Day one for me was actually the day before the workshop.  I arrived at Smithereen Farm via an Amtrak train out of Penn Station then via a car ride with Severine and Anne from the Greenhorns project.  Our first stop was an antique farm store called Hoffman’s Barn Sale, a large, wood-stove heated menagerie of rusty farm implements, old style canning jars and mid-70s classic rock albums.  It was like a flea market except the store was filled with useful shit, not just beat up boxes of doll parts or piles of messed up Dokken tapes.

The mission at the Barn Sale was to pick up some last minute cooking implements.  These implements included – what was described to me at the time – a pot big enough to fit a pig’s head.  Not in itself all that interesting until you start to talk about what that means and why it means what it means.  Yeah, we’ll just boil this pig head for awhile, you have a problem with that?  It reminded me of a page from the Sandor Katz book The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved about processing pig heads -

We found that pot along with a giant stock pot, some Pyrex casserole dishes and a Dutch oven.  Scattered among the purchases were the echoes of Severine shouting from every corner – “Anne, we need this.”  Not having been in this dynamic before, I wasn’t sure if this was just how shopping with Severine was or if indeed we did “need this”.  Severine also reminded us that her mother always told her to buy Pyrex when she could.  So we did.

Back at the farm it was a breakfast of fresh eggs and coffee and toast with plum jam.  It was playing with kittens and listening.  It was coloring salsa labels and organizing stuff.  It was digging a pit and splitting wood for the slow roasting of a pig side.  It was getting the first sniff of a weekend’s worth of wood smoke.  It was meeting new folks and trying to be a talker.  It was a warm wood stove and giggles from grown ups.

It was the start of a pretty immense undertaking, this crash course in butchering and sausage making.  I ended the day tired like I usually end my days, but this tired was an out-of-town tired. I didn’t worry about it much and prepared myself to go to sleep late and wake up early, getting back to work and getting back to tired.

Hardly recognize simple things anymore
I don’t want to be defeated

What else is there to do
But go outside and look around*

*Lyrics taken from Bed for the Scraping – Fugazi

Noel read up on how frost can affect sweet potatoes and determined that it would be best if we dug them up promptly.  Another frost was coming, we had the hands needed to get the job done and it seemed like a fun project for a Monday evening.

We had planted quite a few varieties to see how they would come out.  The sizes and yields varied with the only constant being that the roots may have been held back by the thick clay soil.  Sweet potatoes really prefer a light soil and a long frost-free growing season.  Our area is great for the frost-free part but not so much on the for the light soil.

Kristin, Gray, Noel and myself tore up the dying vines, feeding them to the waiting pigs.  Pigs love sweet potato vines. They are great nutrition for people as well.  Next year I plan to try to ferment a few and see how they taste.

With the dying vines pulled up we had to race a dropping sun.  We dug as much as we could in the fading light, but ended up resorting to head lamps for the last hour of harvesting.  I’m not sure if we missed any in the surrounding darkness.  I guess we’ll find out in the Spring when volunteers start shooting up from the soil.

The potatoes spent the night in our room cuddling with the wood stove.  Noel and Gray moved them into the greenhouse to cure for a while.  Curing is a whole other scene…

Last Winter was our first season in the room and our first time using wood heat.  We learned a lot in the process:

• We cut wood as we needed it instead of stockpiling.  This led to some shortages and some work in the dark as we scrambled for a night’s worth of wood.
• We didn’t have a damper in the stove pipe.  This led to most of the heat going up and out the chimney.  It also meant that we had to feed the fire every three hours.  I guess it was like having a newborn baby but with way more cussing and shivering.
• We didn’t have electricity run, so we didn’t have an overhead fan.  Heat went up and up and out.

So we fixed some things, and we are in a little different place this year.  First, we have a ceiling fan wired up.  It keeps the hot air down at our level and helps with heat distribution.

Second, I put a damper in the stove pipe.  This closes off the stove from the chimney, allowing the wood to burn longer  in the stove.  Since the stove is pretty old, it is not airtight.  Without the damper air is sucked through the openings in the stove, making the fire burn hotter and shorter.

Third, we started cutting and splitting wood when it warmer outside and not needed for burning.

