New Communities: Or, Why I Haven't Been Updating

I realize that it has been over a month since my last post. All I can offer are sad excuses, like "But I was moving to Pittsburgh and starting grad school and everything was going really fast and it was super hard and it will never happen again I swear!"

Well, they do say not to make promises you can't keep, so I will avoid saying that never again will I avoid this blog because I have, I don't know, a thesis due or something. But I can promise that I will be making a concerted effort to regularly update this tiny slice of the internet so all my lovely friends and family can see what I am doing, where I am going, things I'm learning, stuff I'm accomplishing... I'm sure you get the idea.

To be honest, I was inspired this weekend to update my blog. By this lady.

This weekend was the Mother Earth News Fair in Seven Springs, Pennsylvania, a mere 90 minutes down the interstate from here. Fortuitous, no? And in exchange for manning the Chatham University table for a couple hours and participating in the Farmer Olympics (my team came in second to last... but we get a year's subscription to Mother Earth News so it's hard for me to be too sad about it), I got free admission to the fair. Which was only $30, but I am a poor graduate student. And while it was very cold and I was so unprepared to the point that I failed to even bring a jacket (AND we camped out Saturday night... you can thank my 20 degree sleeping back for my continued existence), I did enjoy some of the workshops and keynote speeches. Especially the indoor ones.

One of the speakers I had the pleasure of seeing was one Jenna Woginrich, a lady homesteader, writer and blogger from upstate New York. Her keynote speech, about the importance of community, was particularly poignant for me, considering that I have completely uprooted myself (again... it's what, the fourth time in as many years?) and moved to a completely new place with completely new people to do something I've never done before.

She discussed the various levels of community... the community we come with (family), the community we choose (friends, folks with similar interests), the communities we hire, brush against on accident, seek out intentionally... there are many, too many to describe really.

Yet here I am, deliberately putting myself into a new community of people who, like me, value food and learning and making positive change in the world. By reading books and blogs, by attending conferences, by deliberately moving away from what I thought I should do and choosing a world that was unknown to me but infinitely more exciting, I am building my own community around me, a little bit each day. It's a very exhilarating time, to feel like I'm where I need to be and making the best choices I can make. How can it get any better?

So thanks to all of you who every come to this blog - my family and friends, my neighbors, my long-lost acquaintances who Facebook-stalked me and found this, and you, person who randomly found me because you Googled "sexy girl on a tractor". Thank you for making yourself part of my community, even if it was only for the briefest of moments. I am indeed blessed.

The Agricultural Generational Gap

My grandfather has been living with us for the last two months. It's been interesting, to say the least. I love him, but we do not see eye to eye on a number of things... and one of those is farming.

For almost the entirety of my farm job last year, Papaw would call me about once a week, and we would have the following conversation:

Him: So.... why are you working on a farm?
Me: Well, you know, sustainable agriculture and learning about issues concerning farmers and public health and stuff....
Him: Oh, okay.
-One week later-
Him: So.... why are you working on a farm?

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a common attitude his generation has towards those who, like me, are approaching farming despite never before having so much as picked an ear of corn - i.e. "Generation Organic".*

Papaw was born in 1931 and has lived his entire life in Milltown, Indiana. Milltown is a very small town in southern Indiana, in a county with so few people that they don't even have a stoplight. He spent his formative years on a farm, where his family grew pretty much all the food they needed to survive. They had four cows, a few pigs, chickens, and produce - a homestead, basically. When they needed a little extra money, they went to town in the family's Model T and sold eggs and cream. After a brief stint in the Navy, Papaw got a job with DuPont in Louisville, where he worked until he retired.

To my grandfather, farming is something he was required to do. Being in a position to purchase food, rather than grow it all himself, was a mark of prosperity. You only farmed if you needed to.

Not to mention, he helped pay for my college education... something he never had. From his perspective, it probably looks like I'm just throwing all that money away. After all, you don't need an education to farm, right?

