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By Michael Ableman
In 1983 during a trip to hike in the Himalayan Mountains I found myself
on an unplanned detour into Mainland China. After walking for several
hours into the countryside that surrounded the city of Chengdu I came
upon a narrow path that wound its way up and away from the road, eventually
cresting on the top of a hill. There below me for as far as I could
see was a vast network of tiny fields of vegetables surrounded by
waterways and paths. Each of these tiny farms was being worked by
families, hundreds of them, of every generation.
This sight was amazing enough but even more so when I discovered that these families were working land that had not only been worked by the parents and their grandparents but by their great grandparents, and great great grandparents and in many cases all the way back for some four thousand years. Four thousand years on the same land yet it still appeared fertile and productive.
This experience triggered my desire to see the remnants of traditional agriculture in other places. I returned to China to explore in more depth the oldest agricultural tradition in the world. I visited central and east Africa, southern Europe, and in the Andes I observed ancient cultivation on land so steep that farmers have been known to fall out of their fields. I discovered that we are not doing anything new, that we have merely picked up the thread from something very old, taken our place in a long succession that goes back thousands of years.
In 1981 I started the work of developing Fairview Gardens. Twelve and a half acres floating like an island in a sea of tract homes and shopping centers. That farm has become a model for what is possible on a small piece of land within an urban or peri-urban environment. Some publication recently referred to it as "the little farm that could". It produces a hundred different fruits and vegetables, feeds 4-500 families, employs 27 people, and provides educational programs to as many as 5000 per year. Threatened with jail time for making compost, challenged by its new urban neighbors because of the crow of the roosters and ultimately in danger of being developed, the farm has survived and is now preserved under an active agricultural conservation easement that protects it forever.
Now you might think that after twenty years on the same piece of land that you might have it figured out. Perhaps I am unusually slow, but it seems to me that after all those years instead of having more answers, I’ve actually had more questions. Each year its like starting over again; the climate is different, the marketplace changeable, the condition of the soil improved but with different responses.
It doesn’t seem to matter how long you’ve been farming it’s difficult to shake off the cultural programming that we all seem to carry around; that a farm or garden should be made up of straight rows filled only with what we put in them, that somehow we are in control, and that good farming is about technique. But as hard as we may try to mold and manipulate our farms into our own image, nature always has another idea.
Nobody ever told me this when I started, and so now I require our apprentices to take a notebook and walk the farm several times a week recording what they see. I want them to develop what I consider to be the most important agricultural skill observation, and I want them to discover for themselves that biological systems never stay the same.
I really believe that whatever success I have had and that is a very relative term has come when I approach my farm with a beginner’s mind.
In the spring of 2001 I began what was supposed to be a one-year sabbatical from Fairview Gardens. After putting in the spring plantings, and endless meetings to organize every possible eventuality and detail, we packed up our stuff, walked the fields and orchards one last time, said our good-byes and headed north 1000 miles to the small farm we bought on an island not too far from here. As we traveled north it was like watching a piece of time-lapse film footage in reverse from spring back into winter. The orchards in central California were in full bloom, in the northern part of the state they were just beginning to show pink, in southern Oregon buds were just swelling and when we reached Canada everything was still completely dormant. So after arriving and moving in I waited and I watched as spring came to the north, and what a glorious show it was.
Then I started the spring routine again; making and spreading compost, mowing and turning new fields, planting asparagus, pruning and mulching and starting transplants in flats in the greenhouse. The chicken coops were two feet deep in manure, the fences needed repair, and I was starting over again. For the first time in many years I worked alone in the fields; no telephones ringing, no visitors to show around, no interviews to give, no students or apprentices to instruct, no lectures or classes to teach, no staff to give direction to or meetings to attend.
While the return to pure physical work has had its own challenges, it was like coming home, returning to my roots, finding my way back to that which brought me to farming in the first place the love of land and good food, and the desire to share that with others. Pretty simple stuff. My hands are fully callused again, and the calluses on my brain have begun to soften, allowing my mind to slow down to the quiet rhythms of the land.
