9/14/18 - Week 15 - Letters from Patagonia

David here. When I was 26, I found myself footloose, fancy free, and lost (existentially... and sometimes literally) in Patagonia. Outwardly, I was traveling; backpacking in the Andes for the purposes of “adventure”; but inwardly I was searching for something I could not explain.

In hindsight it was rootedness. Meaningful work. Purpose.

Somehow I ended up on a tiny, off-grid CSA farm on the Eastern slopes of the Andes, and found what I was looking for.

During that trip I was writing extensive, caffeinated letters to a friend from home. I've put one of last of those letters from the end of my stay on the farm, down below. It is angsty and verbose, but it also ends with maybe the precise moment that made me want to be a farmer. And, hey... Fall and Winter, the time for verbose angsty-ness, are nearly upon us!

I hope you enjoy.

-David

* * * * *

The valley of the Rio Azul near El Bolson, Patagonia, Argentina.

June, 2011

“When the sun rises, I go to work.

When the sun goes down, I take my rest

I dig the well from which I drink,

I farm the soil that yields my food,

I share creation, Kings can do no more.”

Ancient Chinese, 2,500 B.C.

It is very much winter now. I can see my breath in here. Things are quiet. I am spending the days caring for the animals, trying to trap the wild hares eating our last crops, baking bread like an old Grandma, and doing other random projects to help Alex the farmer wrap up the season. A spokeswoman for the local Mapuche native people just passed through and spent the night. A Gaucho Folk guitarist the next. My friend Ponta, a Japanese orphan who has had the hardest life I have ever heard of (and who revealed the last chapter of it to me yesterday) just left for Peru. I will miss her. One of our dogs is very sick. Another is pregnant. There is a volcano exploding 200 kilometers to the North, sending rolling thunder like stampeding horses down the valley. Life and death are tangible forces out here.

It will be hard to capture in words what the last two months on the farm have been like or what they have meant to me.

We have no electricity out here, no hot water, all the farming is done by hand. The only machines we have are a chainsaw, a weedwacker, and a dirt bike for town trips. A sweet, spindly old horse named Petiso will pull a harrow for us in exchange for a bucket of oats and complete freedom to roam the valley with his feral friends the rest of the time. All the buildings and huts and ovens here are cob and built by hand with wood, clay, and friends from the land. Three beloved dogs, Michay (wild like the native plant she is named after), her brother Pirata (a gentle pirate), and Tao (their mother), escort us everywhere. They sleep under my cabin every night, guarding it, and also guarding the garden from the horses. We harvest every Wednesday. The farm is the farm of the CSA members. Their children come and play with their food and chase the chickens. There is so much wealth here... so much poetry.

It’s all quite lovely, but I think it has done something deeper to me.

You and I have always felt called by nature -- to the tangy mountain air, to the oak meadows -- these places have felt like home. But time flies and we inevitably find ourselves pulled back along auto-littered highways to the turmoil, cement and grid of the city. There awaited the hidden pressure to specialize in one profession, one craft; for the love of it, if we are lucky, but also to pay for the 'necessities' which are piped to us. If we succeed, we make more and can spend more - we travel back to visit the tangy mountain air, to run our eyes enviously over the ranging hills, and then we return. But do we understand more? Do we share in creation?

Working on this farm has put me in forceful contact with the sources of my life -- the water, the land, the plants, the animals, -- and a realization that these things are not commodities, they are not necessities. They are us. They are our brothers, our sisters, our greatest teachers. To work with them is to work with creation.

