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Urban Farming -
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Last March I began a one-year sabbatical from Fairview Gardens in Goleta, California...and worked a small farm in British Columbia. For the first time in many years, I worked alone in the fields, no telephones ringing, no visitors to show around, no interviews to give, not students or apprentices to instruct, no lectures or classes to teach, no staff to give direction, and the best part, no meetings to attend. And while the return to pure physical work has had its own challenges, it was like coming home, returning to my roots, finding my way back to that which brought me to farming in the first place.
My hands are fully calloused again, and the calluses on my brain have begun to soften, allowing my mind to slow down to the quiet rhythms of the land. Now this change has not come with some difficulty. After years of living a very public life, I suddenly found myself in a very quiet, very private space. At first it was pure bliss. The quiet and the simplicity were incredible.
But after a few months, the thoughts and questions started to creep in. What gives me the right to be off on my own private land doing my own thing? Don't I have a responsibility to the world? How does this little farm on an island fit into my broader worldview? And I realized that I was carrying around a very common misconception that activism is only manifested in street protests, political challenges, or public campaigns. But I am coming to believe that my quiet time on the land rebuilding soils, engaging in community life, providing food for my neighborhood is as political and as powerful as all of my years of more frantic public life.
Now this summer, my 20-year-old son was with us on the farm, and I cannot describe the sense of deep satisfaction and fulfillment it was to have him working next to me in the fields, to watch him patiently explain the qualities of fresh dug potatoes or green garlic to customers at the farmer's market, to discover that all of these years he had really been paying attention. And I remembered-- I remembered that another form of activism is in how we raise our children.
Every time I plant a seed and I see it emerge, it slows me down and allows me once again to experience one of the great mysteries of life. And on some level, each time I cannot help but be renewed. And this is why I farm. My back gets sore and it's hot or it's cold or it's wet or I'm tired, and my brain starts to add up how many of the same boxes I've filled and lifted and put away and filled and lifted year after year... Some impulse far more powerful than my rational mind keeps me going cycle after cycle, worn out and exhausted by the time winter arrives, but thoroughly excited to begin anew each spring. With minor interruption I've had this experience over and over for the last 27 years, and I feel pretty lucky I can plant and nurture and harvest and share and enjoy each day the bounty of the land right outside my back door. But even as I am having this blessed experience, I often feel a bit of sadness.
I'm aware that most of our society no longer has this opportunity, no longer knows what it is like to pull a carrot from the ground or eat the heart out of a watermelon still warm from the sun or bunch on beans that are so fresh, they explode in your mouth when you eat them. There is a different kind of nourishment, less tangible than the carrots and the beans and the melons that being connected with the land provides, a deeper, soulful nourishment that I think our society is desperately longing for. It cannot be had from food that travels an average 1300 miles from the field to the plate. It can't be absorbed from a package or from the shelves of the supermarket or from anonymous ingredients floating out of context. It cannot be enhanced or disguised or manufactured. Even the most complex preparations, the most sublime sauces cannot bring to life what is not already there. And the kind of nourishment I am describing is the result of understanding connections, knowing the person who grew the food, knowing that their family was paid a living wage, knowing that the land is well-cared for and protected from development, knowing that the ingredients have not been assaulted with an array of chemistry or that it hasn't been irradiated or that its genetic makeup hasn't been messed with.
...And now you can see the products of organic farms on supermarket shelves shrink-wrapped next to the Cheetos. There are a lot of folks who are heavily invested in this. They say this is a good thing, a sign of progress. They say that we are now an industry, that we have grown up, that the days of movement populated by longhairs and local activists is gone...
Organic farming has, in fact, become industrialized and globalized, helped along by law such as the Organic Farming Production Act and by a host of organicrats who will leave us with so much regulation, so much paperwork, so many new fees that we will wish we had taken that office job rather than sought out the independence that farming once provided. But I'm not just going to rail against the bureaucrats. Organic farmers have some responsibility in this as well. Too often we find ourselves using the same linear production system, the same factory consciousness of inputs in, products out. We use the same high-energy distribution system, shipping foods thousands of miles from the field to the plate, hydro-cooling, palletizing, plasticizing, trucking, stacking, and on and on.
Organic growers and eaters must now renew their commitment to the values that inspired our movement, the movement started by asking questions. How is this grown? What materials were used in its production? We now need to start asking questions again, new questions like how far does food travel from the field to the plate and at what cost in terms of energy, fossil fuel, and food quality? Whose hands grow and harvest our produce and are they paid a living wage? Does the farmer or the community own the land? Or will we rebuild soils only to lose land to real estate development? How do we make pure food available to all, not just those who can afford it? . How do we educate consumers and future farmers? ... Washington cannot answer these questions for us, nor can they place a definition on the values they reflect, for they are spiritual values and rely on a system of regulation that far exceeds any that can be legislated. I like to call it community certification. It's based on some old-fashioned values called honor and trust. It's dependent on the most vital aspect of a healthy food system, relationships, local, biological, interpersonal, econological. And ultimately, we've got to find new ways to talk about what we do, and we may have to use different words. And invested as we may think we are in organic, let's not be afraid to let the word go, for when any movement becomes institutionalized and industrialized and globalized, it's time to move on...
So one of the ideas that I'd like to challenge is that farms are by definition, separate from cities and that food must flow into the city from somewhere else. This assumption implies that urban dwellers are helpless creatures just waiting like baby birds in the nest, to be fed from distant farms. And that the urban environment cannot create and sustain its own internal food systems. In fact, most folks believe that the responsibility of feeding the world belongs to farmers.
...Urban farms and food gardens may appear to be tiny in their scale, but their potential impact is huge. So while many look to a new agriculture, organic or otherwise, as a source of salvation, it may be that the real revolution is actually taking place in neighborhoods, in back yards, and in cities. A significant percentage of the world's poor are surviving not from the products of their nation's farms, but from their own small urban plots, and this remarkable shift is taking place on postage stamp-sized gardens, next to railroad tracks and under power lines, on rooftops, and in the most unlikely of places. It is a movement that has the potential to address a multitude of issues: economic, environmental, personal health, and cultural.
I really believe that we need to rethink our idea of what a farm is and where it resides. What we see in our mind's eye when we think food system, how much land it takes to feed a community or neighborhood, and what is possible in an urban area. Perhaps we should consider whether we can continue to feed an increasingly urban world from food produced and transported far from that world.
And we notice a lot of flag waving driving down, and I suppose it provides some sense of belonging to some, but it seems to me that if you really love your country, that it would be more useful to join in the work that so many folks here are a part of. Protect and restore some wildness. Support local agriculture. Plant a garden. After all, what good is a country and a flag if there is no more fertile soil, no ancient forests, no clean water, no pure food? Those who work to protect and restore these things are the real patriots in my mind.
Michael Ableman has farmed 12 acres of land in Goleta, Ca. for the last twenty years. He is the executive director of The Center For Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens, and the author of two books: From The Good Earth (Abrams 1993) and On Good Land (Chronicle Books, 1998). Ableman is the subject of the award winning PBS film Beyond Organic. He is currently farming a small piece of land on an island in British Columbia, is at work on a new book, The Hands That Feed Us, and is researching the development of an urban farm at "Ground Zero," the site of the world trade center. This speech has been excerpted with permission from Voices of Bioneers. For details about the Bioneers call 877-BIONEER or www.bioneers.org. The film version of Mr. Ableman's entire talk will be viewed at the Palm Theatre in SLO on April 23 (see ad in this issue).