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Excerpts from Fields of Plenty
by Michael Ableman
Richard DeWilde and his partner Linda farm a couple hours outside of Madison, Wisconsin. Richard drives us around in his chevy pickup to check out some of his 39 fields of vegetables that are scattered around the valley.
There’s a case of 30-08 springfield silver tip rifle cartridges sitting next to the 4wd shift, a bag of tobbaco and some rolling papers, and a single cippollinni onion sitting on the seat.
I don’t normally get all ga ga about Kale but the field we’re looking at is as deep a green as any thing I’ve ever seen. Not the kind of artificially pumped up rank green that comes from too much ammonium nitrate or urea, this one is deep and blue and forest like. The plants are vibrant and well formed, with huge turgid leaves, each plant standing up straight as if they’ve been told to pose for my camera.
Richard tells me that he gets snapshots in the mail of someone’s kid eating a piece of their squash or corn or a carrot. There is an enclosed note that says that this is Johnny’s first meal. Eighteen years later and their providing the food for Johnny’s wedding.
At the market his customers will introduce their kids to “our” farmer. There’s these beaming kids standing there that have been raised on his food. He tells me it makes him feel ten feet tall.
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Born in Idaho, raised in potatoe fields, Gene Thiel comes from 4 generations of root people. Ask any chef or farmers market regular in Portland Oregon where they get their potatoes and they’ll tell you matter of factly from the potatoe man.
Thiel farms at 4600 feet in the mountains of eastern Oregon, taking advantage of a perfect convergence of ideal potato conditions ; a blend of high elevation, deep glacial soils, clean and abundant fresh water, and low humidity.
“It’s rewarding to go to restaurants and markets and find people who really appreciate what you’re growing,” Gene reflects.
“It’s fundamental—we need that sustenance, that connection, that completion. When you produce a product and they see its value, it’s like searing truth. They taste that truth. It’s the ultimate compliment.”
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Everything at Strattford dairy in Vermont is run on gravity. The milk moves downhill from the milking barn to the cooling tanks then on to the bottling and ice cream rooms without the use of a single pump. When the pastures were cleared trees were left strategically so that as the shade moves across the pasture so will the cows.
At first, I marvel at these simple innovations. Then I realize that it doesn’t exactly require a masters degree in industrial design to figure out that using gravity is a good idea, or that trees provide shade and that cows will follow.
It’s just that so much of agriculture has lost any relationship to common sense. We’ve got this idea that things need to be complicated to be any good, that simple solutions can’t possibly be as good as technological ones.
Earl Ransom runs the 30 cow Guernsey dairy herd selling milk in glass bottles just like the milkman used to drop off in front of my house when I was growing up. The farm also produces premium ice cream made with the eggs from older brother Barry.
“Of all the things I’d like to give my boys, I want them to be able to die as old men on this land,” Earl’s wife Amy tells me. “I also want them to be respectful, I want to make pickles, and I want to personally eliminate all of the flies from this farm with my swatter.”
Jennifer Greene farms alone producing thirty different grains with a team of horses. She does her own milling, and produces pancake mixes and polentas and breakfast cereals which she provides to the two hundred families in San Francisco who are members in her grain share program.
We often agonize over the quality of our vegetables or fruit, wax eloquently over cheese or wine, but accept flours, edible seeds, and cereals that are rarely fresh and come from a limited diversity of plants.
Jennifer’s 30-acre canvas is filled with one-third- to one-half-acre plots of amaranth, barley, millet, teff, heirloom wheats, blue and yellow popcorns, garbanzos, lentils and fava beans, pumpkin, sunflower, and poppy seeds, all merging and mingling together.
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In the spring before our visit the pear and apple trees on Bob and Eileen and Salina Lane’s place were loaded with fruit. Special attention was paid to the orchard, to pest and disease control, to summer pruning and to the very time consuming expensive job of fruit thinning.
By late July the Lanes were preparing for the largest crop they had ever had, and doing as most of us would, quietly planning on what they would do with the much needed extra income.
Tuesday July 26th. was clear and sunny and hot. Work had wrapped up early and the small crew was hanging out talking near the house. There was a distant rumbling and a mellow thunderstorm began.