But here's the thing... you do need an education to farm. My grandfather received his education from his parents and grandparents, and they from theirs. His education was distilled over generations of farmers making mistakes and learning from them to find what worked best. Farming is something that takes observation, skill, perseverance, and the ability to problem solve.

Once the middle of the 20th century hit, agriculture in this country underwent a radical change. Technological advancements enabled fewer people to grow larger amounts of food. The number of farms dropped, while the acreage of those farms went through the roof. Suddenly, you didn't have to farm to make ends meet. You could have a job in the city and shop at the supermarket.

And a generation of children grew up without knowing how to farm, and all that lovely knowledge disappeared.

My grandfather will probably never understand why I feel compelled - yes, compelled - to farm. Part of that is because of his short-term memory loss, which means that he forgets everything I tell him within minutes.

But even if he could remember, I don't know if he would really get it. He has always taken for granted the warmth of the sun on the back of his neck, the heft of a shovel, the feel of Indiana soil crumbling between his fingers.

And I have always taken for granted that, if I need to, I can just run down to the store and pick up a head of lettuce. Understanding - or not, as the case may be - is a two way street.




*I say this because he's not the only member of his generation who has tried to convince me that farming is sheer madness and a waste of time. One of the nicer responses I've received was, "Well.... I guess it's a stable occupation..."

Looking Ahead

2011 was a year of change for me, and it seems that 2012 is continuing the trend. 

A lot has been happening, to put it mildly.* Two main occurrences deserve particular attention. First, my grandfather has been living with us since early December as we wait for a room to open up for him at an assisted living facility. Second, my mom started a new job in Atlanta today.

The fact that my parents will be leaving the house they've had for the last 18 years has brushing on the edges of my consciousness for the last couple months, when it became clear that my mom would be taking this new job. But the arrival of my grandpa put that in the back of my mind. As his departure looms closer, though, I'm starting to think more about what this change means for me.

Now, I haven't technically lived in Indiana for the last three years. That being said, my parents' house has been my permanent address, it's where I've kept all my belongings, and it's where I've returned in between my gigs with AmeriCorps and the farm. And although I haven't been here full-time for a while, I've always assumed that I'd eventually end up in Indianapolis, whenever that far-away concept of "settling down" becomes a reality. My friends are here, after all, and until recently, my family was as well. It's home.

But now I have to face the notion that, when my job at Clear Spring Creamery ends in August and I have only a few weeks before the start of grad school, I will have to return here and do the impossible. To wit: decide what I have that's worth keeping and somehow get it to my new digs in Pittsburgh. Sever my ties to a home that has been with me since I was eight. Realize that I don't get any more "summer breaks" where I can just come home for a month or two and rest on my laurels until I figure out what comes next. Not in Indianapolis, anyways.




*Hence the long break between posts. My bad.

Goodbye, Farm. Hello, Rest Of Life.

Tomorrow is my last day at Brightwood Vineyard and Farm as an intern. Once evening arrives and my car is packed, I'll be driving to Washington D.C., where I'm attending the American Public Health Association conference next week. After that, I'll indulge in visiting friends on the East Coast, and then head back to Indiana for the holidays.

The end of an adventure is always bittersweet. I've enjoyed this year so much. Susan and Dean have been unstintingly gracious and kind, Autumn and Brian have been amazing co-workers and friends, and I've learned an incredible amount about farming, food, and myself. (Sorry, I know that's cheesy. But true.)

This experience hasn't been without its hardships, though. For one thing, I've had to cope with being the most ignorant person on the crew. When I got here, I didn't know a damn thing about gardening, farming, or agriculture. It's never easy for me to admit to myself that I don't know what I'm doing - is it easy for anyone, I wonder? - but I chugged along, and improved steadily. Whatever farm I find myself on in the future, at least I won't feel quite so stupid and ill-prepared.

