by Paula Manalo
Small farmers are also caught in a void. “Gardening” tools sold at nurseries are largely overpriced, poorly designed, and way too dainty to get anything done on a farm. Conversely, most farm equipment is sized for huge producers with thousands of acres of commodity crops and is obviously unsuited for us smaller-scale folks. Thus, we’re forced to repurpose odd items found hidden in the recesses in the back of the barn, to buy antiquated equipment at auction, and to improvise our own tools.
For me, there was no better introduction to this phenomenon than apprenticing for a few seasons with Roy Brubaker on his organic vegetable farm in central Pennsylvania. Roy had a fierce imagination and a steady hand with an arc welder, and he hated to buy anything. This combination led to a steady stream of inventions pouring from his shop, some absurd and some amazing. I remember harvesting greens with a tool made from a food-processor blade and an electric drill, “harvesting” pesky sparrows and invasive starlings in a human-size trap, and watering transplants using harvested rainwater from a reclaimed milk tank on a semi. We even had an old Dodge Colt that was converted for use as sort of a field-delivery wagon. We’d drive it down the farm lane, filled with sacks of fertilizer for the transplanting crew, and return to the packing shed overloaded with boxes of melons or bunches of beets from the harvest crew. Once, in a pinch, I picked up my mother from the hospital after a serious bacterial infection in our “Crop Car.” It was actually a pleasant ride. Mom napped in the front while a fresh breeze whipped through the missing window seals and wafted the scent of organic fertilizer through the car.
Roy loved working in his shop and would do so as often as the constraints of farming would allow him to. I remember him struggling through a cold spring day of harvest with a serious cold, hacking and coughing all the while. Later that night, I found him in the shop, the temperature even colder, welding away. “I’m starving my cold,” he said. I think he figured if the conditions were tough on him, they had to be even worse for whatever virus had infected his lungs. Sure enough, the following day yielded a chipper and smiling Roy, complete with a new creation from his shop in hand.
He never passed up the chance to create his own solution for whatever problem arose on the farm, even if he could buy one relatively inexpensively. We had homemade opening devices for our greenhouse ventilation windows, a homemade spool to distribute our plastic packing bags, and a homemade barrel washer to clean our root crops.
Were all these homemade tools worth the effort it took to make them? Did they really improve our efficiency? Did Roy get a proper return on all the time he spent in the shop? The answers are immaterial. I learned a lot from working with someone who was unafraid to exercise creativity to solve a problem rather than reach for an off-the-shelf solution.
During my second winter in Pennsylvania, I was midway through building a set of harvest crates from a poplar harvested from the farm when I realized that, for me, the most valuable part of farming lies in the process, not in the number of pounds of produce harvested at the end of the season.
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Small-scale farmers are forced to repurpose odd items, buy antiquated equipment, and to improvise our own tools.
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That said, tools for small farmers are starting to become more available. New companies are springing up and old ones are expanding their product lines to supply high-quality equipment to farmers of all scales. It’s a welcome change, as there’s nothing more frustrating than struggling through a task with a poorly designed tool. Ultimately, I think tools are at their best when they’re well planned, properly made, and efficient to use but still carry some of our collective farmers’ soul. My favorite chore is digging burdock roots using the “Kentifer” weeding tool that Roy made for me in his shop from a piece of old truck spring steel (the original model was built as a wedding gift for two of his earliest apprentices, Kent and Jennifer). It’s strong as hell and a joy to use, and brings back a lot of good memories every time I pull it out of the toolshed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NINJA TACTICS
Perhaps by now we’ve convinced you that agriculture can be quite a complex negotiation. And that this, it turns out, is part of the thrill. Doing something hard, particularly when times are tough: that’s when the heroics of a difficult path seem most attractive. It may not be easy, but it sure isn’t boring. If we had been born in a different era, some of us might have become pirates or whalers, beaver trappers or Klondikers; we might have been mercenaries or missionaries, exploring botanists, or sod busters. Pioneer spirit doesn’t capture it completely (although that’s certainly part of it). What we’re talking about here are the ninja tactics of starting a farm, and a farming career, despite the odds.
Driven by spring-loaded opportunism, we’re ready to make things happen. We take a mental inventory of the world, always scouting for useful objects, fixtures, and components that can be retooled. In the city, it means Dumpster diving for pig slop and building supplies. In the country, it means joining town boards, getting hooked up with cardboard from the appliance store and sawdust from the lumber mill. It means surfing Craigslist for shop tools, hitting up yard sales, fact-finding at the county offices about barns that look vacant, finding benevolent landowners and storage-space landlords. A lot of bobbing and weaving and institutional interface.
It means giving back, walking a straight path, being accountable in a serious way.
Establishing the radical farm goal is one thing; making nice with all the parties along the way to that goal is another. It doesn’t take long to figure out that nimble maneuvering, staying positive, and strategic generosity go a long way to ensure goodwill in the community. Big things start small.
We’re ninjalike because of our ambition and struggle to stay aloft, because the ordered space we’re working to build must compete at every junction with disorder. We’re about discipline in a world of convenience, about cooperation and reciprocity in a world in which the idea of the individual is pervasive.