Last night we fired up the stove for the first time this season.  We went through eight pieces of wood from six in the evening until morning, much less than our average last year and with no need to load it after we went to bed.  The fire kept the room very toasty all night long.  It was so warm that I slept on top of my sleeping bag.  Kristin felt is was uncomfortably hot under her covers.  This tells me that we might have figured out the formula to keep warm this year.

CircleAcres is a collective land project seeking to create a self sustaining ecosystem that provides its inhabitants and community with food, fuel, and medicine while moving away from mechanization, resource extraction and consumerism. Utilizing biological processes to meet our needs while making use of the unending stream of “waste” produced by the current system. We are nestled in Chatham County, NC a small community with a strong sustainable agriculture presence.

It is our first year on the land so there are lots of projects underway and lots of learning opportunities to jump headfirst into.Some of the things you can potentially learn about while here include:

Permaculture, wildcrafting, rainwater catchment, human scale food production, sheet mulching, establishing a food forest, small scale animal husbandry, goat milking, growing medicinal herbs, making tinctures, vermicomposting, charcoal production, hugelkultur, growing mushrooms, graywater systems, grafting, seed saving, scything, dumpster diving, homemade potting soil from local materials, and cob construction.

We ask that work traders help out 20 hrs. a week with farm activities, and help on a rotational schedule with dish duties and cooking. Food will be provided along with tent accommodation.We are all omnivores but can accommodate vegetarians and vegans though there may be occasions you will have to take responsibility for your own meal needs. Circle Acres is still in its infancy so accommodations are rustic. We shower outdoors and get about 2 gallons of hot water at a time. So if you are in need of more traditional living quarters we may not be the best match, but if you have an adventurous heart and yearn to be a part of creating a Truly sustainable system you’ve found the right place.

No pets please.

Contact us: circleacres at gmail

The experienced farmer is humbled by the presence of what constitutes a large sampling of the next generation of practitioners of sustainable agriculture, showing up on their farm, to work along side them and step through the same rows.

The mobbers are humbled by the ease with which they have access to lessons learned and practical advice, not only on that day but from that day forward until – if it is even possible – the relationship is exhausted.

But then maybe humbled isn’t the right word.  Awe?  Wonder?

Which leads to an opening of the debate on who is standing in who’s shadow…

Guerrilla Growfair is a group of agrarian rebels, many with substantial farming experience, that get together to swiftly combat a big project. The group uses unconventional tactics in the form of ambushes and raids to attack its enemies who are less mobile, but larger in force. Enemies include, but are not limited to; wiregrass, Johnson grass, crab grass, infertile soil, and impervious surfaces.

The type of work done could range from installing a garden at someone’s house to cultivating a field for a farmer that is behind on planting this season. The goal of the project is not to offer free labor, but to unite the community for the simple cause of feeding everyone. There is a lack of cheap nutritious foods in certain areas of Raleigh and these areas are known as food deserts. In a food desert the only type of food you’ll find is fast and greasy. Our goal is simple… to erect an oasis in every desert.

The Guerrilla Growfair tagline? Lending hands on the lands.

I’m not a fan of the metaphorical old orchard.  I have been rolling away from it for a long time now, even rolling through some more recent orchards at the expense of all the good times under the canopies.  At some point I will end up in an entirely different orchard under entirely different species of trees – maybe under hickories and I am an apple or maybe under pears and I am a paw paw.   Or maybe there are no trees at all, anywhere, and I am rolling around among thyme blossoms in full sight of the various stars of a southeastern summer.

All orchards have a lot of contrast, like grass growing between the yellow lines of a rural road.  Similarly, our agrarian places at night have no comparison to our agrarian places during the day.  At night, moist tree frogs attach themselves to any available surface, calling into the dark and into the ear membranes of potential mates, barely puncturing the drone of the various crickets scattered through the grasses.   It isn’t quiet, but it is still.  This is a contrast to the blur of a peaking sun, the quick clanking movements of hand tools among unloved rocks.  Sweat seeps off what looks and feels like a crying body; full and uninterrupted shade is a distant wish.

