Those technophiles Sam and Will over at Everlaughter Farm in Hillsborough don’t just send a email out to their myriad fans and customers, they send a weekly podcast. In the podcast that came out shortly after the July Crop Mob they give a report on the crop mob and give a big thanks to all the mobbers who came out.  They also recognized the farmers who have paved the way over the past 25 or 30 years and really built the sustainable ag movement in this region.  For those who were concerned they figured out why their chickens had been eating all of the eggs.

Here’s an article from USA Today about young farmers in the sustainable ag movement.  Trace was interviewed and Crop Mob gets a mention.  It’s a feel good piece that only just barely touches on some of the major issues facing young farmers such as wages and access to land.  As long as sustainable ag is considered a niche industry, rather than an essential piece of our food system, the issues facing young farmers trying to make a go of it will be glossed over.

Dears,

I don’t know how but we have discover your site and your work. This e-mail is only to contact you from the other part of the planet. We are based in the Catalan Pyrenees, in Spain. We just organized the first shepherd’s school that wants to give answer to this real necessity of young people that wants to learn and develop the cattle and agrarian job. Our project is called “Projecte Grípia” and it has a lot of success. Nowadays we have 25 young people from 21 to 34 that are learning directly in the farms of our little county who to be farmers with a sustainable activity.

We would like to keep contact with you. We are organizing in our country our little revolution. The farmer’s job is changing and a lot of people wants take part of it!

Good like with your project.

Get in touch!

Vanesa

I have been involved in the Crop Mob since the first time the group convened to do work last October. I missed the initial meeting of people who created the idea and named it, so I take no credit for its inception only its implementation. I push the idea whenever and wherever I can, attending every call of the Mob in the process.

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.

Doug has been farming organically for 38 years and does so now at Piedmont Biofarm - host of our first Crop Mob.  

I was in my junior year of college in 1971 and I was hearing about a lot of people who were moving out of the urban areas and starting farms. College at that point was losing its meaning for me and that sounded like something really meaningful to do. I was in a group of kind of spiritual seeking people. We got together once a week and chanted songs from different traditions all over the world and this woman came to our group one day and said she was starting a spiritual community on her farm one hundred miles away. I went to check it out the very next week and decided right away this is what I was looking for. I had been kind of looking around and didn’t know how to make a connection. So, that summer as soon as the semester was over, I moved there and started telling my parents that I was probably going to drop out of school. They freaked out about that and convinced me to live weekends at the farm and finish my last year of college. I figured out a way that I could get by on two or three days a week of college. So, I was off and running. I was just immediately drawn to the idea of growing food. My parents had a small, part-time farm when I was a kid and I came from a rural background where all of my Uncles had Dairy farms. So, it was kind of in my blood I suppose and I knew that was what I wanted to do.

So, the community was part of the draw for you?

We developed a sharing, networking, work day kind of thing like the Crop Mob that is happening here. In those early years, the mid seventies, we had a gathering once every month or two and would rotate at different farms. We would work, do projects on the farm, have a big potluck, and have a meeting for an hour or two where everybody would share what they were doing at the time on their farm. It was kind of the equivalent of a modern list serve where you post different questions about a vegetable variety or a source of a particular soil amendment and others answer on the list serve. Back then we would have to get together physically to do that kind of thing. So we would meet and talk in a big circle about what we were doing on our farms, what we were needing what we had to offer, what we were looking for in the way of machinery and tools, tips and suggestions, and all that good stuff.

The predominate paradigm that we were working under at the time was driven by the predictions we held about the modern, military, industrial civilization out there that we had been all groomed to take part in was going to just crash and fall apart. And that we were the pioneers learning a way to survive and thrive on the land. So we used to sit around and talk about how it was all going to come crashing down around us.

That sounds similar to the mentality of the young sustainable farmers and food activists today.

Yeah there is definitely a theme of that happening now. And what we thought was going to happen starting in the 70’s kind of never happened. In fact, when Reagan came in (1980) it went the other direction. Everything changed and suddenly we had a lot less people applying for internships on our farm. All of the college students were getting serious about business careers and the whole idea of cooperative actions and activism in general started evaporating. It was just a really big change I saw going on. In the late 70’s there was this huge environmental movement that was peaking in a way; anti-nuclear, we had a huge anti-power line fight. There were proposed power lines and nuclear plants for our area because we were considered the backwater area were they could put these technologies that the city people didn’t want in their backyards. So we were the far away backyard where they could put all that stuff and we got very intensely active to prevent that kind of thing.