The farmer, Alex, is very serious about this one point: The farmer knows that he does not create. He may have a vision for the farm, but after that he is an empty vessel, a butler, a steward. This is how he should work the land, coaxing it, observing, responding, moving this there, maybe taking that away. And then, one day, as if by magic, a vision reveals itself to him as he sits back peeling an apple, watching in awe as the shear creativity and richness of life weaves itself through the fields, writes it's stories in the rows, plays it's song in the seasons. The blossoms, bees, fruits, fungi, bacteria. The animals, the people, the stars, the moon -- the movements and arcs of their lives, and all their far flung interactions, alight the farm. But this symphony is also a dissonant song of chaos, poop, death and decay. But Death, the richest of masses (Mozart's richest Mass is his Requiem Mass) is the bed upon which joy and new life burst forth again and again in the Spring. This symphony writes itself into the hearts of anyone who will listen... and it has written itself in our culture.

Working here I’ve realized some things about culture, and art. Agriculture, tending the wild, or however a group of people survive in their land is the root of that people; it is their original art. Take the Mongols: The art they developed for surviving that steppe is inextricably woven into the fabric of their lives. It is their houses (the collapsable yurt), it is the fiber of the clothes they wear, the tools they handle everyday. It is the animals they see, and the animals they talk to, what they talk about with each other, what they dream about. It is the substrate of their myths, their legends, their stories, it is in their songs and it is the material that makes up their instruments. Our art of survival is the stage and the props of our lives. We are no different today. Although it may seem to be the case, we have not emancipated ourselves from the land under our feet and how we choose to cultivate it… and it in the fabric of our lives.

The raised bed gardens at La Granja Valle Pintado. We had dinosaur pest problems

Before coming here the word "farm" sent a chill down my spine. Why? To me, it meant mono crops; hectares upon hectares of almond trees; endless fields of corn. Temp wage labor. Agribusiness. It was artless, ugly, fragmented, socially and environmentally exploitative. What it took from from the soil it did not give back. Desire. Anonymous.

But like the Mongols, this agricultural system is also our culture. It is global. Sometimes faceless. Many people don't know their place, or where they come from, or their place and what they do is unknown to them. As American and Chinese agribusiness has mono-cropped Argentina and much of Chile, so has American culture "mono-cropped" much of South America. I don't think it's a coincidence that people started wearing the same clothes in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Santiago, and started building similar houses, and started dreaming the same dreams, at the same time that those countries adopted, or were forced to adopt, Western agribusiness, its methods, its seeds. In a certain reverse way, the art of how a culture sustains itself is a mirror on that culture... I'm not saying the reflection I'm seeing is 'bad', but is this how we want to live?

What I've seen here in the Painted Valley is pure art. It sustains many, and is sustained by the beings it sustains. The human culture around the farm hums with life. The farm has an identity, it is a home to so many. Inventors, pioneering agriculturists, builders, indigenous activists, artists, stop in and take refuge here almost daily. Economically and socially the farm works through mutualism. The association of families who support the farm are most concerned with the long term health of the farmland and the farmer -- as they should be, it is their sustenance. And so the farm’s produce, its vegetables, are priced with that in mind. In this sense, they are priceless. The farm itself is an ecosystem. Nothing is wasted, waste becomes new life. The air and leaf litter and creatures of the surrounding wild permeate the farm — which is like a slightly more organized emanation of it.

One evening after work, I was putting away some tools, and Alex came over with childish glee on his face yelling and pumping his arms in the air, "I love life in the campo! I love life in the campo (field)!”

"Me too!" I laughed.

He was serious all of a sudden, and stared inwardly, out at the small winter field of rye spreading before us. He was silent for awhile. Finally, he said quietly to me but also to himself, “It is the art of life and death, you know. Nothing more and nothing less."

* * * *

See you in the fields,

David & Kayta

9/8/18 - Week 14 - Conversation in the Field

There are unexpected perks and disadvantages to any and every occupation on this good Earth. The perks and prickles of farming are many and famous. Long hours, rewarding work. Dirty hands, clean hearts. Being at the whims of nature and also at her bosom.

One of our favorite perks of the profession, gifts that keeps on giving, are the abiding friendships we develop with the people we work with; our colleagues in the fields; compatriots through the long summer days; comrades in the Fall frosty harvests.

