Farm You, America
It’s morning in Washington, D.C. We are grateful to be safe, and to know that most of our friends are too. Despite all that happened yesterday, and what surely will continue in the days to come, I’m not going to spend any more energy on recent events than to tell you one of the most valuable lessons I learned while getting my degree in foreign service (lol, random, I know). The motivation for terrorism is to spread fear, discord, and disruption, using the violation of peace and safety as a political bargaining chip. Therefore, the only way to combat the use of terrorism is to be unrelenting in our fearlessness, to be in tight sync with our communities, and to be unshakable in our pursuits. If we can do that, we can sap terrorism of its power, leave its perpetrators as empty-handed and anonymous villains, forgotten by the history they felt entitled to define, and discourage its tactical use in the future.
So today, I’m writing to you about the future for farming we’re building together, one with the resilience to withstand much more severe calamities than the ones that currently threaten the community I call home. If you think discussions of American farming are distant from this moment, they are not. The way we practice agriculture in this country is an integral part of how we arrived here, and addressing those deep, systemic, and painful roots is a vital part of moving forward. We have the wisdom to know that while sending a mob to storm our sacred space is a blow, it is comparatively superficial compared to work like unseating the demons that haunt our food and farming system. Because we know that injustice fuels hatred, we won’t waste our time fighting the fringe armies of hatred, we’ll attack the very seat of injustice instead.
F(irst) of All, Some News about Other F Words
Remember today that swearing is good for you, physically, and can increase your pain and stress tolerance. So if it’s been a little bit of a rocky 2021 so far, don’t let anyone hold you back from saying whatever fucking F word you need to say.
Second of All, Some News about Farm (and Other F Words)
Revisions have begun *aggressively*, which means some of you will be receiving bizarre, late night/early morning emails from me asking extremely out-of-the-blue questions that I think you might know the answer to. I promise there is a method to the madness, so thanks for bearing with me. Also, you all will be getting a sneak peak at some chapters in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out if you’re interested in some lite but highly exclusive spoilers.
And a final update; we blew up IndieGoGo so aggressively that the campaign has been marked InDemand, and the purchase deadline has been extended a few more days. So if you know anyone who meant to get in on all this but hasn’t yet, they can still pre-order. (Feel free to forward them this email if they’re interested!)
F(arm) of War
Speaking of doing battle, etc., I (or better yet, someone like Ariel Greenwood, a Big Team member and rancher whose thoughtful insights on Western land management, agrarian psychology, and all things really, makes her a fabulous follow/connection) could write a whole book about children’s media and farming— especially games.
But all great children’s media, be they Maurice Sendak books, Pixar Movies, or many modern board games, aren’t just for children— they’re for the children inside us all. In the depth of quarantine my partner and I gave in and purchased Scythe, a game set in an alternative history 1920’s, a time it describes as one of “farming and war, broken hearts and rusted gears, innovation and valor” (I’m tempted to spend several paragraphs dissecting just those 11 words, but we’ll push on).
The designer includes a fascinating note about the game’s title;
“A scythe is both an instrument of farming and a weapon of war, which perfectly encapsulates the combination of those two elements in the game. The workers rely on the protection of your military just as much as your empire depends on the resources they produce.”
In some ways, this description evokes a kind of alternative to the biblical “swords to ploughshares” mythology, where instead of reshaping our destructive tendencies and technologies into tools of progress and growth, we (or the alternative reality “we”) accept a perpetual state of intermittent growth and destruction, and keep a tool nearby that can be used for both.
Here’s a game piece in my favorite color—
The steampunk tractor-cum-tank design of these piece highlights a reality of modern farming that we’ve worked very hard to forget. Many of the technologies that have defined agriculture in the last 100 years, from chemical pesticides to heavy farm machinery to GPS steering to the modern grocery store, were either invented or perfected during the world wars and the early Cold War, either as war time technologies themselves (chemical pesticides like glyphosate were invented for use in chemical warfare) or as a result of wartime tech advancements. Businesses that grew wealthy during the war looked to find a use for their once lucrative (murder) tech at home, and with FDR’s Vice President being the founder of Pioneer Seeds (now owned by DowDupont), the New Deal Department of Agriculture was excited to help farmers buy all that top of the line technology— machines, chemicals, fertilizers, and hybrid seeds, and smooth their adoption with the knowledge of publicly-funded extension agents. Framed another way, we took our tools of destruction, refined in the most extensive war on Earth to date, and put them to the task of subduing nature. And taxpayers paid to help.
In this way, the story built into this game reveals more than it obscures (as good science fiction does).
I love these mission cards, because they’re very Hogwarts house in their breakdown, offering the choice between “the Philanthropist,” “the Capitalist,” and Slytherin. In reflecting on how America has moved through the world since the 1920s in our non-alternate reality, we’ve done a lot of very Slytherin things, prioritizing material gain over our social or moral standing in the global community. And agriculture has been a huge part of that. Our insistence on subsidizing the production of commodity corn and other grains (for decades) is a direct cause of the instability of agricultural markets in the Global South. To this day, we are using food and agricultural production as a weapon; as a way to threaten or coerce trading partners, to harm less affluent countries who displease us (by either flooding their markets or withholding food aid), or to create barriers for our competitors, regardless of who goes hungry in the process.