But by 1981 or so there was so much less of that activism going on and so many fewer people. I mean there was still a movement and farming going on and it gradually continued to grow, but the young people looking for that as an exciting, meaningful way of life was decreasing. We had to go out and find interns by posting on bulletin boards at the Cornell Ag School and send letters to career offices at colleges. Our intentional community reflected these changes also. A lot of the Back to the Land homesteaders (from the 70’s) decided it was impractical for them to do what they were doing and they all got jobs in town working for the NPR station, government agencies. Others got jobs at the local food co-op, or created some other kind of work that was more lucrative than trying to sell food. Everybody started to realize that farming is at the bottom of the totem pole and it was really hard to pay your bills growing food.

I lived in this intentional community that was pretty supportive of the food growing end of things so we were able to manage paying our bills barely. We lived a really poor lifestyle. Every stitch of clothing we had came from thrift stores or hand me downs. We cut and hauled all of our own fired wood. We fixed all of our own vehicles, and fixed everything else we possibly could ourselves. We were fortunate to have the land we bought really cheap in the 70’s and the barns, outbuildings and a decent house there. We could live there putting those resources to use and keep things at the survival level.

But our community fell apart in the early 80’s, people moved into town for better paying jobs or went back to college following the trends of the Reagan years. And I kind of hung in there. In about 1987 those trends started reversing and new people started joining our community again. We started getting much more serious about farming again and developing our markets more. So the 90’s were a building phase for us again. Our community grew and our farm operation grew. In the meantime the Northeast network of farms was rapidly improving and there was a really good Organic certification program in each state developing. Suddenly the Ag schools were forced to take Organic farming more seriously. We started noticing that they were starting to have meetings at places like Cornell University. So looking at that compared to the early 80’s when they were laughing at the concept of commercial organic farming. They would say organic gardening is ok for the backyard but it is impractical to try to feed the world with organic farming. That seemed to be the general consensus with Ag schools and things. By the early 90’s young, brilliant students and their new ideas about organic farming were replacing the old, stick in the mud professors. And I remember there was this group of undergrads and graduate students at Cornell that formed the Sustainable Agriculture Research Collective to do sustainable research on their own, and all kinds of things like this started happening and building in the early 90’s.

What is it about the Piedmont area of North Carolina that made you decide to farm and live here?

I moved down here in 1999 to Blue Heron Community outside of Pittsboro North Carolina. I was attracted to the dense population of Organic farms in the area. And the farming community here is very important to me. The Sustainable Farming program was already going and I was suspecting there might be some teaching opportunities for me there. So by the fall of 2000 I started to do a little teaching at the college. I had my own field trip class and starting teaching the Organic Vegetable Production class in 2001 with Tony Kleese and have been teaching that ever since. So I knew the education was important to me. In 2006 the Piedmont Bio fuels people asked me to consult for them helping get some oilseed crops going. The more I worked with them the more I appreciated their energy and really strong commitment to seeing sustainable farming rapidly blossom in this area. I knew there was land available so I started farming here at the Bio farm in 2006. We’re growing on about two and a half acres now. We are mainly a production farm but I am gradually doing more and more research, more variety trials, and more breeding work.

What are some of your favorite varieties that you have found that grow absolutely best here and thrive in this climate?

It is sort of more what grows well in this climate than what grows well on these soils around here. That is the biggest factor that I had to learn when I moved down here. I’ll talk about a few of the more popular crops here.

With tomatoes you are looking for the ability to flower and make good fruit in hot weather. I really like the orange tomato called Persimmon and a red one called Tropic. Both are very tolerant to the tomato diseases here. I did experiment with a tomato that was developed by an amateur breeding group up north called Brandy Rose and that’s pretty nice. You have to grow Cherokee Purple here. It’s got the big name and it is a really beautiful tomato. I mean when you cut one of those in half it’s just a beautiful thing. The old art historian in me is coming out. Some of the food I grow, it’s the visuals that are important to me as much as any other quality. Combining art and farming.

