Greenhorns

by Paula Manalo

  One of the by-products of seed farming is usable produce that can be preserved once the seed has been extracted. Most seasons I’m left with the exhilarating challenge of putting up at least two thousand pounds of tomatoes and peppers for sauces, paste, salsa, and ketchup. I also dehydrate the flesh of dozens of melons and freeze hundreds of eggplants that have been grown for seed. By allowing the feminine gift of reproduction to flourish on our farm, I’m drawn back into my kitchen every August.

  As our kids have gotten older, my life has moved into ever widening circles. I’m a social creature by nature, and have found myself in various community-organizing roles. After hosting farm interns for several years, we helped start a nonprofit devoted to improving the quality and education of farm internships. I received a grant to write a curriculum for interns, which helped launch the organization’s farm education program. Rogue Farm Corps currently has fourteen participating farms and educates at least twenty-five interns a season. I also started doing work for our regional agricultural cooperative and received grants to purchase seed-cleaning equipment for the group. Then, Tom and I became the coordinators of the cooperative’s multifarm CSA program, which comprises fourteen farms and ranches. A few years after that I started working part time at Oregon State University’s local extension office, teaching classes on farming.

  I enjoy feeling that I have a positive impact on the larger agricultural community, but once again I feel torn. This time, I wonder if I’m spreading myself too thin and spending too much time away from the farm and the kids. How much more successful would Wolf Gulch be if I plowed all my energy into our own operation? But the truth is that I find a deep satisfaction in working at the heart of a larger movement, on a scale greater that the perimeters of my own farm. I like to think of myself as planting seeds in the hearts and minds of my students and helping to preserve the bounty of our rural culture and economy through cooperative efforts.

  Tom has remained supportive throughout. Ironically, our relationship has turned out to defy some typical gender dynamics: I’m the one who leaves home two or three days a week to work in an office while he stays on the farm. The world in which I operate is much larger than his, yet our relationship continues to draw me back into the domestic sphere, where I find a different form of contentment.

  Like a faithful cat proudly bringing home dead rodents for its owner, Tom arrives at the kitchen door with bushels of tomatoes and peppers for me to process. He looks both pleased with himself and a little sheepish at the abundance of the harvest. I feign dread and even resentment because I want him to appreciate how much time and monotonous labor goes into transforming these fruits into two valuable products: seed and preserved food. Tom, who indulges me just enough, expresses his gratitude for my labor. Secretly, I’m pleased by the fecundity and fertility of our farm. I am also pleased by Tom and his efforts, and I strive to match his work ethic. In this moment, I appreciate that our distinct roles create an intimate and interdependent dynamic between us. I also feel at peace with my desire to work in both the microcosm of our farm and the larger sustainable agriculture movement.

  This past August, as I checked the temperature of the canning bath and felt steam hit my face, I was struck by the completeness of my life. I’m like a plant that has been given free rein to manifest my biological potential. When the canning season wanes, on the eve of the first predicted frost, the kids and I always join Tom to gather up the winter squash and stash it in the safety of our barn. That night, after supper, we ritually open our first jar of canned peaches and light a fire in the woodstove. The peaches are always sweeter than I expect them to be.

  Surrender

  * * *

  BY COURTNEY LOWERY COWGILL

  A writer, editor, and farmer based in central Montana, Courtney Lowery Cowgill is the cofounder of the online magazine New West and a columnist for the journal The Daily Yonder. She and her husband run Prairie Heritage Farm, where they raise vegetables, pastured turkeys, ancient and heritage grains, and sometimes a little ruckus.

  * * *

  One Friday in early September, I dragged myself out to the field to harvest for the next day’s market, ready to spend hours picking, weighing, and sorting the overwhelming bounty a September harvest day brings.

  Instead, when I arrived, my husband shouted from across the field four small but feared words: “We got a frost.”

  The forecast had called for 38°F, but in our little spot that had quickly dipped below freezing. We’d harvested the first of the tomatoes the week before and the peppers were just starting to put on fruit. It was a cool, wet summer and most of our hot-or long-season crops had been seriously hampered. We’d been waiting, hoping, for an Indian summer. Some of the winter squash — what would feed us and our customers all winter — had only recently started to flower. We still had five weeks of CSA deliveries for our customers and four weeks of farmers’-market tables to fill.

  As we walked through the beds, inspecting blackened tomato leaves and wilting summer squash plants, Jacob said, “I’m trying really hard not to feel bad about this.”

  I felt it, too. Overwhelming defeat and, moreover, a feeling of guilt.

  It’s baffling to me that something beyond your control can make you feel like a failure. But welcome to the life of a farmer.

  The cliché about the complaining farmer is an easy one, but it’s accurate. Find a farmer who doesn’t complain about the weather or wheat prices or sawfly or federal farm policies and you’ve found a rare species. Listen closely, though, and I think you’ll hear that the complaining isn’t just for its own sake. These farmers are not looking for sympathy. The griping is an acknowledgment — a plea for some sort of recognition — that all of this is out of their hands.

