The Most Phallic Carrot In the World
Hello Big Team!
I’m finally starting to get back on top of things, and I’m excited a bit of a newsletter mix-up this week. It’s all about you! Well, it’s entirely prompted by Big Teammate questions, prompts, and feedback. I hope this beautiful collage of all of your brains gets you excited to meet one another and to dive into a big warm season of remembering that humans exist in three dimensions.
The Most Phallic Carrot with Mina Vafaeezadeh
“Last year while harvesting carrots we, of course, had a contest on who could pull the most phallic one of all. This took the cake.”
Please, and I really can’t emphasize this enough y’all, please send pictures of funny plants, funny animals, and tell me all the funny stories you have related to food, farming, nature, people—I’m not picky. We need the laughs. Please send similar veg-noods.
Why Cows with Lucy Ellis
“Right now the question I keep coming back to is — ‘Why cows?’ Would love to hear any of your thoughts on why cows.”
Happy to tackle that. Because honestly, I don't really believe in cows. I like to remind folx that cows are just European swamp-dwellers, the descendants of forest and wetland species, not one that developed on open plains like those of the American West. Because of that history, cows have some really destructive habits; they like to loaf and wallow in riparian areas, for one, and they're not big migrators, which is also not great for grass. They need shade and water brought to them because they're low-key kind of useless at big picture survival on their own, which requires a good amount of bending of nature to accommodate them. In short, I don't really think cattle are a good substitute for say, bison on the prairie. They may be better than nothing (though wild deer and other species are not *nothing*), but I'm definitely not trying to die on Cow Hill.
I think most of our domesticated animals have a similar problem, to be fair. Look no further than the desolation of the Middle East for The Problem with Sheep. Between humans and ovines, we transformed a fertile region into near impenetrable desert. That's nuts. Goats are really destructive to trees and bushes (being browsers). Chickens are flightless jungle birds that have to be concentrated (to some extent) because they have exactly 0 ability to protect themselves from almost anything outside that setting. Pigs have the opposite problem; they're too competitive outside their original environments and we very quickly get a 30-50 feral hogs situation.
So part of the problem with the domesticated animals we have to choose from, I'd say, is that we've moved them too far afield from where they thrive. Land races help with that a little— there are hardier cattle breeds more fit for the range, for example. But the markets we have tend to reward uniformity, which discourages these adaptations in a lot of cases. The other reality we don't like to face is that it's not necessarily that cattle are lazy to the point of destructiveness, that sheep want to eat a prairie to dust, that goats must strip trees like locust, or that chickens are useless meat sacks, it's that all those things occur because we're raising too many of these animals. All of these animals do a lot less damage when stocking rates aren't pushed to the max.
I like the Feral Loner Test to determine a species' fitness to be raised in a certain place. Basically, if an animal could get separated from its herd/flock/whatever, and not *necessarily* succumb immediately to starvation, dehydration, the elements, etc., than we've probably got a good species-ecosystem mix, one that holds dignity for the animals (who can survive), the humans (who are relieved of the burden of playing god), and the environment (that isn't being warped to accommodate an animal that doesn't fit). If a feral animal could never imaginably survive getting isolated from a domesticated environment for any amount of time, I think we should think hard about whether the choices being made there respect the dignity of the beings involved.
Anyway, now I'm rambling, but I'll just say, in response to "why cows?" I'd argue, "for no good reason." And if I was pushed to dig on why we focus on them so aggressively anyways, my guess would be 1) European (white) supremacy and 2) aren't long horns kind of just head penises? (There's a lot of weeeeeird masculinity shit that goes along with cattle in particular, but now I'm preaching to the choir).
On Joining the Big Team Farm from Natalie McGarry
“I was wondering if your book covers what office/behind the scenes roles/work there is on Big Team Farms and how to skill up for them? If not, do you know where I can learn? Basically, through a combination of listening to you and Chris Newman and by doing some broader reading, I'm convinced, Big Team Farms are the Future. And I'd love to go all in as a part of my future/career, but I'm an office worker in NYC with zero farming experience and after a couple years of reflection, I've also realized I'm fine with office work, and would love to be on a Big Team Farm, just...not necessarily doing the farming itself.
“So my question is, does your book have sections on what roles there are and what behind the scenes stuff there might be to do?…I don't mind taking a few years to skill up/train/educate myself in a skillset valuable to a BTF, but without a solid understanding of what's out there to do, I don't know how to pivot (I do database/project management stuff and have no idea if that's already useful? My guess is no, but then I hear about logistics stuff and using data in farming and I think...maybe in conjunction with other things? Should I just generally educate myself on the industry?)”
