried to buy eggs that we cage-free or from our friends who have chickens.
ReplyDeleteThere have been many places that have made me feel an "essential aliveness," however the location that sticks out to me the most was at the top of a mountain. While in China we took a trip outside of Beijing to a Buddhist Monastery and we hiked up the side of the mountain behind the temple. The view was incredible and the air was clean; it was very refreshing after spending four months in the polluted center of Beijing.
Growing up I had what seems like zero knowledge about food and farming. The first time I remember even putting significant thought into agriculture is when I decided to become a vegetarian in early middle school. My reasoning at the time was simply that I like animals, but I started getting a lot of questions about whether I was making that choice because of issues in the meat industry. From there my eyes were opened to a complex web of ways in which large scale food production is harming communities and the planet. I also began to notice at that time the amount of consideration my parents put into the small vegetable garden in our yard. I began to observe their common practice of attempting to make meals with whatever they could harvest from the garden before going to the store. I also appreciated their practice of feeding the leftovers to our guinea pigs and rabbit as a way to use as much of their harvest as possible.
ReplyDeleteI think I have had the privilege of experiencing several places that fill me with "essential aliveness." One place that sticks out to me as relating most to this topic of discussion is one of the villages that we stayed in during study abroad in Thailand. Every morning while we were there we would ride our bikes to school along a road that overlooked what seemed like endless green flourishing fields. Every evening we would come home to fresh fruits and vegetables from our host parents' farm and we would snack on them while we helped to prepare the produce for the farmer's market. On the day that we got the opportunity to go out to the farm with our host parents and "help" (realistically we were only slowing things down), I felt a connectedness to the earth and our natural sources of nourishment that I had not experienced before.
My dad owns his own landscaping business and loves working outdoors with his hands in the dirt. My family lives on a couple of acres of land and as far as I can remember, we have always had a bountiful garden. One summer when I was seven or so, my dad gave each of the kids (myself and my three siblings) a garden bed of our own to take care of. We were in charge of planting, watering, and weeding and got to choose what we wanted to grow. I remember the zeal of the project and being so excited to be in control of helping to create something. I’m not sure much actually grew in my garden bed (I was far more interested in watching Powerpuff Girls and swimming at the pool than chores), but to this day I’ve been lucky enough to see our garden grow peaches, plums, pears, tomatoes, zucchini, squash, strawberries, blueberries, and more. I’ve also seen the sheer amount of work and the many, many hours my dad has put into growing these foods, and the struggles and disappointment that exist alongside the excitement and joy of it. In the last couple of years, my dad has added chickens and bees to our micro-mini “farm” and there has been some talk of maybe a few pigs joining in the future. It has been incredible to grow up in a home surrounded by nature and it has instilled in me a lifelong love of enjoying the outdoors. I have also seen firsthand the amount of dedication and work that goes into the creation of even small quantities of food, which gives me a keen awareness of the difficulties of doing so and makes some sense of our society’s shift to an industrialized food system. It’s hard for me to pinpoint an exact moment of awareness about the problems with our agricultural system since my parents have always been vocal about their concerns with our food. Of course, I only really started believing them and listening to them after moving out and coming to college. I’ve tried to become a more conscientious eater (and overall consumer), but it’s been a really difficult process. There is a lot for me to work on in how to personally address the issues of the agricultural industry.
ReplyDeleteI grew up on the east side of the state, in an upper-middle class suburban city. We didn’t talk about food production at all when I was a child. I didn’t know anybody who farmed or grew their own food; our neighborhood was defined by carefully manicured lawns and small (flower) gardens. We all seemed disconnected from the food we were consuming and from nature more broadly. I didn’t know anything about farming or even cooking. During my childhood, my family was often busy, which meant that we typically ate carry-out or in restaurants. Farming wasn’t a part of the picture at all.
ReplyDeleteAs I grew older, my community became more invested in eating “local.” (Or, perhaps, I simply began to notice this more.) It became increasingly common to hear my friends and neighbors talking about going to farmers markets to buy their produce. Yet, within the Detroit area, “local” could sometimes still mean food was quite far away. Further, these farmers markets can often be prohibitively expensive and limited to certain hours, which didn’t always work for my family. As a result, my mother began to introduce some foods into her garden.
Over the years, my mother’s flower garden has made a slow transition into a vegetable garden. She still has some flowers and other plants, but these days she also grows a number of foods, including tomatoes, zucchini, squash, potatoes, lettuce, and peppers. Her garden is not large in comparison to full-scale farms, but it’s enormous for our neighborhood. Although the garden requires considerable effort from my mother, it allows us a greater flexibility in when we can have access to fresh foods, and at a more affordable cost. The garden does not come close to feeding all of us; we still make frequent trips to the grocery store for produce. However, it has provided a starting point for us in addressing some of the issues with the “shop at the farmers market” approach to food access.
It is only during the past couple of years that I have begun to think more seriously about our agricultural systems. I am not, by nature, an outdoorsy person. My tendency has always been to let other people think about food production, rather than doing that work myself. When I was younger, I believed that agriculture and farming were simply outside of my own interest. It has only been recently that I have come to see how they fundamentally intersect and play off of other issues of importance to me, such as social justice, human rights, and the control of narratives. I want to continue to further explore these connections.