  As a farm kid, I’m no stranger to that out-of-control feeling. I grew up on a farm that tried to play the commodity game. Wheat, barley, wheat, barley, and all of it sold for whatever the market told us to sell for. Being at the mercy of the weather and the pests and the soil was one thing. Being at the mercy of the market and the grain elevator added insult to injury.

  When my husband and I started thinking about farming, we set out to do so by asserting more control. After watching my family go through what we did in the eighties and nineties, I would dive into farming only if it meant more stability on the farm (and thus in the family) than what I had known as kid.

  That’s how the sustainable ag/local-food movement won me. Direct, local markets meant predictable markets. No commodity markets meant we got to name the price and call the shots. Less dependence on government help meant less intrusion, direct or implied.

  The first thing we did was set up a CSA for the farm. In a CSA, customers, or shareholders, as they’re called, buy in up front for products, giving the farmer the capital needed to grow or raise the food and establishing a ready market. It creates a wonderful relationship between farmer and consumer. We share in the risk and we share in the bounty.

  For our first CSA, we sold shares for Thanksgiving. Early in the season, shareholders paid for their heritage turkey, winter squash, potatoes, and onions — all before the turkeys were hatched and the seeds were in the ground. Our next CSA was a traditional vegetable operation in which members paid in winter for a weekly delivery of vegetables during the growing season. In our second year, we added a grain and seed CSA in which members get one big delivery in the fall of heritage and ancient grains, specialty barley, and lentils.

  This is nothing like the farming I grew up doing, and that first year, with every CSA check that arrived, I relished what I thought was control. We’d figured it out, I thought.

  Oh, how wrong I was.

  No matter how much control our business model gives us, we are still farmers and farming is mostly an exercise in managing chaos — an attempt to control the uncontrollable. No method or scale or marketing strategy can change that.

  * * *

  Out on the farm, and in the bedroom, the more things I tried — lights, water, fert
ility charting, worrying — the less happened.

  * * *

  That spring, I heard that message loud and clear. In my early-planting schedule, I’d sown flats and flats of basil seed. I couldn’t wait to see the little sprouts. I watered and rotated the lights and waited. As all our other seeds sprouted and moved on to the greenhouse, the little basil flats stayed brown. I turned up the heat. I watered more, I watered less. I sprayed instead of sprinkled. I replanted. And still, weeks after they were supposed to germinate, nothing.

  We were trying to get pregnant at the time and fertility, or lack of it, surrounded me.

  Ironically, when we first moved onto the farm, I dubbed the potting shed — where we germinate our plants — “the womb.” That first spring I spent a lot of time in the womb, and every week: no germination in the greenhouse. Every month: no germination in the bedroom either. With every passing day, I felt more and more defeated.

  I must be doing something wrong, I thought. I’d gotten accustomed to a modern life that taught me that if I wanted to succeed, if I wanted something, I needed to be more, say more, do more, pray more, move more. So naturally, if I wasn’t getting what I wanted, there must be something more I could do to make it happen. Especially in my career in online media, I’d gotten used to making things happen instantaneously. In this modern life, I think we’ve all gotten used to making things happen instantaneously.

  But out on the farm, and in the bedroom, the more things I tried — lights, water, fertility charting, worrying — the less happened.

  Finally, frustrated, I decided to give it over — not give it up, but give it over. I came to terms with the fact that all of this was out of my hands. I’d done everything I could and it was time to surrender — to God, to Mother Nature, to fertility, to the basil gods, to whatever. I wasn’t in control, and I had to be able to be okay with that.

  Surrendering wasn’t easy, but once I did it, it gave me a powerful, freeing feeling.

  In the solitary days on the farm, it’s easy to find metaphors for life among racing winds and sprouting plants. Some of the metaphors don’t make it beyond that particular day, but this one, the one of surrender, is the one I’ve carried with me since.

  I’m not saying I don’t still complain. I do, but I realize now why I do it. And now, when I hear other farmers complain, I recognize the subtle wonder in their voices. It’s less of an “oh-poor-me” tone and more of a “can-you-believe-it?” one.

  The truth is, most of us know that despite our attempts at marketing, at pest or weed management, at crop rotations and fertilizer, a majority of what happens on our little patches of land is beyond our control. And that’s as it should be.

  After all, being out of control means we’re connected to nature, to our crops, to God, to something bigger and mightier than we are. And for many of us, that’s one of the main reasons we do what we do in the first place.

  That spring, eventually some of the basil germinated and what did grew up tall and luscious and kept our customers and us in pesto for the winter.

  About a year later, when we’d stopped “trying” for a baby, I saw two wondrous pink lines on a little stick. The next fall, we added a little farmhand.

  That October, I took five-week-old Willa into the greenhouse to harvest what was left of the basil. After we had lost all of the outside basil to that September frost, aphids — fittingly — got most of what we’d planted in the greenhouse, and I thought I’d had my last taste of fresh herb. But when cooler days killed off the aphids, I was shocked to find a few resilient basil plants still putting up shoots.