Okay, great questions here from Natalie, and I love the energy. I am also an office worker! I’ve done the farm work, and let’s be real, I wasn’t that good at it, and I didn’t like it that much. For better or worse, I’m great in a business meeting, I’m great at developing strategy, and I can’t resist a good comms or sales challenge. The phenomenal news is, there’s So. Much. Space. in agriculture for our kind of people, because there currently are none, so just a few of us could really shake things up.
Okay, so the direct answer to your question about the book is yes and no. The answer is yes because the number one skill necessary to being part of a Big Team Farm organization is understanding why a Big Team Farm works and the alternative doesn’t. Understanding the alternatives is critical to avoid making the same mistakes of competitive organizations.
The answer is no (and more directly so) because there’s not quite a handbook in Farm (and Other F Words) of the work that needs doing. The good news is, that’s basically what the whole of the next book (out December 2021, title still undecided— thoughts on People Farm?), but I’m happy to offer a preview.
First, there’s very few traditional business skills that are not important to food and farm businesses. We’re talking marketing (that’s my current role at Sylvanaqua), sales, accounting, legal, strategy, data science, project management, logistics, business development, personnel (humans are not “resources” so best to avoid the HR language), office and facilities management, operations, IT, customer service, you name it. In my experience, the best place to learn any of those skills is in an organization that already has talented practitioners on staff who are willing to mentor you, and which offers opportunities for leadership and growth. I’ve worked at a lot of crap organizations before, but even the worst of them taught me really, really important job skills.
Which brings me to my final point— beyond the technical skill sets listed above, the most important skills needed to work in a Big Team Farm setting are good communication and emotional maturity. Navigating a workplace that doesn’t rely on force (in other words, a traditional command-and-control hierarchy) is insanely different than navigating one that does. Learning how to advocate for yourself, for the organization, for team goals and priorities, not to a boss or a manager but to other co-equal members with their own priorities and goals is hard work. Any opportunities you have to live/work/serve in this kind of ultra-democratic space I think is critical experience.
After that, all I can say is, finding the right fit takes time. Full disclosure: I met Chris Newman, and observed Sylvanaqua from afar, for four years before I came on board. And by “came onboard” I mean I literally showed up on at the farm one day a week, every week, for six weeks, and eventually we developed a small marketing project for me to work on, which snowballed into a bigger support role, and then I basically just stayed persistent until I was in the place I wanted to be. It took knowing what I was good at and what I wanted to do, knowing what the farm lacked and where I could add value, and then just a lot of selling. This isn’t the first job that I’ve gotten in this way, and you know what? It’s never failed me. Find a farm (or other organization) you want to work at, and figure out what they need, what you like, and if they intersect, just stick with it! And when in doubt, have you considered a cold email? That’s how I met Chris.
“Lastly, I know I'm a stranger asking for specialized advice, if this was inappropriate or stepping over the line, please let me know. Or if there's some way I can reciprocate or compensate you for your time/help let me know (I don't mean that to be insulting, Twitter just has me very sensitive about demanding things from strangers).”
Appreciate you Natalie! I’m not the most prompt responder, but I pretty much always respond. No *need* to compensate me, but if you appreciate this response, you can always throw the folx at the Worker Justice Center of New York a donation.
Land of Our Ancestors with Carla and Clarice
I got two comments recently that I want to tie together with another idea I’ve been batting around. First, this heartbreakingly relatable note:
“I’m very guilty of dreaming of farming because I love land and nature, but my life has taken me to soil science and road transportation. I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, but was raised with a lot of familial guilt over “abandoning the farm for the city”… I personally feel that land is forbidden to me and most humans because most land I’ve encountered is privately held. Your work reminds me how this is a deliberate choice by people, but people can make different and better choices.” -Carla Ahlschwede
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve talked about Wyoming here, but I think about it daily. Lincoln is just a few dozen miles over the border in (please forgive my inborn bias, Carla) America’s Worst State, Nebraska. But I think about Wyoming all the time, about home, and whether or not I am still allowed to call it that.
