Neither a product of the world, nor a reaction to it

Although I can eat a lot of vegetables myself, it's only the smallest fraction of what I grow—so why bother doing all this work to grow so darn many? Clearly the farm plays a big part in your dinner plans, the vegetables being your main interface with what's going on here! But there are many reasons to have a farm, just as there are many reasons to join a CSA: there's the ecological principles, living in the natural world, or engaging with an enterprise that contributes to connection with sustainable agriculture and local food systems. These are all things that you might appreciate, and that I do appreciate. Another facet is to be a part of the local economy, and for you to support small businesses, ideas you're probably familiar with in general. It's a little harder, though, to get a feel for why exactly to do that, and what arises as a product of that small-scale, local economy. For me, one of the main things I appreciate about the farm in my own life is that it is a way to support my livelihood with an engaging, positive project while living as a part of the economic patchwork of the world around me.

The area I live in is based on farming, at least in a historical sense; there's still enough of that agricultural community left that I fit into it on that basis. But it also contains repair shops, parts stores, mechanics, truck drivers, and all the other support businesses and tradesmen required to keep an agricultural area going, all here in this same place. My farm is an operation that lives in that larger picture—my peer group is comprised of the people and businesses who are doing that same thing, living in that same world. These people are the vegetable farmers I learned from, selling at farmers markets to provide for their lives, and now, retirement. They’re the neighboring businesses we sold next to and thought well of for the fact that they could do the same. They're the farmers I pass on the road, people I don't even know, driving tractors to make hay before rain. It's the machinery repair shop, the traveling mechanics; it's Fred the plumber in his truck heading the other way down the road, and the propane delivery drivers delivering fuel for greenhouses and winter heating. In our own way we're all doing the same thing, a part of the same world.

This social fabric is the cultural history of the place where I live. Describing the society of immigrants who came to Pennsylvania, then spread down into the Shenandoah valley and across the Potomac here to Lovettsville in the 1730s, Warren Hofstra writes in A Separate Place that “No farm was entirely self-sufficient, and few farmers sought to live in isolation from their neighbors. Many...could not produce all they needed to feed, house, and clothe their families. They had to depend on local trade. ... The need for wagons called for wagonmakers, blacksmiths, and wheelwrights to make them and teamsters to drive them. ... Thus the farm and the limited scale of commercial activity on the farm generated an intricate goods-and-services economy. ... This network was a community premised on a set of exchanges that were reciprocal and mutually supportive.”

Not all farms, though, are a part of that goods-and-services economy, today or in the past. I use the same equipment and production systems as farms many times my size, to produce vegetables of largely the same types—tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, squash. But the giant farms of agribusiness out in the Salinas Valley of California, they aren't owned by people—and a monocrop of thousands of acres of lettuce isn't really my speed. The tomato fields of southern Florida, the same: whichever businesses control that ground are designed to export the resources of the region to generate more and more money and power well beyond a human scale, rather than to live with their neighbors in small-scale commercial relationships.

On the other end of things, many small sustainable farmers have the opposite orientation to the business side—in fact a deep discomfort with the imperative to support one's livelihood with one's farming efforts. I didn't encounter this questioning in the world of farms I came up in; here it was laudable to support one's long-term life by selling vegetables. In my first job, the farm owners talked about money and shared their numbers; anybody paying attention knew how much money they made and how they saved for retirement.

Being neither a product of the world that seeks money and power, nor a reaction to it, is what in fact allows a farm to exist via human-scale commerce as a node in the local social fabric. And it's the economic interconnection of buying and selling, and relying on local repairmen and service providers, and employing people from the same networks, which allows the world I live in to flourish under more or less the same principles as it has for centuries. When people talk about local economies, small businesses, main street, etc., this is what I feel like they're getting at. There's no aspiration to endless growth as a metric of success, nor to make a farm bigger than what one person can run—never mind to build the sort of empire a true business entrepreneur might. I'm doing the upper level planning here for the farm, and also still picking the lettuce.

And my farm does this in conjunction with all the other small businesses in my world who share this orientation, in a network of mutual reliance comprised of people who despite being entirely different characters understand that holding a society together as neighbors does not require being friends. For all our apparent differences in farming methods, products, and professions (not to mention the variety of social, political, and religious backgrounds), yet we share a common orientation towards our own work and interface with others.

Describing the social organization resulting from William Penn's land policies, Hofstra writes that “Englishmen, Germans, Scotch-Irish, Dutchmen, Swedes, and others...built Presbyterian, Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, and Baptist churches. Sectarians like Quakers, Moravians, Mennonites, and Dunkers founded their own towns. … But although religion and ethnicity provided a basis for community among small groups, neither could bring cohesion to the whole society. … Only the commercial life of Pennsylvania provided a basis for community beyond the neighborhood.” As these people moved through Maryland and into the mountains of Virginia, the contrast with the society of Virginian plantation owners to the south and east became clear—a world built on class difference, subjugation, and hierarchy, formed for the purpose of exporting profit to England.

But for those Pennsylvanians, and their economic descendants in my neighborhood today, commerce and trade bring positive results, the exchange of goods and services encouraging connection and social cohesion, not exploitation—a system of economic exchange where everyone is better off, no one person more powerful than another, no one business large enough or self-sufficient enough to take advantage of others less well off. There's a place in this fabric for everyone, from the scrap man collecting cast-offs useless to others, to the well-driller's assistant able to run the shovel and retrieve tools from the truck—not much, but enough.

In the 1790s Irishman Isaac Weld spent three years traveling through our new country and published a popular book of his accounts; I'll conclude with this passage about the area of the Shenandoah Valley due west of here around Winchester, where he describes the social organization and aspiration of the Pennsylvanians, of their communities in the Shenandoahs, and by extension, of those who came across the Potomac to Lovettsville. “There are no persons here, as on the other side of the mountains, possessing large farms; nor are there any eminently distinguished by their education or knowledge from the rest of their fellow citizens. Poverty is also as much unknown in this country as great wealth.”

Crew Work

It's Labor Day week! As we're celebrating the contributions of organized labor, I'm thinking about organized labor of a different sort: the task of picking up the winter squash. Although the plants were set in neat rows, the vines spread far and wide in a green canopy and now, as the leaves are dying back to shriveled brown paper, they uncover the tan butternut squash dropped every which way across the entire field. The puzzle is what method to use to clip and gather them all up. 

It's a job for many people—but not simply a number of people working individually with their own set of clippers and crates (many, many crates). This is a job for pallet bins—the sort that hold pumpkins in front of the supermarket at Halloween—and four people working together as a unit: one person to toss squash that's been clipped and gathered from the rows, one person on the corner of the pallet to catch the squash, one person in the bin to pack it, and one to drive the tractor, pallet, bin, and people along the edge of the field. Each person's work is connected to the others', interrelated with the whole. The tractor driver watches the others and moves the rig at the proper pace; the tosser throws squash one after the next but only when the catcher will be ready, handing off the previous squash to the packer. When it's well coordinated, there's a squash in the air while the last one is still being handed off to the packer.

This is the sort of crew work I enjoy most, where my work relies on the work of others and where others are waiting on me to complete my element of the task. On a small farm, here, we rarely have large enough jobs that we can access this sort of crew work. Two people often work individually in parallel, each doing the same task in their own row, and several people might work simultaneously on different single-person tasks. This is efficient, productive, and appropriate for the scale of farm I have here. But occasionally there is call for three people to work on a transplanting rig, each person's work reliant on attention to the others, the entire project accomplished as a group with no single person feeling ownership of any particular part. It's not relevant which particular plants any one person planted, or the fact that the person driving the tractor (me) didn't plant any plants at all. We all together completed the same project, and much more pleasantly than if we'd each done a third of the field all by ourselves. I miss the crew work of my time years ago working on larger farms—when the projects were large enough that most of the work was in some way a group effort, with five or ten people accomplishing a large task acting as one unit—and I appreciate the rare opportunities for that sort of work when they come up here on my own farm.

When I worked here a long time ago as a nineteen-year-old, it was for a farm that planted 20 acres of vegetables, employed a dozen workers, and went to 14 farmers markets each week. At my three-acre farm now we plant, at most, four rows of a crop in any given planting, and with only two or three people in the patch, it's easy to keep track of what areas have been done or not done. With so many people in a large field that wasn't the case, and that farm crew had developed its own culture of crew work, a culture passed on to new folks each year by the returning, experienced folks who appreciated the system. It worked like this: when a whole group of people enters the patch, each person takes the row closest to the top of the patch that doesn't have anyone in it. Whenever anybody finishes a row, they move down to the start of the unoccupied row just below the person in the lowest row. Once the last row is occupied, anyone finishing their row now goes to the far side of the first still-occupied row and works towards the person languishing in the middle—who now knows that help is on the way, the work of their row just cut in half! Once those people come closer and closer and eventually meet, completing their row, they go together to the center of an incomplete section between two other people, and go back to back, working towards those other two—who were previously working with their partner, but who now have a total of FOUR people in the row! Done in no time.

It’s clear where anyone should go next, without anyone having to be in charge, or answer any questions: people start from the top of the patch and complete rows working down to the bottom, and work down each row always moving towards another person or towards an end of a row; the undone section is clear, and so, it's clear where to join to help—without confusing anyone. This understanding was common to the crew; each person knew it enough to execute it or to direct an unsure person how to participate in the group project. Nobody who followed the system could get lost, and everyone could trust that no sections were missed, even though no one person paid any attention to the others' individual work.

There was no need to talk about the work, no need for judgment calls, or for any direction from one person over another—we simply executed the work together. We talked about other things, that's for sure, and stayed within talking range as much as we could. And we were glad to confirm that we'll split someone's remaining section, or to say “Let’s go help them with that row” and then, to the two people being joined, “Hey, we’ll split you!” If our own spot turned out to be a hard, slow-going row, we knew others would arrive to help, and we wouldn't be left to complete it alone. We were always working towards somebody, and when we met, a milestone, minor victory—the end of a row, the end of a section, and a chance to walk down and brighten somebody's day with the knowledge that the end of the task was now close at hand—the very arrangement of people letting everyone in the field know that the long task is coming to a close. That feeling, of one's own effort as part of the whole, is the crew work—so different from just working alone for a while, and then stopping, even if others are also working alone nearby, also doing their task on their own, in parallel.

At last, after finishing our row, after joining our neighbors, and then all four moving on to the next section, finally everybody accumulating to join together in the last, worst, slowest area, all so ready to stop and be done with the giant project, we're all getting closer and closer to each other splitting and finishing sections until everyone is shoulder-to-shoulder in the last part, all having accomplished the thing together, having reached the largest milestone and climbing into the pickup truck bed to return home for lunch.