  I made pesto out of what was left and sometime in January, when I can’t imagine something green and sprouting, I’ll spread it on crackers and start teaching Willa about the power you can gain when you let go.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MONEY

  Somewhere along the way in school you learn about the nitrogen cycle, and that nitrogen is the big limiter when it comes to plant growth. Later, when you become a farmer, you realize it’s true. And unless you’re already a tycoon, you inevitably learn about the other limit to growth on your farm — it’s called Money. Whether you’re trying to buy land, or build a barn, or afford a tractor, or fill the tank in your delivery rig, most of the time it takes money.

  And most of the time, we farmers don’t have it.

  Nor do folks — be it the bank, or the government, or shoppers at the farmers’ market — always want to give it to us.

  I learned that lesson the hard way during the first spring of running my own farm. I had saved and I had penny-pinched and I had scraped and I had scavenged in anticipation of the cash outlay it would take to get the farm off the ground. Nevertheless, come April I had spent everything and my first hope of income was still two months out, growing slowly through a cold, wet spring. I was in the midst of what they call a Cash-Flow Crisis. Sounds dire, and in fact, it was.

  I had hoped to qualify for a USDA Beginning Farmer Loan, a federal program that until then had stirred up feelings of pride and patriotism in me. What a great government to earmark funding specifically to support young farmers! But when I told the loan officer that I needed the money to pay for a buried irrigation mainline on the family land I was row-cropping, he shook his head unapologetically. Sorry, no money for permanent improvements on leased land. No matter that it was family land that I intended to lease for a lifetime, or maybe someday own. Never mind that I was the very demographic he was purporting to serve: young, limited resource, female (a.k.a. “minority”), and just starting out. It was a bitter pill, getting a USDA slap-down in my very first season.

  The banks told me they’d happily give me a loan, at 12 percent interest. And my parents didn’t have any spare change to help float me until June.

  In the end I resorted to using a credit card with a twelve-month 0 percent interest rate to finance my first year of farming — the scariest, most out-on-a-limb financial risk I’d ever taken. Thanks to a good enough growing season, I was able to pull myself out of credit-card debt before the 18.9 percent interest rate kicked in.

  The financial stress of farming doesn’t ever go away completely. We have good years and we have bad years. We have business growth spurts that require elusive capital, and we routinely weather unforeseen, expensive disasters — hurricanes, floods, droughts, barn fires, broken tie-rods, runaway horses, diesel thieves, global economic melt-downs, cucumber beetle infestations, hungry deer, and the neighbor’s bloodthirsty dog. Things that can knock us flat, but hopefully don’t leave us broke or broken.

  These essays tell you about some of the financial woes and middle-of-the-night ulcers, as well as the perseverance and passion that won’t be intimidated into surrender by loan officers, banks, parents, or bleak balance sheets. These stories admit that our farming endeavors are defined largely by money, but they also remind us that money alone cannot, will not, does not define our success.

  — Zoë Bradbury

  How Not to Buy a Farm

  * * *

  BY TERESA RETZLAFF

  In 2003, Teresa Retzlaff and her partner, Packy Coleman, began farming on the north Oregon coast. Six years later they managed to purchase land near Astoria, and now live and farm on 46 North Farm in Olney, Oregon, where they’re building both their soil and a very big elk fence.

  * * *

  “Do you really want to keep farming?”

  We asked ourselves that question more often than I want to remember: each and every time we found ourselves flat on our backs, gasping for breath after hitting yet another brick wall on the path toward buying a farm.

  We had reached the end of the road at the farm we’d leased for five years on Oregon’s northern coast. (Lesson learned: If you’re going to lease land for your farm from very nice people you know and are maybe even friends with, be sure to put everything you are agreeing to in writing. Be explicit. Then have both a lawyer and a therapist listen as everyone involved explains exactly what is being agreed to. And then still have
a backup plan in case it all goes to hell.)

  We were self-taught farmers, former urban folks who had followed the “just jump off the cliff and figure out how to flap hard enough to sort of fly” method of beginning a farm. With the help of family, friends, a few good books, a very effective small-business management class, and many extravagant but useful mistakes, we had built a strong local following for our herbs, flowers, and edible plant starts that we sold mostly at farmers’ markets.

  Still, if we wanted to really make it as a farm and reduce the amount of off-farm income required to make ends meet in the winter, we needed to expand. We had to start growing produce and fruit, keep chickens for eggs, develop some value-added products, and maybe start to offer on-farm workshops. All this would require a significant investment in infrastructure and long-term land security.

  We wanted to make a serious, stable, long-term commitment to a piece of land, to plant fruit trees and blueberries and know that we would be there to harvest them when they matured. We wanted to take the time to build good, rich soil and not have to walk away from it just as it started to produce well. We were wary of leasing, knowing now what it meant to invest huge amounts of money and years of our lives into land that, in the end, you have no legal right to. Any lease can be broken. We needed to buy our own land to farm.

  We found a wonderful piece of land, eighteen south-facing acres outside of Astoria, on the north Oregon coast. It was out in the country but still close enough to town to make selling practical. About half the land was well-drained, silty loam, which in that area is like striking gold. The small house was in good shape, it had a lovely old barn that desperately needed a new roof, and a couple of other outbuildings that could best be described as rustic. It was for sale by owner, and priced optimistically high to try and catch the property-market boom that was only just beginning to slow. It had been for sale well over a year.