Greenhorns

by Paula Manalo

  Despite these occasional moments of blinding success, the books often just barely lean in our favor. Any farmer can tell you the list from the other side of the coin is long: the engines that fail you; the rain you are desperate for, that seems to pass over your farm and soak your neighbor’s suburban yard; the deer that randomly develops a taste for tomato vines; the owl or the dog or the hawk in the chicken coop. When you win at farming, you get a small but hopefully fair wage for your time and work. But when you lose, you can lose big.

  I have a friend who works in the dot.com world and has described the shop talk they use. Ideas go in baskets and need to be carried; they plant seeds of interest and harvest click-throughs and page views. It made me laugh because I know that many people find their work so intangible that they hide behind farm talk in their comfortable air-conditioned offices.

  Years ago, my then-very-young niece asked me what I do at work. At the time, I was working for an environmental organization on forest protection, so I told her that I help save trees. She was excited, and asked if I plant them or water them. She was visibly disappointed when I had to confess that what I actually do at work was type on a computer, talk on the phone, and attend meetings. We could have any of a million different professions, and these are the same things we mostly do at work.

  * * *

  Most of us don’t need to search for meaning in our lives; we see it every day.

  * * *

  Farmers work with plants, steel, soil, engines, and earth. We live by the weather, the earth, the seasons, the sun, and the rain. The baskets we carry have three dimensions. Most of us don’t need to search for meaning in our lives; we see it every day. Thankfully, the work itself propels us forward to the next task. After seeding and planting tomatoes, you naturally want to tie up sagging vines and later pick the fruit. We know that money does not buy happiness, freedom, or meaning in life. And the farm brings all of these, some days in excess.

  Surviving Globalization Together

  * * *

  BY JANNA BERGER

  A farmer and artist, Janna Berger has found many incredible homes around the world, including Angelic Organics, Red Fire Farm, and the Sunshine Farm. She owned and operated Living Stems Cut Flowers in Washington state and now manages vegetable and flower production at Adamah, in Connecticut.

  * * *

  I was a terribly angsty suburban teenager, but traveling abroad, exploring and transforming the foreign into the familiar, made the world feel real and worthwhile. In order to fund these trips, I donned khaki pants and endured work stints at places like Pizza Hut and the retail infant-supply superstore buybuy BABY. I was miserable doing customer service, but my paychecks were promissory notes for adventure. When I was abroad, I avoided the frenetic confusion and alienation of backpack tourism by volunteering, studying languages, teaching English, and working on farms. In this way, I happened upon the glamour of manual labor.

  One such experience occurred during a reforestation project in Ghana the summer I turned twenty. I was clearing brush in preparation for tree planting and, like most of the other international volunteers, I was nowhere near as proficient with a machete as our Ghanaian hosts were. I quickly understood that our main contribution to the forestry effort was not our ineffectual hacking but rather the two-hundred-dollar program fee that paid for the saplings. Nevertheless, some combination of pride and sheer enjoyment brought me back to the brush each day along with the Ghanaian volunteers and a similarly persistent Frenchwoman, sweating and swinging my machete with little skill but lots of vigor. A stark contrast came into focus: the fluorescent buzz of my dreadfully boring days scanning teething-ring bar codes compared to the invigorating effort of clearing brush for replanting.

  As such physical work experiences piled up, a new vision of myself as someone capable of using my body to alter the world emerged. With this realization also came a whole host of questions about what forces, if not my own self, had been shaping the world around me up until then. Suddenly, the effortlessness of the survival techniques I was brought up on scared me. Send in rent check: sheltered. Turn up dial on thermostat: warm. Pick up phone and order fried rice: fed. How did such a system work? And what if it didn’t? And where did I, the fledgling machete wielder, the naive and enthusiastic novice, the green student of the international language of hard work, fit into all of that?

  When I was twenty-two, I fell in love in Wisconsin. Thus motivated to deny my expatriate tendencies and find a job stateside, I took an internship on an organic CSA farm and quickly became somewhat of a farming nerd. I was thrilled by the daily work of bunching cilantro in the pouring rain, stuffing hundreds of infinitely squishable kale leaves into a single bin, digging up leguminous cover crops to see the mycorrhiza nodules at work fixing nitrogen on the roots, relieving myself in the brilliant technology of a compost toilet, and, perhaps most of all, seeing strong-armed women my size lifting and hauling and digging and creating with their bare hands.

  The more I read and the more I pondered, the more I came to understand that local farms not only provide feverish excitement for the agronomically obsessed, but they are also a powerful offset to corporate hegemony over the global economy. Chicago salads are going to get their tomatoes somewhere, and it’s better that they come from community-oriented organic farms in Wisconsin than worker-exploiting, chemical-soaked megafarms in Mexico and shipped thousands of miles on the same oil that fuels today’s explosive wars and global climate change.