This change has not come without difficulty. After years of living a very public life, I suddenly found myself in a very quiet, very private space. At first it was pure bliss, the quiet and the simplicity was incredible, but after a few months the thoughts and questions started to creep in What gives me the right to be off on my private land doing my own thing? Don’t I have a responsibility to the world? How does this little farm on an island fit into my broader worldview? I realized that I was carrying around a very common misconception - that activism is only manifested in street protests, political challenges, or public campaigns. But I am coming to believe that my quiet time on the land spent rebuilding soils, engaging in community life, providing food for my neighborhood is as political and as powerful as all of my years of more frantic public activity.
These last two summers my twenty-year-old son has been with us on the farm. I cannot describe the sense of deep satisfaction and fulfillment it is to have him working next to me in the fields, to watch him patiently explain the qualities of fresh dug potatoes or green garlic to customers at the farmers market, to discover that all of these years he had really been paying attention. And I remembered that another form of activism is in how we raise our children.
During this time I also took a break from the news. Aside from the island paper which focuses on local news and events, I did not listen to the radio, watch TV, or read a major newspaper for five and half months. Remarkably, instead of being out of touch, the further I dropped out the more I seemed to tune in. The more quiet time I spent on my land, and within my local community the more real information I seemed to be receiving. I discovered that important news does not only come from CNN or CBC or NPR it comes as I walk my land, meet people at the mail box or the hardware storeIn 1983 during a trip to hike in the Himalayan Mountains I found myself on an unplanned detour into Mainland China. After walking for several hours into the countryside that surrounded the city of Chengdu I came upon a narrow path that winded up and away from the road, eventually cresting on the top of a hill. There below me for as far as I could see was a vast network of tiny fields of vegetables surrounded by waterways and paths. Each of these tiny farms was being worked by families, hundreds of them, of every generation.
This sight was amazing enough but even more so when I discovered that these families were working land that not only been worked by the parents and their grandparents but by their great grandparents, and great great grandparents and in many cases all the way back for some four thousand years. Four thousand years on the same land yet it still appeared fertile and productive.
This experience triggered my desire to see the remnants of traditional agriculture in other places. I returned to China to explore in more depth the oldest agricultural tradition in the world, I visited central and east Africa, southern Europe, and in the Andes I observed ancient cultivation on land so steep that farmers have been known to fall out of their fields. I discovered that we are not doing anything new, that we have merely picked up the thread from something very old, taken our place in a long succession that goes back thousands of years.
In 1981 I started the work of developing Fairview Gardens. Twelve and a half acres floating like an island in a sea of tract homes and shopping centers. That farm has become a model for what is possible on a small piece of land within an urban or peri-urban environment. Some publication recently referred to it as "the little farm that could". It produces a hundred different fruits and vegetables, feeds 4-500 families, employs 27 people, and provides educational programs to as many as 5000 per year. Threatened with jail time for making compost, challenged by its new urban neighbors because of the crow of the roosters and ultimately in danger of being developed, the farm has survived and is now preserved under an active agricultural conservation easement that protects it forever.
Now you might think that after twenty years on the same piece of land that you might have it figured out. Perhaps I am unusually slow, but it seems to me that after all those years instead of having more answers, I’ve actually had more questions. Each year its like starting over again; the climate is different, the marketplace changeable, the condition of the soil improved but with different responses.
It doesn’t seem to matter how long you’ve been farming it’s difficult to shake off the cultural programming that we all seem to carry around; that a farm or garden should be made up of straight rows filled only with what we put in them, that somehow we are in control, and that good farming is about technique. But as hard as we may try to mold and manipulate our farms into our own image nature always has another idea.
Nobody ever told me this when I started, and so now I require our apprentices to take a notebook and walk the farm several times a week recording what they see. I want them to develop what I consider to be the most important agricultural skill; observation, and I want them to discover for themselves that biological systems never stay the same.
I really believe that whatever success I have had, and that is a very relative term, has come when I approach my farm with a beginner’s mind.
In the spring of 2001 I began what was supposed to be a one-year sabbatical from Fairview Gardens. After putting in the spring plantings, and endless meetings to organize every possible eventuality and detail, we packed up our stuff, walked the fields and orchards one last time, said our good-byes and headed north 1000 miles to the small farm we bought on an island not too far from here. As we traveled north it was like watching a piece of time-lapse film footage in reverse from spring back into winter. The orchards in central California were in full bloom, in the northern part of the state they were just beginning to show pink, in southern Oregon buds were just swelling and when we reached Canada everything was still completely dormant. So after arriving and moving in I waited and I watched as spring came to the north, and what a glorious show it was.