Then the sky turned black, the temperature plummeted thirty degrees and lightning came down in sheets. At 3:15 the hail came, large hail, hail up to 1/2 inch in diameter. Exactly thirteen minutes later the hail stopped, the sky cleared, the sun came out and the Lane’s fruit crop was destroyed.
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Eli Zabar is not a farmer, he ís a successful baker and retailer with several stores in Manhattan that feature products from his own kitchens, bakeries, and now from over a half an acre of their own rooftop gardens.
These gardens aren’t just some passing novelty trial experience, Zabar invested in installing steel beam reinforcements for the rooftops above his bakeries where pipes carry the spent heat from the ovens into the greenhouses.
Winter tomoatoes and salad greens are produced by two fulltime rooftop farmers.
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Farmer John Thurman chuckles and tells me “we’re sure not keeping up with the Jones’s” nodding towards the three rusting twenty foot trailers that house he and his wife Ida and their seven children.
At night we gather outside to talk. I take out one of my harmonicas to entertain the kids and begin to blow a slow blues in the key of G. (PLAY) Ida rolls her eyes with pleasure. When I play the final note she tells me that it reminds her of her roots in Missippi, and the old timers who used to sit around telling stories and playing music.
Considering the poverty that exists here, I am amazed to discover how much of John and Ida’s time and energy goes into community projects; teaching local youth how to grow food, providing fresh vegetables to seniors, organizing a black farmer’s cooperative.
John describes the farm as “nothing special, just a group of hardworking people trying to make something beautiful”. Each week John and Ida and their kids trek into Chicago to sell collards and sweet potatoes and beans and melons and pasture raised chicken to the all black Austin farmers market in a neighborhood that does not have a single grocery store.
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Ken Dunn farms in the city of Chicago in the shadow of Cabrine Greene the sixteen story prison style wire covered housing project built in the 50s to wherehouse the cities poor and unemployed.
Dunn’s two 1 acre plots boast thirty varieties of heirloom tomatoes; striped German, Brandywine, Green Zebra, Black Russian growing in the composted remains of rejected apple and cherry pie filling and the uneaten arrugula salads and filet mignons from local high end restaurants.
Five tons of compost made from Chicago’s waste has been laid down over this site, just a fraction of the 15000 tons of urban waste that is disposed of in this city each day. The ground feels like a sponge and if I closed my eyes and plugged my ears it would feel as if I was walking on the floor of some virgin forest.
The tomatoes don’t seem to mind the constant noise or bad air or the poverty that surrounds their little island. The plants are tall and robust and absolutely loaded. Their world is rich in nutrients, reflected warmth and light from pavement and buildings, and the attentions given to them by local chefs who are thrilled to tell their clientele that the tomatoes on the menu were harvested down the street.
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Hilario Alvarez slipped over the border into the US 20 years ago to work in Americas fields. He had nothing. Now he owns his own farm and employs over a hundred people.
Alvarez’s pepper field is like an out of control block party. Eighty five varieties, many of his own selections, are thrown together in an eight acre burlesque of color and shape.
There is humor in this field; a former migrant’s statement on the ultra linear, monocultural, totally predictable fields of America’s industrial agriculture. I tell Hilario he is crazy, that I’ve never seen anything like this before, that he should quit harvesting peppers and open the field up as a seasonal museum.
I imagine docents giving tours, stopping along the rows to discuss the history and culture and use of certain varieties, the arrangement of color and shape, what the farmer was going through in his life when he planted this section or that, as if they are standing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art analyzing a Mattisse or a Van Gogh.
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George and Anna Zebroff Russian Dukhabor fruit farmers in British Columbia. As we are preparing to leave George pulls me aside. “You have eaten our apricots fresh and dried, you drank our apricot nectar, and even tried the kernels, but there is one thing left.” There is a slightly mischevious tone in his voice as his guides me to the front of the house.
There on the stump of a cherry tree now used as a table is a bucket of fresh warm goats milk, a small container of amber honey, a few spoons and glasses, and a tall glass bottle filled with a clear liquid. This he tells me is apricot elixir.