  Across the United States, the number of American consumers buying local in order to decrease their dependence on the anonymous, exploitative, globalized economy has grown rapidly since I began my journey in small-scale agriculture six years ago. The broadening market for locally grown, organic goods has increased the viability of my making a living as a farmer, however modest by American standards.

  This remarkable opportunity for me to begin farming is happening at the same time that doors are slamming shut on the opportunity to continue farming for most of the world’s farmers. Over the past two hundred years, agricultural technology and the global food trade have rapidly pushed out small-scale farming and local markets. Industrial agrarian systems that use tractor power, hybrid and genetically modified seed, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and crop specialization are highly productive, thus setting unprecedented low food prices. This industrial model requires expensive capital investments and land acquisition, making its adoption an impossibility for most farmers in the world and spurring massive rural exoduses into cities across the globe. Unemployment and poverty are often the result, as our economy simply hasn’t created enough alternative professions to replace farming as a livelihood.

  * * *

  A new vision of myself as someone capable of using my body to alter the world emerged. What forces, if not my own self, had been shaping the world around me up until then?

  * * *

  Having totally restructured where and how humans live, the rock and the hard place between which industrial agriculture leaves us is even tighter, because its rapid consumption of resources makes it viable only as a short-term system. Topsoil is washing into the oceans due to erosion. Soils are so stripped of fertility that larger quantities of manufactured fertilizers and water are continually necessary. Herbicide-resistant weeds are emerging. Pest pressure on monoculture keeps ramping up.

  We can’t go backward to a time when the wisdom of one’s ancestors could create a modern livelihood, because the environmental and market forces against it are too great. Surrounded by such a crisis and disconnected from the more sustainable systems that preceded it, where should agricultural pioneers look for modern agrarian models that reclaim agricultural livelihoods and soil fertility?

  As a beginning farmer searching for the most sustainable systems, I have relied heavily on the knowledge and perspective of resurgent small farmers across the United States. Learning from farmers in other countries, especially ones who still have a relatively strong local economy, has proved more d
ifficult. In a day and age when a Chilean avocado can make it onto a Canadian burrito before going soft, is giving voice to agrarian wisdom from the far reaches of human experience too much to ask?

  Perhaps it is the nature of farming that makes worldwide networks of farmers educating one another and innovating together so elusive. With farmers necessarily engrossed in the universe of their own farm, it’s difficult to connect. When the cucumbers need to be irrigated or the winter squash needs to be brought in before frost, it’s easy to forget how big the world is.

  My hope, however, is that in choosing to be a farmer, I have not relinquished my role in cross-cultural interaction, a resource too valuable to be squandered by individuals and dominated by transnational corporations and governments. In addition to minimizing the negative impact of exploitative global interactions, farmers, too, can reap the benefits of our modern capacity for global communication: We just have to open our eyes and seize the opportunities available to us.

  My income and schedule as a farmer has made globe-trekking harder than it was when I took orders for Pepperoni Lovers pizza with extra cheese between flight departures, but I did manage to spend a winter in southern India a few years ago. There I met Indian farmers, their colorful, complicated farms similarly, stubbornly, tucked among mega-monocultures, whose environmentalism, humanism, and insistence on commonsense wisdom echoed those of so many American organic farmers. I was introduced to technologies I’d either never heard of or never seen in action, such as composted humanure, algal fertilizers, and the remediation of saline soils by certain types of trees. Again, I was blown away by the way foreignness softened into friendship and the real potential for collaboration became clear.

  Not all such lessons have to occur so far from home. Working on farms over the years, many of my coworkers were immigrants from countries where rural exodus happened more recently than it has in the United States. Often, their knowledge of their traditional farming systems goes unrecognized as they are relegated to laboring rather than creative management roles, an unfortunate situation that farmers can easily avert by having deeper conversations.

  Networks of farmers have tangible things to share with one another, from heirloom seeds to effective crop-rotation schemes, not to mention the confidence to be gained from interacting with like-minded colleagues. Telecommunication, the Internet, books, air travel, and bold, basic listening are all potential tools for sharing strategies about how to survive as a small-scale farmer.

  Most farmers cannot viably make a living solely by employing the methods of their grandparents, and yet the contemporary industrial model will destroy us all in short order. Founded in an epidemic of poverty and the environmental degradation that exacerbates it, the commercial bounty offered by globalization continues to float methodically over checkout scanners. The upside is that globalization also offers unprecedented opportunity for connection. In the face of the modern dichotomy that pits rich against poor and technology against tradition, today’s agricultural pioneers cannot afford to leave the powerful tool of global communication unutilized.

  Lost and ... Still Lost

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  BY BEN SWIMM

  The manager of Spring Creek Farm in Palmer, Alaska, Ben Swimm grew up navigating the crowds at the downtown farmers’ market in Madison, Wisconsin, where his favorite items were Amish sticky buns. Although he now attends markets as a vegetable farmer, he’s still known to trade some of his fresh produce for the occasional danish.