Then I started the spring routine again; making and spreading compost, mowing and turning new fields, planting asparagus, pruning and mulching and starting transplants in flats in the greenhouse. The chicken coops were two feet deep in manure, the fences needed repair, and I was starting over again. For the first time in many years I worked alone in the fields; no telephones ringing, no visitors to show around, no interviews to give, no students or apprentices to instruct, no lectures or classes to teach, no staff to give direction or meetings to attend.
While the return to pure physical work has had its own challenges it was like coming home, returning to my roots, finding my way back to that which brought me to farming in the first place; the love of land and good food, and the desire to share that with others. Pretty simple stuff. My hands are fully callused again, and the calluses on my brain have begun to soften allowing my mind to slow down to the quiet rhythms of the land.
This change has not come without difficulty. After years of living a very public life, I suddenly found myself in a very quiet, very private space. At first it was pure bliss, the quiet and the simplicity was incredible, but after a few months the thoughts and questions started to creep in; What gives me the right to be off on my private land doing my own thing? Don’t I have a responsibility to the world? How does this little farm on an island fit into my broader worldview? I realized that I was carrying around a very common misconception, that activism is only manifested in street protests, political challenges, or public campaigns. But I am coming to believe that my quiet time on the land rebuilding soils, engaging in community life, providing food for my neighborhood is as political and as powerful as all of my years of more frantic public activity.
These last two summers my twenty-year-old son has been with us on the farm. I cannot describe the sense of deep satisfaction and fulfillment it is to have him working next to me in the fields, to watch him patiently explain the qualities of fresh dug potatoes or green garlic to customers at the farmers market, to discover that all of these years he had really been paying attention. And I remembered that another form of activism is in how we raise our children.
During this time I also took a break from the news. Aside from the island paper which focuses on local news and events I did not listen to the radio, watch TV, or read a major newspaper for five and half months. Remarkably, instead of being out of touch, the further I dropped out the more I seemed to tune in. The more quiet time I spent on my land, and within my local community the more real information I seemed to be receiving. I discovered that important news does not only come from CNN or CBC or NPR it comes as I walk my land, meet people at the mail box or the hardware store, or across the table at the farmers market. I heard about the big stories, but in a strange way it seemed more important for me to know that my friend who farms down the road got a good crop of potatoes, that my neighbor had her baby and that all is well, that our island community has created its own currency with pictures of Orca whales and local farms and farmers instead of queens and dead presidents, and that it is unified in protecting its watershed, its forests, and its farmland.
And as if all of these changes were not enough my wife and I had a baby. I have to be honest, as satisfying as it was to raise my eldest son, as much as I love teaching and working with children I was more than a little resistant about starting over again. But nature exerts a powerful force on our psyches. Within a microsecond of the birth of my new son all of my resistance and hesitancy, my worries about the state of the world, my concern and sense of responsibility in bringing another being in, were instantly dissolved and I was totally in love.
Amongst other things young children give you space from that frenetic, kinetic, hyped up, sped up pace that life is moving. It is as if we have all become cogs in the wheels of federal express, fax machines, and instant Internet. The scary thing is it never seems to be fast enough.
And yet every time I plant a seed and I see it emerge it slows me down and allows me once again to experience one of the great mysteries of life, and on some level each time I cannot help but be renewed.
This is why I farm. My back gets sore, and it is hot or cold or wet, or I’m tired and my brain starts to add up how many of the same boxes I’ve filled, and lifted, and put away and filled and lifted year after year, how many trucks I’ve loaded and unloaded, rows cultivated, peaches thinned, carrots bunched. But some impulse far more powerful than my rational mind keeps me going cycle after cycle worn out and exhausted by the time winter arrives, but thoroughly excited to begin anew each spring.
With minor interruption I’ve had this experience over and over for the last 30 years. I feel pretty lucky that I can plant and nurture and harvest and share and enjoy each day the bounty of the land right outside my backdoor.
But even as I am having this blessed experience I often feel a bit of sadness. I am aware that most of our society no longer has this opportunity, no longer knows what it is like to pull a carrot from the ground or eat the heart out of a watermelon still warm from the sun, or munch on beans that are so fresh they explode in your mouth when you eat them.