There is ritual to all of this. In Russian he asks his young grandson to demonstrate. With a spoonful of honey in one hand and a glass of warm milk in the other the young boy alternates back and forth. Then comes the elixir. George mixes it with goats milk and we toast. It is a powerful drink but it goes down easy. He pours another and we drink again. I protest when he offers me a shot without the milk. He insists and we drink again.
It is hot, we have a long drive, and I haven’t had much to eat. Grape vines and cherry and apricot and apple trees swirl beneath us in a carpet of green, children roll and giggle in a nearby hammock, freshly dug potatoes and greens and meats are being prepared for Sunday dinner, and I am back as a child with my Russian born grandparents sitting at their table drinking and eating and sharing.
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Fields of Plenty Speech at Bioneers
by Michael Ableman
Michael Ableman is a farmer, photographer, writer and farming activist who has written a number of books that deal with farming and a care for the land. He has been instrumental in initiating the agrarian movement that is now spreading over this land. He also has been at Bioneers speaking at its prestigious Plenary Sessions. He has allowed us to reprint his speech from the recent Bioneers Conference.
Close to 35 years ago, I joined a commune in southern California that was based on agrarian principles. On 4000 acres we had row crops, orchards, a goat and cow dairy, and grain and fiber crops. Besides feeding ourselves, we had our own natural food store, bakery, juice factory and restaurant. We even made our own clothing, backpacks, and shoes.
I was given the responsibility of managing the 100-acre pear and apple orchard in a high desert valley east of Ojai, California. I was 18, with no orcharding experience, directing a crew of 30 people most of whom were older than I. The orchard had been abandoned for 15 years, and the branches had become so intertwined that you couldn’t find the alleys between the rows.
I had attached to the door of my 20-foot unheated trailer Goethe’s quote: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Now this could have ended up really bad, but there was something that took place down those rows of apple and pear trees, something very different than what is happening in most agricultural fields and orchards in North America. I went to work each day with 30 of my friends, and while we worked we joked and talked, and we discussed our dreams. We tried out our latest theories and philosophies on each other, speculated on the fate of the earth, and ate our lunch together under the shade of the trees. In the winter we pruned every day for four months straight, in the spring we thinned fruit, and in the fall it was a 10-week harvest marathon.
It was repetitive work, but at the end of each day instead of feeling I had been chained to some mind-numbing drudgery I felt I had attended an all-day party. The work got done, the orchard thrived, and those organic apples and pears gained a reputation around the country. And while the cold nights and hot days of that high desert provided ideal growing conditions, I am sure that fruit was equally infused with the energy of that group of people and the pleasure they found in each other and in that land.
This was my introduction to agriculture. This community experience has informed all of my agricultural endeavors since: it demonstrated that good food is more than just about the confluence of technique and fertile soil, that it is the result of men and women who love their land, and who bring passion to working with it.
That experience was my preview into the new agrarian movement that is now sweeping this country, a movement I believe embodies many of the most critical elements of a healthy society: reverence, mystery, humility, ecology in its wider sense, and community. I wanted to pick up where I left off with my first book and visit and write about and photograph this movement, tell the good story, hold my heroes up for all to see. So my 24-year-old son Aaron and I left our own farm for a three-month journey across the US and Canada to document this quiet revolution. We visited farmers who had gone beyond organic and were redefining that movement, using their farms as platforms for education and social and ecological change.
We went to see folks who are happily married to a place, many of them master farmers, innovators, their farms incubators for the new agriculture, demonstrating that farming is not just some lowly drudgery, but that it is an art and a craft and an honorable profession. My new book, Fields of Plenty, introduces you to a few of these folks. I wanted you to see their faces and their land, hear a little about their story.
One of them, John Thurman, told me “If you’ve farmed you can run the world.” I thought about that and about what it means to be a leader, and I realized how few true leaders there really are. We’ve got plenty of managers and legislators, actors and dictators and manipulators. But I’m talking about leaders, folks who have compassion, respect for diversity, creative vision, an understanding of our true place in nature.
I wonder how it happened that lies and deception and obfuscation, greed and thievery and murder could have become the dominant characteristics required for government office.