More notably, I've had three deaths in my family since this time last year. I've had to deal with my own personal demons on that score, on top of the ever-present cloud of my own curious insecurities. (One memorable day comes to mind, when I was harvesting by myself and sobbed nonstop for an entire two hours, blowing my nose on my shirt as the goat bucks looked on with a nonchalant curiosity tinged with wondering when I would get around to feeding them.) Something I didn't expect, however, was that being on a farm would help me cope with losing some of the people dearest to me. I wrote an entry about it at the time, but since then I've taken part in the circle of farm life myself, killing and eviscerating chickens on my own.

That's perhaps one of the best parts of being on a farm for an entire season - being witness to the cycles that occur here over time, from washing chicken eggs to processing old layers, from watching baby animals grow up to picking up lamb meat from the butcher. Experiencing closely the progression of seasons, the change in the grasses and depth of the river, the temperature and humidity at night as I laid in my tent. And there's something weirdly symbolic, too, about ripping out tomato plants that you planted yourself and harvested for weeks on end while your skin burned and your hands turned green. I wish I could watch over the next few years and experience the even wider circles that I have sensed, but have yet to see.

I have the feeling that certain thoughts and opinions and ideas have solidified within me this year that I'm only now beginning to understand. One of them caught me completely by surprise this afternoon, when I was doing some last-minute errands. Being woefully unprepared in the sartorial department for this conference next week (Business casual? Puh-lease.), I've been stalking the racks at Goodwill for the last several weekends and have managed to accumulate a few outfits that at the very least don't sport the remnants of chicken poop. But even if I could buy tights second hand, I wouldn't. So today I ran to Target for that purpose.

I was, to put it mildly, pretty uncomfortable. As I walked along the rows of cosmetic supplies and clothes and DVDs, I realized how completely incompatible shopping at a Target has been with my lifestyle this year. The whole idea behind farming is to produce something that you and your neighbors can use. The whole idea when you go to Target is to indulge in orgasmic consumerism. Being there made me realize how important reusing and recycling has become to me - not just when it comes to making compost out of vegetable waste, but in my choices as a consumer. And when I was done, I felt none of the temporary satisfaction that making a purchase once gave me. I was just glad to get out of the parking lot.

Perhaps even more surprising to me has been the realization that I could see myself farming one day. When I began this internship, that was the furthest thing from my mind. I saw working on a farm purely as a learning experience, a sort of hands-on aspect of my upcoming graduate studies, and a way to learn the issues facing today's small family farm. That still holds true, but now I ask myself questions like, "How would I do this if it were my farm?" It doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility, at any rate.

The truth is, working on this farm feeds my soul. I'm even tempted to say that it has given me a sense of spirituality that I've never felt before. I don't know what it is - the smell of soil, feeling the sun on the back of my neck, the heft of a shovel - but I've never felt more alive, or more at peace.

There will things I won't miss, I guess. It will be nice to finally be able to sleep in as late as I please. I can't wait to wear clothes that don't have stains from five different kinds of animal poop. It will be an absolute pleasure not to shake out my jeans in the morning and watch five stink bugs fall out. I'm practically panting in anticipation of the day when I look outside at the terrible weather, and know that I don't have to go work in it. I'm looking forward to seeing my family and friends, to using a shower that doesn't flood and lightly electrocute me when I touch the handle, to doing nothing but read bad fantasy novels for four consecutive days.

But, man. I sure am going to miss this farm.

Two Months Left - The 3/4 Retrospective

The end is in sight.

Today is the first day of September, which means that I'm three fourths done with this farming apprenticeship. That's two months, or nine weeks, or sixty one days, to be precise.

Since I failed to do a mid-year report in July, I shall do one now, and call it my three fourths year perspective.

The thing everyone talks about with farming is how hard it is. I really couldn't tell you how many people seemed utterly surprised that I would be working on a farm - including farmers, even - and said something along the lines of, "You know it's really hard work, right?"

Well, I was certified as a wild land fire fighter for two years, and I wouldn't call the pack test a cake walk. I eat well, I'm in shape, and I'm healthy. I work out. I hike. Do I look that delicate or frail?

