Thursday Week 1: Relationships to Food, Farming, Each Other

To kick off our series of Thursday conversations, we'd like to invite us all to reflect on our relationships to the food we eat and the systems (and people, plants, and animals) that produce it.

Here are some reflections from John & Amy:

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 too young to be of much help in the barn then, 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 I loved growing up on the farm. 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 eight 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 resilient, just, and joyful 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.

I titled this class “Slow Farming” after the “Slow Food” (https://www.slowfoodusa.org/about-us) and “Slow Money” (https://slowmoney.org/about/principles) movements, which emphasize the revitalization of local food traditions and investment in community food systems as means of resisting corporate control of food and farming systems. I think we need to extend these “slow” conversations to include the growing of food as well so that more people have the ability to access the deep pleasure and responsibility of growing their own food. I hope this class will contribute to that for each of you.

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 food and farming systems? How have you responded to that awareness? Your responses might include thoughts, feelings, or actions. Please type your reflections in the comments section of this blog.