It's been over five months since I've written a blog entry! I feel
as if I've been in hibernation, but looking back over my photo record of
the winter, I realize that I've been all over:
1. Land Searching!
2. Big Picture Learning & Practicing
3. Civic Duty in DC
4. Visits to Faraway Friends
This
land search deal has lasted for 6 years, as my patient real estate
agent knows well. However, since I sold my farm business and moved out
of town, and then through life's unexpected twists and turns, moved BACK
to Rochester, the search has intensified. I know I want to farm, I
know where I want to farm, I know how to farm, and I know that I don't
want to farm on leased land anymore.
I've been looking
high and low, far and wide, for the right place to plant my roots for
the rest of this lifetime. Land-searching in the wintertime lets me
flex my creative-visioning muscles, dreaming up colorful abundance in
monotone landscapes that often look more like the surface of the moon
than an organic fruit or vegetable farm. But I enjoy walking through
fields, and I enjoy dreaming and planning. Here is a sampling of the
landscapes I've seen this winter, some candidates for my lifelong
stewardship:
And
oh, the soil maps! I may have the glacially-formed landscape of all
arable topsoil less than 30 miles south of Rochester memorized by the
time I'm finished with this search.
And
the barns. I have always been in love with these pastoral dinosaurs.
Unfortunately, many of them are falling down because we have
collectively turned our backs on these relics that were once so central
to our thriving rural communities and economies. Now we often just
store junk until the whole thing collapses.
But,
other than prancing around in collapsing barns and across tundras of
blowing snow, I've filled my time with learning, in its various forms--
from gatherings to farm visits. Also, practicing meditation, at
Blue Cliff Monastery as well as on my own.
I was blessed to be invited to a lovely meeting of the
Permaculture Institute of the Northeast (PINE) at
the Omega Center in Rhinebeck. These committed folks are thinking
really long-term: how we will be growing our food in a not only organic
and sustainable way, but absolutely regenerative, restorative, and
resilient! We brainstormed, networked, shared experiences and project
ideas. I am excited to learn more and more about how agriculture can
change and adapt beautifully to a changing climate.
I spent a few days with
Sean Dembrosky in Trumansburg,
who is becoming a serious expert at extreme backyard food production--
he is experimenting with locally-adapted fruit and nut tree varieties,
shittake mushrooms, and
bio-char production.
We stayed up tending neat pit-fires of recently felled pine trees, then
poured water on them when they were all red-hot as hell. What remains
is not ash but a dark stable form of carbon which can stay in the soil
for thousands of years, adding fertility to garden beds for the
long-term. This is a practice that indigenous people used for many
years in the tropics, but we are just starting to learn now, and it
could be an important tool for our atmospheric-carbon problem.
I have been hanging out with my favorite farmer-mentor,
Elizabeth Henderson. She and I both live in the city of Rochester now, so we like to get out to farms on field-trips and stuff:
This is our field-trip to see
Doug Mason's hundreds of acres of produce, and high-tech warehouse:
I swear we are not a Carhart ad. And yes, those are robots x-raying and sorting apples for size, color, and defects.
Another
field trip: I couldn't pass up a visit with my favorite kids in the
world, Felix and Zola, who just moved to Cooperstown with their
omelette-providing buddies.
And it was a good fall for gathering wild mushrooms! My housemate Emily and I found a 50-pound
Chicken-of-the-Woods
while walking the dog along the Genesee River, eating it for many meals
for several weeks, and freezing some for the winter months. And these
Maitake were abundant and delicious in a woods which will remain
anonymous!
I
got to tour the apple orchards of Ontario and Williamson, up by the
lake where the weather is moderate for fruit growing and the landscape
almost looks like Napa Valley. New apple production is all on a trellis
system like grape vines, except 10 feet tall! "Trees" are planted as
dense as two feet apart and pruned aggressively. I understand the
practical reasons for this change in techniques, and appreciate the
skill and beauty that goes into it all. But I still have questions
about the long-term resilience of a system like this, which currently is
dependent on a lot of chemical sprays.
Winter
is also for dancing -- I learned that a local grange hall hosts a
monthly Cajun Zydeco band, a sign out in front claiming that it is the
largest grange in the USA! It is a beautiful building, and as I get
down on that lovely wood floor, I feel connected to all my ancestral
booty-shakin' agrarian folks.