I, like Carla, also have a complicated relationship with moving on from where I grew up. Though there wasn’t as much familial guilt about abandoning the farm (our farm was not multi-generational) I do still feel like it’s one or the other, like it’s not possible to be tied to urban communities and lifeways while also being connected to ruralness. I’ve also struggled with the fact that it hurts the rural community more to lose us, because the world of people they could lose is so much smaller.
Beyond that mental and emotional quagmire, is Carla’s point about land, which is what I want to focus on. The older I get, the more I realize that land is the only thing that really matters. Having a place to be, to exist, feels like the most important non-human relationship that a person could have. I regret quoting the deeply problematic movie Gone with the Wind, but unfortunately, it has a great line that really captures this:
“The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts.”
In a world where people are literally buying weird digital art for thousands of dollars, where many of us spend most of our waking hours staring at one screen or another, where wars can be fought almost entirely with machines, and someone on the Internet can learn almost anything they want about anyone; tangible, physical, real world things like land feels more important than ever. After all this time, all the strides we’ve made and all the things we’ve done, we haven’t escaped the fact that one of the only things that’s really, *really* worth having, no matter what, is a place to be ourselves. Land is survival, food sovereignty, long-term shelter and connection to nature. It’s home.
Considered this way, Carla’s sentence is a lot more alarming (and real). The sentence “[food sovereignty, long-term shelter, and connection to nature] is forbidden to me and most people,” is no simple regret, it’s an indictment of the society we live in.
It’s easy to remember all the wonderful and critically important things that land is, and to treasure it, and therefore understand why people would strive for it, crave it, and fight their whole lives to earn and keep it. But it’s equally important to remember that land doesn’t have to be owned exclusively to be valuable to the people who care for it. In fact, the meaning of a thing tends to be multiplied by the number of people who find it meaningful. We don’t have to hold land exclusively for it to offer food sovereignty, long-term shelter, and connection to nature for many. And nothing about our innate desire for these things demands that private families or individuals hold thousands and thousands of acres. That is simple avarice. And when an individuals greed results in the denial of basic human dignity (like say, lack of food sovereignty, long-term shelter, or connection to nature) that’s a societal problem that must be dealt with.
This brings me to Clarice’s note:
“We have a bin of peas that we found out yesterday have spoiled on top and I'm putting off going out to learn to use the grain vac after this so I'll keep ‘er brief.
I guess I have questions about where you go at the end there. For the white/settler-culture farmers among us, whose family's have bought in to and told and re-told the dominant Story about farms and farming in N. America for 2, 3 generations now, do you know what it would look like for us to tangibly do good work on this? Do you know of examples of ppl who have made significant contributions to reparations and continued to farm in a better way?
I think I am beginning to understand the tone in your writing. Tbh, sometimes I find it harsh, but I'm here for it. I'm just wondering, if Gracy was still farming today and writing this article as a farmer, what would you recommend she does?” —Clarice Martens
Great questions here; and I get why this is a scary prospect, because sometimes it can sound like the answer has to be “all the white people with land have to go away and give away everything they have.” This all-or-nothing outlook is a false dichotomy, and in the near-infinite range of options between “have all the land” and “give away all the land” is where Big Team Farms lie.
Let me use Gracy as an example. If Gracy (from last week) were writing as a farmer today, I would recommend that she consider transitioning her operation to a Big Team Farm. The steps are actually simpler than you might think (again, whole second book coming about this).
First, Gracy has to find partners that are talented where she is not. If Gracy loves the farm work, great. Then she has to find a trusted colleague with experience in the food or fiber space, who has a vision of how to help your farm seize an actual market opportunity. Then, she has to find a trusted colleague who’s a people person, who’s going to help her build a team that will execute on the vision while making sure the day-to-day work still gets done. This is going to be hard. These people need to be different from Gracy, not “yes men” or employees, but true partners with shared goals and ambitions, who have different perspectives and can come to different conclusions and advocate for themselves when they do. Diversity here is absolutely critical, and the absolute worse thing that a farmer could do in this case is to fill either of these roles with a partner or spouse.
Then, Gracy needs to sell these partners (or arrange to give them— a lot more on this later) part of the business. And I don’t mean part of the new thing. I mean part of the land, part of the physical assets, all of it. Give them part of the decision-making power too. Forget passing the farm on whole to kids or grandkids (how dare Gracy assume they want to be farmers, anyway?) and start acting like there’s a competitive business to be built and run that it will die if it isn’t profitable. Because it will (or should).