There is a different kind of nourishment less tangible than the carrots and the beans and the melons, that being connected with the land provides; a deeper soulful nourishment that I think our society is desperately longing for. It cannot be had from food that travels an average thirteen hundred miles from the field to the plate, it can’t be absorbed from a package or from the shelves of the supermarket or from anonymous ingredients floating out of context. It cannot be enhanced or disguised or manufactured. Even the most complex preparations, the most sublime sauces cannot bring to life what is not already there.
The kind of nourishment I am describing is the result of understanding connections, knowing the person who grew the food, knowing that their family was paid a living wage, knowing that the land is well cared for and protected from development, knowing that the ingredients have not been assaulted with an array of chemistry or that it hasn’t been irradiated, or that its genetic makeup hasn’t been messed with.
In 1996 I gave a speech to the IFOAM congress in Copenhagen. The title of that talk was Beyond Organic, Cultivating a Revolution. At the time there were a lot of organic success stories, lots of money being made, folks were getting pretty comfortable and not everyone was too excited to hear my challenge. And so after years of being labeled a heretic for my public concerns regarding the industrialization of organic I was pleased to see that the New York Times ran a story on the topic, that people here are talking about it, and that a few folks have even borrowed the Beyond Organic title.
In the late sixties and early 1970s US Secretary of agriculture Earl Butz confirmed federal agriculture policy when he coined the phrase get big or get out. In spite of that the organic movement remained a local, community-based alternative that focused on the importance of building and sustaining living soils. We rejected the arsenal of chemicals that were vigorously marketed by manufacturers and their government representatives. But more than substituting organic materials to replace chemicals, we wanted to redefine the food system as a whole, to offer an alternative in which individual, social, and environmental health did not have to be a casualty of eating. Instead we have become seduced by the very food production and distribution system we sought to oppose.
Now you can see the products of organic farms on supermarket shelves shrink-wrapped next to the Cheetos. There are a lot of folks who are heavily invested in this; they think that this is a good thing, a sign of progress, they say that we are now an industry, that we have grown up, that the days of a movement populated by long hairs and local activists is gone. But movement implies social change, forward thinking, industry implies economics. The traditional bottom line does not assign a value to soil fertility, to the long term well being of community, to the preservation and vitality of local economies.
Organic farming has become industrialized and globalized, helped along by legislation that encourages large scale production, and by a host of organicrats who are creating so much regulation, so much paperwork, so many new fees and inspections, that we will wish we had taken that office job rather than sought out the independence that farming once provided.
So I think we’ve got to renew our commitment to the values that inspired the movement. The movement started by asking questions such as: How was this grown? What materials were used in its production? We now need to start asking questions again, new questions like: How far does food travel from the field to the plate, and at what cost in terms of energy, fossil fuel and food quality? Whose hands grow and harvest our food and are they paid a living wage? Does the farmer or the community own the land, or will we rebuild soils only to lose land to real estate development? How do we make pure food available to all, not just those who can afford it? How do we educate consumers and how do we encourage future farmers?
The USDA, Codex, IFOAM, the FAO, Ottawa, or Washington cannot answer these questions for us nor can they place a definition on the values they reflect, for they are spiritual values and rely on a system of regulation that far exceeds any that can be legislated. I like to call it community certification, it is based on some old fashioned values called honor and trust. It is dependent on the most vital aspect of a healthy food system - relationships; local, biological, interpersonal, ecological.
We’ve got to find new ways to talk about what we do. We may have to use different words. As invested as we may think we are in Organic I think it is time to let the word go. When any movement becomes institutionalized and industrialized and globalized it is time to move on.
My former neighbours who shop in supermarkets are well paid, highly educated individuals, many who work at the high-tech defense research companies that design the so called smart bombs that we saw being dropped on Afghanistan. Yet if supermarkets stayed closed, they would have been hard pressed to feed themselves. With all of their education, with all of their financial resources, with all of their knowledge about the most sophisticated technologies, they would be powerless when faced with taking care of the most basic of human needs.