There is something about going through a season on a farm that feels like you really went through something with someone. Something indescribable. Something important. And you really get to know someone through the ups and down of a growing season; how they fall, how they get up.

Perhaps this bond is not unlike the bond soldiers speak of with their war buddies.

But I think the real secret to it in farming maybe something simple… and rather rare these days.

Lots of conversation.

It is well known: Human-scale agriculture requires a lot of repetitive work with the hands. Harvesting 800 feet of tomatoes; hand weeding 600 bed feet of Fall carrots; washing a morning’s worth of fresh vegetables. With the hands occupied, the mind and the heart — and the tongue — are freed to wander. One might say, on a 95 degree day, on the 4th of 5 tomato rows, they are required to wander for the upkeep of sanity. Regardless of need, with a buddy alongside you, and the hands occupied, the mind and heart oft and do wander together and great — or at least informative, interesting, revealing, or hilarious — conversations inevitably sprout up like weeds in the field.

Ingrid the Egret (far background) is a terrible conversationalist. Luckily we have Anna.

Wendell Berry (good old, Wendell!) famously writes about the culture of conversation (of good storytelling, of good “talk”) in the mid-century tobacco fields of Kentucky. There, he writes, the talk could be exceptional. And a good talker was as good as gold. A good talker could make the day fly by. A great talker could illuminate the soul. While the conversation topics have surely changed, this is all still true today at Green Valley Community Farm.

And lucky for us, we’ve got some exceptional talkers with us this season.

Anna, with her inquisitive, seeking, audacious mind; her breadth and depth of knowledge; and her proneness to outbreaks of ticklish rolling laughter, is a godsend of conversation during a late afternoon raking session. She is an encyclopedic font of Harry Potter knowledge (ask her anything), will deep dive with you in debate (she is a Ravenclaw, afterall), and change your mind for the better.

Kate’s buoyant, effervescent, pun-filled parley provides the breeze you need whilst crushing a 200 foot bind-weed invasion. She is a bold and compassionate explorer of the human heart and spirit, the queen of Lord of the Rings trivia (and puns), and the reigning champion of the celebrity-vegetable name game (i.e. Rutabaga Ginsberg; Benedict Cucumberpatch).

We are also fortuned enough to be visited by regular volunteers and farm visitors, who are great conversationalists themselves, and their relative rarity on the farm makes us drawn to their talk, to their minds, like moths to a flame.

Kayta and I have a deep history with field talk. Our relationship was essentially birthed through 7 months of field conversations on 6 acres of green fields in Western Massachusetts. I won her heart by narrating the entire plot of the movie “Aliens” over the course of three days of hand weeding (sound effects included). While our field talk now consists mostly of the practical aspects of keeping GVCFarm humming, we still cherish our field talk.

Farmers: We may be penniless paupers but we are filthy rich in long, deep, meandering, dialogue with our fellow humans and the friendships that come from it. And in this fast paced, disconnected age, that’s as good as gold.

See you in the fields,

David & Kayta

9/1/18 - Week 13 - Oaks: Reprise

Kayta and I are heading to a wedding in Colorado this weekend. The farm will be in Anna's capable hands. Below, is a repost from this time last year on some of our dearest tree neighbors, the mighty Oaks.

* * * * *

There was a chill in the air this week. The chill made us think of Fall -- of orange leaves, of fires, and of Oaks and acorns.

Top (L to R): Canyon live oak, Tan oak, Coast live oak, Interior live oak.

Bottom (L to R): Blue oak, Oregon White oak, Valley oak, Black oak, Oracle oak (Hybrid of Black oak x Interior live oak)

Kayta and I became very interested in the Oaks of California a few years ago. From a farmers perspective, it is nothing short of miraculous to witness thousands of pounds of food falling from the sky every year with little to zero human labor or toil. We dreamt then, as we do now, of bringing the abundance of the acorn into a CSA share someday...

But first, thought we, one must learn to identify what one is looking at.