Despite my scoffing, however, I admit that I underestimated how hard this would be on my body and my mind.

We're right in the middle of what Susan calls the mid-season burn out right now. When we first started harvesting all the summer produce in July - tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, eggplant, to name a few - it was new. It was exciting. And it wasn't lettuce. But six weeks and three times a week later, I'll admit a little bit of the shine has worn off, between the itchiness of the tomato plants and the okra and squash spines that make your fingers bleed, the backaches and the bending over and the bruises.

Dean is fond of calling our work the "farm fitness program." It's not an inaccurate description. When I first arrived in March, I was sore for a couple weeks - the kind of sore that comes from using those muscles you don't usually use. But in the last month or so, it's morphed into a soreness that never really goes away, a fatigue compounded by never really stopping. 

We do get time off, obviously - usually Sunday, and often part of Saturday afternoon as well. But frankly, it's wearing to just have one day off a week. There's something about having two full days off that recharges your batteries much more completely.* When I first got here, I was going on hikes in Shenandoah National Park nearly every weekend. My last hike was in late June. These days, all I want to do with my time off is lay around reading, or watch a VHS in the living room.

There's also an aspect I didn't consider before I got here - one that I've experienced before in AmeriCorps, so you'd think I would have known better. That is the act of living and working with a small group of people all day, every day, for months on end. I know that Autumn and Brian, Dean and Susan will be valuable friends for the rest of my life. But at the end of each day, all I want to do is be alone.


So yes, I admit it. This is hard work - harder than I'd really thought it was going to be, mentally and physically. But that doesn't mean I don't love it.

Time for an anecdote: when I was working at a Boys and Girls Club in Georgia a couple years ago, I went to a Methodist church in the area a few times. I really liked the guy who preached, and one of his sermons really stayed with me. He talked about how the hardest part of a journey is towards the end. You're tired, you just want to be home, and you don't know how - or if - it's going to end.

I recognize the feeling I'm having right now. I had it around this time last year and the year before in AmeriCorps. I'll call it the middle-of-the-journey blues. The end is coming, faster than I anticipated. I'm tired. I'm sore. I miss people at home. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when this is done. But I'm not entirely ready for it to be over, either.





*I still don't know how Susan and Dean manage to keep going with basically no days off, except for a two week vacation in summer. They say it's different when it's your own farm. I'll take their word for it.

The Real Cost of Cheap Food

A couple weeks ago, a man who was coming to stay at the cottage with his family asked me, "So why is organic food so much more expensive than regular food?"

I have a hard time trying to decide what I found more jaw-dropping: the incredible scope of the question, or the sheer ignorance of someone coming to stay at our "green B&B".*

After a few seconds of furious thought, I was able to organize my brain somewhat and manage an explanation that didn't make me sound like a complete idiot. But afterwards, I started to think about the encounter. Is it really such a fantastic question? Many people just think of organic food as the "expensive" alternative. If you only compare grocery store prices, then yes, it is. But a lot more goes into it than that. For every "cheap" food item you buy, there are invisible costs somewhere that you are encouraging - costs that are taken out on you, your community, and every tax-payer in the country.

(WARNING: This is a long rant post.)

Health

When you buy a cheeseburger from your favorite fast food place, it probably seems like a good deal. Four bucks for a sandwich, side and drink? Sign me up.

But the hidden costs with cheap food are considerable. The "obesity epidemic" sweeping America is proof of that. One in three adults in the US is considered obese. The number of obese children has tripled since 1980, with 17% of children under the age of 20 considered obese today.

Noticeably, there are considerable racial, ethnic and income-related disparities in obesity. Obesity rates tend to be much higher in low-income neighborhoods. Hispanic children are far more likely than non-Hispanic children to be obese, and African Americans have the highest rates of adult obesity.

But what is the actual cost, in dollars? In 2008, medical costs resulting from obesity were estimated at $147 billion.** Also consider that conditions relating to obesity include type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and some types of cancer. That doesn't include what the costs of lost productivity were in that year, or how much of that cost forwarded to the public as part of their tax money.

