by Paula Manalo
Although I grew up in central Pennsylvania, a region with plenty of religion and plenty of farming, I came all the way to California to, in a sense, reconnect with these parts of my heritage. As a young farmer, most of my training has taken place within the context of Zen Buddhism as practiced by a community settled in the San Francisco Bay area for almost forty years. I arrived at Green Gulch Farm, part of the San Francisco Zen Center, in 2005 with no knowledge at all of Zen and only the briefest elbow-brushings with organic farming. I was applying for the farm and garden apprenticeship, and I’m grateful to have been invited to stay on for six months. During that time (and the seasons that were to follow), I got rich: I learned what it means to live in community; I learned about religious forms and ceremonies; I learned about silence, stillness, devotion, and love. I also learned what a joy it can be to grow food, teach others, care for the whole landscape, and tap in to a very rich heritage of small farmers.
The source of all these riches? Please see the bottom of the good list: “(dependant on networks of relationships and connections)” is written there like an afterthought, but it’s the foundation.
For me, one of the most profound teachings of Zen Buddhism, and one that I know will resonate with all ecologically minded farmers, is the awareness of all beings and our interconnectedness. Every single day at Green Gulch we invoke the presence of “all beings,” from which we as individual farmers and truck drivers and web designers and kindergarten teachers are not separate. In fact, there is no separation at all. My cat sleeping on the bed, the mites in his ears, the microbes in my composting toilet, the ancient beings whose fossilized bodies fueled my delivery van into the city this morning, you, your parents, all the people you’ve ever kissed or high-fived or tried to ignore on the bus, giant redwoods, ephemeral mushrooms, molds, grasses, ravens, poison oak — we are all interconnected in this great net of being. Just by simply existing, we support and are supported by this interconnectedness, but I say it becomes all the more powerful when we give and receive this support with awareness.
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Food links our bodies and the body of the earth.
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What better way to study the complexities and paradoxes of interconnectedness than by studying food? Food is an intricate dance of causes and conditions — human acts, vital seeds, four elements, and a vast array of plant, animal, and microbial helpers and hindrances. And that’s only to produce the food. There’s also the vast world of harvesting, of selling, of procuring, of preparing, of consuming, of disposing of the wastes of eating — all acts that have been swollen to an international and industrial scale.
Although a globalized food system might seem all the more wondrous an example of our vast interconnectedness, I don’t think it serves the project of witnessing and becoming more deeply aware of our own value as participants in the health and vitality of other beings. When the food we eat was produced in a place (whether it be a distant country or the unknown interior of a factory) we cannot conjure up, our food — one of the greatest links between our bodies and the body of the earth — becomes another anonymous product to be taken for granted and removed from any living context.
Here at Green Gulch, I am honored to serve on the farm, which has grown and evolved in tandem with the sangha (a Buddhist term for community or congregation). Some of the abbots and former abbots of the Zen Center used to work on the farm, the land has hosted thousands of temple visitors over the last decades, and our farm altar is part of many temple rituals throughout the year, including a seed-sowing ceremony in February and a Thanksgiving Harvest ceremony in November. During the summer months the entire community, instead of going to zazen (meditation), comes to the farm at dawn to participate in silent hoeing before breakfast. Some of our apprentices have gone on to become farmers, some have gone on to become priests. It has been vital to my development as a farmer to see not only how enmeshed a farm and a community can be, but also what it looks like when the community holds the land as part of a sacred tradition. This experience, combined with the teaching of interconnectedness, has opened my heart to the reality that all farms are sacred places, not just the ones that “belong” to a religious community.
Farmers, understand what you’re doing in the context of interconnectedness, of caring for multitudes of beings. Take refuge in the care you are generating and the sustenance you are providing, for humans and bees and microorganisms, for gophers and fish and spiders. Our dirty work is good work.
Farmers and nonfarmers alike, you have the opportunity every single day to be reminded of the amazing network of beings that nourish you. And to give thanks. There’s a bumper sticker I particularly like, despite my current non-theistic status. It reads: ARE YOU WELL FED? THANK GOD . . . THEN THANK A FARMER. We recite a more ecumenical grace at Zen Center: “We reflect on the effort that brought us this food and consider how it comes to us, the work of many people and the transformation of other forms of life.”
If you stop, even for a moment, each time you’re about to eat something and think, simply, “Someone’s hands picked this food,” it would be the beginning of a brain pattern of recognition. You don’t have to believe in a god, you don’t even really have to give thanks. You are just recognizing that you exist in a state of dependence on other beings, and that other beings depend on you as well.
May all beings be equally nourished.
Farming with Two: Pleasure and Independence
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BY EMILY OAKLEY AND MIKE APPEL
As the owners of Three Springs Farm, a diversified, certified-organic vegetable farm in Oklahoma, Emily Oakley and Mike Appel cultivate more than fifty crops on five acres. They sell their produce through a farmers’ market in Tulsa and a one-hundred-member CSA.
