Kentucky Young Farmers Mixer and Screening

Song in a Year of Catastrophe

I began to be followed by a voice saying:
"It can't last. It can't last.
Harden yourself. Harden yourself.
Be ready. Be ready."

"Go look under the leaves,"
it said, "for what is living there
is long dead in your tongue."
And it said, "Put your hands
into the earth. Live close
to the ground. Learn the darkness.
Gather round you all
the things that you love, name
their names, prepare
to lose them. It will be
as if all you know were turned
around within your body."

And I went and put my hands
into the ground, and they took root
and grew into a season's harvest.
I looked behind the veil
of the leaves, and heard voices
that I knew had been dead
in my tongue years before my birth.
I learned the dark.

And still the voice stayed with me.
Walking in the early mornings,
I could hear it, like a bird
bemused among the leaves,
a mockingbird idly singing
in the autumn of catastrophe:
"Be ready. Be ready.
Harden yourself. Harden yourself."

And I heard the sound
of a great engine pounding
in the air, and a voice asking:
"Change or slavery?
Hardship or slavery?"
and voices answering:
"Slavery! Slavery!"
And I was afraid, loving
what I knew would be lost.

Then the voice following me said:
"You have not yet come close enough.
Come nearer the ground. Learn
from the woodcock in the woods
whose feathering is a ritual
of the fallen leaves,
and from the nesting quail
whose specking makes her hard to see
in the long grass.
Study the coat of the mole.
For the farmer shall wear
the greenery and the furrows
of his fields, and bear
the long standing of the woods."

And I asked: "You mean a death, then?"
"Yes," the voice said. "Die
into what the earth requires of you."
Then I let go all holds, and sank
like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,
and at last came fully into the ease
and the joy of that place,
all my lost ones returning.

9/28/68

- Wendell Berry, Farming: A Handbook

National Agricultural Commons

"Most of feudalism’s overt abuses had now ceased. But the remainder represented unaccountable control over other people’s lives and a steady transfer of wealth from poor to rich in rent or fees....even in the cities, where people suffered from an often-fractured sense of identity and their feelings of powerlessness led them to accept poor governance as a norm. Taking on landlordism by setting up [a]…Trust, then, would be a symbolic work.  It would send out signals aimed at a wider transformation, connected as it was to a sense of belonging and the human ‘claim of right’—the right to freedom…The authority structures that held it all in place might resemble a fortress; in certain ways, some of which were not to be underestimated, they were a fortress.  But in other ways they were just eggshell.  Yet as long as that eggshell remained painted with iron bars, it could imprison oppressor and oppressed alike…

It was therefore going to mean engaging power…the whole corpus of landed interests…It would mean drawing presumed authority structures into question and helping to build an exciting and sustainable alternative...And just look at what, in the case of landlordism, the alternative could be. With community ownership, security and commonwealth could become the core values rather than profit and domination. Rents and other revenues could support infrastructure rather than subsidising the idle mores of the rich. People could recover an authentic sense of connection with place and therefore have a framework in which to cultivate responsibility."

                                        - Alastair McIntosh, Scottish activist, ecologist, writer, and bard                                                                                                                                                                                                           

So God Made a Farmer

GrowNYC

Below is a TED Talk given by Michelle Hughes, a friend and colleague who runs the very successful program GrowNYC. Enjoy!

Sometimes I Feel Like...

Agrarian Arendt

"The blessing of labor is that effort and gratification follow each other as closely as producing and consuming the means of subsistence, so that happiness is a concomitant of the process itself, just as pleasure is a concomitant of the functioning of a healthy body….The right to the pursuit of this happiness is indeed as undeniable as the right to life; it is even identical with it….There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance – poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death – ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive."

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

SSAWG Workshop: Growing Farm Profits

Do you need to know how to increase profits? Growing great crops is just not enough to make your farm economically sustainable. 

When/Where:        

December 1-2, 2012, Mills River, North Carolina

January 23-24, 2013, Little Rock, Arkansas

This course will cover:

Managing for Profitability

Critical Decisions

Product Pricing

Records that Matter

Enterprise Evaluation

Actual Expense Tracking

True Cost Discovery

Market Channel Evaluation

Profitability Calculating

Real Farm Examples 

Useful Tools

Real-farm data will be used to demonstrate practical ways to improve profitability. Participants will take home farmer-friendly business tools for keeping records and making decisions that affect profitability.

Register Now! To learn more about and to register for the North Carolina training, contact Bridget Kennedy at (828) 236-1282, bridget@asapconnections.org.

To learn more about and to register for the Arkansas training, which is being held just before Southern SAWG annual conference. These risk management trainings are brought to you by Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. Support is provided by the USDA Southern Risk Management Education Center.

Autumnal Lamb

This morning I walked out into the pasture and was surprised by the arrival of a new baby lamb to the flock at Ecotone! This is the first lamb from Red (AKA Red Ram from Riddy Road), and I must say she's beautiful! Several other ewes look like they may be near lambing too, and we'll post photos as they do.

Tennessee Local Food Summit

Come join local farmers, chefs, and community food activists at the 2nd Annual Tennessee Local Food Summit on November 30 and December 1 in Nashville! There will be a panel discussion and local foods dinner at the Sunflower Cafe on Friday night, and a barn dance at Green Door Gourmet after the workshops on Saturday. I'll be participating in the panel discussion, and will be around for most of the day on Saturday as well. Hope to see you there!