From the September AARP magazine -
At 8 a.m. on a Saturday under a blue summer sky, Denise Sharp, co-owner of Sharp’s at Waterford Farm in Brookville, Md., is preoccupied with a sick goat. On top of that, she’s preparing for visitors.
“Usually there is pandemonium the first time a volunteer group comes here, because they don’t know what to do or how to do it,” she says.
Well, what do you know, we’re ” inventing the wheel.” I grew up on a farm in Iowa and every summer farmers rotated the farms threshing oats and filling silos with silage (chopped corn stalks that fermented and was like a “liquor” fed to cattle.} What happened to the small farmer? The mechanization and subsidies to not grow crops to keep the prices up forced out the small farmer–couldn’t afford the price of feed suppliments needed.
My folks had friends who helped out, for free, when there was illness or a bumper crop to be harvested when it was ripe. So, what’s so new about volunteering to help farmers–more fashionable now?
I think this is different in that people from urban areas are also chipping in to help. It is also scheduled volunteer time and not just for a specific harvest – it happens every month no matter what needs to be done, on a different farm in a different area. Folks are exposed to many different ways of farming during all seasons.
Cooperative harvesting and farming never really went away; we are just adding to it and raising the profile a bit.