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Neither of us grew up on a farm or even had so much as a family garden.
We came to farming with a passion for its intersection between social justice and environmental issues. Internships on large-scale organic farms in California sealed our fate, as we fell in step with the rhythms and way of life farming offered. We resolved to use only our four hands to run our own farm, adapting lessons learned in California by modifying them to a smaller scale.
Even though we own twenty acres in rural Oklahoma, we cultivate only three and a half acres of diverse annual vegetable crops and have two and a half planted to perennials. We take pleasure in the independence of farming. It’s our full-time job; we have no off-farm income, and we like it that way. It’s our goal to operate as a two-person farm with no hired labor or interns. We have designed our farm, business, and relationship around these principles.
We aspire to be as small as possible while still making a living. We believe that bigger isn’t always better, especially in farming. Bigger means more worries and responsibilities, and it doesn’t always equal more money. Instead of continued growth and expansion, we strive for efficiency in time and costs. Like any other target, it’s a work in progress and something we tweak each season.
Why make a point of farming without interns or hired labor? We like keeping our hands in the soil, not in the office. We don’t have to busy ourselves with extra paperwork such as workers’ compensation and payroll, and we don’t spend time and energy managing people. With just the two of us, things get done the way we like them done. Obviously, internships and apprenticeships are an essential part of growing new farmers, and our hats are off to those farmers who can make the commitment to providing a place of learning and encouragement for young would-be farmers. We appreciate their farms; we just don’t want to be one of them.
Not having employees also gives us the ability to stay small. The higher the labor costs, the bigger the farm needs to be to pay for and justify the expense. Lower income needs mean we require less land to farm, and that made purchasing a farm more affordable for us. Also, it’s important to us to have a meaningful off-season; we want time to be involved in activism, for friends and family, and to rejuvenate ourselves. Bec
ause we don’t have to worry about keeping people employed over the winter, we can stretch our off-season to fit our schedules.
Being a two-person farm certainly has its limitations, though. If anything’s going to get done, we have to do it. No sick days on our farm! Got a sore throat? Suck on some Ricolas. Without plenty of extra hands to rely on, it’s easy to get overextended. There’s also an automatic cap on our income — we can earn only what we can earn without relying on help. And at times, it gets lonely out there in the field with just the two of us and the veggies. Farming without the buffer of other people can occasionally be a strain. Emily might be chattering away while Mike is secretly dreaming of peace and quiet. We are together all the time. Generally, we like it that way, but sometimes it sure would be nice to have another sounding board.
Any way you do it, farming takes serious talent and commitment, but farming with two has unique requirements that farms with labor don’t have to be quite so concerned with. There’s no boss, so cooperative decision-making is a must. Talking through choices and coming to consensus are necessary skills.
Efficiency and good time management take on a whole new meaning. Investing in equipment to minimize labor goes a long way toward performing tasks quickly. Weed control becomes something of a science, with tractor-mounted cultivators reducing the need to hand-weed. Likewise, fertility management and variety selection enable us to grow fewer rows and achieve better yields. Harvesting, washing, and packing produce are refined each year by calculating the hours required to pick and prep each crop.
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With a two-person farm, there are no sick days.
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Probably the most essential ingredient to a financially practical two-person farm is a strong direct-marketing outlet. One hundred percent of our produce is sold directly to the consumer through farmers’ markets and a CSA. You’ll never grow enough volume to sell at wholesale prices and still earn a living as a two-person farm. Selling retail is indispensable, so you’d better be good at it.
In addition to the broader philosophical decisions, there are operating choices we make that help keep us viable, both economically and emotionally. The litmus test for everything is always time. Our greenhouse is a small, inexpensive, homespun design. We plant in one-hundred-and-twenty-eight-cell plug flats and never pot up. We use the tractor to do as much as possible, from tillage and bed-making to transplanting and cultivation. Initial equipment investments quickly pay for themselves in saved field hours and less-sore backs. Cover crops and crop rotations are a three-in-one elixir: fertility, weed control, and pest and disease prevention. They’re very cost- and labor-effective — all you need is a broadcaster or seed drill and a mower. Although we plant more than fifty varieties, we focus on anchor crops to carry us through each season and generate cash-crop revenue for each market month, going from asparagus (April), to strawberries (May), to blueberries (June), and ending with tomatoes (July and August).
We farm because we love it, and we want to continue loving it. Burnout is our nemesis. At the end of each season, we ask ourselves what we need to do to ensure that we’ll continue loving it into the future. One of the first things we did was eliminate our fall CSA share. Although it’s lovely weather to be outside, we decided we would rather have the time to work on farm or community projects rather than earning extra income. Securing a long-term land arrangement gave us the opportunity to indulge in perennials and plan a farmscape.