Then, develop a plan with her new partners to build the Big Team Farm. Identify who her customers are and learn how to meet them. Understand what they like and don’t like about her product and how she can make it better. Don’t expect them to come to her or to accommodate her business.
From there, a successful farm business comes together or it doesn’t. I’m simplifying a vast and complex process here, but this is a path to a more just farm system from my perspective. Because the more farms like this that exist and the more opportunities there are to farm, not just for those winners of the farmer genetic lottery, but for anyone with skills and passion for food and agriculture, the more non-old-white-man farmers we’ll see. And these aren’t farmworker or tenant positions either, these are ownership stakes in productive businesses that lead to beneficial and resilient outcomes for the original owners as well as new owners. Many businesses operate this way (law firms are a decent analogy that comes to mind), and there’s nothing stopping farms from following in their footsteps except for the very dominant farm story that Clarice mentioned— with it’s obsession with hereditary passage of land wealth.
This brings me aaaaallllllll the way back around to that idea that I’ve been toying with. I’ve been listening to The Pogues song Body of an American a bunch recently (honestly, don’t ask), and the lyric, “So big Jim Dwyer made his last trip/To the shores where his father's laid” has been nagging me. Death rituals have always fascinated me, and for many cultures, there is a critical element of the body “returning home.” And I get that. Because, yeah, when I think about where I want to end up, it’s Wyoming (though obviously, I’ll have no actual opinion on the matter at the time). Why? That’s the interesting part. I’ve been wondering if it’s possible that there could be a biological component. Like maybe because my fundamental substance and literal bones were made on that harsh Wyoming steppe, maybe I feel the tug of nature, trying to close a nutrient loop. Maybe it’s a good thing, a mark of our innate humility and willingness to participate in the circle of life, that we, too, want to go back to the land we came from.
Again, then, we have another data point that to separate people from land, to deny them access, to make them strangers from their homes, is not some simple reality of economics or “desire to live in the city” or whatever. To separate people from their homelands is to deny our very natures. There are few worse crimes, I think, and there are few better ways to restore justice than to make more space for more people on more land whenever we can.
#FarmArt
This too is user contributed! Teammate Cerberus on Twitter sent me this tweet a little while ago:
I’m a sucker for some stitching, in part because women have long used creative stitching as a way to resist the confines of the female identity, and in part because there’s something deeply therapeutic about drawing with string.
But this is a newsletter about agriculture, so I’ll share a tiny snippet of a certain forthcoming book that this art made me immediately jump to:
“There’s still this idea that farming and agriculture happens in a square,” A-dae [Romero-Briones of the First Nations Development Institute] says, bringing to mind the view out the window of an airplane. “But really, that’s still missing the point. Because everything outside of that square will affect that square, but we rarely ever talk about what’s outside of that square.” In other words, she says, nature does not recognize or respect private property. It operates on the scale of watersheds, ecosystems, and so, necessarily, on the level of community, not the individual or family. Assuming decisions made on one acre can stand independent from those made on each of its neighbors’ is simply another iteration of the flawed understanding that a part can be separate from the whole system.
Last F(ew) Things
I collaborated with Rhishi Pethe on an issue of his newsletter “Software is Feeding the World.” A lot of people liked it! And more importantly, it was fun. Check it out.
A little later today (10 et) I think I’m going to have my butt kicked when I participate in a carbon panel on Clubhouse (ugh). If you need a Clubhouse invite just ask. More info here:
Here’s a question: would you be interested in participating in a Big Team Farm book club? A chance to read something and then meet and connect with people in this community? If you’re interested, please let me know by clicking here.
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 more recent additions by visiting Big Team Farms online.
Do you have announcements that would be relevant to the 1,200 or so members of the Big Team? Feel free to shoot me messages about projects, resources, job posting, etc. And to everyone who’s done that already, or who has asked questions that I haven’t yet responded to, look out for those in the next couple of newsletters.
For those keeping track at home, I have taken a break from Outlander because it gets just way too sad, to watch A Discovery of Witches on AMC+, which, in case you didn’t know, is trash Twilight for adults. Like truly, it is a weird possessive vampire love story, but without the narrative cohesion of Twilight. That’s how bad it is. So naturally we watched both seasons in a weekend. I’m ded.
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Stay safe out there, dear ones. Don’t forget, if you have funny gifs, thoughts, comments, stories, questions, feedback, catchy song lyrics, good podcast recommendations, or anything else to tell me, I’m right on the other end of this email.
Rock on,
Sarah