There is a new lettuce that came out a couple of years ago called Malawi that is the most intensely dark red lettuce that I’ve seen. That is really useful in a salad mix especially in the winter when the light levels are low. Red lettuces tend to get much more pale and this one really hangs in there. It is very productive and just a great lettuce. There is a Cherokee that we’re pretty excited about here that looks stupendous when it’s growing in full light conditions.

My favorite peppers are the ones that I’m breeding. I am developing my own and I’ve got some really exciting material. I feel like all I need to do is get the weird stuff out. It’s called rouging out. I’ll do a couple of more generations where I’m selecting away from types that are not what I’m looking for. I’m honing it down to a uniform, genetically reliable pepper that produces the same results every year. Some are already there and some I need to work on for a couple more generations. The Marconi is a variety that I saved my own seeds of and they have become more vigorous over time.

Sen po sai, a delicate Asian collard green, is something I am very excited about. It was something developed in Japan that I have been growing for four or five years as an open pollinated variety, gradually removing all of the off-types, making it look very uniform.

What makes farming so rewarding for you still after 38 years?

I’m just a stubborn old farmer I guess. (Laughs) Well, the realm of Sustainable/Organic farming is absolutely infinite – in the amount of research that can be done. I am trending more toward research than production. They could give us twenty times the budget that currently goes into sustainable research and it would easily all be put to good use. As far as Foundation money and Federal money there are just so many things that can be worked on to improve Sustainable/Organic farming. It kind of always made me mad that the Ag Schools would put down Organic farming, but if they weren’t funding the research to make it more feasible then they couldn’t really compare the potential of it in a valid way. All we needed was for fossil fuels to go through the roof or for problems with pesticides to keep surfacing, then the more progressive people in Ag Schools started realizing that at least some of the principles in Sustainable and Organic production need to be seriously adopted in all farming if we were to survive on this earth.

So it just started becoming more obvious to mainstream agriculture that things are going to have to change down the road and for those changes to happen we could do a lot of useful research to make it possible to be profitable in Organic farming and still feed the masses. Right now there is still this kind of dichotomy; Farmers such as myself kind of set up our marketing so it’s mostly upper-middle class people buying our produce because they’re willing to pay the price that we need to charge for the low-level of mechanization and labor intensive kind of farming that we do. This is what we call a very information-intensive kind of farming and there is a lot of extra work and effort that goes into doing things organically. You have to constantly be experimenting, constantly be adopting new methods and learning as much as you can about how to do it better, wisely, with less impact on the environment, and still make a living! You know that last little bit is the tricky part. Trying to put all of those things together is the tricky part. It is infinitely challenging and fun.

All my best!

http://deepgreenblues.blogspot.com/

Crop Mobber Roshen Sethna created a photo documentary titled Victory of the Commons for a class at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. The documentary is about our relationship to land and community and features photos from the Stone House Crop Mob.  Click here to read Roshen’s artist statement.  The documentary can be found at http://www.susiepostrust.com/Duke08/Roshen/index.html

I wonder how much the Crop Mob is about agriculture and how much is simply about enjoying the company of like minded people? We came from all over to dig beds and spread mulch for someone most of us had never met, yet we did it with skill, enthusiasm and the efficiency of seasoned laborers. This is only the second time the Crop Mob was used; for a third of this group of 24 this was their first experience with the group.

An outsider would question our motives as would some cynical old-timers or jaded sustainable agriculture veterans. I wouldn’t even bother with those folks. My main thought is not on convincing the skeptics that our agenda is one of filling a need, but rather my main thought is Where do we go from here?

Three months out of Wilmington and it is finally settling in that I am in a very different place. Things move quickly here and things get done by folks who say they will do them. I can feel some of my own cynicism fading away as I leave behind some of the vapidity of Wilmington, its slow moving, energy-sucking ambivalence flaking away like dead skin.

I am starting to warm up to the people that spin around in my daily interactions. I’m trying to build the sorts of friendships that emulate family. The Crop Mob is helping me with some of my apprehensions about new people and my own motives for entering a new world as an automatically standoffish person.

I have had a hard time, wondering how I would fit in when my experiences with building community in Wilmington often met with horrible failure. I came into a ready made yet evolving community, ready to take my place yet unsure of what that place would look like.