We move through it all, knowing that any craving for a cold-front is counterproductive to the goals of growing plants for consumption.  So we sweat and we grit teeth and we get headaches and we keep moving.  If we stop we realize how hot we are, how soaked our clothes have become, how miserable we must look.  Compare this to how we look in the blackness and dampness of rural summer; the clay stained knees and greasy hair hide among the sleeping cardinals in the privet clumps.

But what do we really care anyway?  If you are self conscious about being dirty and looking dirty, don’t work with the soil.  Just remember:  Dirt Don’t Hurt.

What would we do otherwise? We can’t go back to any previous life.  To what? To old cities or hometowns, old beer haunts and pool tables, grave markers and faded Christmas trees?  Nah, there is nothing romantic among the ruins and elders.

I have to think about my elders, how I can’t offer them the respect they think they deserve just because they are “elder”.  I used to have a bookcase full of political books with a “Respect Certain Elders” sticker on it.  In this young agrarian movement we are all elders, and we should fully appreciate when others begin to roll away from us and into their own orchards.

When I wake up I have to clear my throat to get words to come out, words like “hey piggles, you wake up too!”  or “get off the bed you lazy animals”.

I am ignored as the cat just twitches an ear, irritated but with a full belly and another eighteen hours of sleep to look forward to.

It feels like I just wander around on those alone days, tinkering around on slightly neglected projects, working from a list that has no written equivalent.  It isn’t until everyone returns that I realize I have accomplished anything, making me realize that I do have a function even if no one is around to prove it to themselves or to report it to others.  It is simply me moving through the life I have chosen.

It is those alone days that I know concretely that I have chosen well, that all five of us non-human animals have chosen well, that we are some of the luckiest people to ever sign a land title.

Watch out, we are just getting started.

I pull the lice out of their ears.  That alone makes us pretty tight.

Kristin has become attached to them, giving them their nightly belly scratching and making sure they have enough of everything that they need.  As I alluded to in a previous post, it is because of her view of the way these pigs live that she may be able to eat them when the time comes.  She has been vegan/vegetarian for thirteen years, about half her life, so it is a step that has not been considered lightly or without questions.

I spent some time as a vegan/vegetarian, some five years or so, but as the saying goes, “if you aren’t now then you never were”.  Or maybe that is a straightedge thing.  My reasons for that life were political and human based, focusing largely on the interactions of people in the food system.  Animal rights and treatment were a close secondary consideration but not the major thrust for action.  Living that life greatly informed my decision to eat entirely local and make a conscious decision every time I make a food purchase.

I have eaten meat for the last few years and, with very few exceptions, I know exactly where that meat comes from.  I have to allow some exemptions (such as the weekly free lunch at a church in Pittsboro), but I have to have a pretty good reason and it has to be from a local restaurant or store.

But in a few months, all my pork will have come from a few hundred yards away.

This brings up the issue of how to deal with ending the life of an animal who has shared your space and your time and your close interactions.  I haven’t had to actually address the feelings before simply because this will be the first time I have raised an animal with the intent to eventually kill and eat it.

I can say that the best way to avoid any attachment is to treat the animal simply as a machine, a machine that needs to be checked on once in awhile in order to change the oil or put more fuel in the tank.  This is how many farmers treat everything on their farm – human labor, soil, resources.  Since I am trying to live a new example, I cannot get away with treating non-human farm residents as inferior or not worth any extra effort.  They are not machines; none of the components around me is a machine although sometimes I fail to see that.

I need to know firsthand that I have created a space in which the pigs feel safe, cared for and unstressed and are able to fully enjoy being pigs.  This means mud holes and tall grass, real dirt and kind words.  It means that when it comes down to it there can be some sort of peace between the killer and the killed, that the sadness and harshness of the process of taking lives can be tempered in some way and that life up until the end can be human interpreted as “happy”.

Without trying to justify any action, we, as the users of this food, have to take responsibility for the actions needed to place a meat meal on our plates.  We cannot do that unless we know where our food comes from.

We were there to attend the commitment ceremony of our friend Duncan and his partner Rachel.  The ceremony was fun and short and a good time to catch up with old friends and listen to new friends.  The reception was a potluck with long tables full of all sorts of yummies.  There was even banana pudding, which is my favorite locavore exemption.