Environmental


I think everyone got tired of hearing about environmental problems after the Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill, but when the Australian government reports that the Great Barrier Reef is being significantly damaged due to agricultural chemicals, we have a problem.

Conventional agricultural practices result in a variety of long-term environmental problems. Tillage often subjects the land to severe erosion, for example. To wit - a 1950's topsoil survey of Virginia listed what is now Brightwood Vineyard and Farm as having six feet of topsoil. When Dean and Susan moved here ten years ago, the farm had two. And it takes a thousand years to build a foot of soil.

Then there's pest and weed management, which is what everyone thinks about when the question of environmental impact arises. While Monsanto might be engineering corn that can withstand application of Roundup, anyone who uses a product like that isn't thinking a few steps down the line. The GMO corn might be okay, but all the beneficial microbes in the soil are wiped out. Application of fungicides and pesticides do the same, killing everything in its path, and making the soil anaerobic and completely unfit for use for the next ten years. Runoff of these chemicals then has the predicted effect - tainting water sources, killing wildlife and native plants, and so on.

To counter the complete decimation of their soil, conventional farmers use NPK fertilizers that add "the big three" back into the soil - Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium. Other than the ridiculously over-simplified idea that these three nutrients are all crops need to be healthy (and we wonder why produce today has 40% fewer vitamins and minerals than produce from the 1940s, as Michael Pollan courteously explained in In Defense of Food), the application of fertilizer also has consequences for the surrounding environment.

Example: when I was in high school, back in good ol' Indiana, one summer something interesting happened. The run-off of fertilizers from lawns caused severe algae bloom in the Eagle Creek Reservoir, which happens to also be the primary water source for miles around. The algae killed off all the fish, and made the water taste like the inside of a toilet. The county then had to spend taxpayer money to mitigate the problem by getting rid of the algae and restocking the entire lake with fish.

Human Rights

Think about the rice selection at your local grocery store. At the low end of the selection, you have family-size bags of store-brand rice for maybe $2 or $3. At the other end of the scale are small one-pound bags of "specialty" rice - Arborio, perhaps, or wild rice mixes - at $6 or $7 each.

If you're like most people, you probably go for the $2 bag. It's the better deal, yes? But how is such a large amount so cheap?

The answer is most likely that it's taken out of the wages of the workers who cultivate it. Most large farms pay their workers a pittance - not even a living wage. This has been considered a problem in California for years - anyone who remembers the United Farm Workers strikes in the 1980's, led by Cesar Chavez, has an idea what I'm talking about. Our country, especially the agri-business, has a long and illustrious history of importing illegal workers who will work for a fraction of what American citizens would consider appropriate.***

Something like rice isn't usually grown in the US, though. It's grown instead in countries like India, China, South Korea. Not only do workers there have to contend with low pay, but the working conditions are often atrocious. A lot of pesticides that chemical companies like Monsanto and DOW spent years and millions of dollars developing are no longer legal in the United States; these chemicals are now sold to countries where they aren't illegal, creating hazardous working conditions for agricultural workers there.




The bottom line is if you are buying cheap food, then something is wrong. There is no such thing as "cheap food". With organic food purchased at a local farmer's market, you know that your money is going directly to the farmer, that no chemicals were used in the making of your produce, and that it is the healthy choice.

For a much less righteously angry and considerably shorter post on the topic of the externalized costs of cheap food, check out this post on Marion Nestle's blog.





*Lest I sound like a pretentious ass, let me explain that after observing five months worth of visitors, I can safely say that most of them are familiar with (and often eat lots of) organic food.
**Stats can be found at the CDC website.
***The question of illegal immigration is a large and unwieldy one - for a look at this practice, I suggest checking out the documentary Food, Inc.

