Zoe Reich-Avillez ‘15, on how a favorite farm task transforms the mundane:
I first worked on a farm (rather, I first stepped foot on a farm) during my freshman year of high school. The trip to Gaining Ground was posted on a school bulletin board under “Community Service.” Gaining Ground, the sign proclaimed, is a non-profit farm that donates all its food to local food banks and meal programs. Located just ten minutes from my high school, it was the perfect destination for a mid-afternoon volunteer shift. Never one to turn down an outdoor field trip in early spring, I immediately signed up. Looking back now, the memories of that short shift are beyond foggy. What I do remember though, is the feeling of being engaged in manual work. I couldn’t articulate it then, but something just felt so right about working my hands through the soil and crouching over a bed of newly planted seedlings.
A year later, I heard about Gaining Ground’s summer internship. I had barely given my workday a second thought, but remembering that still-so-poignant feeling, I decided to apply. Through the summer, I weeded, planted, harvested, weeded, prepped beds, and weeded some more. As any farmer will tell you—and as I discovered that summer—there will always be more weeding.
For some reason though, I relished that never-ending task. What is often the bane of the farmhand’s existence became my favorite job: hand weeding. Massaging the soil, grasping for weeds, pulling the unwanted plants from their roots, and finally looking back to see a bed of head lettuce surrounded by dark brown soil, was deeply satisfying. I found myself looking forward to the days when I would be sent out to the field, with or without a partner, to weed for hours on end. Even now, when I crave a task that is comforting, that will re-orient me with myself, I crouch down in a pathway, dig my hands into the soil, and start to weed.
When I try to understand my love of hand weeding, I often turn to the physicality of the work. Search and pull, search and pull. So easily, I can lose myself in the repetition, in the sheer simplicity of the action. At my best though, it is not just my body put to work; my mind too, is engaged in that repetition and simplicity. When I say that I lose myself in the task then, I mean that I am completely and totally present. I’m reminded what it is to find home in myself. This groundedness, I now realize, is the feeling of “rightness” that I knew but couldn’t name during my first shift at Gaining Ground. Now, I know its name and I know it’s what keeps me coming back to the farm time and time again.
Farm Intern Nace Cohen ‘14 on the costs—both explicit and hidden—of the modern food system:
There is an economics term, externality, which means that part of the cost of a product is not passed on directly to the consumer. This cost is still inherent to the product, and because the consumer doesn’t pay it in dollars it often ends up being paid out in other ways by society as a whole. An example of a product with an external cost is gasoline. In addition to the price paid at the pump, Americans pay for an oversized military with bases throughout the Middle East, oil spills in the gulf, pollution, and climate change.
One of the major problems with our food system is that there are too many externalities in the food that we buy. Americans spend less than the members of any other nation on their food— less than 6% of their income, according to the USDA. The next closest country, the UK, spends 9% of their income. This could be hailed as a great success of industrial food production, and an affordable food supply is not a bad thing— in fact quite the opposite. However, while we may directly spend less than other countries on food, if you factor in externalities this isn’t the case. By demanding that our food be cheap before anything else, we are getting food that is making us sick: more than one seventh of the US GDP is spent treating diet related diseases, according to the New York Times. By ignoring the harmful production of our food, our food system is destroying our environment: there was a 9,400-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico in 2011 due to agricultural runoff, according to Science Daily.
These are costs that aren’t being paid in the grocery store, and certainly aren’t being footed by the corporations producing food for our industrial system, so who is picking up the bill? The answer, sadly, is us. The consumer is not simply paying the healthcare costs upfront, with his or her own body: the dramatic increase in diet-related diseases, many of them chronic, has lead to an increase in healthcare costs across the board. The costs to the environment are such that we haven’t yet started to pay for the damage that has been done, but oceanic dead zones, soil depletion, climate change, and other adverse effects of farming are real, and society will end up paying for them one way or another.
So how should these costs be assessed and covered? I believe that the people who should be responsible for paying for the externalities of the food system should be those who benefit from the system, the producers. Anybody who has taken basic economics will tell you that this will lead to an increase in the cost of the product. Increasing the cost of food is a complicated issue because everybody has a right to life, and therefore to affordable food. However, this right does not need to be ensured by ignoring the external costs of the food system. How do I believe this should be done? I believe that food producers should be ranked by an independent party on how their food production effects the environment, and that food processing companies should be ranked on how damaging their products are to consumers’ health. Based on the rank and the scale of operation these companies should be fined accordingly.
What does not matter is the solution that we agree upon, what matters is that we agree upon a solution. The food system that we live in is endangering our health and our environment, and the government has yet to admit that it is a problem. This is not a problem the market will fix, if we want to live in a safe healthy society it is something that we will have to change.