In the corner was a whole roasted pig, all wrinkled skin and a nice tan head still attached.  It skeeved Kristin a little.  Her thoughts and imagination turned to the three little pigs we have at the farm and how they would look spread out on a table, some chef’s hands all in their insides pulling out hunks of smoked muscle and fat.  But she says she may eat them when it comes time just because she knows that they have had amazing lives full of good food, tons of space and belly rubs twice a day (more on weekends!).

The reception after-party wasn’t really my thing, which was kind of a bummer.  Since I don’t drink or smoke anymore  I find it increasingly hard to relate to the folks who I consider “my people” – the artists and anarchists and renegade agrarians who wash over me wherever I go – once the sun goes down on a Saturday night.  I can’t keep up or interact.  Maybe I’m getting old or maybe I simply over did things way back when and now I am paying the price for my lack of foresight .  As I keep repeating to myself and others – regardless, here we are…

* The name of this post comes from a song by …Revel in the Morning. They once did a show in the basement of the Local Revolt house in Wilmington. I lived there for quite a while, well from start to finish actually, and our friend Duncan lived there for six months or so. Nathaniel, pictured in many of the slides in the above slide show, lived there for a year. There is a video of a song from the Revel show featuring the actual basement of Local Revolt. It was shot by the band on August 14, 2003 -

We’d have to throw the rocks into the tree line or into a tractor bucket, breathing the dust as it split with the crevices of the basalt and granite and diorite brought to the surface with the most recent bottom plowing.

The rocks arrived long before we were thought off, catching a ride on the gray belly of a two mile thick glacier.  In the deposits that followed came everything from the boulders – now sitting in front yards painted with house numbers or enveloped by lichens – to the baby minerals of feldspar and hornblend and all those magnificent magnetic bits of iron.

Picking up rocks is as fun now as it was when I was eight years old, which is to say that it is no fun at all.  It reminds me of work for no pay.  It reminds me of long summer days away from friends.  It reminds me of responsibility that I had no need or want of.  It reminds me of time ill-spent laboring for someone I could care less about.

But that all changes with the crop mob…

Sometimes I know that rocks need to be picked and weeds need to be pulled.  These tasks are best accomplished with more than one person, in a mass of asses and elbows, jabbering on and on about everything other than rocks and weeds and tasks that really have no end.

Weeds decay into their components of minerals and carbon and nitrogen within days.  A person could watch the whole process if they had the patience and justification.

Rocks decay much more slowly and, without the aid of the outside crush of a human or machine doing some work, they will not likely decay within a person’s lifetime.  You can watch if you want, but you might want to bring something to eat while you wait.

So picked and piled rocks will remain picked and piled rocks wherever we place them at least until some other monkey comes along and moves them again.  Maybe they will be hidden under weeds as the years pass only to be rediscovered by a passing lawnmower or an unprotected toe.

Only when I was a teenager did I realize that there existed mechanical rock pickers that pulled behind tractors and did the work we did in seconds rather than hours.  This made me realize that dropping off kids at the edge of a field was just a convenient way to get rid of those kids for the day.  Tasks without end make good kid-sitters.

It’s like being ‘a ninja’

The farmers often live very frugally, Philpott says. “You typically produce lots of food, and that cuts down on your food costs.”

Jennifer Belknap, 36, and her husband, Jim McGinn, 43, are old-timers. Their Rochester, Wash., farm, Rising River, dates to 1994. Belknap estimates they net $30,000 a year. They live off the land and keep other expenses to a minimum.

It’s like “being a ninja,” says Fleming, in Nevis, N.Y. You have to be fluid, flexible, an activist and an entrepreneur, she says. “We’re working against the odds. The educational system, the economic system, the subsidies, the tax structure for land owners,” none of them are focused on helping tiny organic farmers, she says.

Trace Ramsey, 35, one of five farmers at Circle Acres in Silk Hope, N.C., works a full-time job and devotes weekends and nights to the farm. “Having a steady paycheck really helps with upfront costs like buying feed or cover crop seed,” he says.

Ramsey worked as a technology manager for a small company for five years after graduating from the State University of New York-Genesee, where he majored in biology.

He met up with a group of like-minded friends and they decided to start a farm together. They spent six years saving and planning and looking for land to buy around the country. They finally settled on North Carolina because it had access to consumers wanting organic produce and there already was a strong organic farming community there. Their 2-year-old farm sells to CSAs, some restaurants and the local Whole Foods.