Mulch History

As a new worker at Wheatland Vegetable Farms back in May of 2005, my first summer job as a college music student who knew nothing of farming, it felt like my first days and weeks there were filled with mulching. We mulched with those giant round bales you see in fields on the side of the road, pushing them out to unroll the 700lb bales down the aisles between rows of tomatoes, squash, and peppers. A third-year worker showed me how thick to keep it, how to feel the edge of the bale to tell the smooth direction or the pokey direction that indicated the way it needed to face to unroll properly. “Unroll” is a generous description of the process; although the baler rolled up the windrow of dried grass around and around like a carpet until the bale reached about 5' in diameter, and 4' wide, it never unrolled quite so easily. This was mulch hay, not high-quality horse hay; full of weeds or briers, or had been rained on and maybe gotten moldy, or was otherwise not fit to be fed to cattle, and sold for $10 a bale. Occasionally we were surprised by a nest of ground bees or an unfortunate rabbit that had got caught up in the baler. Since the 20-acre farm used so many bales all at once in the spring, before the new year's hay had yet been baled, Jay Merchant delivered rows of bales in the fall to stockpile over winter for use in the spring—and from sitting, they inevitability developed a flat spot, making them all the more difficult to push out. It was hot, heavy, dusty work.  Somehow it didn't even occur to any of us to wear gloves.

Most mornings that time of year began with mulching for everyone, before some groups were siphoned off for smaller or more specialized tasks. Knowing nothing yet myself, I was often one of the ones left to continue mulching. The reason for mulching was, at the most basic, to use a cheap, readily-available, natural materiel to block weeds from growing. And it added significant amounts of organic matter to the soil and protected vegetables from rain-spattered mud. Mulching also provided a unifying identity for the farm; it was a difficult job that everybody did and a practice that few similar vegetable farms employed. We heard once of a former worker who'd gone up as far north as New York State, and, upon telling of where they had worked down here, were greeted with--”oh yes, the mulch farm!”

The reason for our outlier status was our location here in an outlier agricultural area, one which had recently been entirely rural, but was turning over to houses as development pressure crept west. At that time there were acres and acres no longer being farmed for crops, in some sense waiting to be planted to houses, whose owners needed to take advantage of the “ag use” tax benefit from producing some sort of agricultural product on their land—and there were enough farmers of the old generation still around to make the hay, which was produced in such quantity that the price was kept low. It worked out that they were hired to hay the fields, and basically needed a place to put the bales. We were that place for a lot of it.

So, when I started farming on my own, I also used hay for mulching—at first in the exact same round-bale system, and then later with square bales, which could work with the narrower aisles resulting from the narrower tractor system I'd worked out to make more efficient use of space. Mulch was the system I learned, and mulch was the system I used. Still heavy, hot, dusty, hard—and never quite 100% weed control with all the Johnson grass and thistles. Jay Merchant still delivered the bales and mostly did the unloading himself, whether tipping the round bales off the trailer or stacking 100 square bales up tall and straight, interlocked so the stack wouldn't collapse. After watching a few times, I got to where I could make an all-right stack, and he tossed the 40lb bales from the trailer up to me to arrange on top of the stack. It felt like we were two people sharing the work, but even though he was over 70 and more than twice my age I knew he was doing most of the work throwing them so high; I was just doing the arranging. I did my best to keep up.

Eventually Jay came one time and told me he was retiring from making square bales, on account of their being too much hassle to move around anymore. I couldn't blame him. I went back to the list of phone numbers of mulch sources that I'd photocopied from my now-landlords' farm records, and worked down the list. Mostly these people, by now, were long retired (if not dead), and none knew where to send me.

As luck would have it I reached one man south of Leesburg, who I'd never heard of, but who did indeed have square bales—a giant stack of perhaps 800 or 1000 bales, under a tarp some years old, but still good hay he said, and cheap at $1.50 if I could move them myself. He was still at it making square bales, but he was a person to have all manner of mechanization to make squares easy to handle, I don't think he touched them once by hand from baling to stacking. But while we were chatting, as I handed him the check after loading up with a relative of a neighbor I'd hired, he told me how it was getting too dangerous to drive tractors down the road anymore, and how he was probably about to stop. His impression was that new people moving into the houses built on those former hayfields were glad to live in a rural area, but impatient with slow tractors on the rural roads. That giant haystack proved to be a two-year supply for my farm, and even though he gave me the old tarp they'd been stored under, still they ended up pretty rotten and full of snakes on the bottom layer setting on the ground.

After that stash ran out, I got along for a few years on luck and Valley Trader listings, or Craigslist, buying 50 or 100 bales here and there for cheap from people looking to clear the last of their prior year's bales out of the barn to prepare for the new-cut hay. It was a lot of driving, and a lot of packing bales into the 1997 U-haul truck that I had at the time for deliveries. When that truck died and turned into a shed on the farm I was happy to give it up. To my dismay, however, the only source of square bales I could find was a longtime Lovettsville farmer, who'd had nice bales the whole time but for more money than I wanted to spend. Now I was desperate having no other source, and so I paid him the $3.50, and then $3.75 per bale. At least he did the stacking & delivery.

By this time, about 5 years ago, economic and demographic change had come to the area. Those hay fields had turned to houses, no longer in need of land-use taxation, and that generation of farmers had pretty well gone away, with few folks left to fill that haymaking economic niche, even if there had been still hay to make. Agricultural change had also had come to the farm: I heard from a former neighbor in one of our yearly catch-up phone calls that he had begun using a thin landscape fabric, newly marketed in the produce-supply catalogs for laying down between crop rows, fulfilling the weed-blocking purpose of hay mulch. It was easy to put down even in hot weather and as fast as mulching with hay, blocked weeds 100%, and could be reused over and over again. I was beginning to find hay bales too hot, too dusty, too ineffective—the people who worked here were feeling the same way. And to my (continuing) surprise, the one-time cost to buy the fabric was the same as buying a one-year supply of hay bales at current rates. I didn't like—still don't, really—how it isn't a natural material from down the road and doesn't add organic matter to the soil, but there's no arguing with the benefits. We've gotten to where I've built a machine to roll the fabric up again, and learned to put it down in just 15 or 20 minutes a row—mulching the same amount with hay would take about an hour.

A year or two ago, in October, Jay Merchant called me up to say he had a truckload of square bales he'd made for his church's Halloween festival, for benches and all, and so they'd been set outside but really were fine. Did I want to have them? He really was just looking for a place to put them. Although I wasn't buying hay anymore, sure, I figured I'd take them for free. After all, it was garlic planting time and, of all things, garlic is traditionally grown under a thick blanket of mulch. I figured I'd do just that, since the bales were free and all. Jay came with his truck and trailer, and his grandson to unload. Jay stayed in the truck; his grandson and I dropped the bales down the garlic rows as he drove along. It turned out the garlic shoots came up faster than expected, and I missed the window for mulching them. Those free bales were still in the field, though, and had to be collected, transported, stacked, and stored in a greenhouse-style shelter for use on next fall's garlic. Over the winter, a windstorm destroyed the shelter and tore all the grommets out of the new tarp I'd put over it. The free bales survived under the tarp laid over the stack with sandbags, until they went straight-away in the spring to a neighbor.

I've so far kept my vow never to have a bale on the farm again.

"old way of life"

Sometime last winter my friends/neighbors/landlords and initial farm employers were clearing out some old files in their basement and came across a copy of the original application I'd mailed in to work for them on their farm here when I was nineteen, my first farm job—really my first real job at all. In response to a question on what interested me about the farm job, I wrote that “I would not be simply another employee of some retail chain. It always saddens me to see the sort of 'old way of life' disappearing. ... Farming is a fundamental institution, what people have done for thousands of years. ... It is not just a job that takes up free time; it will be my life for three months.” Although I knew next to nothing when I wrote it, there's nothing in there that isn't still true.

Recently a new neighbor was telling me about the temporary tutoring work he's been doing and, in conversation, I asked what sort of job he's looking to find more permanently—or whether, like his farm neighbors, he would hope to carve out a life with less distinction between “job” and “the things one does with their days.” And in posing that question, it became clear to me how far removed from my own life the concept is of maintaining that dichotomy of a “career” separate from "non-work life," although I do plenty of work on all sorts of projects every day. They're all simply projects I'm working on, with some being more critical than others.

That “old way of life” I imagined in that old job application isn't farming itself, exactly, but what arises in a world where many people have projects going on that need doing, profitable and non-profitable activities all mixed up together, the sum total of which happening to yield enough money to live on—and where people are tied to place, and therefore to neighbors.

The local plumber, who's in his 40s, was in my basement once and we were talking about Lovettsville history. He said that, of his high school class, about half of his classmates had stayed in the area after graduation. His father, also a plumber and also in my basement, pointed to himself and said, “For me, ninety-five percent.” What that "old way of life” of generational history and overlapping livelihoods generates is a different kind of community, a different kind of neighborliness, a different kind of friendship—there are not "work friends" or "professional connections," which largely evaporate when people change jobs or careers, but "community" and "neighborly" connections that arise as people live their lives in close proximity, doing what matters to them personally and interfacing with each other through the course of their daily activities. And even when people change projects, or switch jobs, they still all live in the same community. That connection of necessity, of needing to visit the members of one's local community in order to get something done on one's personally relevant work, creates and sustains a relationship different from a work friendship or a purely social relationship: one that, although less personal, can become stronger than one where people only see each other out of intentional action.  And when these interconnections reach a critical mass, a different social fabric arises.

This year I rented the greenhouse of the retired farmers directly to the south, neighbors who I like and often chat with through the fence line. We've known each other for over a decade and are friends dedicated to supporting each others' farming, although as much as we'd like to see each other socially, we rarely do. But this year, in the course of going over to water my transplants each morning, I saw them more days than not and in passing we inevitably registered the briefest observation or complaint, talked about some happening, or asked some question we'd never think to call each other for "on purpose." Now that the greenhouse season is over we're no longer brought into contact by my transplants and my neighbors' morning gardening, and we see each other less. Similarly, eight or ten years ago—I remember this because I remember when it changed—people talked on the phone to ask even a quick question (if you can believe it!), because there was no other way. A call to sell some lettuce or to buy some tomatoes might last only a minute, maybe two...but there, several times a week—without even thinking about it—in the course of accomplishing our work we would hear something of the news of the day in each others lives, and thereby maintain our relationship through such frequent and mutually-necessary interaction. By now, texting has solidified as the norm: straight to the point, no need to answer the phone and spend 60 or even 90 seconds talking to one another; no need to hear another's voice or to chat without intention. This new mode is admittedly more efficient, but I do feel the loss of that connection that arises when people are forced by the necessity of their work to cross paths not for social reasons but simply in the course of living their daily livelihood.

I've mentioned here before how I enjoy building and repairing the old farm equipment I use on the farm. During the evenings, for the past month or two, I've been fixing up my farm shop—organizing tools and sorting out an overwhelming volume of auction lots haphazardly stacked, much of which came from Bill Moore the welder's sale last year, which had been, til recently, sitting as it came home including his enormous 1000lb drill press from 100 years ago or more (a $40 bid) sitting awkwardly in the middle of things where the tractor set it down. A farm shop well organized and ready for work is just on the horizon, in time for the winter season. It's true I am looking forward to enjoying time spent practicing out-of-date mechanical skills learned from old books, a sufficient reason to be sure, but in no small part I'm also setting up the place with a mind that I might come to make repairs now and then for others. In the practiced assessment and hand-work of making a repair there’s a joy entirely different from the work of creating a tomato, and in fact there's not all that many things that break on my own farm so it would be interesting to have access to a body of repair work greater than I can generate here on my own. But moreover, to be able to send neighbors away with something that was previously broken but now allows them to do something that they want to do in their daily lives, that activity brings people into contact with each other in that “old way of life," keeping relationships strong through the interactions that happen to occur because we're living in reliance on one another.