Death and the Farm

The overabundance of funerals in my family over the last month has me thinking about a lot of things, death naturally being one of them. When I returned to the farm two weeks ago, I felt much more attuned to the ebb and flow of life here - the balance of predator and prey, the birth of baby goats destined to become goat burgers, the knowledge that our Peking ducks will be ready to process in just a month.

In her book Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Barbara Kingsolver notes the increasing distance between Americans and their food. She describes how few people in this country have ever processed a chicken or lamb or cow. Instead, we go to the grocery store, where we purchase the appropriate part all nice and clean in its styrofoam and cellophane packaging, beautiful beneath the flourescent lighting, bearing no hint of its messy beginning.

It’s a disturbing train of thought. How many of us can say with certainty which part of the steer originally housed our rib eye steak or chuck roast? In the store, thighs and breasts, ribs and shanks, are all completely devoid of their original context. So few people today have anything to do with their own food production, lacking even a lonely tomato plant to dot their lawn. We think of food as it appears in the supermarket: clean, unblemished, stacked neatly into tall piles and organized by color.

This separation between animal and human has ramifications that reach beyond our dinner plate. It speaks to something far more substantial: our relationship with death.

For many, the only time we encounter the dead is when a loved one passes away. Often, we do not witness the moment of their passing. Only later do we see them turned out at a viewing or funeral, the product of modern embalming practices. With rituals like these, it is no wonder that so many people find death to be upsetting, disturbing, and even traumatic.

Death and farming are remarkably intertwined. I saw my first livestock death about six weeks ago, when a sick chicken needed to be put down in case it was contagious. Brian took it and hung it upside down by its feet, before using a knife to slice the major vein running down the size of its neck. The chicken shuddered. Then it flapped wildly. Then it was still.

It was my first time to see the death of an animal on the farm... but it won't be my last.

All of which makes me wonder: does being exposed to death on a farm make it more acceptable in life? It's hard to say. I don't think it makes it any easier, necessarily. But I think that it makes death a little less traumatic.

On a farm, as in nature, death does not happen arbitrarily. The chicken is sick, Old Yeller needs to be put down, the lamb will be eaten and respected as part of our meal. There is always a reason. Death is merely one step in a long chain of events - and not necessarily the last one.

If more consumers were involved in their food, up to and including witnessing and perhaps helping with its death and processing, then I have no doubt that they would be much more mindful of how they used that animal. And if we were more exposed to death and its effects on the farm, then we might be a little better prepared to meet with it in life.

Farming, Community, Life: My take on The Greenhorns

Thursday evening, I had the opportunity to attend a screening of the new documentary The Greenhorns, produced by the grassroots nonprofit The Greenhorns, and which I first learned about a few months ago.

Greenhorns is a nonprofit that provides information and resources for new farmers. In the documentary, the Greenhorns founder Sevarine von Tscharner Fleming travels the country, interviewing beginning farmers,* as well as some big names in the field, like Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation).

These new farmers, or “Greenhorns,” (see what they did there?) range in age from 18 to their early 60’s, and span the US from coast to coast. They are married and single, with children and without. They grow greens on city rooftops and raise cattle on rural family farms. They rejuvenate empty lots and provide produce for food deserts, balancing the tasks of introducing the joys of local food to consumers of all ages while working to learn the basics of keeping a farm running.

Their stories are all truly inspiring. But I’m not going to write about their stories, because it’s already been done – and very well indeed – by Ms. Tscharner Fleming. 

Instead, I want to talk about a theme that pervaded the Thursday night event: community.

First, let me give a brief summary of how the evening ran. When I arrived, I realized I actually knew a few people – there were several interns who are participating in other Piedmont CRAFT farms, who I met at the Sharondale mushroom farm tour. We spent an hour sitting on the grass outside, enjoying the historic and picturesque Morvin Farm, eating a dinner thoughtfully provided by Whole Foods and comparing our various farm apprenticeship experiences. After the screening, there was a “Young Farmer Panel” featuring five relatively new farmers who live in the Charlottesville area.