Ramsey stages what young farmers are calling “crop mobs.” A local farm puts out the word that it’s holding a crop mob to untangle drip irrigation lines or pick sweet potatoes. A crowd descends, works for the afternoon, gets fed a big dinner and then has a party and dances until dawn.

“You can do a week’s worth of work in five hours if you have 50 people,” he says. “It creates such a huge connection between everybody. Living in a rural area, you don’t often have much chance to see folks every day like our urban contemporaries.”

There are five of us at Circle Acres – four owners and an apprentice.  We bought our land two years ago, and we started our project in earnest this February.  We continue to improve new areas for planting.  We are currently growing produce on 1/4 of an acre.  Goats and pigs and chicken occupy another 1/4 acre.

We grow food for ourselves and the surrounding communities.  We do not ship to faraway places.

We live pretty simple lifestyles away from television, mass marketed products and wholesale appeal.  We feed ourselves with the food we grow as well as food we salvage from the trash.  We live apart from the mainstream and have no interest in it.  Email does not reach us at night or on the weekends, but we are available by phone if we can catch a signal.  However, we are not back-to-the-landers or hippies or gun nuts or dropouts.  We are idealistically anarchist, radical, punk  Do-It-Yourselfers interested in promoting systems and ways of life free from hierarchy and experts.

We consider ourselves an educational place rather than a farm, which is why we have omitted the word “farm” from our name.  We are educating ourselves on the diversity of tactics of sustaining ourselves and our neighbors.

We are guerrilla agrarians in the information age.

Oh, and I have never danced until dawn.  They totally made that up…

***

***

***

So let the rain become a raging flood
To wash away buildings and boundaries
Swallow whole the world we have known
And as the waters rise
Let the black flag fly

Looking up at me with big eyes and puzzled expressions, were two children straddling their bicycles, one training wheel on each bike touching the pavement.  Most likely there were streamers coming from the handlebars but I don’t remember that part.  No one else was around.

“Why you in the gahbawg?”

“I’m getting food for my pigs.”

“You pigs eat gahbawg?  That’s gross.”

“Naw, they like to eat this stuff.  It isn’t really garbage; I’m just trying to help them out.”

“How big you pig?”

“About this big…” I approximated the length and width of the pigs with my arms.

“Oh…and they eat gahbawg.“

I had quick thoughts of what it might look like if the parents of these kids came around the corner to see some guy with mud on his pants standing next to a dumpster talking about how big his pigs were.  And the truck was still running.

Nice to meet you kids, but it’s time for me to go.  Hope you learned something?

So I edited and added and doubled the length of the original.  It was eventually rejected for the compilation because there was not a personal story involved.  I am working to fix that by writing another bit on my own journey to this point, but the original essay will most likely have a new life as the preface to my photography book project.

So, here it is for your review, the new and improved New Blood For the Old Body, a “Farm or Die” screed for those of you stuck in Accounts Payable or the IT Department or some other place where you know you don’t belong.  Join us in the creation of a new agrarian experience…

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Many of us never meant to become farmers. We had our ambitions to enter the world as accountants or lawyers or teachers or some other clean, respectable professional. We never really thought about the origins of our food or questioned the intentions of those who screen out the realities of farming; we always knew that the supermarket shelves would fill themselves, food came in boxes or cans ready to serve and farmers were simply one dimensional photographs in the mix of a hot new marketing campaign. Sustainable and industrial agriculture held meaningless differences, no more distinction than competing national brands of light duty trucks or diet soda.

But then something happened. In the previously steady route of our lives, a shift occurred. The soil moved under us somehow, got stuck in the creases of our pants, in the ridges of our shoes, in the lines of our palms. Suddenly white picket fences, situation comedies and mutual fund returns didn’t seem so interesting anymore. The big ball game and the driving range became distractions from the reality of a new love affair. We got hooked on the possibilities of growing our own food and also providing that food to others.

The epiphany was likely different for many of us. Maybe a friend took us to a farmers market. Maybe someone had a plate of local hamburgers or collards at a picnic. Maybe the news of some global food disaster made us question the monocultures piled high on our plates. Maybe a real life farmer entered our life.