Last week I invited a neighbor from down the road to come see the progress I'd made on the shop—a friend I like though we rarely talk to because we're both busy, but of course the shop capability was interesting enough that they made a point to come over to see it. We talked at length about drills and vises, and ended up with a social visit to boot, where we never would have gotten together "on purpose." We farm-types certainly are intermingled with each other, but we're also often busy, often sequestered off on our own projects, too caught up in our own activity to think of a visit except by necessity. In a world moving on from such inefficiencies, it's possible I might be able to create some of those necessities, with old-school metal and mechanical ability.

Bill Moore, the welder

Today is the anniversary of Bill Moore’s death last year at 63, of a heart attack. His family had kept Lovettsville area farms running for 100 years and his repairs, or his ideas, touched nearly every piece of machinery on my farm. Other writing about his life is further down on this same page.

I always do see Bill Moore with a hammer, when I drive by his shop in Lovettsville and remember what it was like for his roll-up door to be open, to turn and record the momentary image as the car passes of him bent over, arm raised, working on something with a blacksmith's hammer just inside the shadow of the building. Well—the memory is just that, that single frame compiled from the hundreds of times I drove past him there on the main road—the story my mind extracted from that shape of him, bent over, arm raised, is of hammering. It wasn't a hammer, though. That would have been his grandfather, swinging a hammer at a forge, or perhaps his father. Bill, he would have been reaching for the vice grips, or returning with the cutting torch, or flaking out welding cable for slack and more precision, or standing up to lift his visor to take a closer look before bending back for the next weld.

When I needed his skill for a repair for my own farm, or his take on a mechanical problem, I stopped and parked and walked down the short gravel driveway between the weeds and up to that shape of him, bent with work, until he stood, half surprised to see someone, curious what I brought. He always had an answer to my problem, but it often came sprinkled through a longer exposition, almost stream of consciousness, of interconnected recollections stuck end to end, relating in some way to the problem at hand. One time I came to seek his advice on a thermostat I was trying to repair, and came away with an accounting of mercury switches, how mercury was used in critical applications because being a liquid it wouldn't corrode. Surely that story came because mercury switches are often found in old thermostats, although I don't think he included that detail. Later on I noticed the thermostat in my old house had just such a switch, and I watched it in action.

His stories might have been of recent events only ten or twenty years ago, or from his time on the mobile welding truck in the peak of his career, or might comprise a profile of somebody recently died, though told through old anecdotes; and other subjects from time to time appearing (like the highway being built over in Maryland and all the work and machines that went into it or the Black school built with community funds against opposition from the local government) that seemed to be reported of his own experience but in fact turned out to be a recollection of events that occurred when he was a child, or long before his birth. All the same, he kept the record.

Any story, really, is about something that occurred in the past, but many of the people and all of the places his stories were about, they still exist—and in that way those stories to me were just stories of the current world, as all stories are a telling of what happened in the past to inform an understanding of a place, of a time, of an event. In this case, Bill Moore's stories were telling of the world he lived in—the town of Lovettsville and its surrounding activity. The field was right around here where the man had a heart attack by his tractor, where the pilots who worked for the airlines out of Dulles lived and flew their private planes and where one of them once took Bill up in a glider, where the man once planted his corn in a spiral for simpler cultivation, Bill's church up the road and the mechanical problems of an old building, the stories of his neighbors in the community: the honest, crooked, hard-working, or the self-important—who all happened (just by chance) to now be old and some already dead. I never saw a young man with work for Bill at his shop.

When I came to him I inevitably and without even trying, or noticing, brought something of this same world: to weld a new ball onto the tie rod of my little International Cub, designed in 1947, (I learned how International Harvester tested new equipment in the southern hemisphere's summer, to be ready for summer sales up here, before losing its global dominance to the 3-point hitch), or a broken sprocket from a McCormick grain drill from the 50s that needed a new tooth brazed on, or a disc tongue that had cracked from some farmer's poor repair long before I got it. Cleaning out the grease channels on a used disc I bought, with uncommon 7/16ths carriage bolts, Bill remarked that such bolts were often used on equipment built by Ford, in the 70s, and wasn't surprised when I told him it was, in fact, a Ford 201 disc.

These days as I drive south on the main road, through Lovettsville down towards my farm, I no longer look over and see Bill working in his shop. His bay door is closed, as if he's just away for the day, or it's after hours, and he'll be open later. He won't be open later. The grass is grown tall, now that he's not here to keep it mown on his tiny old riding mower. Instead I drive down the same road as ever but I don't see Bill and the world he described through his stories—though I still know which person built his own house and everything else before in his old age becoming obsessed with growing potatoes (never successfully) and from whose son I happened to buy a wagon frame after Bill sent me there looking for potato equipment; and how the traveling salesman (from whose catalog Bill's father bought a welder) helped a man start the business down the road, now run by his son; and how Lovettsville is all farms and Brunswick across the river is all railroad; and how the humble scrap man is more respected than the cabinetmaker who is industrious and highly skilled but thinks he's better than you. Instead of the world these stories are a part of I see the houses, and the new strip mall, all built over the last 20 years since developers discovered the flat, perfect farmland of Lovettsville was also perfect for houses, offering an amount of money no retiring farmer could refuse as fast roads came west and the suburbs grew from DC to connect isolated towns in the country into a continuous exurban expanse. The thousands of people who moved into those houses on every cornfield don't know of the hundreds who comprise a parallel world of activity—or who used to, anyway—and now it becomes difficult to reconstruct the connections, to feel the presence of that world anymore.

Thing is, that world was on its way out when Bill Moore was in his forties. Long before I knew him. Bill just never saw a need to change—he kept things mostly as they were in his father's day; even the rack of wooden tool handles still hung from the ceiling, from when the shop served as the local hardware store, ages ago. His stories too were probably just the same as ever, new ones added to the canon as they came up. He had something to share from the moment I walked up until long after the work was completed. Sometimes I looked for a pause where I might add a topical anecdote of my own, but I rarely found one; he needed to tell me what he needed to say.

On the final page of the classic memoir The Things They Carried, the author Tim O'Brien keeps people and place alive by making up stories, and writes of being dead as “like being inside a book that nobody's reading...the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hoping somebody'll pick it up and start reading.” Bill Moore seemed to live through stories, some recent, some from long ago, some incidental, some personal, but mostly just an accounting. Maybe he wasn't just keeping the record, or sharing it with me, but in the telling of it, he was keeping his world alive. For himself. Like a memory, whose neural connections have to be refreshed, if not gone over in recollection now and again, it fades. Without his stories keeping the threads knit together, his world would soon unravel. As it begins to for me, without him. He kept it alive as long as he lived, alive enough for me to feel it was real.

The lasting imprint of Germans & Jefferson on July 4th

I thought last week, for the Fourth of July, I might write something at least mildly patriotic while watching those fireworks blooming on the ridge. But it took me a week to nail down the idea—in this political time, to write anything on large-scale “patriotic” themes seems likely to feel divisive to one faction or another. The important point though is not the national politics and government, disagreeable to all in one way or another, but the small-scale patriotism of the local society in which we live our day-to-day lives. A patriotism of being proud and appreciative of that social fabric of schoolteachers, librarians, letter carriers, volunteer first-responders and the other connections of the community fabric, which I think (I hope!) might be more universally appreciated: to focus not on the greater concept of the Country, but on literally the country (as in country-side) in which we live.

Thomas Jefferson had a lot to say about lofty national ideals, but when it came right down to it, one of his core visions was of a country whose social fabric would be comprised of farmers—independent, self-sufficient, self-governing homesteads reliant on neither government nor employer, and therefore truly free to vote and act towards the best interest of the nation. (Even though the only people eligible to vote in the first decades after independence were those who owned land—and who were white and male.) This agrarian vision of the American Family Farm remains rooted in our national consciousness, showing up in children's books, the famous Fisher Price Farm, and in grocery-store (and pickup-truck) advertising. But at exactly the same time as young Jefferson was developing his agrarian perspective on the colonial plantations of the Virginia Piedmont, German immigrants were moving down from Pennsylvania into the flat fertile farmland here where I live between the ridges west of Leesburg...and down into all the hills and valleys of Virginia west of the Piedmont, in the Shenandoah Valley. Jefferson's plantation culture of the day was indeed one of self-sufficiency, each plantation essentially an outpost for the purpose of exporting profit back to England, a company large enough for all work to be done in-house—and mostly with enslaved labor, while somehow claiming the virtues of an agrarian moral high-ground. With no need for outside help from independent tradesmen or merchants, there was little need for towns, or for that matter, roads. Social connections developed from status; government, the same. Perhaps Jefferson imagined the virtues of agriculture remaining the same at any scale, with a modest homestead maintaining an equally self-sufficient lifestyle, as if the goals of a multinational corporation could be in any way compared to those of a small business in town. The German agrarian society worked in just about the opposite way—there was no social hierarchy, no aspiration to wealth, and no sense of self-sufficiency, but rather, community resilience and a focus towards modest, stable, agricultural livelihood. No one family's enterprise was large enough to employ their own tradesmen, and so there had to be independent blacksmiths, wheel-wrights, transportation businesses, and every other ancillary function the community needed to get by. In this way the German society was a society of equals, who, through their livelihood, were drawn into contact with each other—in towns, and along roads, and in the daily course of business—and so developed strong social ties, and an understanding that the success of the community as a whole relied on the success of one's neighbors, each person's livelihood reliant on the others'.

The imprints of these two agricultural societies—one based on large-scale agrarian virtue, a nation made up of independent and self-reliant farmsteads; the other based on small-scale agrarian relationships, a local community made up of interconnected economic activity—are still visible today, faintly but indelibly marked in the generational echoes of our past. For one thing these cultural differences between the Virginians and the Pennsylvanians caused Clarke County to split from Frederick County, to the west of here. But more locally, the dividing line is just as clear. To the north of me, the Lovettsville area has had a concentration of small-scale farm enterprises and support businesses for nearly 300 years, persisting long after people stopped speaking German and new families moved into what had been “The German Settlement”—as in “Those Germans Over There, In That Settlement.” Even as the individuals changed, the values and social norms persisted and the Lovettsville area remained a place where people knew who had what skill to offer, and where people were inclined to help a neighbor out of a jam. To the south, where the plantation-centered society set the culture, and then dissolved, there is not the same unbroken thread. I don't believe it can be a coincidence that every single plumber, electrician, builder, welder, hay salesman, machine repairman, fellow farmer, and “old-timer” I know around here happens to live to the north of me. Not a single one of these people lives to the south across Rt 9, even though the main town of Purcellville is down that way. I just can't believe that's all by chance, and not by history.