Oh,
also berry pies. I like to perfect my pie crust practice in the
winter. We all need more butter in our lives when the temperatures go
below freezing. These were made from wild grapes!
Can't
say enough about Blue Cliff Monastery, in the Catskills, and the
life-changing lessons I've experienced there. Sitting on a cushion in
silence, I learn again and again that peace and happiness are not
something to be sought after but are actually present and accessible at
all moments when we just wake up to the fact that we are alive right
now!
I
got the wonderful chance to lobby in DC as an organic farmer concerned
with the fact that so much of our food in the US comes from genetically
modified crops which were designed by the big-ag industry to tolerate
vast spraying of herbicides. I was joined by a dozen other organic
farmers from around the country, as well as top scientists researching
these herbicides and
"super-weed" resistance,
which requires farmers to spray more and more chemicals in order to
kill weeds, a toxic treadmill which poisons our land, our water, and our
bodies, and only benefits the companies selling the chemicals.
An important report
just came out from the World Health Organization that the world's most
popular herbicide, glyphosate (Round-Up), probably causes cancer. Over
80 million acres in the US are sprayed with this stuff each year, so
this is a bid deal.
I have been disappointed by all the
US mainstream press coverage on this report, which across the board
seems to defend Monsanto's claim that this science, done by French
researchers working for the International Agency for Research on Cancer,
is faulty and not to be listened to. I hope that people can read
between the lines to see that of course a gigantic multinational company
like Monsanto, and others in the industry, will spend millions to try
to convince us that its toxic chemical business is safe! They have a
lot at stake! But so do we...
In
DC I got to see it from the inside, hear it direct from the mouths of
our legislators: the agribusiness industry has lobbyists in there
all the time,
telling them about studies that their (paid by Monsanto) scientists
have come up with to prove that the chemicals are absolutely safe. The
Senate and House staffers asked us to show them science which proves the
hazards of glyphosate-saturated GMO crop production -- they honestly do
want a clear and true view. We left them with a few facts, a few
stories, (I may have shed a few tears), but really, we do lack a lot of
solid scientific evidence. That's because there's no money to fund
these kinds of studies. It seems like science is no longer a noble
effort for truth; results you are looking for can be easily bought.
The two scientists I spent the day with in the Senate confirmed this story: the research they are doing at
Penn State
and Washington State University (which highlight the potential hazards
of escalating herbicide use, and dire warnings about cancer and birth
defects) is consistently squelched, accused, questioned, and called
"junk science" by the industry. These are intelligent men with PhD's,
with genuine concern for people's health and the future health of our
land and our planet. They have volunteered their time, like me, to fly
to DC to try to help our law-makers understand the situation we are in.
Monsanto's
lobbyists are probably not volunteering. What an eye-opener for me to
understand how things function in this country. Big corporations have
money to be able to basically make laws as friendly to their purposes as
possible. Their purposes being: making more money. They may claim to
be feeding the world through technology-enhanced crops, but I'm sorry,
the world can feed itself in
a much better way.
It's just that no one is making much money as a small organic farmer
growing for their local community. So our ability to change laws is
limited.
But we try! Below, my new friends Matthew
Raiford, 6th-generation veteran-farmer from Georgia, and Kara Boyd,
president of the Association of American Indian Farmers! I feel so
honored to be a part of this hopeful effort. I truly believe that our
hearts are stronger, in the long run, than the dollars that are
currently turning the wheels of our "democracy."
After
this intense civic effort, I turned west-ward, to my heart's longing
for sun, green, ocean, and old friends in California. Goodbye, winter
storm warnings, hello Half-Moon Bay. Everyone needs a little splurge once in a while.
Now
it's March, back to a shades-of-grey landscape, invisibly lined with
the hopefulness of flowing sap, buds preparing themselves for another
season's growth, farmers preparing themselves for long days of work.
I
am taking soil samples through a foot of snow. I am as eager as those
buds. I am a seed almost bursting with its desire to put roots into the
ground.
I
am turning my new hatchback into a truck again, filling it with rusty
farm equipment and a fine layer of dirt. (My old hatchback didn't make
it through the winter.)
And I am dreaming of summer, of blueberries, and of a bright future of good hard work powered by the heart.