I became a vegetarian in the sixth grade. My two cousins, who were my age, had gone vegetarian as well because they thought animals were too cute to eat. My reasoning had nothing to do with animals, which was a fact I brought up often and pointedly. My dad has worked in renewable energy all my life, mostly with wind turbines, and because of this, environmentalism as a concept has played at the forefront of most of my life, starting at a pretty early age. Thanks to this consciousness, I guess, I decided to go vegetarian because I vaguely understood that raising meat required more energy and resources and caused more harm than growing crops. This was the vague idea behind my vegetarianism, and I found the longer I was a vegetarian the more I learned that backed up this idea. At this point I’ve watched Food Inc. probably 15 times and it always made me feel horrified but also assured in my choice to not eat meat. It also sparked my interest in corn, and in early high school I went through a corn conspiracy theory phase. Eating vegetarian kind of became a habit until sophomore spring when I had to eat meat to study abroad and just sort of stopped. Since, I’ve considered the privilege it took to be able to live the vegetarian lifestyle I did and the limited access of so many people to healthy, protein rich, vegetarian foods, and have become more critical of the practice. I think it’s a fine choice for people to make but I’m often troubled by the elitist, shame-based culture that surrounds vegetarianism and veganism, so I haven’t gone back. But, the learning surrounding this choice I made for myself very young has really couched the way I think about food and food systems since.
ReplyDeleteThrough the culture of my family in India and my parents, eliminating food waste and vegetarianism has been embedded in me from a young age. The society and culture of modern day USA introduced me to the consumption of meat, and I chose to become a consumer of off and on throughout my life. Education at K and through various documentaries that reveal issues in the Food system such as conspiracy, Food inc, and forks over knives, and my time engaging with the wilderness on LandSea and other outdoor endeavors, I have reflected on my place as a human, my relationship with the natural world around me, and the larger human society that I am a part of. The messages from the institutions/systems within our societies such as the government, schools, economic, etc seem to be conducive to poor overall health and well-being as they have unlinked the relationship between man and nature and focused on the outputs/material/consumption nature of man, emphasizing competition and personal gain as end goals in the lifetime of a modern man. The consciousness of creation of what we are consuming seem to have largely been lost. As I've become aware of these issues, I want to implement all the solution-oriented change that I believe to be essential to well-being within my own lifestyle. I have adopted a plant-based diet and aim to be more mindful of my role as a consumer and producer within an ecosystem (i.e. buying fruits/veggies from farmer's markets or co-op, taking time to thank/think about/feel my food through all of my senses, etc). I believe implementing changes that you wish to see in the larger society first in ourselves and our daily lifestyles is critical to any larger change, so I spend time studying myself/my body/mind/spirit relationship with food. It is also during these internal reflective states of engaging my mind/body with conscious consumption of a) food through eating, b) air through breathing and my physical movement that I feel most alive and in touch with myself and my surroundings. Although I try to practice this mindfulness in any environment, I feel most alive in a natural environment, especially forests or out in the sun near bodies of water, where my body is connected to the Earth.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger, I did not have much knowledge about farming, as I grew up in a pretty urban area, where there were no farms present. When I got older, I learned a little more about farming. For example, I studied abroad in San Jose, Costa Rica, where the food was different than food in the United States. When I live with my host family, my host mother used fruits and vegetables from her garden when cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When I ate fresh foods in my host family’s home, I physically felt the changes in my body. I had more energy, I was happier, I lost weight, and my skin cleared up. When I returned back to the United States, I feel he huge difference from when I lived in Costa Rica. When I returned, I felt the negative affects of the food that I consumed back at home. Additionally, I had an opportunity to take environmental sustainability course while in Costa Rica, allowing me to be more aware of agricultural systems in Costa Rica. The only time that I have felt a sense of essential aliveness is when I went to Girl Scout Camp as well as other overnight camps, that exposed me to nature relating to farming and wildlife. Some of the elements that sustained those feelings related to the animal or nature experts who were doing the teachings. Furthermore, my participation as a camper contributed towards those feels.
ReplyDeleteMy first “farming” interaction was when Korea went through a trend called “Weekend Farming”. Yup. Your initial reaction is probably correct. The idea was that families living in cities (background information. Unless you are living in Seoul, there’s probably some form of agricultural land relatively close to where you live because in Korea everything is smoothed together very very closely) rent a plot of land and do a small garden/farming. They would tend to the garden during the weekend (cause that’s what plants do; needing attention only during the weekend) and the people managing the land had seeds and seedlings available for us. It didn’t really work (other than the glaring flaw of trying to put garden on a 5 day working schedule) because my Dad was always exhausted during the weekend, and rightfully so. He was working full time, after all. Without him who was the only driver in our family, we didn’t make it to the farm too often and as result, the little gardening project didn’t go too well. And although I can’t remember too well, I don’t remember if any of the families had any ideas to really “farm”. I know most of my “farming’ or “gardening” knowledge came from children’s books, which isn’t the most credible sources out there.
ReplyDeleteFirst time I learned about flaws within the agriculture system was when I started college, but it was specifically for a US-centric system. Even now I don’t know too much about Korean agriculture system, and I’m not sure if that is because if I don’t remember much or if that is because Korea does not have … messed up system? I would like to think it’s the latter. I mean, I have looked it up out of curiosity and nothing much popped up. I do know it was a big deal with Korea signed the FTA with US because we were concerned we’ll be forced to import “bad” meat from US, so I guess that saids something.
It was less of “feeling a sense inside myself of essential aliveness” and more of realizing the lack of. While I lived in Shanghai, I noticed how grey the skies were and how the grass was yellow all year round. Before moving to Shanghai I was always exposed to nature in some shape or form, so it was the absence that made the heart grow fonder.