It seems that my role here could be one of role model or experienced advice giver, but mostly, in the first few months, my role has been that of a lost explorer. Things that I know how to do – cook, forage, dumpster dive – have been lost temporarily as I try to figure out the basics of living.

Cooking without anything resembling a kitchen has been frustrating; washing dishes without a good source of water makes cooking more of a chore than it needs to be. What that has to do with the Crop Mob is beyond me, but it does affect my interactions. It has also made my first impressions harder to shake. Adah (pictured above) has tooled on me about my peanut butter and white bread lunches, but for me that meal has been easy, quick and comfortable in this time of transition.

Now that some of those issues are worked out, I feel like I can join this community in a functional capacity, sharing what I know and accepting learning opportunities as they present themselves.

And yet I am still not a talker.

To bring it back to the Crop Mob, the rhythm of the work is often set with old camp songs. The one I have heard at both mobs is about sweet potatoes and biscuits -

Sweet potato biscuit that’s what I said
sweet potato biscuit dancing through my head
went to the cook’s table askin’ for some bread
found me a biscuit but the cooks was all dead

Sweet potato, sweet potato biscuit on the run
gotta find me a biscuit, gotta get me some of them
Sweet potato, sweet potato biscuit on the run
gotta find me a biscuit, gotta get me some

Standin’ on the lookout since the day before last
saw a line of biscuits stretchin’ into the past
Jesus on the hillside you know what he said
he said take this biscuit this sweet potato bread

Standing on the banks of the river wide
hop on a biscuit and catch yourself a ride
ride to the devils house all the way
share a biscuit with the devil on the judgment day

Sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit
sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit

sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit
(whispered) sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, (shouted) BISCUIT!!

Growing a local food system is really about building community. It is a process of personalizing our relationship to food and those who grow our food. In order for our communities to be healthy and successful we need to deepen our relationships not just between producers and consumers, but also within the community of producers. To that end, a few weeks ago a bunch of the young, landless, and wannabe farmers associated with the Triangle Food Commons got together to talk about the challenges and opportunities presented to us as we try to make a life of growing food. There was talk and debate about wages, healthcare, land, and retirement. At some point the discussion shifted to community, overwhelmingly these people who represent the future of the food system are interested in working and growing collectively as part of a community of growers rather than as individual farmers.

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.

The number of landless and itinerant young farmers, working alone or with a few other people, is a pretty large demographic in my world. What is sometimes missing is not only land ownership but the sense of community that can come from an agrarian culture. None of these farmers wants to farm alone, removed from the company of like minded people.

The reality is that the work of farming requires a lot of time, and extra time is not always available to pursue the sort of friendships and bonding with other area young farmers that make the experience more fulfilling. Farming might not be as sexy as the New York Times sometimes makes it out to be, but can definitely be as fun as it looks. However, it can also get lonely and monotonous.

Fortunately there is enough social thread around here to keep everyone together, whether it is through interactions in sustainable ag classes, conferences, or the newest idea around here – crop mobs.

A crop mob isn’t necessarily a new idea. Migratory groups of farm laborers, starting with “hobos“, have been a part of the American landscape for quite some time. And if you attended high school in the United States you might remember reading The Grapes of Wrath, the Steinbeck novel about traveling farm workers. Yeah, poor traveling farmers have been on the road a century and half. That doesn’t seem to be ending even as the number of farms available to work on diminishes.

So what makes it different this time around? For one thing, the idea of economic hardship as the driving factor has been removed. Most everyone involved is likely enduring some sort of financial or structural ruin in their lives. I don’t have running water, but I own land and make a mortgage payment; another lives in a tent, but lives rent free and worries very little about buying food.

We all have our problems, but none of them are sufficient enough to demand that we wander around the country doing meaningless labor for horrible wages. We demand and get better treatment and farm in the places we want to farm, for the experience it provides.

We farm because we want to, not because we need to. At some time or another we were infected with a desire to give and take from the dirt, whether it is the red clay of Chatham County or limestone infested soils of Western New York.

What brought this group together was the need to establish a community of people going through the same sorts of movements, many of which keep folks separated during most days. Classes, part time jobs, internships, harvesting and living far apart from each other keeps us in our own little bubbles.

This new crop mob goes where it is needed, does the work that is needed, creates the community that is needed and gets us out of those bubbles.