Our goal became simple: To be able to approach an Oak tree in Sonoma or Marin County and proclaim, with scientific assurance, "This is a Black Oak tree!" or, "This is a Coast Live Oak tree!" or, "this is one of the other 6 species native to these parts!."  We packed our hiking bags with Tree Identification books, laced up our boots, and marched proudly into our future. Our future of Knowledge.

Life had other plans.

The first oak tree we approached, the "Wedding Tree" as our little neighborhood called it then, was a giant Quercus next to a tributary of Salmon Creek. It shaded and cooled us as we peered into our books. "See here, the leaf is lobed." "Yes, but not too deeply and not too shallowly." "Are there many lobes." "Yes, but they are rounded and not squared." "Hmmm." "The leaf seems as if it were a perfect amalgam of an Oregon White oak and a Valley Oak." "But what about the bark, is it gray or white?" "There seems to be a gradient from gray to white." "Is that possible?" "Evidently" "What about the texture of the bark?" "There, it is smooth. But here, it is ridged." "There it is like an alligator's hide, and there like an elephant's leg?"

The bark of the Wedding Tree seemed to match the descriptions of the barks of all the oaks. We scratched our heads. Wedding Tree swayed gently in the wind.

Foiled, but intrepid, we found another Oak. This tree, on a dry, south facing hill, had small, tough, dark green leaves that were armed with little spikes on the edges. A Live Oak, our guide books told us. But which? Again, we analyzed the tree; its shape, its leaf, its bark, its colors, we peered into our books --- and again, we could not ID it.

"Perhaps we are missing something?" thought we. "The acorn?" "Yes" "We will wait for the acorn." "We will wait for the Fall."

Late summer. The acorns grew. They filled out. Fall came. They turned from green to brown. They fell.

We returned to the Wedding Tree and searched the duff below her branches for little fallen answers. Finding an acorn we held it high, admiring its perfection. We turned it over and over in our fingers and felt the weight of the cool orb in our palms. We busted out the books. "The cup is warty, rather than scaled, wouldn't you say?" "I don't know, there are tiny scales growing out of the warts." "Definitely egg shaped though, right?" "Too thin." "A thin egg?" 

Fall deepened. So did our confusion. 

We stood under countless Oaks up and down the State. We looked for the trees described in the books but we could not find them. Buoyed by a few victories (the unmistakable cupped leaf leading us to the Coast Live Oak and the iconic star shaped leaf leading us to the Black Oak) we journeyed on, but every tree seemed to defy the language in our books in one way or another.

Around Thanksgiving, a breakthrough came to us in the form of a website describing the Oak families of California, or "the Clades", footnoted by a simple yet profound statement that trees within the same Clade can and do hybridize, and that there is such thing as an "Oregon Valley Oak". We knew, we had seen them everywhere. 

We began leaving our books at home. We stood under more Oak trees. And finally, it began to click. We began to see what we had always seen.

Every tree had its own face, every hillside and every valley, its own tribe. There were the Blue Oaks of the Sierra Nevada foothills along Highway 49, long trunked, long acorned, leaves thick and grayish blue, shaped by their land and place. And then there were the light green leafed, egg shaped acorned Blue Oaks of Annadel Park in Santa Rosa, modest and protected in the rolling hills they called home. And there were the Interior Live Oaks on the upper ridges in the Ventana Wilderness near Mount Carmel with their squat, arrowhead acorns, and tightly wound branches, and then their brethren down the ridge with pin pointed acorns and languid branches. Each group, each tree, was so unique.

In the end we found something. We found trees that more or less matched the descriptions in the books. We found shortcuts for distinguishing California Oak species from one-another. But we didn't really find what we thought we would.

What is out there, growing on the grasslands and in the canyons, is a reality more vast and incomprehensible than any book can hold. It is life. Ever changing, combining, and expressing. And every tree has its own face. 

Perhaps it is up to us to give those trees special and unique to us their own name.

See you in the fields,

David and Kayta