It doesn't seem that Jefferson's agrarian vision, scaled down, looks like the independence and self-sufficiency he imagined. From where I can see, the country of small farmers is an interconnected, inter-reliant one, as people necessarily are brought together in the course of their day-to-day livelihood, and that those small-scale economic connections of daily necessity bring about a robust social fabric of neighborly, community-minded relations. It's that way among the people I know in the farm world, at least. Relationships are kept up as an inevitable result of calls to buy and sell vegetables, inquiries of who to call for a repair, stories told and news shared while waiting in line or during a practical visit to somebody not seen in a long time. Even at the farmers market, the purest exercise of supply & demand economics, the farmers are competitors in name only. When I first worked here, for a vegetable farm selling at a dozen markets a week, it was clear that we were not competitors with our compatriot farms—we knew many of them, wished them well, lent equipment or workers to help out when necessary—we knew that the farmers market only thrived (and brought customers to our own stand) if each other vendor saw success. And in that way, we became woven into that fabric of our agricultural community, neighbors to all and friends with some, all engaged in the mutually understood “group project” we each recognized in the others: that of the success of our small-scale farm world.

Farm Artifacts

I'd say an artifact is something of a former time that has persisted through the years that, when viewed in the context of today, allows us to understand something of that past era... or something of a place that shows something of what that same place was like in a different time. Of course, most artifacts originally were hardly worth noting in their own day, being so thoroughly normal and not offering any comment at all on their current setting. On the farm, the artifacts I find are often just oddly shaped pieces of rusty metal, nearly meaningless on their own—but there's always a larger story to be found once somebody can figure out what it is and why it fell to the ground in this particular place.

Things lost on a small farm always turn up eventually, no matter where they were lost. As a worker here during college summers, sometimes I would discard a long-sleeve shirt on a warm day, lose it, and it would appear again weeks later. Even my indestructible Nalgene water bottle was lost track of, written off for good, and then it too turned up again—with a big dent in it. I always assumed it had fallen into a field and then got tilled up.

Everything lost can't have gone far on a vegetable farm, and, after enough work weeding, or enough tillage passes, or enough time pulling up drip tape, someone will view the exact spot where it happens to be. Even items like the small gas cap from my International 884 that I left sitting on the tractor fender while refueling and then promptly drove away, leaving it to fall off into a field (and forcing me to sheepishly turn up at the parts counter to buy a new gas cap like an idiot)... several years later someone working here walked up and handed me a little rusty round piece of metal—I knew exactly what it was.

One of the more common items that turns up here—we find one or two each year when sticking a pepper plant in the ground or digging up potatoes—are the spring clamps that I used, until a few years ago, to hold up the plastic on a long hoophouse. The hoophouse no longer exists, and even though nobody ever lost a clamp on purpose, still they keep appearing in that part of the farm.

Sometimes more interesting pieces of metal come to the surface. I think it was 2016 when we found this pointed piece of metal, clearly manufactured in a specific shape but for what purpose I had no idea. Years later, at a farm auction, looking at the old rusty equipment, I saw a part that was was exactly the same shape as this piece of metal—it was the guard on a sickle bar mower, through which the toothed bar slides to cut the tall grass to let it fall over evenly on the ground to be dried and raked into windrows for making hay. I never saw a sickle bar mower as a worker on farms, and nobody has used that machine on this ground (or even made any hay here at all) within the memory of anybody I know.

Around the same time that mower part came to the surface, I was discing up a patch of ground at my neighbor's flower farm and found this heavy triangle of rusty metal. I knew exactly what this one was though, although to somebody else it would be as foreign as the sickle bar guard was to me. All of the ground here, her flower farm and my vegetable farm used to be farmed by the people I worked for and learned from. And their key piece of machinery was the spader, a game-changing one-pass tillage machine that replaced the old plow and disc. Being a mechanicallyinclined ninteen-year-old, I was one of the workers assigned to replace the spades when they wore out twice a year. I'd know those plow bolts anywhere, with their difficult deformed-thread locknuts. The piece I found is not just the replaceable spade, but the fixed part of the machine it bolts onto—the remains of a poor quality (“meets farm tolerance”) weld are visible, where it would have been attached to the arm of the tillage machine.

Just as that sickle bar guard tells me something about what happened before my time here, 50 years from now if somebody found a spader spade (and could identify it!) it would tell something of what happened here before their time—the only people in this area who would have ever had a spader would have been the few small-scale vegetable farms here around me now.

I've been farming this very ground for nine years now, tilling it up every year, making beds, laying plastic, transplanting down every row, and I thought by now I would have found anything of any size—and honestly, the finds I've recounted here are just about the sum total of what has turned up! But digging potatoes last week, I pushed my hand into the loosened ground and felt something thin and pointy, about 18” long and curved in a gentle arc. I couldn't believe it, but it had to be. A tine from the part of the spading machine that leaves behind a flat fine seedbed. It's hard to miss—and dangerous! How on earth had nobody come across it before? But it's been here the whole time! I remember new tines being repair welded back on to the finish harrow from time to time, which means they must have broken off from time to time, and here was one of them—found 13 years after the last time anyone used a spader here. It's been down there, underground and unnoticed, only now brought to the surface.

These bits of rusty metal tell something of their era—a sickle bar mower used to be the standard way to make hay, now going out of fashion, and it's neat to find a piece that came off of an old machine. But the bigger story is that an old machine piece tells not only something about the old equipment it came from (and the fact that these parts fell off, requiring a careful repair to get going again), but also about the past story of this particular place.

Sometime, long before I was here, before the 50-year story of the farming here in Wheatland as I know it, there is an earlier part of the story of this farm that I would never have known—that it was at one point a hay field grown tall. One day, somebody came to mow hay, a thoroughly normal activity, and they brought a tractor not unlike the old ones I drive on the farm today (except in that day it looked modern and normal), or perhaps even a horse, if it was long enough ago. And as they drove that sickle bar mower back and forth, looking west at the same treeline I look at, looking east at the same horizon of the ridge between here and Leesburg, following the same contours I drive over in my own tractor and in the very same place where my field is now, a mower guard just dropped off into the grass, the only record of what happened here that day, really the only record of anything at all that happened in the past right here, separated from my own work only by time, but not by space.

And some day long after I'm gone from farming here, I will have unintentionally and unavoidably left a record of my own particular farming, artifacts all common to my shop-built farm equipment and nobody else's, but which few people would know to put together into the full picture—4 1/2” bolts, 5/8” hitch pins, 1/4” clip rings, and a few greenhouse clamps scattered around a 15' x 270' rectangle.

Entropy

We might think of farming as a natural system, in some way working with nature to grow those natural plants out there in the ground, left to their own devices and undisturbed by the “unnatural” pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. But the farm is an ordered, organized, linear, countable system created with effort towards a certain end—that is, tasty vegetables each week for you all. Natural systems are not arranged in this way; they don't take effort to maintain. Nature—which is to say “those woods out there,” the consequence of natural systems—is not the farm. And it always wins in the end.

Right now, towards the end of the season, the farm is a mess! It's almost embarrassing. Over the course of the season I put effort towards maintaining the crops that are in production, but as soon as their utility is on the wane we put our effort elsewhere, not wanting to do extra work just to keep that natural reclamation at bay. And without energy put in to weeding, mulching, and rowcovering, first the grass covers the spaces between plants, and the pigweeds grow tall from any square inch of soil exposed to sun, and before we know it there is no longer order. The mower restores some peace of mind, but only long enough to take up the drip tape, the tomato stakes, the fabric mulch, before nature finishes dismantling the agricultural order we had put so much effort into arranging.

If left even longer, for a year or two, woody perennials would arise, seemingly out of nowhere, as happens in unmowed meadows and under power line rights-of-way. Passing birds drop seeds, and, soon enough, a little seedling tree here and there. Eventually, without effort put in to mow the fields and maintain the farm, it would turn into forest. Indeed, a few dozen yards into forest that grows just off the west edge of the farm, lies an old fenceline—that fenceline is a memory of what at one point used to be the edge of the forest, which has since escaped its boundary, now held at bay only by the mower and the occasional chainsaw.

In physics, there is the idea of “entropy:” Everything under the sun and everywhere else inevitably tends toward disorganization, as the amount of energy available for work gets to be less and less over time. I'm sure I'm about to mis-apply the concept here because I'm not writing about some thermodynamic system, but that's okay—I'm no physicist either. The principle I take away is that it takes some energy to keep a particular biological system organized, and over time, disorder—entropy—rises as it seeks its natural equilibrium instead of the “unnatural” carefully ordered state. That natural state might be complex—look at the woods, and the cycles of plants growing, dying, being consumed by insects, bacteria, the fungi in the soil linking trees together in a web of biological communication – yet given this region's fundamental conditions it's the inevitable, characteristic result, absent any outside force.

The only reason there's a treeline by my field at all, of course, is that hundreds of years ago people put their energy towards clearing fields to farm, and it's only due to continued effort that they have remained clear and not reverted back to forest. People from elsewhere say this part of the country is beautiful, green and lush, and, as someone who grew up around here it's hard to appreciate: of course there are forests, of course there is undergrowth, of course highways are lined with trees and smaller gravel roads I drive near the farm are cut out from beneath the overhanging canopy of limbs. But this Mid-Atlantic hardwood forest is a product of our own climate, with four seasons and frequent rain. In another part of the country, the nature that would move in would be a product of that area's own climate and geology underlying its own natural system—the plains states, if left alone, would progress towards grassland. It's not that the area has never seen tree seeds, but that because of climate and geology and soil, trees just don't grow well there, apart from along the creekbeds. A forest of trees would take some effort to establish, and if left alone, would in time revert back to prairie.

And even our forest here—our characteristic Mid-Atlantic forest that grows by default without any particular attention—is itself changing rapidly. Recently I visited some friends nearby and we we walked through their woods. They noted the number of dead and fallen trees: all ash trees. When they moved here years ago, they told me, it was an elm forest. Once the elms died of Dutch Elm disease, it became an ash forest. It's only a matter of time until the last ash trees succumb to the emerald ash borer, and we don't know yet what will fill the space left by the departing ash. My old house is built of chestnut, whose original status as the dominant woodland species here is remembered only by its ubiquity in old buildings, barns, furniture, and how its nuts used to offer a subsistence living to people carving out their own ordered stability in the Shenandoah mountains.

Last January I drove up to Vermont to help a friend fell some trees to clear space for a building. Driving north through Pennsylvania, across into New York and up along the Hudson river, I looked for the transition out of my familiar, homey Mid-Atlantic hardwood forest. Even well into the Hudson valley, the roadside forest looked remarkably similar to what I'm used to around here. Finally, crossing east into Vermont, and with the Green Mountains on the horizon, I saw my first birch tree and soon enough, the ground became snow covered and the forests turned to birch and evergreen. Left to its own devices, nature had tended to create something different in response to different natural conditions.