  * * *

  Last season was my first comanaging a CSA, and it brought so many unexpected challenges that by October I was ready to collapse in a permanent heap of worn Carhartts and dusty long-sleeve shirts. With the season over, I kicked off my boots and banished farming from my thoughts and actions, wondering if I would return to it at all. It wasn’t until I read an article by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times that I started to feel a bit better about farming. The essay, “Lost and Found,” describes the author’s struggle with the sometimes chaotic nature of farming. Especially frustrating to him is his bad habit of losing tools in the middle of a busy day. I have the same problem, so I connected with the essay instantly. To me, losing tools is a symptom of the larger challenges of farming, part of a chaotic spiral that’s especially dangerous for beginning farmers.

  It starts with the overambitious nature of most farmers, the inescapable tendency to pack more into one season than a single person could reasonably handle. This leads to flutter and haste, as one attempts to achieve more tasks than there is time for. This, in turn, causes disorganization and chaos. Combined with the resulting lost tools and time, it’s easy for unanticipated events to spin this disorder into a dizzying cycle of accumulating and unsolvable crises that can eventually leave a farmer demoralized and helpless.

  Further contributing to this feeling of helplessness for a first-year farmer is the seasonal nature of farming. Many problems that arise throughout the season simply cannot be solved that year, and damage control is only so uplifting. If your garlic doesn’t sprout in the spring, you don’t have another chance to plant more garlic that year. All you can do is buy garlic from the farmer down the road, wonder why you hadn’t secured your mulch against the Alaskan-winter wind, and face the terrible reality that you had just one shot to grow garlic and you failed. After a number of these failures in the same year, coming back for another year doesn’t seem appealing.

  What makes it all okay, says Verlyn Klinkenborg, is that you usually find what you’ve lost, albeit only when you’re no longer looking for it. Sometimes your lashed-together solutions, against all odds, do work. The satisfaction of these moments makes everything worth it, he says. The moment of stillness and clarity after his inspired solution for thawing out the water supply for his horses is triumph. His reaction to finding a long-lost object is idiotically joyful. These small victories are what keep him coming back for more. It sounds wonderful.

  My response to Mr. Klinkenborg is this: That’s easy for an experienced farmer to say. As a young farmer, though, you can’t realize the foolishness of your quick solutions because you haven’t failed yet. You won’t find what you’re looking for because you haven’t been around long enough for it to turn up. Sometimes there’s no positive resolution, no chance to get the better of a wind-ravaged greenhouse or a moose with a ravenous appetite for fresh peas and beets. At the end of the season, after emptying our workshop of all usable tools and leaving them in some field or box or drawer or greenhouse to be found some years from now, I had yet to feel a moment of redemption similar to Mr. Klinkenborg’s. Sometimes pliers remain lost, or by the time they’re found they’re rusty and nonfunctional. Sometimes you can’t find the right solution to anything. At least not on the first try.

  What Mr. Klinkenborg has that I don’t, I realize, is experience: years of tinkering that have given him an instinct of what will work and what will not, as well as an accumulated patience that has shown him that if he keeps working at it, things will eventually work out. When something goes wrong, he’s been around long enough to know that he’ll get another chance next year, and he’ll be better prepared. One day I’ll have the advantage of a similar perspective. In the frustrations of my first season, though, it was difficult to believe that farming would ever get any easier. At the end of an especially taxing season, this doubt made it hard to want to come back for another.

  In October, I didn’t know if I would make it over that hump and into a new year, excited and ready to farm again. The wisdom of an older farmer, though, tells me that the hurdles will get smaller each year. Next season will bring its own challenges, but I have to trust that it will also bring more of the transcendent moments that make farming worthwhile. This hope is what finally revved my excitement for the coming season.

  * * *

  What makes it all okay is that you usually find what you’ve lost, albeit only when you’re no longer looking for it.

  * * *

  Shortly after reading that essay in the Time
s, I picked up a book on composting. Soon after that, I began reading about soil science and discovered why our onions had thick necks and didn’t cure correctly: Our soil is low in phosphorus. By mid-December, I was once again fully consumed by farming, reading, studying, trying to solve the problems of the previous year. What will bring me eagerly back to the fields in the spring is faith that the solutions are out there somewhere, and that someday I’ll find them. Along with that pocketknife.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  OLD NEIGHBORS NEW COMMUNITY

  My lettuce starts were sizzling in the field. It was May of my first farming season and I was trying frantically to get my new irrigation system up and running in the middle of an unseasonable heat wave. My desperately needed income was wilting in the field. The heat had come a month sooner than anticipated and I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t sourced my overhead sprinkler hand lines yet, much less finished burying the mainline, and half of the field was already planted — and thirsty.

  I was sick as I swabbed PVC glue onto the last of the pipes, sweating behind the rubber respirator. The crop failure could be monumental. I might have to start over. I would lose half the season, half my projected income, not be able to pay off the startup debt I’d put on my 0 percent credit card before the no-interest grace period ended.