Guest posting: Intern Kim!

Hey folks! My name is Kim Henderson, and I’m one of the five interns Erin has working on Mud Creek Farm this year. So far it’s been a really intense, but amazing experience. I thought I’d share a little bit about myself, and my experience here so far with everyone, so you could understand what it is like to be a farm intern.

People often ask me what brought me to Mud Creek. I think there are a variety of reasons I decided to join Erin’s team this summer. For one thing, as a farmer’s daughter, I had experienced how my family farms, but I wanted to experience other, different farms. Erin’s farm is about as far away from my family’s farm as you can get. For one thing, Erin’s farm is organic, and it is a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture.) My father’s farm is also a vegetable farm, but he grows food on a commercial scale, he sells most of what he grows at auctions, and he is not organic (although he is moving in that direction.) I have also farmed on Rivka Davis’ Road’s End Organic Farm, in Starkey, NY. Rivka’s farm is a lot closer to Erin’s farm in many respects, except she wasn’t a CSA either, she sold all of her produce at farmer’s markets. So it’s been a great experience being able to work on three very different farms, all of which are very different scale of production, and managed very differently as well.

Besides farming, my interests are wide and varied. I attended Birthingway College of Midwifery for three years, and see myself as a midwife someday. Farming will probably just be something I do as a side thing, maybe three acres at most, enough to feed my own family. I think I’ll primarily want to focus on attending home-births, growing herbs for my midwifery business, and making herbal medicines. But I do think farming and midwifery can go hand in hand, since many of the midwives I know are also small-scale farmers and/or homesteaders. I think this is because midwives tend to know the value of good nutrition, and because both midwifery and farming are about being good stewards of the earth, while helping people be healthy and heal. One of the most famous midwifery authors, Michel Odent, a French man who started revolutionary water birth centers in France, was a farmer before he became an OB. He wrote a book very well known in midwifery circles called “The Farmer and the Obstetrician.” I need to read that book.

I also like adventures of all types, everything from epic bike trips, to dancing, to hiking, traveling (often with little or no money,) trying to tan animal hides, making home-brews, swimming, fishing, hunting, punk rock shows, eating wild foods, bonfires, canoing, and all sorts of other adventures. For example, I once hitchhiked all the way from Portland, OR to Minnesota to meet up with a group of people, most of whom I didn’t know, to harvest wild rice from lakes in the northern woods. That turned out to be a great adventure! And by the way, freshly harvested wild rice is the best tasting grain you can imagine!

I’ve lived a very unconventional life so far, but it has been very full and imaginative. I’m so glad Mud Creek Farm has become part of my adventure this year!