I often think of Vermont as an agricultural state, with cows, Cabot cheese, and all the back-to-the-lander farming operations supplying fresh, fancy food to New York and Boston—and in fact I had gone up there in part to take a closer look at its rural, agricultural economy. The Hudson valley had been full of small farms, greenhouses, farmstands, but driving north through Vermont, it was only sawmills. I passed sawmills and firewood mills, little small-scale businesses, I passed logging trucks driving along the road—with hardly a farm to be seen. I can't tell you the last time I came across a sawmill here in VA, or passed a log truck on the road, but I can barely go anywhere around here without passing an agricultural operation of one sort or another. Just as with natural systems, the business enterprises that happen to do best as a result of an area's climate, geology, and economics are the ones that over time end up predominating.

The Loudoun Valley, where I am, has long been known for its good soil and agricultural promise—as opposed to the area east of the ridge, between Leesburg and Fairfax, which is remembered for its scrubby useless forest and poor soil. The thoroughly agricultural history of the valley here reflects that, as does the arrangement of farms—this area's rolling hills and creeks has made small-scale land-holding the predominate social arrangement, because unlike in the flat land to the south and west it would take too much work, too much energy, to have expansive plantations here.

My own, particular farm, as idiosyncratic as it is today, it too is shaped by the same forces of place, of geology, of climate, tending towards the low-energy state of this region's characteristic vegetable farming activity. I started off, in the beginning, growing the uncommon crops and storing root vegetables for sale over winter, because there was a better market for those items as a new farmer breaking in. The reason for that, of course, is that it takes more effort to grow spinach, carrots, and beets in this climate, and in this heavy soil. Those crops and that style of mechanized farming was not the characteristic operation well suited to this area. Indeed, I was copying systems familiar to the Northeast, which few people employ down here, to produce crops that were marketable precisely because few people grew them. I had learned to farm from my neighbors, but my farm didn't look anything like theirs.

As I farmed, year by year, making decisions about equipment, about crops and sales models, I tended (as anyone would) to drop the elements that were less successful, or less productive, or that I over time found to be less reliable than others. And as I adjusted towards what works best and grows most easily in this area, I can now look back over time to find that my farm, for some unseen reason, has less and less direct-seeded roots and greens, and more and more of the hot-season summer crops grown from transplants on plastic mulch. I realize that my farm is coming to look more and more like my neighboring vegetable farms I learned from in the beginning. Not because of any particular intention, or even awareness, but by following what produces with the least difficulty, the least energy. Which is, of course, what those other farmers had done, in their own day, regardless of their own interests, abilities, and skills—and they too happened to settle in to the same sort of farm that am being pulled toward today. Like any system in the world—in the universe, even—my farm can't resist the principles of entropy, bending towards the characteristic arrangement that arises with the least complexity, the least special intention.

Bill Moore, the welder

The news on the farm this time is more consequential than most. Bill Moore, the 3rd generation welder just up the road from me, passed away last week. His family kept Lovettsville area farms running for 100 years until his death, and his work tracked the development of farm machinery and farm land in this region. His repairs, or his ideas, touched nearly every piece of machinery on my farm, and without him my farm would not be as it is now. He was 63 years old.

Twelve years ago I was a young twenty-four-year-old trying out vegetable farming, and I had an idea for a mechanical seeding contraption to run behind an old 1950s Farmall Cub tractor. I needed somebody to build it before the season began. I was sent—of course—to Bill Moore, the welder. Unusually, I called him on the phone, since he was at home recovering from his heart attack, and he told me it's exactly the sort of thing he would love to do, but he'd need to stay out of the shop for another month or so. But he was happy to talk—of course—about the Cub tractor, and old-school machinery, and surely would have told me several of the stories of his own well-cared for Cub that I later heard him recount in his shop. He sent me to another local welder, with whom he'd gone to high school, who normally did an entirely different sort of metalwork but was helping people keep up and running while Bill was recovering. Later that season, with Bill back in the shop, he made me some clamps for a new cultivator setup, a design I later modeled my own work after, once I had learned to weld and began to build more of my own farming equipment.

No matter what I brought to him for repair or advice, Bill was always game to stop what he was doing to help the walk-up customer, whether it be a quick fix (“Five dollars”) or a discussion of design considerations told in stories of past machinery built, tried, broken. At that time there was almost always a line, a steady trickle of people stopping in to drop off, or pick up, according to the day of the week, or the weather. Bill never rushed through one person's work to wait on the next; mostly one person's appointment seemed to conclude when the next person walked up. I was never sure whether the work or the talk was the main purpose, and learned to block out at least 45 minutes for a visit to Bill Moore, most of that taken up with listening to Bill tell about mechanical history, local history, and his own family history, a deep repository—a catalog, really—of the activities, characters, relations, and deaths of the farm-based Lovettsville world. He remembered unnecessarily specific stories that even the people they were about had forgotten had ever happened. But of course, he had his old favorites: the one about the man who planted his corn in a spiral, cultivated his way around and around to the middle, then came back a couple weeks later with a can of gas and cultivated his way back out again (that was the first story I heard him tell to somebody else, that I had already heard), or others concerning the success or failure of an unusual idea (going bankrupt borrowing for a steam-powered thresher; industrial potato planting not earning more than to pay the freight, etc). And the humorous one about the new folks coming in from the city, the man who showed him a picture he took of something very exciting in his yard: “He had a photo of a deer. A deer!”

Bill Moore no doubt carried with him three generations of mechanical craftsmanship, but he wanted it understood that he hadn't just picked it all up from his father. “I learned from LOTS of people,” he impressed upon me, “I have a lot of books.” Bill developed the shop towards his own interest of practicing greater levels of craftsmanship, bringing in the mill, the lathe—even the press, a machine used every day—as new tools to access work his father didn't do, or to do the same work better. And he learned to use them—in fact the first thing made on the new lathe was a part to repair the new press. Other people, stopping in for a quick fix, might think that the machine does the work, but Bill he knew it was the craftsman. I made that mistake once, watching him cleanly melt a nut off of a bolt with a torch to fix my tillage disc, remarking in awe that the metal of the nut would just melt away from the bolt, leaving the threads intact. “You're not going to give me anything for skill?” I got his point. Like most people with high-level skill and knowledge, the layman can't appreciate even 10% of what's interesting to the craftsman. When I passed the standard welding test, I brought my bent pieces of metal to show him. Recognizing them immediately, Bill said I ought to be proud of my work and began describing his own time practicing at the Hobart welding school, perhaps glad to tell the story to someone who might understand something of what he was talking about, and would appreciate the skill he'd developed. “I still have all my own bend tests,” he said, “They're on a shelf in my basement.”

It was clear that Bill lived and breathed mechanical work, and I felt him to be so fortunate to have happened to grow up in his father's shop and to now be able to live his life walking down from his house every morning to do work he so clearly enjoyed—and then going back home to yet more mechanical projects. But like most people who work it was simply his profession, work which paid the bills and that he happened to be good at, and liked enough. And he understood that, at the most basic, he ran a customer-service business that played a vital role to the community of working people in the Lovettsville area—as had his father, and grandfather. People needed him to get back up and running, during haying, or harvest, or the snowplow season, and he prioritized his work according to how critical it would be to whomever needed his repair to get going again. He would tell me, as I stopped in to get his advice on some mechanical retrofit I was building, “I'm happy to help you, but I need to get a certain amount of work done,” gesturing to the repairs in progress around the shop, “And I don't know what might come in.” At first I thought he meant financially, that he needed to work a certain amount to make enough money, and of course offered to pay him for his time. But in fact he meant that he simply needed to get the work done, because other people were relying on him to do it.

Years ago, well before my time, in an era when the Lovettsville area was thoroughly a farming economy, and when now-outdated machinery was new technology, there was such call for the shop's services that they had a jig to set up a common repair on one particular part on the front wheel of one particular make of tricycle tractor. More recently, when I would stop in with a farm repair, there was no longer even a line at the shop. Bill would be able to talk for an hour or more without anyone arriving to interrupt. And the work had changed, too. “People bring me things that just aren't worth repairing, or aren't worth the time...and there's very little about it that's at all challenging, that tests my ability.” I remarked to him that his business these days seemed mostly to serve old people with old stuff—and, newly, landscapers and their trailers—which he confirmed was the case. The era of his work was coming to a close, as Lovettsville changed and his customer base aged. “Tractors and machinery just don't break down much anymore,” he explained, “And there just aren't many people around here anymore who are really farming.”

If he was becoming bored by his work, he was becoming more excited about the projects he maintained in his home shop, projects that to most people would appear indistinguishable from his “work” activities, but which as far as I can tell he spent nearly all his time on after closing up for the day. That is, when he wasn't sharpening chainsaw chains, or helping out at the church—or at an auction. He often talked about the precision lathe he was working on setting up at home, and the clocks he was repairing, and their mechanisms; he told me about having such a delightful Christmas morning last year, sitting at home on a Saturday finally getting a difficult clockwork back together, and how he'd got it running so cleanly that it had only lost so many seconds over a long period of time. He had a lifetime of projects to work on up at the house, and Bill was so looking forward to having time to sit down with them. To work on things that really interested him, to have time to execute the craftsmanship that he liked, to whatever level of precision he desired. His dream was to someday use that precision lathe to build a complete copy of an old but innovative Canadian-made clock. Bill Moore, not designing something new, but enjoying the use of his skill and knowledge in reworking something old.

Most weekends, Bill could be found at an auction. He loved attending auctions, and especially enjoyed showing off what he had bought for a song at the last sale. “Guess what this went for! … Five dollars!” A motor, welding leads, buckets of pipe fittings (“Oh, I'll use them all eventually, to make bushings.”) Once I learned to attend auctions as well I brought him my own stories to share, and useful things to show him, some of which he was happy to buy for a few dollars, or to trade for some minor work. One time I'd ended up with a box lot of about half a dozen old brace hand drills, not very serviceable, and he went right to the one with the rounded-out chuck, the worn shaft, the handle re-wound with soldered wire—an unusual repair for such a drill. “Oh my,” he said, taking in the record of the tool's life. “This one's seen a lot of love. I would be glad to have it.” I'm sure it's still somewhere up at his house, with all the other things he cared about.

One more piece on Bill Moore — fiction writing on the topic of his upcoming auction, at which I ended up buying, among many, many other things, an old worn hand drill and some bent pieces of metal.

A Visit to Bill Moore

November 30, 2022

“I went to an auction last Saturday.” He pointed to something just over there, asking, “How much do you think I bought that for?” He waited for my guess, which was too high, as usual. “A dollar!” I acknowledged the good buy. “It was a great sale. You know, I go to a sale every weekend, somewhere or another. Even if I don't come away with anything, I just love going to an auction.” I nodded; that much was clear. “There used to be so many more auctions around here, back when there were more farms—somebody was always retiring, or dying, and having a sale.” I noted the bluntness of his description of the way of the world. “Well, that's how it works. People collect what they need over their life, and then when they no longer need it, it's dispersed to whoever can make use of it for their own lives.”