For a few of us, those with farming in our past – a childhood spent in the fields of the big farms or the family plots, throwing rocks into the hedgerows for little or no pay or watching over milking machines in the stench of industrial sized barns – there was no love, no kind of encouragement, no appreciation for our part in the dynamics of food production. We were simply limbs and calluses then, small gears in a giant cranking clock. We left the farm to pursue something else only to be pulled back hard when it became apparent that we could abandon everything that farming once meant to us. We could make it ours.

Still others came to farming from DIY and anti-authoritarian backgrounds, building urban community gardens or putting up food in anarchist collectives. Gardening always had a community aspect to it, but we wanted something more. We knew that we could do the work, that we had the right vision and skills. We just needed the access and the resources to get started.

Regardless of how we arrived at this point, here we are; we will call ourselves farmers from now on. We are transplants from cities, dropouts from university systems and ex-corporate shufflers. We are mothers and sons and grandparents, masters in communications, colorful documentarians, shy propagandists. Most of all, we are teachers and students inhabiting the same bodies and breathing the same air.

Our young and new farmer movement is made up of many itinerant folks, traveling to places we want to see, gaining knowledge we never thought we would need and forming the basis for our own theories on agriculture. Our commonality with the landed and the stable is the soil and its layers. More specifically, our bond is in the ways we approach that soil and our desire to grow food in a way that builds on a sense of the farmer never dying. The immortality is not functional but symbolic – if you imagine that you will need to use a piece of soil forever, you will never intentionally do it harm.

This intentionality is not a new idea, but neither is it very well known in the information age. It is buried in our collective past, not necessarily waiting to be discovered, but intact and beckoning nonetheless. To get to the guts of it, we are throwing away the agricultural methods of our parents and grandparents, even subverting our great-grandparent’s proud thoughts of survival amidst the coming surpluses. Things may appear as cobbled together bits of dust and weight and worn out shovels, but its functionality in an agrarian way of life is apparent with very little inspection.

We stand in the books and plots and ideas of the past, pulling out the rusty pages and diseased cells in order to build something practical from the obsolete and misinterpreted, rewiring the seed catalogs, rewilding the crosswalks, reconnecting the pastures to the kitchens.

So here we are, doing more than is required of us, daily pushing the boundaries of our bedtimes, our muscle structure, our hunger pains, our balance of minimalist living conditions with the reality of satisfying relationships. We don’t need justification for living this life, but that rejection of validation won’t feed or shelter our families or protect our chickens from roaming dogs. We have concrete needs – access to land, to capital, to markets – but we cannot ignore the bounty before us as we seek to satisfy these needs.

We have to live farming as it happens, at our level, at the pace that we can move. The weeds don’t and won’t pull themselves; the new beds won’t magically appear out of spilt potting mix or the crumbs of a quick dinner of sandwiches among the paths. Anyone who tells you that growing food is simple is a lunatic. Anyone who tells you that having animals lessens the physical workload is a liar. But we stick the possibilities of a simpler, easier way of life in the context of the larger ecology, the massive inebriation that defines the world and my generation. If we are to sober up, we need to get moving.

We are bridging eras, going about tasks the hard way but with newer tools and even newer outlets, burrowing into ancient methods and supplementing with our own big-brained flourishes. A generation of reclamation, telling our story to groups of people that may have never been inspired to so much as think about how a piece of grass might pop from a crack in the sidewalk. The whisper is that we are here to exploit those cracks, get our dirty fingernails scratched with asphalt and debris while attempting to save the disorientated souls of the material apocalypse. We young farmers have the double task of growing food for the community as well as being able to communicate about the process and our decisions in spaces that are new and possibly uncomfortable.

The pictures we take of ourselves hang in art shows and stand out in glossy magazines; our recipes are printed on cardstock and handed out at tradeshows; our words bring excitement to readers wishing that they too could participate in the riot that is small scale sustainable agriculture. This riot exists outside the handshakes and millionaires of the agra-political grease machines, knowing, with the certainty of the tides, that the transactions we despise will occur no matter how long we scream, no matter how far we march, no matter how many letters we write. It is not defeatist or abandonment of the successful tactics of the past, just recognition that we can do much better with the actual actions of farming in sustainable ways, demonstrating to the consumers and wholesalers and value-adders that we are successful despite their dismissals. We cannot change the culture without changing the culture; yelling and otherwise carrying-on never has set a sweet fruit or fed a piglet, and I will bet it never will.