So yes, agriculture is hard, it’s dangerous, it’s a big commitment, but no, it’s not boring at all.
— Severine von Tscharner Fleming
Apprentice Tent
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BY JEN GRIFFITH
After working on agricultural projects in Nicaragua, California, Tanzania, and New York City, Jen Griffith is currently an apprentice at Quail Hill Farm, on the South Fork of Long Island, where she is close to two of her loves — the Atlantic Ocean and Brooklyn.
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I boarded a plane from New York City to San Francisco, checking my whole life, housing and all, in the cargo compartment beneath the plane. My destination was an organic farm where apprentices spend the season in tents.
Coming from a city where space is a precious resource, I bought the largest tent I could find — a twelve-by-nine-foot canvas army tent tall enough to stand inside. Once I arrived in California, I scoured Craigslist for a queen-size futon, a dresser, a bookshelf, and carpet. Using graph paper, I created scaled diagrams of how I would lay out my new home.
I erected the tent on the north side of the farm, with the front door facing a long, thin field of nondescript plants. The farm was a patchwork of greens, textures, and long rows plowed in all directions.
Going to bed that first night, I bundled myself into sweat pants, put on a wool hat, and wrapped myself in every blanket I had. California nights were colder and damper than any East Coaster might imagine. Inland from the Monterey Bay, it gets very windy, as the warm ocean air rushes in, as the land air cools at night. In the middle of that first night, I woke up to find my tent shaking. The winds ripped and pushed against it, bending metal poles and flapping fabric.
I didn’t sleep much at first, as I adjusted to the sound of canvas rippling around me. I felt so exposed to the elements.
Some nights I fell asleep to the hooting of the barn owls in a cypress tree above me. Most nights, I could feel the fog from the Pacific Ocean roll in and leave a coat of dew on everything, incl
uding me.
Living in my tent, the fields became my hallways. I’d unzip the mesh tent door, hair messy and pillow lines in my cheeks, to arrive at the farm. Running on caffeine and the adrenaline of a new experience, I worked hard. I struggled to tell the differences among chard, kale, and collard. I fumbled trying to figure out how to hold a hoe so that my back would ache a little less. On foggy days, my pant legs were wet at the bottom; on dry days, they were dusty.
Eventually, the physical exhaustion set in, and I was able to sleep through most nights.
Intermittently throughout the season, I would still wake up to a pack of coyotes laughing hysterically after they made a kill in the field just behind my tent. At these times, the blood would rush out of my body and the feeling of exposure would return. This thin canvas wall was all that separated me from an active nighttime world.
As dirt rubbed into the cracks of my hands, the farm started to seep inside of me. Change is funny. Sometimes it happens in small, imperceptible increments; at some point, they add up to something you can see. The plants outside my front door became a small field of wheat. Every day I watched the plants progress from tiny, bushy leaves to sturdy, upright stalks to flowering green heads to golden grain, ripe and ready. We harvested the wheat right in front of my tent, cutting it with sickles, threshing it against pallets and tarps, and winnowing it in the Monterey Bay breeze.
Throughout the summer, I spent less and less time in my tent. It had started to seem silly to me how much I fixated on it when moving out there. I now spent free moments in the strawberry patch, gorging on berries, or under the kiwi arbor for a private afternoon nap. One evening, after work and before bed, I sat in the apple orchard to watch the sunset. A great blue heron swooped down and landed twenty feet from me. For fifteen minutes we sat together quietly, side by side. Suddenly, it thrust its head into the ground and came up with a gopher in its bill. It tilted its head back, tossed the gopher, and swallowed it whole. I could see the body working its way down the heron’s skinny neck. That night, I went to bed tingling.
My First Intern Worked Pregnant for the Entire Summer
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BY ERIN BULLOCK
After growing up in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, Erin Bullock picked up the sustainable-agriculture momentum living in the San Francisco Bay Area for six years. She then returned home to start her own CSA, Mud Creek Farm, in 2009. She now leases twenty-eight acres of sandy loam in Victor, New York, grows fifty kinds of vegetables, and is looking forward to acquiring permanent land soon.
* * *
My first intern worked pregnant for the entire summer.
Beth had walked into my life at exactly the right time, moving back to her hometown, just like me, after ten years of living away from it. She had just gotten married, and she and her husband were looking for a house to buy. She wanted to learn how to farm. She had volunteered with us for a few days in the fall, so I knew she was a hard worker and already knew a bit about growing food. We picked out seed varieties together in January. We even discussed having her be a partner in the business. Eventually, we settled on an employee-employer relationship, forty hours a week at minimum wage, April through October. I had her draft a “learning contract,” so we could check in periodically to see how we were both doing.
I was nervous going into it. Would I be able to balance the responsibility of mentoring with the realities of production agriculture? We would have a hundred and fifty CSA members that year. I really wanted her to have as good a mentor as I had when I was learning how to farm. Dave Hambleton, at Sisters Hill Farm in Stanfordville, New York, had walked me step by step through how to do everything from thinning beets to using a moldboard plow, and inspired me to start my own farm. Here I was, only two years later, on the other side of that learning relationship. I was scared.