In contrast I think of the gardens that I visited in New York, in Philadelphia, in the bay area and other urban communities around America when I was working on my first book. I think of the community in Watts where we built a market garden. Neighborhoods where average household incomes are $8000 a year, where infant mortality and violent crime rates are among the highest in the country. And yet in those most vulnerable of places food is being produced and consumed and sold. I remember one woman who told me while standing in her house with broken windows that they always "grow extra to feed the poor." I had to wonder "who really are the poor"?
So I’d like to challenge the common perception that farms by definition need be separate from cities and that food must flow into the city from somewhere else. This assumption implies that urban dwellers are helpless creatures just waiting like baby birds in the nest to be fed from distant farms, and that the urban environment cannot create and sustain its own internal food systems.
In fact most folks believe that the responsibility of feeding the world belongs wholly to farmers. But when the food system no longer fulfills the needs of the people, whether for economic or distribution reasons or because of concerns for food safety, or simply because people want corn that tastes like corn, or potatoes that are more than just a tasteless medium to convey ketchup and salt to their mouths, then people need to take that responsibility back into their own hands.
So while many look to a new agriculture organic or otherwise as the source of salvation, it may be that the real revolution is taking place in neighborhoods, backyards and cities. A significant percentage of the world’s poor are surviving not from the products of their nation’s farms but from their own small urban plots. This remarkable shift is taking place on postage stamp sized gardens, next to railroad tracks and under power lines, on rooftops, and in the most unlikely of places. It is a movement that has the potential to address a multitude of issues: economic, environmental, personal health and cultural.
If we really love our land then lets protect and restore wildness, support local agriculture and plant gardens. After all what good is a country without fertile soil, ancient forests, clean water or pure food? Those who work for these things are the real heroes.
Getting Beyond Organics: Key Solutions
As we bear witness to the disappearance of nature, and the disconnection
of our society from it, we also see an increase in confusion, an extreme
lack of compassion and understanding for how to care for each other
and for our world, a loss of understanding in regards to cause and
effect. We need to seek out and support those people and places that
are providing real food and real earth based experiences, where we
can go and see food growing, observe natural process, and where we
can teach our children about context and interrelationships, places
that provide some sense of being rooted in the real world, not just
hooked up to some computer screen.
We have to ask ourselves who really benefits from the concentration
of control of the food production system? Are rural communities better
off; have we provided more safe and well paid jobs; is the air and
the water cleaner; does the food taste better and is it safer to eat;
does it have more nutritional value; is the society healthier and
better fed? Important, critical, and urgent decisions are being made
every day about our food and about our future and they are being made
far from the land and far from the table by people whose primary focus
is on the bottom line. But the traditional bottom line does not consider
the unpredictability of nature nor does it assign a value to soil
fertility or the well being of the land, the farmer, or the community.
As the percentage of the population growing the nourishment for the
rest continues to get smaller, as the control over our means of producing
food is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer the problems
in our food system will get larger and larger.
Several years ago before George Bush claimed ownership of the term
Julia Child called me a terrorist, specifically a food terrorist.
I had just given a talk to an audience of food professionals and had
encouraged them to consider more deeply where their ingredients came
from and how they were produced. Julia was critical of me for bringing
up issues that interrupted the "pleasure of the table". She didn’t
like that I talked about the children in Guatemala we visited, seven
and eight years old, carrying backpack sprayers that weighed more
than they did, spraying crops with no masks, crops that would end
up on northern tables in the winter time. Or when I reminded this
audience that 19,000 children die each day as a result of malnutrition
and related illnesses, and that we live in a world that is nutritionally
divided. Some of us are overfed and others are underfed.
Food security is not just the responsibility of farmers; it is the
responsibility of the society as a whole. It is popular to talk about
saving the land, about sustainable agriculture; regular folks are
even talking about soil and water. But what about the sustainability
of those who are doing the work. We can save the land but we also
need to save the farmer. As we get older many of my friends and colleagues
are looking for ways to pass their work on. Providing farm successions,
creating exit strategies that work for both young and old is something
we all need to be talking about. All of the most sophisticated techniques,
the most rigorous organic methods were nothing compared to the human
and community component of our work. The best fertilizer is indeed
the farmer’s footsteps on the land.
Michael Ableman is a farmer, educator, photographer, author and
a popular speaker on food and agricultural issues. This article was
edited from his presentation at IFOAM 2002.
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