Though I like Scythe, if I were to recommend a board game with some food system elements to get you through the rest of quarantine, I’d go with Spirit Island instead. Mostly because most of us were raised in a agro-conquesting culture consistent with Scythe’s whole ethos, but many fewer of us have lived as the original inhabitants of a place, collaboratively fighting off an indefatigable agro-conquesting people to preserve the habitability of our homeland (but boy, could we use the practice). Though with less direct farm elements (other than blight, a reality of settler colonial agriculture that is rarely discussed), it offers a really impactful look at how hard it is to combat invaders. Plus it’s always more fun when everyone wins or losses together.
F(armArt)
I am so excited to introduce you all to the gorgeous work of Al Woody, a Diné Native Artist. Seriously, if you need a minute of zen in your life today, head over to his Instagram and just take a scroll through his work (and it’s pretty much all for sale, hit him up!). It’s… it’s… well, I’ll let him tell you about it.
“Grandmother said ‘these new generations are lucky,’ and I said ‘why, grandma?’ She said ‘we had to carry our drinking water from the well miles away, through the elements. Building a fire for light..now you can get up flick a switch! wallah, light!! Then keep walking, then turn a knob! Magic!! Water!! Spoiled.’ she said in disgust.
It is hard for me, because she passed 2019, two weeks before my birthday. I miss her. But our elders have experienced worst times and situations.
When we were children, we were made to work around the home. I used to follow my grandmother to the corn fields. She always told me the importance of farming, hunting, survival. To be adaptive to the weather. She said nature has no remorse. We have to move with it, and take care of it.”
When there are calls to re-center the most innovative farmers the world has ever known in American ag (namely, Indigenous American farmers), I often here the response that “Indigenous people were basically hunters and gathers, and we can’t live like that anymore. We have to farm the way we farm.”
Just to give you a salvo for your personal arsenal for when you inevitably need to disprove everything about the above statement, consider this marvelous quote from Charles Mann’s 1491;
“Indian farmers grow maize [corn] in what is called a milpa. The term means ‘maize field,’ but refers to something considerably more complex. A milpa is a field… in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and beans, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume)… The milpa is an elaboration of the natural situation, unlike ordinary farms, which involve single-crop expanses of a sort rarely observed in unplowed landscapes. Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary… as a result… The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes… ‘is one of the most successful human inventions ever created.’”
Unlike even the most “sustainable” ag practices of today, the milpa has a proven record of success, with some locations in Mesoamerica having been continually cultivated in milpa for 4,000 years. Needless to say, not only are Indigenous people not just hunters and gathers, they are arguably the source of some of the most advanced farming knowledge and inventions in the world (hello, maize/corn). So, I don’t know, maybe the rest of us could sit the hell down for a minute and let our elders speak.
When I look at these images, I see all of this. Thousands of years of history, expertise, and care. And what wisdom has been wrought along that path? Humility, the ability to tread lightly and to weather hardship, and an unyielding hope that the sun will rise again on a new generation.
Last F(ew) Things
Your inbox didn’t eat it— I didn’t send a BTF Newsletter last week. Let me tell you, I had a vision of coming back hard and fast after that mildly depressing Christmas edition with a hopeful, soaring message about all the things we’re going to do this year, how we’re going to get through it all together, what doesn’t kill us, etc. But then I thought, it’s always easy to have big dreams and starry eyed goals on New Years Day. It’s a lot harder to show up in these streets, in ways big and small, on Jan. 7th, and the 14th, and March 5th, and June 29th, and October 11th. This work isn’t really “one big speech and you’re done” kind of work, any more than it’s “one book (or two) than you’re set” of “one victory and its fixed” kind of work. So I’ll save my best “soaring hope for the future of farming” material, and try and sprinkle it across some more ordinary days when maybe we’ll all need it a little more, and in the meantime, I hope you all had a peaceful and restful New Years, cause we’ve got some work to do 😘 .
If you’re new to Big Team Farms and want some explanation for what the F you just read, check out The Intro Newsletter and “Nobody Wants to Read About Agriculture”, “We Found Some Animals and Now They’re In Prison” and “We Won’t Be Home for Christmas”
That’s all friends. Thanks for being my reason to keep my sanity today— my one stable thing to focus on while the world does its best to shake us loose. In moments like this, people love to trot out the “look for the helpers” line from Fred Rogers, but I like to remember that these are also our opportunities to be the helpers. So hopefully this email helped you a little bit. Writing it helped me a lot. You all give me so much purpose, and I hope I can, in whatever small way, return the favor. So remember, if you have questions, comments, concerns, or high quality gifs (especially farm-related) you’d like to share, I’m right on the other end of this email.
Sarah