Late in the Q&A session, one of the panel members quipped, “I became a farmer because I thought I wouldn’t have to interact with people, but I talk to more people every day now than I’ve ever had to before!” Which got me thinking about the sense of community a small family farm creates in its wake.

Once upon a time, America’s countryside was dotted with small, healthy communities – at least, healthier than today. Folks got their food from local family farms, they bought their goods at locally-owned stores, and they weren’t afraid to lean on their neighbors for help.

Today, most of America suffers from what I like to call Cowboy Syndrome – the thought that every man (or nuclear family unit) is an island, and must be as self-reliant as possible. Which is just plain sad. How many moms feel comfortable asking their neighbors to watch their kids for an afternoon? How many people are okay with going next door to borrow a cup of sugar? Too few, I’m sure.

For a small, local farmer, isolation is completely unattainable. As our intrepid young farmer explained, you are constantly interacting with others. Susan and Dean’s home, for example, is constantly revolving with with WWOOF-ers, part-time workers, cottage guests, neighbors dropping by, travelers hoping to check out the winery, college professors examining how the farm copes with soil erosion, the local vet checking the donkey’s hooves… the list goes on and on. Merely starting a small, locally based farm will draw others to you, like small children to an open cookie jar.

While family farms are like small communities in and of themselves, they also play important roles locally – they purchase what they need from other local businesses, while providing fresh food for local families.**

All this crossed through my mind as I understood that, there in the horse barn where the documentary was screened, we were creating our own community: a community of young people, young farmers, a movement of those of us invested in creating justice, health, and sustainability through good, local food.

And as we ate our vegan pasta salad, comparing heirloom tomato seeds and laughing about nighttime chicken raids, I realized that we are building bridges to one another. We, the next generation of farmers in America, are creating relationships that we will use to strengthen our communities, our farms, and ourselves... even if all we need is to borrow a cup of sugar.

* According to the USDA, we learn, “Beginning Farmer” means anyone who has been farming fewer than 10 years.

** At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Walmart sort of messed this up.

AmeriCorps NCCC: A Retrospective

My last post was on...October 20? Yikes. A lot has happened in that time.

I'm not sure where to begin - the Acres USA conference, which I attended in December in my hometown of Indianapolis? I saw speakers, attended workshops, bought books, met farmers. My progress in farm research, perhaps - I've applied to six internships in the last week, from Washington state to Virginia, and I'm researching dozens more. Maybe a book review; I'm continuing to voraciously read, and have several new purchases/gifts I'm drooling over, including Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes; Food Politics and What to Eat by Marion Nestle; Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, a collection of essays by Wendell Berry... the list goes on. Or maybe I could discuss my many culinary adventures over the holiday season. Or maybe talk about volunteering at the Indy Winter Farmer's Market. Or one of a dozen more ideas ricocheting off the inside of my skull.

These are all things I hope to get to eventually. But what I think I should devote this post to is the culmination of my most recent adventure, AmeriCorps NCCC.

I've mentioned the program before - AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps, a team-based, fully residential leadership program for young people ages 18 to 24. I served at the Atlantic Region, based out of Perry Point, Maryland. I was a Corps Member in 2009 (a member of the infamous team known as "Kill Squad"), and the Community Relations Support Team Leader in 2010. In NCCC, you travel around your region with a team of about ten, doing community service projects lasting six to eight weeks. In return, you get room and board, a modest living stipend, uniforms, health benefits, and an education award of that you can use to pay off loans or help pay for college or grad school.

It staggers me, thinking about who I was when I joined in February of '09, and who I was when I left a couple of short months ago. When I joined, I was a fairly recent college graduate, 22 years old, with degrees in Theatre and Drama and Germanic Studies under my belt. I was pale from holing myself up behind stacks of scholarly journals during the Indiana winters, researching and creating color-coded outlines as I sweated over research papers. And although I loved the student life, I knew that after graduation was my best chance to get out and do a few years of service work, before getting saddled with too much debt from grad school.

