From 6-9pm on this Friday October 15th, Trace opens his first solo exhibit New Blood for the Old Body- Photography from inside the new agrarian movement at Hotel Hadley Studios in Siler City, NC. Going through Trace’s photographs one can’t help but notice a parallel to the photography of the Farm Security Administration, the New Deal program that attempted to collectivise agriculture and sent photographers to document the effects of the great depression on rural people. It is these iconic FSA images that gave a face to the great depression. It’s interesting that now at the time of the greatest economic turmoil since the depression images of a similar style are speaking to people but the message they convey is drastically different. The labor is similar, the tired bodies and dirty knees are the same, but the emotional tenor of the photographs is different. The faces of these new agrarians express hope, possibility, strength, determination, and joy. It’s not that exhaustion, heartbreak, and sorrow are absent from their lives but these feelings don’t consume them.

We’ll also be celebrating with live music (bands TBA), food, and birthday cake!

Here are the details:

Who: Crop Mob and friends!
What: Digging sweet potatoes, live music, eating birthday cake
Where: Piedmont Biofarn @ the piedmont biofuels industrial campus
Why: Cause it’s Crop Mob’s birthday
When: October 25th from 12pm-5pm with music on into the evening

What to bring:
We’ll need digging forks and wheelbarrows don’t forget your gloves

As usual a delicious meal will be provided by the farm

Please RSVP to infoatcropmob.org with the number of people you are bringing (lots) so that we can make sure to have enough food.  Also let us know if you can bring a wheelbarrow.

I think this desire for community is about us reaching for something that is conspicuously absent from the dominant culture. We get it in bits and pieces, little snapshots of community, at summer camp, on vacation, or during a disaster. These are times when we are removed from our “real lives” and the habits and pressures that go along with them. Ultimately we are lured/forced back to “reality” by our schools, televisions, jobs, and mortgages, but some piece of the experience persists.

Many if not most people have a nagging sense that something is not right, that something is missing in their lives. This dissatisfaction manifests itself in addiction to substances, television, and general consumption. We are constantly looking for something to fill the hole left by a lack of community, a sense of belonging or purpose.

Before the development of industrial agriculture, growing food was a community affair. Your community might be a large extended family on a family farm or a collection of families on nearby farms. Everyone played a role and contributed in one form or another. Community was essential for agriculture and agriculture for community. As agriculture became industrialized and mechanized, there were fewer and fewer meaningful roles for people to fill on the farm. Neighbors needed each other less, fewer family members were needed on the farm so more left, fewer farms were needed so many were sold.

Now we need to repopulate small farms and rebuild that sense of community as we transition from fossil fuel based industrial agriculture toward a more intensive hands-on system. We need to grow food not only on farms, but in our backyards, front yards, porches and alleys. Urban, suburban, and rural communities will all have to come together to plant, harvest, and put up the fruits of their edible landscape.

The group of young farmers decided to do just that. Instead of coming together to sit around a table and talk, we would come together and harvest, plant, or weed. This “Crop Mob” as it came to be called is about working together, co-creating the world we want to live in. We build much deeper relationships working side by side rather than sitting stiffly around a table. We can address the challenges and embrace the opportunities presented to us, we can feel a sense of purpose, and we can build the community that we yearn for so deeply, all while we grow food.