Farm intern Maya Binyam ‘15 on what her Ethiopian father taught her about what it means to depend on the land:
Boston is a cold city. In the winter months a biting humidity saturates the air, threatening to freeze car locks and the tips of hair. The sunlight is static, even in the summer, and reflects but never warms.
In this landscape of fractured water and light, my father attempted to make a home. He cranked up the heat and filled the rooms of our house with things he knew would never survive outside—dainty potted basil plants, an ugly bulb too big for its pot. He was proud of this thing he had created for us—this warm oasis—because it meant we were no longer affected by Boston’s characteristically sporadic temperature declines, its unexpected noreasters. We were comfortable.
After a few months he stopped watering the plants. The leaves wilted and eventually turned brittle, but this was something to be proud of. We had begun cultivating things outside of the home, things more important than plants. We were going somewhere.
Pizza and Events intern Katie Harmer ‘15 writes about discovering that farming runs in her family. Above is a photo of her mother tending her garden in 1976!
Sitting around the dinner table in early June, I was bragging to my parents about all the lettuce seeds I had planted at a local farm that day. My father turned to me and said, “you know, Katie, your mom had quite the vegetable garden back in the day.” I was stunned—I had always thought of myself as the only farmer in our family. I then made my mom reveal every detail of her “secret” garden and the life that went with it.
In her days as a young mother, well before my time, my mom fed her family of six with her vegetable garden. Her garden was so big (and her yard so small) that she expanded to her grandmother’s land. She baked her own bread, canned her own fruit, and froze her own vegetables. The supermarket only got her dollar for meat, dairy, and grain.
The neighbors thought she was crazy when she ordered a full dump truck of leaves and let them compost in the back yard. Her kids thought she was crazy when she made them “zucchini chocolate cake.” Her sister thought she was crazy was she refused cane sugar. But as my mom told me about the leaves, the cake, and the sugar, I knew just what she meant.
2 cups white sugar
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
3 cups grated zucchini
Stir together the dry ingredients. Add the eggs and oil. Fold in the zucchini. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes in a 9x13” baking pan in a 350 degree oven.
“It turns out that fertiliser can be as deadly as a pesticide.”
That phrase— not even a whole sentence— is slipped quietly into this little piece about new technology that will help weed and thin lettuce beds on massive conventional farms in California’s Central Valley. The machine in question has found a way to put fertilizer’s deadly strength to good use, its makers claim: by spreading it directly on unwanted plants, it first kills competition and then provides nutrients to the surrounding survivors.
It seems to me, though, that this idea raises a number of questions relevant to the state of agriculture as a whole; for starters, why are we putting poisonously strong chemicals onto our food and our land? Issues with fertilizer runoff are numerous and well-documented, including everything from tainting groundwater to creating massive dead zones along nearby coastlines; soils managed with chemical fertilizers have been proven to fare very poorly under conditions of drought and flood (the coming effects of climate change, which is caused at least in part by manufacturing chemical fertilizer and then using fossil-fueled machines to spread it). A system that insists on a fertility source that is in every way toxic can’t possible be in very good shape.
There is also a larger question, though, raised by the notion that we need technology to do this work in the first place. The current system is inefficient because “labourers, who tend to be paid per acre, not per hour, have little incentive to pay close attention to what they pull from the ground, often leading to unnecessary waste.” The modern tendency is to view jobs like this one as irredeemably menial, and so to compensate them minimally (if at all) and try to tech them out of existence. For a country in the middle of an employment crisis, this seems like a shortsighted way of thinking about things. What if we took manual labor seriously, protecting workers and paying them a fair wage, making it possible for them to take real pride in their jobs? Agriculture is tough work but it’s absolutely crucial, and there’s no reason to continue to treat it as if it were an expendable process.
This is not to say that technology is inherently evil, or that we shouldn’t be modernizing and mechanizing at all— it’s only to suggest a more comprehensive way of thinking about where technology and agriculture meet might benefit workers in the field as well as the land they tend. Especially given this report that increasing wages for food workers, which includes field hands, would only cost the rest of us a dime a day.
Looking for follow up from last week’s New York Times Magazine food issue? Look no further: here’s Mark Bittman, talking about his experiences in the Central Valley on LA’s KCRW.