“There's a sale coming up in December—I'm not going to be able to go to it though. I wish I could, but I can't make it. It's going to be a really good one. Cochran's doing it. This man's family had a welding shop for at least 100 years—well, it was a blacksmith shop first—the two of them, with him on the truck and his father in the shop, they did work for just about everyone around here, kept everyone going. I mean, the machinery people needed in those days, to get their work done. Of course, that was back when this was truly an agricultural area, everywhere around here. There's hardly anybody who's really farming anymore, and things just don't break down the way they used to. He could repair anything, or make it from scratch—few people appreciated his skill, but me, I knew what he was capable of. It's been a while, though, since anything came through the shop that really tested his ability, not for a long time.”

“Well, I guess he'd finished up his work for the day, closed up the shop like usual, and walked on home—he lived just up the street, between his shop and the church—apparently he got as far as taking his shoes off and sitting down to rest by the television. Had a heart attack. Robert Jackson, actually, went to check on him since he didn't come down to open the shop the next morning—it's sort of a funny story—Robert called 911 when nobody answered the door, and the dispatcher said all the officers were busy, and someone would be there in a few hours. A few hours! So he called our friend who lives just north of town, he's an officer, and he had two police cars over to his house before Robert even hung up the phone. The TV was still on when they found him. No two ways about it, he had a heart attack and that was that. I mean, that was the end of him. He just—died.

He stood silent and shook his head for a moment, considering.

“He was 63 years old.” I didn't know whether to be surprised, or whether that was just a statement of fact. “Well, he was. His father lived to be 90, and his mother, she lived to be 92!” I raised my eyebrows. “Well, nobody knows how long he's got left. That's just how old I am now, 63.” I already knew his age, always surprised to hear he's so young. “One time Robert Jackson and I—you know him?” I nodded. “Well he and I'll often go to a sale together, and one time I was off looking at something or another and Robert was talking with someone, who must have seen me off in the distance, and he says to Robert, 'Look at that man work, over there, why, he must be 80!' And Robert shouts to me, 'Bill!' I was some distance away, you know. 'Bill! This man here thinks you're 80!' Well I stopped what I was doing and shouted back to him, 'I've never seen an 80-year-old work like this!'” I smiled. “Well, that's what I said to him.”

“I'm not as young as I used to be, everything's gotten heavier, and in the winter, the cold just comes up from the floor, but I can still get done everything I need to. Well, I can. I'm only 63, you know.” I nodded. “My father, he lived to be pretty old, older than a lot of people. But he lost his mind. To know how much my father knew, what he could accomplish—to look at him, you'd never guess what he was capable of. But like I say, he just got to where he was completely demented, lost his entire mind. Now that's a sorry way to go. That's a sorry way to go.”

“Anyway this sale, like I said I can't go to it, but it'll be a good one, a two-day sale, the first two Thursdays in December—you can look it up. Sort of unusual timing. But anyway one day will be in the shop, you know, what everybody saw driving past on the road, and the other day up at the house—had a whole other shop up at home, to work on his own projects...nevermind the amount of safes, guns, clocks. He just loved anything mechanical.”

“Cochran's listing says of him, by way of talking up the sale, you know—'He could do just about anything for anyone.' Now, they'll say that sort of thing about any number of people, but this man—now, I knew him—and that's an accurate description.” I nodded. “Well, it is.”

“There's going to be a couple welders—I mean, real welders—a precision lathe, like that you could use to make a clock, a great press, all manner of tools...everything, and I mean, everything. Really, there's probably everything there I'd ever need for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, it'll be a good sale. I'm real sorry I won't be able to go.”

Culture, history, identity

When I first worked on a vegetable farm back in 2005, the farmers often talked to us about the growing practices used on the farm. We sold at a dozen DC-area farmers markets each week, with our tent signage proudly displaying, in brief, our farm identity:
 

NO PESTICIDES
NO HERBICIDES
NO FUNGICIDES

It was clear to us that nearly all of the other produce growers were conventional farmers, using chemical pesticides and fungicides as a key element of their vegetable-growing system. And it was just as clear to us that many customers sought out our sign when choosing which farm to buy from. We workers each went to market once or twice a week, and at every market customers would ask, upon entering our tent, “Are you Organic?” We'd begin our reply, “We're not Certified Organic but we use no pesticides, no herbicides, no fungicides, and use a foliar fertilizer sprayed on the leaves that has no runoff issue and is FDA certified as a...” “Oh yes, that's what I mean—thanks!”

Back in the 90s, long before I worked there and long before anyone was asking for Organic, the farmers realized that customers were interested in this simple description of growing practices and put the sign up, a sign that remained unchanged even as Organic went mainstream. The constant interface of our farm with other farms at market—and with customers—reinforced to us what our farm was and how it differed from the conventional farms, creating a strong cultural identity based around using ecological growing practices while not being Certified Organic—indeed, there were very few Certified Organic farms at the farmers market in those days.

When I started my own farm, I stayed close to the growing practices familiar to me as a worker. But I moved away from farmers markets towards CSA, where I no longer see other farmers each week or talk with customers at market, so I hardly think about my growing practices anymore—they're just, to me, normal.

But growing practices are still important, and maybe even a key reason you chose to join this CSA (I hope so!). It's worth taking a moment to make the point that virtually all farms—whether in big agriculture, or farmers markets, or even CSA farms—who don't advertise their growing practices farm in a way that is reliant on the inputs of conventional chemical pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers. And for that matter, virtually all Certified Organic farms are similarly reliant on pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers selected from the USDA's Organic-approved list.

This farm uses no pesticides of any type, instead excluding bugs with netting and fabric cover, or hand-picking them from the plants. To combat fungal disease I plant resistant varieties, or make multiple plantings knowing the older plants will eventually succumb. Weeds are blocked with biodegradable plastic mulch (which, incidentally, is not approved for use on Organic farms even though it is 100% biodegradable, and so Organic farms instead use miles of regular plastic mulch that goes straight to the landfill or is burned). I do think my growing practices are objectively better for the world than the practices of conventional farming—and, for that matter, than the average Certified Organic farm. Moreover, I'd advocate for the principle of less reliance on off-farm inputs over a farming system based on the products of industrial agriculture.

But if you'd ask my why I use these specific methods, as opposed to some other set of environmentally sane methods, it's not like I've made a rational assessment of the options and come to the conclusion that my assortment of methods is the ecologically superior farming practice. (It could actually be argued that a system where the soil is never disturbed and weeds are killed with herbicide may very well be “better” environmentally than a system like mine that is reliant on frequent mechanical tillage—never mind those cutting-edge farms now working out new methods of doing no-till farming without herbicides, a farming system that may someday become the new “sustainable” standard.) No, the underlying reason that I farm in this specific way is just that: it's just the way I do it. Culture, history, identity.

As in any farming community, I learned to farm through working for the older generation of farmers (or “hippie farmers” as their neighbors called them), receiving principles and values passed down through cultural lineage, ready answers serving as a guide for all future decisions. No pesticides, use rowcover, keep planting, don't till when wet, sell everything, buy used, avoid debt, work hard in the summer, because then there's winter. Cultural restrictions are inherently limiting (What plant disease is this? No idea, won't do anything about it anyway), always in tension with new ideas (it used to be “Kill your rototiller” and now it's “Don't till ever”), but hopefully change over time to meet the future. The point, after all, is not so much to find the "right" answer but to maintain a sense of cultural- and self-identity as the world changes.

As keenly as I feel my farming perspective guide my farming decisions, I don't claim to have the “right” way to farm along sustainable, ecological lines. I just have one that works for me. There are surely things I would be happy to do on my farm if only I had learned to farm that way, just as sure as there are things I would reject except that I happened to “grow up with them” when I was learning. To be sure, the growing practices I employ and advertise to the world do aim to further sustainable ecological farming. And since you've joined this CSA, chances are you also value those same things. At the end of the day though, the reason I do these particular things on the farm is the same reason most of us live our lives as we do: that to do otherwise would be to compromise an inherent part of our history, our community values, our identity.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween this week! Carving pumpkins don't make it into the CSA lineup owing to their inedibility, though they might be one of the most season-specific items out there! I'm sure you'll be seeing them all over town this week as we approach Halloween. This tradition began with the pagan holiday of Samhain, marking the beginning of the dark half the year at the midway point between autumn equinox and the winter solstice, and its Christian counterpart, Halloween. Both holidays honor the deceased and involve the passage of spirits and ghosts from one realm to another. To ward away evil spirits, people practicing folk Christianity in the British Isles carved large turnips and beets into grotesque lanterns lit with lumps of coal, and, in the 19th century, Irish immigrants to this country found American pumpkins to be well suited to the tradition. Soon enough what we think of as “Halloween” began to be celebrated across the country, with carved jack-o'-lanterns set out on porches decorated with dried cornstalks and gourds.

It's no coincidence that pumpkins, potatoes, butternut squash, and other root vegetables are what we decorate with and eat during October and November—and that these are the traditional vegetables of Thanksgiving dinner. These are the vegetables that were stockpiled for winter in the root cellar, before the advent of easy shipping and the modern industrial food system; in a very real way, these are the vegetables that kept people alive during the dark half of the year. Drawing much of our cultural touchstones from regions with long winters, it is no surprise that they are so encoded in our cultural memory.

The fact that these vegetables in particular are our seasonal favorites is simply a product of the principle of evolution—everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. These fall vegetables are produced by frost-tender plants that have all figured out a way to use the sun's energy from the year's growing season to persist in some way over winter to get a head start next year—potatoes with their starchy tubers sending up shoots when the soil warms; turnips, beets, and carrots ready to sprout a seedstalk first thing in spring. These same strategies allow us to keep them over winter for food; the stored energy nourishing us humans instead of growing a new plant next year.

Cabbage and the other hardy brassica greens are also considered traditional fall vegetables because they grow well in cool weather and do keep a while over winter. However, this cultural memory doesn't account for the fact that different types of plants are at home in different climatic regions (take brussels sprouts, which only taste good when grown in cold climates, yet have made it onto Thanksgiving menus nationwide). There's a reason tomatoes are a big deal around here; likewise, New York and Wisconsin are major cabbage growing areas.

Although most plants CAN be grown in most places, different types of plants thrive in the types of weather patterns found in specific regions at specific times of year. The more out-of-season or the less ideal the growing conditions, the more attention required to keep the plant in its comfortable conditions and the more easily they are knocked off course by weather outside of their comfortable range. Tomatoes and peppers, they just grow here in Virginia's heat, no special attention required; same for the fall crops like squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, since they to do all their growing in the heat of the summer. Cabbage and greens, on the other hand, really would love to grow in New York, with a mild summer and long, beautiful fall. Here we get a blazing hot summer followed by a short period of nice October weather quickly becoming too cold and dark for plants to grow. And how many emails have I written over the years about waiting for the exact conditions to seed spinach or the trials and tribulations of growing carrots? They definitely CAN be grown here, and we have had amazing spinach or carrot seasons, but being ill-suited to Virginian conditions it takes some effort and attention to guide them through the times when weather just isn't what they're expecting. I'd say about half the years see reasonable success; and the other years, slim pickings or outright failure. In any case, these are not the crops that we rely on to get us through the lean times.