After a few weeks of working together, I expressed my concerns (we tried to keep open communication with each other about everything) and Beth replied, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll pick it up as we go. Just focus on getting things done, and I’ll ask questions if I need clarification.”
Gosh, what a relief.
We were a great team. She was a people person, and helped motivate volunteers in the fields. I learned how to designate tasks, when to train her in something and then let go. I remember a big cultivating day in April, when I taught her to drive the Farmall Cub with the cultivating sweeps. I watched her go up and down the rows a few times, hitting fewer cabbage plants than I usually do (it was beautiful), and I walked away from that field to do something else. It was hard, because cultivating is something I enjoy doing. At the same time, though, things were getting done, and she was learning a new skill.
One day I took the plunge and trained Beth on the big tractor (Big Orange), my shiny new fifty-horsepower, four-wheel-drive Kubota — a twenty-three-thousand-dollar investment, worth way more than all of my other equipment combined. But it was easy to drive. What took a little while to learn was how to use the front loader, so for a morning I had her turning the compost pile and moving wood chips. Meanwhile, I was working on other things, getting kind of frustrated at how long she was taking for these simple tasks that would have taken me an hour. I went over to see how she was doing and noticed that her face contained even more frustration than I felt; she was even cursing. I was thinking, “Uh-oh. Here’s a side of her that might make things difficult this summer.”
We sat down at break and talked it over; Beth was very emotional, and I was somewhat concerned that she was questioning her decision to be working here. I decided to give her a rest from Big Orange and have her do some weeding for the rest of the afternoon.
The next day she seemed calmer but still a bit reserved, like she was holding something inside. At lunch, I asked her if there was anything going on. She said, well, she might as well tell me: She was pregnant. She thought I would be angry. (I was.) She told me she still wanted to work until the end of her contract, at which point she would be almost eight months along.
“If lots of women have done this before,” she said, “and still do in many other countries, I can, too.”
It took her a long time to start looking pregnant. She would occasionally have to sit down or stop and stretch when a muscle cramp caught her unexpectedly, but otherwise she could do everything I did: squat and weed a row, wield a hoe or a pitchfork, harvest, haul sandbags, move row cover, fix irrigation, lift sacks of cover-crop seed, drive the tractors. She was strong. As a matter of fact in September, when the harvest got heavier, we had to yell at her to not pick up the full bins.
Volunteers pitched in to do the lifting. She had a hard time with it; she didn’t like feeling weak or helpless.
Meanwhile, her husband had found the perfect farmhouse — an old fixer-upper with three acres in a nearby town. They were doing renovations and working out the details to transfer ownership. I went over just before the farmhouse was scheduled for its final inspection, and we had a little picnic on the front porch. There was a big maple tree in the yard, and I had this clear image in my head of her pushing a child on a swing under its branches. This would be their home, their nest, and I shared in a bit of the happiness of what that meant.
The next week it burned down — right down to the ground. Beth’s husband was driving there to work on it and saw the fire trucks. The house was leveled, and all his tools were lost. They never found out the cause, but it was an old house, so it was probably some kind of electrical fault. At least no one was inside when it happened.
The couple believe in signs. Beth showed up the next day to work, and it was a quiet, solemn day for us all. As devastating as it was, I’ll never forget how quickly she regained strength and moved on, always looking forward, making do with what life dealt her.
The final melon harvest was in late September. Beth and I were in the field, knocking on watermelons, listening for that hollow thump, and tossing them to folks who would toss them to other folks who would place them on the wagon at the edge of the
patch. After an hour, we took a break. Beth said it was enough melon-tossing for her. It had taken her awhile to say it; you could tell it pained her not to be part of the action.
For the month of October, she phased down to thirty hours a week, and I worked a bit extra to cover for her, but things were slowing anyway. It was all harvest now, and she was helping to manage crews of volunteers, whom I had already lectured about being proactive about picking up heavy things. During the last few weeks, she couldn’t climb onto the tractors very easily, and fit into just the XXL rain paints. She did a lot of the veggie-washing at the tubs, as even bending over to harvest was difficult.
We had a lot of laughs at lunchtime, talked a lot about midwives and doulas, and cursed hospital C-sections. Everyone had questions for her: What did it feel like when the baby kicked? How much does it squish your bladder? Finally, on October 31, the last CSA distribution day, Beth was ready to stop working. As strong as she was, she said she felt like she couldn’t bear another day. She needed a month of rest and preparation for the birth.
For the entire week before she was due, I couldn’t sleep without dreaming about the birth. Then I got word that she’d delivered a beautiful girl, Emilia. She gave birth in her mother’s house, without any painkillers. The next week, I talked with her, and she described the experience in detail. After three days of not sleeping or eating, as her contractions got more intense, they were ready to send her to the hospital if she didn’t have the baby before morning. She told me that threat gave her the last bit of motivation she needed to push. She was crouching, then standing up to rest, crouching and pushing more, and finally Emilia was born. The midwife said she had never seen anyone with such amazing crouching muscles before, and Beth credited it to a season of serious farmwork.