We love this life – we have to – but sometimes we can feel that we don’t own it, that it owns us and grips us in a way that will never shake us loose. In those moments of weight we can only shrug, pull on the rubber boots and move deliberately until the fireflies speckle the whippoorwills’ breaths. Throughout all the highs and lows we can look at ourselves over and over again knowing that, if we stick to our ideals, we can do noble and appropriate work no matter what happens.

We are the new blood in the old body.

This first photo is from just after I bushhogged the area last Winter:

Then we get on the building of hugelkultur beds.  You can see the lean-to shed in the background for reference:

Present day (well, two weeks ago) – the potatoes are towering in the hugelkultur beds.

When the next photo comes out it will be off harvested potatoes and the planting of a fall crop.

I have been a strong proponent of the young agrarian movement, writing essays, giving interviews, taking photographs. The Crop Mob is the physical realization of all those words and images, the sinew, muscle and breath behind the imagination.

With the Crop Mob there exists the possibility of something beyond what we usually perceive of as farming.

The idea is bigger than barn-raisings, more technical than workshops, more thoughtful than textbooks. It is guerrilla agrarianism in the information age. Maybe that isn’t an apt description, but when I watch shovels hitting dirt on a foreign farm with a crew assembled using email, social networking and word of mouth, it surely feels like it.

The Crop Mob is unstoppable, yet flawed on some levels.  Reciprocity from the farmers we have helped is greatly lacking.  We are all busy, yes, but if we are to keep donating our labor, the labor pool must continue to snowball and include previous beneficiaries of that labor.  On that end we can improve our pitch, farms can understand better what they are getting and everyone involved can get what they need out of the day.

We are not unskilled; we bring decades of combined experience in dozens of areas – bed building, fencing, transplanting, harvesting, permaculture, food/farm activism, media outreach – so we are capable of making substantial impacts in a handful of hours.

Where to from here?  The next step may be to franchise the idea or mutate it or trim it down or use it differently.  In the meantime we will continue to do what we have been doing – showing up and getting shit done.

We (Danielle, Gray, Kristin, Noel and Trace) at Circle Acres farm are planning a work weekend for May 22nd-24th.  We are also calling out for a Crop Mob on Sunday the 24th from 10-3.

We have plenty of camping space available for both Friday and Saturday nights.  Parking at the farm is interesting, so please fill vehicles to the max…

Here are some of the things we might get into -

- sheet mulching “lumps” for the pumpkin patch
- removal of privet and bio-char demonstration
- building sheet mulch beds
- prepping land for a living fence
- untangling and testing used drip tape
- plugging mushroom logs
- pulling new electrical wire in the house
- ripping out plumbing
- digging a gray water trench
- building a solar shower
- playing around with cob mixtures

For food, please bring snacks, drinks and whatever you think you might want to have on hand for the weekend.  We will cook for the Saturday dinner and Sunday Crop Mob lunch; we’ll do our best to provide for other meals, but any help is appreciated.

Please RSVP as soon as you can and let us know what days you will be at the farm.  Also let us know if you have any special needs, dietary or otherwise.

One last note – please leave your dogs at home.

Floretta had her baby, Madeline, a few weeks ago.  Madeline is growing her horns and is old enough to be separated from mom for the night.  That means milk in the morning for the human animals on the farm.

The milking process starts out easy enough and gets progressively more interesting.  Especially when one of the morning helpers (me) does something dumb.  It goes something like this -

1 – Clean out the milk container and strainer.  A glug of bleach will do it.  Or a drop.  Or a quarter cup.  Or don’t worry about it.  Sources of information vary as with anything else you attempt to research on the Internets and apply to do-it-yourself type situations.

2 – Fill up the feed basket with corn, oats and hay.  Floretta really loves corn, so you have to hide it under the hay in order to slow her down.  That said, she knows where the corn is from the moment it leaves the bag and will be ready for it whenever you are.  And she’s feisty.