So as we are immersed in the pumpkin spice everything season, with gourds and winter squash turning up in every major supermarket, and as you get ready to carve those pumpkins, rest assured! You are not participating in the fad of the season. Quite the opposite—you are celebrating culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.

What is "Organic" on this sort of farm?

When I first worked on a vegetable farm back in 2005, we sold at dozen DC-area farmers markets each week with our tent proudly displaying, in brief, our farm identity:

NO PESTICIDES
NO HERBICIDES
NO FUNGICIDES

Sure, they used baking soda to ward off fungus on melons, and, in later years, a natural enzyme to prevent caterpillars from eating their crops, but the meaning was clear: we farmed without chemicals.

This simple sign differentiated our farm—in the 90s and until the farmers retired in the aughts (and later began renting to me, incidentally)—from how all the "regular" conventional farms grew: with plenty of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides as an integral part of their farming systems. At market we spoke with customers one-on-one and answered their questions about how our food was grown. Often people would ask, before committing to set foot under our tent, "Are you organic?" and we'd reply, "Well we aren't Certified Organic but we don't use any pesticides, herb—" "OH, of course, that's what I mean! Wonderful." We were one of the few farms of that type at the market, and we were the market stand they were looking for. I can't remember anybody ever being disappointed and leaving to go find a Certified Organic farm. This was, of course, at a time before Certified Organic vegetables were sold at Wal-Mart, before major brands had bought out the small, trusted Organic brands, before there was mass marketing of "natural" and "safe" food that met no industry standards, and before Certified Organic food became ubiquitous enough for customers to seek it out by name. At that time, organic was simply a shorthand people used to ask whether we spray stuff on the vegetables.

But as farmers markets multiplied across the country and Whole Foods became a household name, interest in organic food caught fire and the large-scale players in the food industry took notice, followed the money, and got to work developing the full line of Certified Organic products found in nearly every grocery store today. Many people think the Organic label means it was grown without any pesticides or herbicides at all, viewing Organic certification as an ideal reached by small, forward-thinking, maybe even 'hip', farms that are trying to do right for environment. Perhaps it was that way when organic food was a niche movement out of Berkeley in the 70s, but governmental regulatory standards are meant for the major economic players, and USDA Organic Standards are no different. As in any industry, big businesses try to do the least that they can while still complying with the rule, all the while working from the inside to alter the regulatory standards to be more favorable to their own interests.

Today, all that USDA Organic Certification actually means is that food was produced only with inputs listed on the Organic Approved List. While the ubiquity of Organic food is a big win in principle for the original organic farming activists, certification doesn't have anything to do with a farm's growing principles or actual environmental impact—the very principles that customers, not to mention the original organic farmers, are most concerned about. There are plenty of pesticides and fungicides on the approved list, and most Certified Organic farms use plenty of pesticides and fungicides as an integral part of their farming systems—they just happen to be from organic sources. And many products are completely safe yet not included on the list. I use a biodegradeable plastic mulch to block weeds, but since it includes an ingredient made from oil it isn't allowed (Certified Organic farmers use miles of regular plastic and just throw it away). The Organic regulation serves a critical purpose in providing an economic reason for agribusiness to use less-destructive methods, and when you buy from big business, I do hope you look for the USDA Organic label.

But for me, I use the same growing practices as those farmers I learned from: NO PESTICIDES, NO HERBICIDES, NO FUNGICIDES, not even the organic ones (apart from the occasional anti-caterpillar enzyme). As a small, local farmer that does care about the principles of low-input, environmentally-sane agriculture, trying to communicate those principles and methods with a governmental regulatory label meant for industrial-scale farms selling in a national market has never made sense to me.

Thankfully, I can talk to you all directly rather than referring you to a third-party certification. When you buy from local farmers like me, I hope you talk with them about what you care about, rather than finding meaning in the Organic regulatory label. Over the last decade, the more Organic products became ubiquitous in national supermarkets, with USDA Organic products from industrial-scale food producers on every grocery store shelf, the more customers began to demand that label in their local farmers market and other small-business settings as well. It is a triumph of the small activist organic farms that the big players have been turned to growing some food with Organic methods (even though Organic food comprises not even 6% of national food sales), but when this increasing customer demand for the USDA Organic label drives small direct-marketing farmers to grow and sell under the same rules as the industrial players, certifying under a program guided by and most appropriate for big business, agribusiness has won at our own game. This is why I am not Certified Organic, and why I encourage you not to care about such labeling when buying food from people like me. In choosing to sign up for this CSA—whether just last year or many years ago—I appreciate that you read the information on the farm website, asked me any questions that were important to you, and decided that my un-certified, old-school, somewhat-contrary farm is the sort of farm you're looking for!

Old-School Weather

Most years I write about the weather from time to time, except this year it hasn't come up as often. Perhaps that is because this summer we've only had two periods of weather: HOT & DRY and now, COOL & WET. The dry period sort of snuck up because it didn't quite feel like it was never raining. Rain was very often in the forecast, and that threat of rain very often determined the worklist on the farm. But every time rain was predicted, the skies darkening promisingly, the small storms missed us out here and then bloomed into giant thunderstorms by the time they reached the city. The ground got drier and drier, limiting tillage, until I gave up hoping for rain and assembled the overhead sprinklers in an unplanted field just to get the ground into a condition where it might eventually be able to grow something.

And yet last week I went up the road to visit the local welder, who in conversation about the weather (an obligatory topic), noted how well his neighbor's soybeans are doing next to the shop. He mentioned getting consistent rain, much to my surprise, but I knew what he was going to tell me next because he'd told me about it before: "It's just like back in the 70s when there were a number of great growing years..." He went on to describe this year's storms all coming up from the south, dropping just the right amount of rain... And I went on to describe how, yes, I know those rainstorms well... I watch them skirt my farm to the north and head right up here to you!

My neighbors, from whom I learned to farm and now retired after growing vegetables here since the 70s, often mention that back then a storm came through just about every week to drop an inch of rain, the perfect amount. They didn't even use irrigation until the 90s, the rain being so reliable. But weather patterns are changing. For example, every year there is usually 5 days of cool and rainy weather during the first part of August; I watch the forecast closely, for this is the fleeting window to sow spinach seeds in the ground. This year the cooler period came right on schedule...but with no rain in sight, I waited until the next window of good spinach-planting weather: a true rainy week towards the end of August, too late to re-plant if it didn't come up well. I had high hopes given that week's rainy forecast, but, as it turned out, that week kicked off these last 4 weeks of rain (pretty much every Wednesday, like clockwork, and on other days as well), which turned out to be too MUCH rain for the tiny spinach, many of which didn't survive germination. The survivors are fine, there just aren't as many as I'd hoped.

Sure, all weather is local and no trend predicts the weather at any particular spot at any particular time, as the welder's quite different growing season indicates, his shop being not 5 miles north of me. But old timers talk how the summer weather these days is just not like it used to be--and, unlike most "back in my day" lamentations, this one is empirically true! The year-to-year variability has increased; the range of weather considered "normal" and unremarkable is getting broader all the time. So much of farming relies on predictable weather, because plants like predictable, stable growing conditions. This widely varying weather, from drought to deluge, late freeze to blazing July, creates new rhythms we don't yet understand and can't adapt to on the fly.

Several years ago, I gave up on the idea that I could trust the old-time weather patterns from the era of the farmers I'd learned from, and began to intentionally diverge from the rubrics learned from those older farmers. I began doing fieldwork when it is possible, rather than waiting for conditions to be ideal, as ideal conditions became more elusive, and adjusted other practices to be more adaptable to changing conditions. And as weather continues to become more unpredictably extreme, I'll continue to shift to more resilient growing systems, like transplanting rather than seeding directly into the ground. These sorts of things take more work and used to feel silly if most years are all right, but the more those "outlier" years become the norm, the less silly it feels to instead see the "regular" times as the outliers and be sure to be prepared for an ever-widening range of possibilities in the future.

Origins of seasonal culture

We are now deeply in the apple and pumpkin-craze season, which is what we have come to expect after the berry craze of late spring and early summer, and then the tomato frenzy of high summer. Have you stopped to wonder where these seemingly-recent seasonal fixations came from? It's not just the power of advertising.

Plants have over millions of years developed some pretty specialized strategies for getting a leg up on the competition. Some vegetables, like alliums (onions and garlic) form a bulb in the sun's summer energy to persist, alive, over winter, using that stored energy to beat the competition, and sending up a shoot first out of the gate when the weather warms. In spring they're some of the first vegetables we get.

In the summer, as you may know, most of the "vegetables" we eat are actually fruits. A fruit, botanically speaking, is a part of a plant that contains seeds–surrounded with something tasty to help spread the seed or to decompose, offering fertility to the next year's germinating seed–such as a tomato, squash, strawberry, or apple. But it takes a lot of energy to grow a fruit (first the plant, then flowers, and finally the delicious fruit) and that's why these are our summer vegetables, needing a long time to accumulate enough growth and sunlight to produce the food we want to eat. Other fruits solve this problem by using stored energy from last year to get the job done earlier (strawberries) or have figured out how to survive year-to-year as bushes or trees.

Now, in the fall, we are back to brassica greens–biennial plants gaining a foothold in the cool, meager growing conditions of fall where other plants decline, in order to grow just enough to survive the winter and send up a seedstalk at the first hint of spring. And of course, we have the fall storage crops like potatoes, carrots, squash and, yes, pumpkin spice.

Seasonality is no accident, but a product of the principle of evolution--everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. Why pumpkins for Halloween? Why potatoes and butternut squash for Thanksgiving? These are the plants that arrive in this season, and these are the fruits and tubers developed to last through the cold months–surviving without rotting to keep people alive during the dead of winter, just as they would otherwise survive to put up new plants in spring. Of course, it's not to the squash's plan to produce a butternut only to be eaten up in December... but isn't that, in fact, botanical success, to be cultivated on purpose, grown with care year after year, its genetics persisting for having found the niche of sustaining human life? As we take in the Halloween displays since September, pumpkin spice for weeks yet to come, then turkeys, everywhere, it's a small comfort to know that all this amped-up insanity of the advertising world is based entirely upon pre-industrial agricultural reality. It's merely marketing finding its niche.

So, enjoy your Halloween pumpkins and your butternut squash at Thanksgiving, and even your pumpkin spice. You're not just being trendy after all! The opposite of recent fad, this is culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.

Underlying Soil

Many people think farmers are engaged in some sort of idealistically bucolic lifestyle, with the traditionally meager pay more than offset by the rewards of working outside in a pastoral setting. And, to be honest, I know a lot of farmers who hold this perspective as well: Farmers who are more than fulfilled by the agricultural life even though USDA data says that in most years most farm operations lose money, with family expenses covered by off-farm income.