So who are we going to be able seek out to guide a society that has become so completely disconnected from the natural world, from the most fundamental necessities such as food and water. What will happen if there are more Katrinas? What will happen when the oil runs out?
John Thurman may be right. In a time when our primary connection tools to the world around us are the computer and the cell phone, those who have maintained an intimate connection with the land, whose daily work is inextricably connected to biology and botany and animal husbandry, those who know how to restore and nurture soil, care for animals, coax food from the earth may become very important to all of us.
The explosion of farmers’ markets, the desire to meet face-to-face each week with the person who grew your nourishment goes deeper than the food; it may just be part of a desperate longing to have some connection to the real world.
So I strongly encourage each of you to make friends with a farmer, you’re going to need them. For I am certain that as the current global industrial experiment comes apart, our society will once again have agriculture at its center.
This past spring I took my three-year-old son Benjamin out to a friend’s cabin on the west coast of Vancouver Island. We had to drive through a huge, fresh clearcut. I’ve seen a lot of ecological devastation, but there is nothing quite so exemplary of humans’ most destructive ways as a rich, diverse, life-giving, oxygen-producing forest reduced to vast fields of stumps and brush and eroding soil. Little Benjamin had the most heartbreaking look of horror and dismay. I felt I had just unwittingly taken my young son to see a really violent film. When it came time to drive home, he pleaded with me not to drive back the same way we came.
“Why” is a word you hear a lot with a three-year-old, but there was a new persistence to Benjamin’s why after our experience that day, and my responses could not satisfy.
I find myself asking why a lot these days as well. Why is a word we should all be asking of ourselves and of those who claim to be our leaders. What if after the events on 9/11, America had asked why instead of who? What if we could ask why in regard to the recent hurricanes?
As we bear witness to the disappearance of nature, and the disconnection of our society from it, we also see an increase in confusion, an extreme lack of compassion and understanding of how to care for each other and our world, a loss of understanding in regard to cause and effect.
It takes a conscious effort to rise above the propaganda and lies, the litany of misdirected questions, to step out of the confusion and be like little Benjamin, come back into our beginner’s mind, to our sense of childlike wonder, and start asking why as honestly and freshly and persistently as a three-year-old.
And I believe that to deal with the great unraveling taking place around us, we’ve got to come back home, immerse ourselves in that which goes on in our neighborhoods and communities, in our own backyards or on the land we farm. We can feel paralyzed by the broader world scene, but we have enormous power in and around the places where we live.
It doesn’t really matter what the issue is: energy, water, food, waste, transportation, or even that pervasive sense of loneliness or disconnection that so many folks have, when you focus your attention on the local world, when you come back home, change is possible.
In a speech I gave at this conference just after 9/11, I proposed that we build an urban farm at the site of the world trade center, that it could become a model of local economy where once only the global was represented, that it would demonstrate that Americans are not just about revenge but that we can grow life and nourishment out of the ashes of violence and destruction. We even submitted this outrageous proposal to the World Trade Center design contest, but, like many ideas for the rebuilding, this one was given some good press and then pushed aside in favor of 1776 stories of glass and cold steel.
Here we are again less than two months after another US disaster. The president and his cronies, purveyors of chaos that they are, are poised to make billions on the rebuilding effort. A flotilla of bulldozers is now being assembled to raze acres of what was once home to thousands of folks who are now scattered across the country in a modern-day diaspora.
A disaster yes, but also an unprecedented opportunity, a blank canvas, a chance to rebuild a city that could embody all of the most thoughtful and visionary social and ecological design components. Imagine how many people could be employed, how many could be fed, if the reconstruction included farms at the center of each neighborhood. There is enough land there to supply every New Orleans school lunch, every hotel and restaurant, every household in that city.
Our arrogance, our wholesale disconnection from the natural world, our belief that somehow we are in control keeps us from recognizing the most fundamental law of nature, the one every good farmer is bound by: what we sow is what we reap, for every action there is a reaction, cause and effect. It’s the law and none of us are immune to it.
At every turn, in each moment, and on the broader world stage we must bring forth the hopeful, positive alternatives and models. No matter how outrageous we may appear, we must gently and creatively and persistently repeat and remind and demonstrate that a new world is possible. A new world is possible! A new world is possible!
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