(Plus check out his list of food-related links for autumn and beyond— Farming the Urban Sea, which Program Coordinator Zan Romanoff co-wrote, is right at the top!)
Hannah Sassoon, ‘15, one of our Farm interns, spent the summer WWOOFing in Sweden. What follows are her notes from Östra Gerum:
The parish of Östra Gerum is a single road through southern Sweden’s flat fields of rapeseed and potatoes. At the middle of the parish is a circle of stone wall older than anyone can remember. Inside the wall is a church that does not open on Sundays. You can hear the bells there every day at seven in the morning and seven in the evening.
Down the road to the south is a dairy farm. Out of the back of the barn, the farmer sells some of his milk, unpasteurized, to the neighbors. When they have carried it home, they whisper to each other about the way he keeps his cattle, but they do not complain because the milk is sweet and cheap, and because he is a good man.
Ten years ago, he taught the new neighbor Jonas how to make a haystack. In Östra Gerum, he explained, it is done with seven vertical timber poles and four horizontal wires:
Sink the poles into the ground in a zigzag line for strength
against the wind. The cut grass,
when gathered with a hay fork, must face in different
directions in order to hold together. Settle it on the wires and over the tops of the poles.
After a week the stack looks like a many-humped camel.
After two weeks the timothy stalks break.
Jonas, before he came to Östra Gerum, was a member of the Swedish Parliament. He had studied cultural heritage without ever learning to make a haystack. When he left the city and bought the farm across the road from the dairy here, he had to re-thatch the barn roof himself. Then he sewed himself a suit and married.
At the north end of the parish lives Vanessa with her goats. She is from Connecticut, studied in New York. At twenty-five, she decided to move to Östra Gerum, learn Swedish, and raise goats—at which point, so far as her father in Darien was concerned, she’d gone to seed.
Once, as she bicycled through the parish, an elk galloped across the road and leapt. Its whole enormous mass sailed over a fence and into a cow pasture. The cows looked up from their grazing. The elk did not stop running. Then, all together, the cows turned to follow it, lurching, at first, and then running, running, until the herd glided together like a single shadow, moving with this elk. At the far fence line the elk leapt again, and let itself be swallowed by the spruce forest. The cows stopped. Breathless from this dream of wildness, they bent their heads to the clover and dispersed among its purple flowers.
The binder twine industry grew in response to the widespread adoption of the mechanical binder, linking international entities to the U.S. and Canadian harvests. Manila fiber from the Philippines, and Sisal and henequen from the Yucatan yielded twine that tied the tightest and were naturally insect repellent. Managing these materials and tools became an exercise in political identity: U.S. manufacturers produced a bevy of binder machines, but the Canadians levied heavy taxes on the imports to protect Canada’ agricultural implement industry. Additionally, because the U.S. harvest occurred occurred earlier than the Canadian harvest, manufacturers sold surplus twine to Canadians but lawmakers, fearing that this arrangement placed Canada at the mercy of U.S. market, worked hard to suppress this trade with tariffs, which were meant to support Canadian production efforts instead.
This piece on twine’s history as a black market item is a good reminder of how powerful agriculture is: it affects everything from the economy to trade policy to how we define contraband.
The Land That Keeps on Giving
They’re on a real food-related roll: this morning the New York Times profiles farmer Eliot Coleman, who helped with the initial designs for the Yale Farm and spoke at a YSFP sponsored master’s tea last fall.
Resistance is Fertile: Queering Farms, Farmers, and the American Homestead
As an American Studies major, I have quite a bit of liberty to create a unique program of study out of my time at Yale. While the past two years have been great—taking classes in everything from U.S. constitutional analysis, to gay and lesbian history, to how the dinosaurs came to be—I’ve now formally embarked on a path all my own.
This past summer, I interned at the Yale Farm and found that I Ioved agriculture in the truest, dirt-under-my-nails-and-sun-on-my-shoulders kind of way. At the same time, I’m super queer. While I was farming, reading about farms, and talking to farmers, I realized that there didn’t seem to be that much space in agriculture for queer folk, especially when talking about small family farms and homesteads and the reinvigoration of American foodways and culture. I made it my mission, then, to find that space where my own queerness and love of farms and food could have a healthy co-existence (marriage is so passé). That’s why this semester I undertook an independent study, “Queer Farms, Queer Homesteading.”