I didn't get into farming because of these pastoral qualities--I happened to take a job on a vegetable farm during college, saw it to be a good fit for my interests, and found that I enjoy the work of running a farm business and the possibilities afforded by the enterprise. I have enjoyed the project of growing top-notch vegetables with responsible farming methods while providing a livelihood for myself by carefully expanding the business bit by bit. I can't imagine running this sort of farm, and then having to work a winter job just to make ends meet.

Small businesses like mine make up the the vast majority of American businesses; together, small businesses generate nearly half of US economic activity, and nearly one-fifth of employees work for a company with under 20 workers (that's me!). But these businesses aren't the ones we hear about in the newspaper. Instead, companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Boeing are making the headlines. And, even though these corporations have shown their business methods lead to incredible business success, the neighborhood small business probably isn't being run in the same way as these headline-generating firms that supposedly prove the American Dream a reality.

What if I DID act like a big corporation, and measure my success on corporate metrics? As far as I can tell, big business tends to seek profit above all else--except, perhaps, that fairy-tale of endless growth. So if I were trying to sell as many vegetables as possible to as many people as possible with regard for little else but the bottom line, what would I do? Would I secretly violate your trust assuming you won't find out? Would I cause environmental harm because there aren't regulations to stop me or, if there are, the chance of enforcement is low or penalties inconsequential? Would I maximize profit at the expense of everything else and somehow earn hundreds of times as much as my lowest-paid worker? Or, perhaps, would I marry my farming roots with American big business and act like Certified Organic agribusiness, pushing my growing methods right up to the letter of the law, and then getting a seat on the Organic standards board to try to change the regulations in my favor?

Even though I think of my farm as a business, that sort of approach isn't the least bit interesting to me, and the idea that the only success is endless growth, with dollars the only metric, isn't how I set my goals for the farm. Don't get me wrong; of course I am trying to sell you vegetables. One of my main goals with the CSA is to create something you will want to sign up for again next year--the farm provides my livelihood after all. I've worked to grow the business and expand the farm, but only to be able to do more of what I enjoy, and to do it in a way that sustains a long-term farm future. I feel like I'm almost (but not quite!) to the size of farm that can support a sensible workload, sustainable income, and stable farm crew--and someday work on daydreams like transitioning to solar power.

While Amazon's customers are mined for cash and Facebook users offer up endless data, that raw material of modern business, I choose to remove my farm from that extractive business environment – in just the same way as my farm's sustainable growing practices work with the natural environment rather than destructively extracting all that is there. In our sort of farming the soil is not simply a substrate from which to mine dollars; neither are the customers simply a source for cash. And just as it is the soil which allows the plants to develop, fostering their growth throughout the season to finally bear fruit, so too it is you all, the CSA folks, whose involvement with this project allows the farm to grow and bear fruit in its own way.

Farm Shark Tank

Have you ever thought about how ridiculous a business idea the local CSA farm is? Generally commercial farmers have always focused on growing large volumes of shippable commodities for the essentially limitless regional or national market. Which is to say, they focus on what grows the best at their particular location at any particular time of year. Why would a farmer choose to grow a crop that grew less well than some other crop, or to plant something at a time of year when it clearly might have trouble?

I mean, if I went to a bunch of average farmers and pitched the business plan of "grow a big variety of crops for six months out of the year, and have them all look good," they would think that's nuts! The farmer from the Northeast would say, "Why plant brassicas with such hot weather down there, when you could focus on peppers and eggplant?" The farmer from the south would say, "If you want early tomatoes, why don't you just buy them from us instead of trying so hard with your hoophouses and rowcover?" And someone else would remark that cucumbers grow great in Virginia but why are you trying to plant them past June--it's too hot! The big organic grower Lady Moon Farms (you've seen their stuff in the supermarket) even has land in three different regions--Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida--so they can maintain a greater variety of produce all grown at the optimal time and location.

And here we are deliberately putting ourselves on the hook for pushing out 6 different vegetables every Friday for 6 months out of the year, week in and week out. We keep high standards, given the constraints we're working with, but in a very real way we are competing with perfect-looking grocery store vegetables since the "global marketplace" can provide any vegetable 52 weeks out of the year, all grown in ideal conditions somewhere in the world. That's what most people are used to in their lives.

But, unlike those commercial farmers, we are constantly pushing the envelope--trying to get a crop to come in earlier or extend the season later--in order to have enough variety at every time of year. We pitch "eating seasonally," but what does that mean when farmers push the boundaries of the ideal vegetable season? I suppose what we really mean is not to eat seasonally, but in fact to eat locally--to eat the food that is produced nearby, rather than produced around the world. (If you think about it, everything in the grocery store is seasonal--it's all in peak season somewhere!)

The real answer for those skeptical farmers is that no, this business makes no sense at all from a production standpoint. But it's how I learned to farm and what I've practiced doing, not because it is a simple idea but because it is an endlessly fascinating and confounding one. What ties it together and makes it successful are the local eaters (that's you) who are drawn to the idea of getting the bulk of their vegetables from a single farm for most of the year. As a production farm, there is no WAY we could make it, even competing on just the regional scale. On a local scale though, given the sort of vegetables we can turn out, it seems like there are enough people who appreciate what we do for this to be quite a good idea after all.

American Stock Characters: The Farmer

Recently one of the local farmers market organizations sent out some publicity that caught my eye. It was a pitch for farmers markets, encouraging people to attend in order to “learn where your food comes from.” I found this interesting, because the very idea that touring a farmers market would teach us something about the origin of the food we eat is connected to the prominence of the “small family farm” in our cultural memory that I wrote about this last week.

As much as we'd like to believe the ideal, our food does not come straight off the iconic “Fisher-Price Farm.” Its red barn and silo represent the cultural symbol of a farm--a stock character alongside “The Cowboy” and “The Pioneer” (and perhaps “The Founding Fathers”), but the reality of these memories has always been more complex than our American narrative allows. The Fisher-Price Farm was originally released in 1968, just three years before Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz's exhortation to “get big or get out” brought us into the modern age of industrial farming. Would Jefferson be proud that the small-scale land holder is what comes to mind as the mainstay of American agriculture? Or would Jefferson be proud that American farms today are in many ways more similar to his operation at Monticello than to the small-scale farmer setting up at the local market?

If you are a regular grocery store shopper, as most of us are, you may notice the largest of the farmers-market farms showing up in the “Local” display at Giant, or an artisan product finding its way onto the top shelf at Whole Foods. But the farms at a farmers market are simply not the farms that supply our grocery store shelves. The general-audience food that Americans eat is produced on a national, industrial scale not a local farmers-market scale. And industrial agriculture has little in common with the sort of farm you might learn about at a farmers market or by reading these CSA emails.

When you join a farm-based CSA, (like you have), you have a close connection to where the food in your bags comes from, not a simple window into mainstream food production. Connecting with a local food system for your vegetables is inherently different, separate from our national food system. And so, to edit that farmers market pitch, I'd say, "Join a CSA so you CAN know where your food comes from." That possibility of unbroken connection to the source is perhaps the biggest difference here.

A Jeffersonian Fourth of July (maybe?)

If tomatoes mean summer agriculturally, certainly the Fourth of July means summer for us culturally. As a topical nod to farming and patriotism, check out this article, Why the founding farmers wanted Americans to be farmers, which ties together a number of themes we think about around the CSA. It is an accessible read that builds the narrative of how food production became a key determinant of American independence, with seeds serving as the organic capsules containing the roots of liberty. Seeds represented autonomy and independence. 

"...Farming represented a means of both procedural and distributive justice. The right to own property and the opportunity to work the land protected Americans from “the arbitrary will of another” and offered the privilege of receiving the benefit of one’s own labor directly. This sort of self-reliance and self sufficiency—at first a rallying cry against British colonialism—would become the underlying principle of our economic system today..."

This sort of small-scale family farming is still rooted in our cultural consciousness (as the marketing department of corporate food production well knows), and is at the core of our American story. As you may remember from grade school—or from Hamilton—Jefferson was a proponent of this agrarian vision, where agricultural production and land ownership forms the basis of a free country and, in fact, the basis of democracy itself.

But however universal those ideals, in practice Jefferson's agrarianism was based on the labor of people enslaved and sold to power those idealistically-American agricultural enterprises. And voting itself, the fundamental activity of democracy, was for the first 80 years of our nation restricted to white property-owning men. Our nation's agricultural origin story does not mean the same thing to all Americans. In a way, my farm is the sort of small farm Jefferson had in mind, and we could use the Fourth of July to consider how being part of a small-scale CSA enterprise strengthens the fabric of democracy, returning us to the Founders' ideals. On the other hand, we could remember that the large-scale players—for example, the Jeffersons and the Washingtons, and now corporate agribusiness—have always been the ones in power. I'd say that by supporting a small-scale farm, and its regenerative rather than extractive growing practices, and the person-to-person economic and social fabric that local business creates, you are supporting the independence of the people. As the grand finale of the neighboring town's fireworks shines through my window, I wish you a happy Independence Day

CSA...and the fabric of society?

When was the last time you bought something from an actual person?  From a business run by someone in your community?  Or even from an employee who you recognize and who you knows you as one of the regulars?  I could talk all day about how fresh the just-picked vegetables are, not two days out of the ground.  Or how it's environmentally better to eat food from a small local farm than from corporate agribusiness more concerned with profit than with ecological sanity.  But consider the idea that meeting your day-to-day economic needs with businesses that are part of the local fabric of society -- having a person-to-person relationship with not only the seller but the producer of those goods -- may in fact be the most important result of buying your food from a local farm.

There's something we enjoy about the small business and the old-school main-street.  The "Towne Center" developments (Fairfax Corner, OneLoudoun, Reston Town Center, etc.) capitalize on this desire for small-town character, but in facade only.  While actual main-streets are comprised of local businesses creating a center of local culture, these faux main-streets are dominated by corporate business, islands lost in a sea of parking where even the ice cream shops and yoga studios are national chains.  Our politicians also capitalize on this appreciation of main-street businesses, with their talk of supporting "America's small business owners," but their policies have little to do with the main-street small businesses that enrich our day-to-day lives.

As much as people would like to live in this sort of world, when was the last time you interacted with a business like this?  Perhaps you stop at the independent coffee shop?  A local bookstore, or deli?  Maybe your mechanic owns the garage, or your hairdresser rents their chair.  But for your day-to-day goods, the go-to source is almost certain to be a national chain or box-store retailer--or Amazon.  These places are so convenient, and with such low prices, that it takes some real work to shop at a business owned by a real person.  We don't often have an easy opportunity to buy our day-to-day goods from the kinds of businesses we would like to see comprise the fabric of our communities, and even when we do, most of us rarely take advantage of it.

And so I encourage you to think about signing up for the CSA not because of the fantastic vegetables, or because of the great recipes every week, or because eating seasonally and sustainably increases your connection to the natural world...but because it enriches your life for something so critical as the daily food on your table to come from a local farm -- from local people.