Not-so-Strange Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Farm

 

Where have I been in the past seven months?  Has it really been since early December that I've sat down to drain the reservoir of brain synapses that have been bouncing and building in my head?  This surprises even me, though as you likely know if you're reading this, I've been keeping a full life.

Jess and I went to British Columbia and Alberta for nearly a month over the winter holidays.  We came back and helped Magic move towards the inevitable shuffle and purge that is coming with the new house next year.  In early April we decided to get married.  I don't remember April, really, because we planned our wedding from scratch in only three weeks.  In early May we got married (you can find a link to photos on my Facebook account).  In mid-May we flew out to the east coast, had a few parties to celebrate, and took the train from New York up to our current home, Picadilly Farm.  We're living in the southwest corner of New Hampshire for the bulk this growing season (May through November), staying in the farmhouse with Bruce and Jenny while working on the farm.  

At this moment, I am at my own little axis mundi of the here and now - a coffeeshop in Keene, NH called Brewbakers.  Jess and I usually come here when we make a trip to the big town of Keene (population 24,000), about 25 minutes by car or 150 minutes by bike, as we discovered today.  The good decaf, friendly and attractive servers, wireless service, and creaky wood floorboards help me tap the spring inside that I draw upon for thoughts worth sharing.  

So what is on my mind these days that brings me back to the keyboard?  Resisting the global race to the bottom, starting on my hands and knees at 6:05 a.m. under a gray New England sky.  

We were talking in the kitchen a few weeks ago about selling eggs at the farm each week for $5 a dozen.  Many people who come to pick up their vegetables each week also purchase other products from local producers who sell through us.  We have maple syrup, milk, yogurt, cheese, bread, meat, and our own Picadilly eggs.  We do it to help support regional farms, offering them leverage by being a point of sale where more than 200 people pass through each week (already committed to buying local produce by virtue of their being there).  It adds a nice feeling of community to the farm, and lots of shareholders enjoy getting easy access to locally produced foods.

In the kitchen, though, we were talking about the incredulity that some shareholders express at buying our eggs for $5 a dozen.  This price represents the focal point of a pickle in which we find ourselves at the farm.  With the cost of feed, the labor it takes to care for the chickens (daily food and water, as well as maintenance of their hen houses and fencing), and the time we invest in gathering, cleaning, and packaging the eggs, Bruce estimates that we're only just about breaking even at $4 a dozen.  Even if we sell 30 dozen eggs a week (about our average) for the whole shareholder season, at $5/dozen we're taking home only $780 for profit.  If there any mishaps along the way, or the price of chicken feed goes up, that only reduces the profit further.  And this is for a farm where most employees work 50 hours a week for more than half the year, and the owners are willing to pay reasonable wages, which come out of their bottom line. Lots of work, and no one takes home big profits. 

What this whole equation basically amounts to is that selling eggs at $5 per dozen is just the busy farmers doing a favor for the shareholders.  We try not to be soured by complaints.  The area of New Hampshire we're in is not full of money tree plantations.  It is as depressed as any other rural area in this modern American permanent recession. 

The pickle is this.  You can go down towards Brattleboro, NH, and probably buy a dozen eggs from Walmart for about two dollars.  When you do that, you're supporting industrial scale food flows.  Why do I say flows?  Think about the quantities involved.  According to the American Egg Board, 77 billion eggs were distributed in the US in 2009. That's a huge number of chickens, cropland to grow their feed, energy to process them, energy to transport them and keep them cool, material to package them, antibiotics to feed them, etc. That is a flow, to keep all that process of supply and distribution going every day of every year.  It's a tsunami of calories on an epic scale, like most food production in America and throughout the world these days. 

At scales of this magnitude, Picadilly farms can't compete.  We could try to cut corners.  We could give them antibiotics to reduce the risk of infection and disease.  We could box them up for their entire lives so that it was easier to just go and grab the eggs.  We could feed them only really cheap chicken feed rather than let them scavenge in pastures for food which requires more of the farmer's time to maintain.  We could pack twice as many in half the space.  We could do these things and probably more, but we like giving the chickens a little decency and ability to realize their full avian potential.  We like having a farm with more integrated cycles of animal life.  We like selling eggs that are probably more nutritious than conventional ones. (I can attest that the yolks are a deeper color yellow than I've seen before.)

When people come and buy eggs (or bread, or vegetables, or anything else) from Picadilly rather than their supermarket, they are making a choice with their dollars to support local producers.  This choice means stepping away from our usual m.o. of giving as little as we can and taking as much as we can get away with.  The idea that we will feel good maximizing our own advantage while externalizing disadvantages (like cheap eggs, the production of which trashes the chickens and the ecosystem) is an insidious myth well worth examining and possibly rejecting. 

When we buy cheap, mass-produced things, we are commanding an exploitative way of life with our consumer dollars.  We may not enjoy sitting around contemplating the effects of our purchases (human and ecological exploitation and degradation), but they are the end result nonetheless.  This is the race to the bottom.  If we offer our money to someone who can do it "cheaper," they will find a way.  Scale up production, dump your waste, enslave your workforce, medicate your chickens, spray your vegetables.  When we smell the chance to save a buck, and the producer smells a way to make an extra buck, we often chuck our moral compass out the window.  We think we're all winning, when in fact all we did was abuse some animals or people, and make the world a little less liveable for future everyone.  

The background to all this is the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  We want others to support us when we're struggling to do the right thing.  If we perpetuate the race to the bottom, what reason do we have to expect others to help us when we wake up to all the destruction we've caused?  How can we support others right now so as to keep the circle unbroken when it's our time to receive help? 

How can we be different?  How can we take a stand for the things we want in this world - happy chickens, healthy and content friends, a stable ecosystem that will support farming into the future?  I think the key to our work is changing our mental organization.  It may seem difficult at first to think that spending more on our food than is necessary (local happy eggs vs. Walmart agribusiness eggs) is the path to more of what we want.  But what if we took the least satisfying dollars we spent in the past week or month (the third beer, the second scoop of ice cream, the cheap shirt at Forever 21) and convert them to purchasing food that does less harm to the earth?  What if we explore the feeling of voluntary buying fewer things and instead making higher-quality, local purchases?  What does a life like that look and feel like?  Where will it take us?  What does it feel like to want to pay $5 for eggs to support local farmers? 

In these times, this kind of exploration is not a destination, but rather a journey that is not always clear.  We live so interdependently.  We use resources from all over the world, and are heavily addicted to our exploitative, corporate systems.  Connecting to local resources is a great way to begin untangling our own place in this web of modern life.  Finding other people who are on similar journeys is a good way to boost our own enthusiasm.  Asking heartfelt questions is great, too.  Why are the eggs $5 when the Big Box store sells them for $2?  I want to support local folks, but I'm not sure how best to do it.  Where can I begin?  

Five days a week, I and about 10 others are working at Picadilly Farm, living out the answers and the questions together.  We're on our hands and knees weeding and harvesting.  We're smiling or frowning at how the crops are doing.  We're mending irrigation lines.  We're washing thousands of vegetables each day and boxing them up.  We're helping to run the farm because we believe it's a good place to begin.