Firstly, I wanted to figure out what the small family farm really means. As much as big-shots like Wendell Berry romanticize it, what does the homestead look like historically? In searching for an answer, I went all the way back to pre-colonization and saw what various food, gender, and sexual dynamics looked like before Europeans ever stepped foot in North America. From there, I worked my way through early settlements, teasing out just how central family roles (and gender relations) were to social/religious life, and how settlers from New Haven to the golden West Coast physically, spiritually, culturally, and cognitively dominated the landscape and native peoples, imposing particular land ethics and enforcing prescribed gender/sexual relations.
This history is far from uniform, linear, or bloodless, but it did provide us, living in a post-1950s world, with a good amount to fantasize and romanticize about, often serving religious, political, and nationalist purposes.
The fun (that is, queer) part has been seeing just how transgressive some folks are. What is queer about farming and homesteading isn’t that there happen to be gay and lesbian farmers (even if they are as “fabulous” as the Beekman Boys), but that there are people who actively resist the language and practice of heteronormativity and homonormativity. Heteronormativity is the belief that heterosexuality is the only “normal” sexuality, and that all aspects of life (and the way we talk about it) center around that state of “normalcy.” Think about “family,” “marriage,” “love,” and “healthy relationships,” and all the expectations those entail, as well as the images they conjure. Homonormativity is the belief that queer relationships are best when they are “normal” like those of the heterosexual ideal (between two people, monogamous, with children, sanitized, de-politicized, de-sexualized, etc.). I want to know about those folks that queer (as a verb) farming by doing things outside of the box—unafraid and against assumptions of “normal” farm or “home” life.
There are lots of places to look. One of the most interesting examples I found was a group of queer men who live on communes in the middle of Tennessee, have an egalitarian family and work structure, and dress in drag for daily chores and pagan ceremonies alike. One of the guys who lives there even wrote a book on fermentation that is now a bible among the homesteaders; in this way, Sandy Katz is subtly queering the whole new foods movement with his expressed queerness and occasionally overt campiness (i.e., a discussion of trans folk next to a recipe for kefir). Or there is the example in Rebecca Gould’s book of a straight couple that resists gender normativity at every turn, creating a homestead where all constructions of gender, sexuality, and desire can exist independent of work performed. Or how about the guy directing a movie about queer farms, actively trying to infuse into the new foods movement the voices of those folks whom talk of “tradition” has often left voiceless.
The topic—queer farmers and homesteaders—may seem to come from out of left field. Or maybe it seems like I’m being overly academic and making arguments about things that aren’t important. Well, in the current political climate where discussion of queers is limited to their service in the military or right to marry, consider how those queers that happen to be farming or creating a home that’s self-sufficient are marginalized by a discourse that assumes they want to serve in the military rather than grow food, or assumes all they want from the government is a marriage license rather than, say, support to buy hoop houses and new seedlings. Even in the “progressive” foods movement, consider how every time we idealize and fetishize the “small family farm,” we are invoking a whole slew of images and meanings that effectively erases and deems unsavory folks that have alternative families, or don’t have families at all.
Queer theory and agriculture aren’t unrelated. In fact, this study has given me a whole new way of considering how my daily food choices can either contribute to or transgress a culture and society that assume our Thanksgiving yams were grown by a straight guy.
Cody Hooks is a junior American Studies major in Trumbull College. He was a 2011 Lazarus Summer Intern on the Yale Farm. To read more about his academic investigation of queer farming, check out his blog at http://codybuffalo.tumblr.com/
In Fresno County, the country’s most productive agricultural county, 45 percent of farmworkers are food insecure.
Civil Eats takes on one of the food industry’s most brutal contradictions: field laborers who grow and harvest fresh produce are often unable to afford it for themselves. This problem, while glaring in agricultural meccas like California and Florida, is an issue across the nation. On October 11, some Connecticut farmworkers involved in The Farmworkers’ Support Committee will speak at Yale about their lives and work, and what can be done to improve their conditions. Food justice is about people as much as land, and fighting for the dignity of manual laborers is a crucial piece of creating a more fair food system, so we hope you’ll come join us to learn more about these issues.
Details about the event can be found here.
