Enough of you have expressed interest in my quixotic quest to put young organic wannabefarmers together with farmland to justify my giving you an update.
To the uninformed (or just uninterested), bear with me while I fill in the back story.
I am an organic gardener. This isn’t because it’s trendy. I’ve always been an organic gardener, meaning that I —.
OK, I’ll start over. That sentence was going in a negative direction. I don’t mind double negatives (they have their place) but I do mind harping on what’s wrong with the world. Sharing information about who’s doing right by nature and how seems like a better fit with my glass-half-full temperament.
So, to begin again, I am buying land to the extent that I am able (i.e., as long as I can cash-flow this venture by running an Airbnb business out of my home and doing all the grunt work myself) for likeminded idealists.
The notion of financing small farms came to me when I felt that I wasn’t doing enough to “walk the talk.”
Fires are scorching the West, drought is afflicting farmers here in Minnesota, monsoon rains are preventing farmers in the East from getting a crop in the ground.
Getting a crop in the ground has been well-nigh impossible for my ragtag trio in western New York. The farm they bought — OK, I bought — had a bumper squash crop last year. It brought in a quarter of what I paid for the farm — OK, half the farm. The hilltop section was too big a stretch for the kids, so I’m keeping it for them to buy when the time is right.
They are eager to begin paying off their debt to me, but how can they when the creek running through our farm is overflowing, when seed just washes away before it can get a grip, when every spare minute is spent bringing in the tractor so it doesn’t rust, and re-securing the flapping tarp over the greenhouses and trying to stay warm (they haven’t got heat yet) by building fires in the wood-burning stove that is their only source of energy, because the farm was previously owned by an Amish family?
My farmers have super-absorbent soil, thanks to the Amish, who kept cattle on the land and rotated many different crops and never sprayed chemicals on them.
But that’s just half of my farm-loan update. Today I’m off to Polk County, Wisconsin, where I’ve just paid $180,000 (yes, I have a line of credit) for 68 acres of land adjacent to an organic farm run by a husband-and-wife team about my age.
Now to find the right farmer.
It’s a hard life. Organic farmers are not subsidized so must rely on the same wealthy customers whose stock portfolios enable them to afford healthy food and now, lots and lots of farmland. Investors fearful of a precarious stock market are rushing to buy up land, which sends prices soaring and puts more pressure on farmers who want to farm the old-fashioned way.
Farming in the U.S. is no longer a profession that requires deep knowledge of soil microbes, plant diversity, and the web of life.
It requires an MBA and deep knowledge of inorganic chemicals and algorithms. It requires a habit of mind that thinks of living things as just the same as inanimate things, and isn’t offended by a system that turns animals into widgets by cranking them out in so-called factory farms.
So to those of you who don’t mind a garden columnist intentionally blurring the line between horticulture and agriculture — a line that never existed before agriculture turned into a form of manufacturing and gardening turned into a hobby that required similar methods and chemicals — to those of you, in other words, who have asked me for updates on my progress in taking back the land, I have one last piece of news to report, along with a modest request.
I hope you’ll join the residents of Polk County in their fight to protect western Wisconsin from hog operations, whose official name is CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation). A 26,000-hog CAFO run by Smithfield Farms, a Chinese corporation that will fatten its hogs on U.S. corn and soy before shipping them to Chinese and other global customers, is slated for construction in Trade Lake, a hub of the sort of old-fashioned tourism that requires swimsuits not spacesuits and is vital to the economy of Wisconsin lake country.
The stench of CAFOs is almost unknown in Wisconsin and the corporation intends to take advantage of that, as well as the relative poverty of most people who choose to live their whole lives in this gorgeous landscape rather than make their fortune in pastures that are greener only if you’re more interested in money than fresh air and clean water.
Many of you who live in Polk County get this paper because you are closer to this city than Madison or Milwaukee. Some of you are even Twins fans.
So please, all of you, support the organic farmers of western Wisconsin who have found a home in hills that are not amenable to monoculture farming but are just right for small farms serving their local community with food that’s healthy, fresh and affordable.
If one of you (or 10) would like to know more about my new role as banker to the movement, do get in touch. You don’t have to be a millionaire to participate in this effort. Think of it as charity, but with a potential financial upside too, if our movement can make a dent in the regulatory and policy apparatus that favors Big Ag and disfavors us.
And now a word about urban gardening. I mentioned squash. In honor of (not to compete with) my New York farmers, I planted squash for the very first time. I did it the easy way, plopping a few plump seedlings into the soil. It was too late to grow squash from seed by the time the box of trial plants arrived from Burpee Seeds, not that squash was on my wish list anyway back in April.
“Primavera” is now swamping every other plant in my tiny vegetable garden, even though it puts out huge, heart-shaped leaves on a “restricted” vine (meaning it’s less aggressive than squash typically is). The papery-textured yellow flowers open and close each day with the sun — that is, until it’s time to make seeds for next year that will be encased in an oblong pale green fruit (the ripe squash is yellow) that will swell to all of three pounds.
At just 10 inches long and half that around, it’s not a monster squash but it promises to deliver amazing taste. At least that’s what the label says it will do. Who am I to question the label? If it fails the taste test, I will blame the gardener not the breeder, and try again next year.
More fun and equally eye-catching is the Mexican Sour Gherkin Cucumber, new this year and sure to endear itself to gardeners with a whimsical bent. My vines are producing fruits just as adorable as the small, speckled eggs being laid by the first of my three new chickens, the ones I started from incubator chicks last February.
They resemble tiny watermelons to an uncanny degree, and they taste, so promises Burpee, “like cucumbers with tangy citrus overtones.”