3 – Get Floretta onto the scrap wood milk stand.  Fairly self explanatory but not necessarily easy.

4 – Lock the head gate and get the feed bucket ready.  Floretta will want to get to the feed bucket before you are ready to give it to her no matter if she is attached to the head gate or not.  If an eye pops out just stick it back in and put bleach on it.  Or don’t.

5 – Lock in the feed bucket.  Watch your fingers.

6 – Start milking and hope Madeline keeps quiet…

7 – Trace has disturbed Madeline, so she is getting very loud, and Floretta is getting antsy, so Noel milk faster! before she kicks the damn bucket of milk over, oh come on be quiet Madeline, sorry just isn’t good enough Trace, you idiot!

It didn’t really go like that, but it felt like it to me.  Madi got very loud prompting Floretta to get agitated.  The milking was cut short during this little demonstration session.

8 – Madeline won’t shut up.  Reunite mom and kid before something breaks.

9 – Drink milk.  Try again in the morning.

The more I read about using pigs as tillers, the more I realize that they need to be in a smaller space for an extended period of time in order for the process to be effective.  I may start moving them around in fifty by fifty sections in the larger fenced area.  This will concentrate their rooting and digging efforts.

I’m thinking that if left in the large area, they will focus on the easy spots and basically defeat the purpose of having them on pasture.  They may just wait for me to come feed them, loaf off the rest of the time, occasionally digging up a worm here or there to satisfy some instinctual piece of evolutionary memory.

But maybe I’m wrong and the pigs know what they are doing.  I mean, they haven’t even been with us for a week, and I can already tell where they have been working.

Kristron – ‘We need to get out more.’

Me – ‘We are out more.  We’re all the way out back.’

The whole dichotomy came into focus (again) as I was hauling ten pounds of bananas out of the dumpster, taking in a nice and cozy 2600 mile diet subsidy.  We are building a farm with a focus on self sufficiency.  Since that goal is way off, we rely very heavily on the waste stream.

I have written about dumpster diving in the past, but the level of food and resource rescuing we do now is pretty unprecedented.  The chickens eat it (bananas and melons are their favorite), the goat eats it (cabbage trimmings are always available) and we all certainly do our part to go through as much of the food as we can.  The pigs are coming soon; they will eat whatever we other critters cannot get through.  Clothing, shelving, buckets, cardboard, wire, dishes, and a billion other things get converted into feeders, mulch and everyday farm equipment.

Artichokes, red peppers, starfruit, melons, red bananas, eggplant, avocado, asparagus – a sampling of the seasons from around the world, all held up by petroleum and horrible working conditions – picked, packed, shipped and then thrown away while still edible.  It is basically a punch in the face of all the work done … The wasteful practices are illustrated over an over again by the sight of good food going to the landfill.  But we intervene, daily, breaking the waste chain, feeding ourselves and others while the world dies around us.

Yesterday – in ten seconds in the grocery store dumpster – I pulled out an entire case of tomato sauce.  Twelve jars with an expiration date sometime in 2011, undamaged and unopened, thrown away simply because it was delivered to the wrong store.  So it gets thrown away.  Not donated, not given to employees, not sampled out.  If a punk wasn’t there to rescue it, it would be on its way to the landfill at this moment, the jars broken on the sides of the trash truck and contents stuck on the gears and plates and pieces of a wasteful world.

But if that waste stream stopped suddenly (like we want it to), our current food paradigm would change radically.  We are not yet growing enough to feed ourselves.  Entire subcultures are built on the availability of trashed food, websites and blogs are devoted to one thing only -

Every year in the US nearly 100 billion pounds of edible food are sent to landfills by retailers, restaurants, and consumers. It’s also estimated that only about 4 billion pounds of food would be necessary to eliminate hunger in America.

Don’t get me wrong, a huge pot of dumpster veggie soup is delicious, but with Trashy Gourmet I hope to show that dumpsters offer an endless array of options for your culinary delight. So start diving, get cooking, and stuff your face while you help save the world! Eating against capitalism tastes so good.

Can we eat our way out of capitalism?  Can we reconcile our goals with our current actions?  Pass me an avocado and we’ll talk about it later…