After buying our farm and moving farther from our marketing outlets, we stopped wholesaling to stores and restaurants. Their purchases were too small to justify the time involved in obtaining and delivering orders. Now the chefs who want our food come to the farmers’ market like everyone else. Rather than offering a preselected basket, box, or bag of produce for our CSA shares, we transitioned to a system in which our members pay up-front in the winter and then “shop” at our farmers’-market stand throughout the season off their credit balance. This translates into much less stress over crop quantities and timing and more flexibility for our members. We attend the farmers’ market twenty-two out of its twenty-six weeks. We find that five months of marketing is just the right amount for our soil and our souls. We dropped our slow weekday market and now focus exclusively on the higher-earning Saturday market.
Over the course of our eight seasons, our strategy for staying small has evolved. We share those plans with our customers through the CSA newsletter. Every decision to cut something out, be it an unusual variety or a particular farmers’ market, has its disappointed customers. We’ve lost a few over the years, but most are upliftingly loyal. They want us to be here for the long haul as much as we do, and they stand behind our choices.
We expect our experiences, feelings, and goals to be perpetually dynamic. We enjoy working together and collaborating on living our dream. Our simple lifestyle reflects both our modest income and our beliefs. We don’t need a lot of money to live happily and well. We don’t want to sacrifice the farm dream for the bottom line.
Each season someone inevitably approaches us about interning or working with us. We are honored to be asked, but every year we return to the same answer: Farming with two is our foundation. Farming small is not for everyone or every situation, but it’s more sensible than it may at first appear. Focusing on a two-person farm enables us to realize the independence and pleasure that agriculture is all about.
CHAPTER FIVE
BEASTS
If our great-grandparents were still around to impart their farming wisdom, one thing is certain: They would insist that a farm without animals is not a farm. Rudolf Steiner, the father of biodynamics, would agree. Cows, chickens, pigs, ducks, horses, mules, goats, turkeys, oxen, sheep: They provide protein — meat, milk, eggs! — fertility, and horsepower. On the farm, they are the cause of our most acute heartbreak and the source of our comic relief.
The cast, of course, is not limited to domesticated vertebrates: remember the industrious bees, the aristocratic praying mantises, and all the other indispensable pollinators and beneficial insects that grace our fields. Remember, also, the coyotes, the tomato hornworms, and, yes, the gophers, that raze our crops, massacre our henhouses, and taunt our sanity.
In spite of all our farmerly efforts to keep things businesslike, animals have a way of insinuating themselves into a personal relationship with us, in a way that plants don’t. Resisting anthropomorphism is tricky. And how can you blame us, when that wily, conniving, goddamn gopher is laying siege to our livelihood in the back forty, as the rooster struts his hot stuff around the barnyard, at the same time as the doe-eyed Jerseys are batting their long lashes at us while generously proffering their frothy milk in the parlor? We talk to our animals, we (the gods forbid) name them, and before you know it, we find ourselves embroiled in all kinds of multi-species relationships.
And frankly, that’s how we like it.
What it means, though, when we take up animal husbandry, particularly in the context of meat production, is that we’ve set ourselves up to face a certain truth: that our livelihood is staked on that happy pack of gamboling spring lambs, and, more specifically, on their timely demise. Killing animals — or occasionally, seeing our animals killed — forces us into a cosmic wrestling match with a few of the larger themes in life: birth, death, and the sometimes uncomfortable human power we wield during the interlude. It’s one thing to grow okra — to start the seeds, tend them to maturity, and harvest them with a sharp, skillfully wielded knife. It’s another thing to raise broilers — to hatch them, tend them to maturity, and harvest them with a sharp, skillfully wielded knife.
Animals, cute as they may be, are not for the faint of heart, and a real day-in-the-life on the farm will cure any agrarian romantic of certain bucolic notions. It takes some resolve to spend a bloody day castrating lambs, docking tails, and tagging ears. Your “ick” tolerance has to be pretty high to trim up a herd of goats with hoof rot, flick maggots out of a festering wound, or clean out a hog pen. And if yo
u don’t have it in you to religiously exterminate rats and mice, well then, you might as well turn around and head back for the cubicle.
If these essays tell us anything, it’s that our animal interactions are not just one thing all the time: not just cute and entertaining, or gross, or morally complicated; they’re all of these things. Animals are sentient beings, like us. They have intelligence, as we sometimes do. They give us protein, honey, storytelling fodder, and, perhaps most important, an opportunity for us to explore our genuine humanity.
— Zoë Bradbury
Reflections of a Rookie Farmer
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BY JUSTIN HEILENBACH
For several years, Justin Heilenbach has been farming in Oregon’s French Prairie region of the Willamette Valley. In 2010 he started Farm. (that’s correct, Farm with a period) with Terra Senter. Justin and Terra have since moved Farm. to Vermont, to pursue their dream of the American Family Farm . . . and to see if moving three thousand miles from Oregon will help with their gopher problem.