This year, for the first time ever, we’ve asked a student photographer to attend every Friday workday of the season, documenting the changes in land, crops, and volunteer attendance as late summer turns into autumn and, finally winter. The results are already striking: above, check out the shorts and tee shirts of early September compared to the sweaters and hats interns were sporting during last week’s walkaround.
Photographs by Elif Erez.
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!)
Sophie Mendelson ‘15, joint Farm and Events intern, on the kind of reflection and conversation that farm work can encourage:
Stoney Lonesome Farm sits tucked away in an unexpected pocket of hilly countryside amidst the mind-numbing sprawl of strip malls and subdivisions that bleed out of Washington, DC into Northern Virginia like a hemorrhaging artery. This summer, there are three of us apprentices tending to the four acre garden that provides for 75 CSA shareholders and their families. On a typical day, we’ll plant, harvest, cultivate the soil, re-organize row covers, stake tomatoes, weed – and weed, and weed, and weed.
Crouching across from each other in the aisles that run along either side of the rows of vegetables, we have been weeding for several hours, tugging out thistles by the roots and (futilely) attempting to avoid grabbing up handfuls of poison ivy. The sun has steadily been gaining height all morning and now sits directly above us, beating down with unrelenting vigor on our sweat-stained backs. The heat wave sweeping across the United States has spared no one: it’s been over 95 degrees every day for a week, with no end in sight. To take our minds off of the heat and the repetitive task, we are talking about faith.
What do you believe in? How do you know what you believe is real? Does knowing even enter into the equation? Does it matter if what you believe is real or not, or is just believing enough? Do you think that faith is a good thing or a bad thing? Do you think that there is anything that you can know that doesn’t require at least some small leap of faith? If you don’t have faith, can you believe in anything at all? If you don’t believe in anything, then how do you decide on your values, make choices, live? Without faith, how do you resist utter paralysis? We reach the end of the row.
Over the course of the summer, the topics of our weeding conversations ranged from the philosophical (what do you really want from your life?) to the political (what is your ideal government?) to the mundane (name your top-five favorite ways to eat blueberries). As our hands went about their business, our minds were free to wander, plunging into territories that may have felt uncomfortable if we hadn’t been partially occupied otherwise. In the same way that many people actually pay attention better in class when they doodle, in the field, we were able to be more honest with our thoughts by virtue of the distraction provided by physical tasks.
The Yale Farm sits at the seemingly unlikely intersection between husbandry and academia. Yet considering that some of the most forthright and provocative conversations I’ve had took place as my hands sifted through some pile of dirt or another, I would say that the combination of agriculture and intellectual exploration is not so far fetched after all. Removed from the stresses and pressures of the classroom, farm work provides the ultimate medium for processing and reflection. At school, I spend so much time trying to think; it’s often the case, though, that my thoughts coalesce most clearly and easily when I allow myself to take a break and do something completely different – like weeding. On a campus full of fervent thinkers, the Yale Farm acts as an invaluable resource to students looking to take a step back, get their hands dirty, and sort through some of those big ideas.
If you’re looking for some lunchtime reading, here are two stories that present a top-to-bottom approach to the issues facing farmers and the food community right now: Tom Philpott considers why organically managed soils stand up better to the extreme weather conditions produced by climate change than their conventional counterparts, and The New York Times gives us a look at who decides what gets labeled as Certified Organic. Both serve as a good reminder of all that goes into what ends up in supermarkets and on the table— and that the process is rarely a simple one.
Forget February and any Valentine’s Day blues: think ahead to warm months and the Alpine strawberries that show up at the Yale Farm each June, and apply to be one of our summer interns for the 2012 season. Applications are available here and due Friday by 10:00 pm.
Podcasts
Here are two podcasts, recorded last week, featuring YSFP Director Mark Bomford and the Rudd Center’s Kelly Brownell. There’s one on food and sustainability and another on local sustainability initiatives. Both are definitely worth a listen!
This winter has been weirdly mild so far, but that hasn’t stopped us at the YSFP from getting excited about the coming of summer. There are two awesome ways to get involved in the coming months:
Apply to be a Harvest leader. Facilitate incoming freshmen’s first experiences with Yale and each other by spending a week with them on a small-scale organic Connecticut farm. Work during the day, hang out at night, cook fresh food and sleep under the stars. This year’s trips run from August 19-24, with leaders arriving August 15 for training. No experience with food, farming or the program is required and all are encouraged to apply.
Or, if you’re looking for something a little more intensive, apply to be a Yale Farm summer intern! Spend 12 weeks on our one-acre market garden, learning the principles of small-scale sustainable growing and meeting some of the folks who do it full time in neighboring cities. Experience with farming, gardening and growing is encouraged but not required; a love of cooperative work and the great outdoors is a must.
Unfortunately, both of these opportunities are limited to current Yale undergraduates; non-Yalies seeking positions in sustainable agriculture should check out Good Food Jobs for alternatives.