I remember sitting in the airport on my flight to Baltimore, thinking about this new chance to be reinvented. I wanted to cast myself in a mold befitting a worldly do-gooder: I would no longer be the listless student, tracking down annotations, corralling post-it notes and organizing my books by spine-height. In my mind's eye, I saw myself pulling victims from F5 tornado debris, administering CPR to grateful half-drowned people, and bonding with like-minded individuals from across the country as we took on the beasts of poverty in our left hands and inequality with our right. My idealism burned with the fury of the thousands of wildfires I knew I would soon be fighting.

It didn't take long for certain realities to give my naïveté a good drubbing. While most of the people in NCCC were there because they wanted to help people, I don't know that I would call all of us "like-minded". It definitely didn't take me long to understand that "diversity" is a complicated word, and it means a hell of a lot more than color, creed, socio-economic status or where you went to school. Forget about so-called "cultural differences"... my team argued about whether to get skim milk or 2%.

The shock of being thrust into this entirely new scenario, so different from anything I had dreamed up, quickly shattered all my pretensions of wanting to be "reinvented". It was all I could do to hold on to the person I thought I was. And as if it wasn't enough to be in a new place, surrounded by new people, doing things I had never done before, they went and gave us all uniforms so we all looked the same - little grey-shirted clones running around, getting things done for America. This was definitely not what I had imagined. As the months rushed by, I let go of my fantasies, and focused on the all-consuming task in front of me - helping the communities where we were assigned. Which is what I'd signed up for, after all.

Although we all go through periods of wanting to transform into new, better versions of our former selves, I credit NCCC with showing me the truth about myself that exists deep down where nothing can uproot it. It was with some surprise that, my very last weekend, my fellow Team Leaders told me over and over how they admired me, how great that I wasn't afraid to be myself, that they'd never met anyone who was so proud to be the person they were. I thought, ".......Really?" But as I thought about it, I realized they were right. It had kind of snuck up on  me, but I had grown into myself in a way I hadn't thought was even possible.

I learned a lot in AmeriCorps NCCC. I learned how to swing a hammer. I learned how to mud and sand and spackle. I learned how to shop for food on $4.50 a day. I learned how to live with seven other people in a tiny apartment where we shared one bathroom. I learned how to send a kid to time-out. I learned how to do "controlled interior demolition" on flooded homes. I learned how to write a killer press release.

I also learned a lot of things that are harder to explain on a resume, like when to talk and when to listen. To not sweat the small stuff. That people sometimes act like dicks just because they're uncomfortable, or sad, or scared, or lonely. That it's okay if you don't always know where the road is taking you. That sometimes it's best to just close your eyes, feel the sun on your face, and go with the flow.

More than being just a learning experience, I've come consider AmeriCorps NCCC a living experience. It's an experience in starting each day anew, in accepting change with an open mind and an open heart. I think I can say with confidence that, more than anything else, I learned how to do just that.

One last thing, before I sign off here. As I think back on the last two years, the days that stick out to me aren't always the easy ones. They're sometimes the days where I thought I couldn't keep up. There were days when we dragged ourselves back to the house with mud and crap in our hair, under our shirts, even in our underwear. There were days when I cried, because of something someone on my team said, because I was homesick, because I hated the job I had to do, because I thought I would never get everything done I needed to. There was the day my grandmother died, less than three weeks before graduation, when I still had to complete the yearbook, round up everyone's final paperwork, finish the end of year slideshow, write speeches, and help finalize details for the awards banquet and graduation ceremony.

But what sticks out to me about those days was not how terrible I felt, or how unfair it all seemed. Ultimately it worked out, because the team came together, because my friends and co-workers helped me out, because someone gave me a hand or let me talk about what was going on. These days stick out to me not because they were bad, but because I got through them, and they made me stronger.

I'm sure it sounds like a huge cliché... probably because it is. But the funny thing about clichés is that they tend to have a lot of truth behind them. And I speak only the truth when I say that everything AmeriCorps handed me that I thought was too hard to handle ended up making me a stronger person in the end.