Good Morning Big Team Farm—
We’re in the home stretch of the book, and many of you have gotten a preview. If you too are feeling like you can’t possibly wait and want a sneak peak at a chapter, that can be arranged. Email me.
Exciting news— we’ve got some cover mock-ups to consider!
Let me take you on a very short book cover journey. It starts with knowing that in my heart, I’m a book person. When I get really stressed, nothing relaxes me like a trip to Barnes & Noble (yes to local bookshops too, as long as there’s coffee). In my days, I have loved many a cover, and I know how important a cover can be. Not just as a first impression that offers some hints about what’s inside, but also as a beautiful piece of art that I (or any of you) would be happy to pull out at a coffee shop or on a city bus and read conspicuously. I want this book to have the kind of cover that is instantly recognizable, cheeky, familiar yet surprising, and that acts as a bat signal so that when you see people toting it in public, you know immediately that you and they are on the same team.
In my search for inspiration, the first cover I found that I absolutely loved was this one:
This masterpiece truly speaks for itself.
Unfortunately I don’t think my designer captured the essence of this cover quite in the way I was looking for (it was a brief mock up, but still):
But I think the second idea went better. Inspired by one of my all-time favorite book covers— there’s millions of Internet points on the table to anyone who can guess what it is (not the art, the cover-spiration).
Anyway, these are the ones we have right now, though they’re just rough ups, and there’s a final secret surprise cover option in the works. I’d be curious to hear what you think! Respond to this email, @ me on social, etc. I’m all ears.
The True Crime of Bees
At the intersection of agriculture and true crime, you’ll find the annual articles about honey bee heists. Since 2016, honey bee farmers have had their crop of bees stolen at increasingly alarming rates, costing them tens of thousands to millions of dollars. It’s become such a problem that some parts of California’s central valley have created their own Agricultural Crime Units.
I wanted to write for you about these bee crimes in part because I personally love true crime, and in part because it’s just a really interesting story. But I kept getting hung up on one question;
Why does it matter?
You see honey bees are critical to California agriculture because so many of California’s crops depend on imported pollinators (like honey bees brought in by truck from states like Idaho). The multi-billion dollar almond industry in particular depends on these pollinators-for-hire. So I thought, well, maybe bee heists matter because stolen bees lead or have led to almond shortages. Except in 2020 (due to a vast reduction in trade with China and an overheated market for nut products) the U.S. experienced a significant nut glut. So no, not that.
Then I thought, maybe it’s having a real impact on the bee farmers themselves, or the honey sector more broadly. But for bee farmers, the biggest problem remains colony collapse disorder, not theft. And for honey, international adulteration of the product is a much bigger threat to the sector than rustling of the honey makers— given that honey is the “third most faked product in the world.” Even with the few thousand cases of hive theft in recent years, these pale when compared to the nearly 3 million hives currently in the US.
So what does bee theft matter, in the grand scheme? I think it has less to do with agriculture, and more to do with American Agriculture, our whole mode of thinking about food production.
See, thieves are attracted to situations where risk is relatively low compared to the possible gain. The risk is necessarily low in stealing bees, because bees are left out of doors, in places where they can move freely, and rarely near well-populated areas. And the possible gain is very high, because without these imported bees, this insanely lucrative industry falls apart. It’s a captive market, and whoever has the bees is going to get paid.
All of this, of course, could be solved by just having enough healthy ecosystem in place to support adequate populations of wild pollinators. In essence, our capitalistic form of agriculture has created a system where everyone has to pay for a natural resource, or it’s simply not there. Control the natural resource, control everything. How could this situation not lead to dystopian outcomes? We created this desert and call it Agriculture. So the bees will find their way to the highest bidder, and someone will get paid, stolen or not.
It reminds me of a great line from the newest season of Fargo,
“You know why America loves a crime story? Because America is a crime story.”
#FarmArt
Speaking of crime and capitalism, this week’s #FarmArt is another non-commissioned work, this one by Keith Cross, a.k.a. Doctabarz. The whole song (and album) are worth a listen from this self-described Scientist. Musician. Vegan.
My favorite part;
“so now you work for a dollar and the Man
when all you needed was the sun, air, the water and land.
…
If they could sell land and sunlight they would,
we’d suffocate and every day would be night up in the hood.”
The chorus of Keith’s song makes a certain kind of obvious sense. If you are able to grow your own food and feed your people, the incomprehensible whims of the stock market are (or might be) meaningless to you. As far as an empowering call to action for a target audience of working class urbanites, this makes sense. And in the lines like the ones above, the critique of our capitalist concepts of land and resource ownership are very, very real.
But there’s also a part of this song that remind me of another. The 1988 Alabama song “Song of the South,” which includes the lines;
“Well somebody told us Wall Street fell
but we were so poor that we couldn’t tell.”
Of course, this song is about the eviction of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the American South around the Great Depression, who were growing cotton as a cash crop rather than food. But there’s actually a lost line of this song, that addresses the food sovereignty of tenant farmers, saying “I was 18 ‘fore I ate my fill, we lived on the garden and the cow’s good will,” and ends with the gutting line, “and momma she was old at 35.” This stanza was removed from the Alabama version for being too brutal for the mainstream.
From the dejected acceptance of the tenant farmers plight of Alabama’s ballad to Keith’s call to embrace home growing, it feels like we’ve come a long way in understanding what it means to fight against dispossession. At the end of Song of the South, the family loses the farm, they move to town, and buy a Chevy and a washing machine. I don’t think consumer products are having quite the same soothing effect on We the Dispossessed these days.
Or maybe I just need a little more sweet potato pie…
Farm is Cinema
I was recently rewatching The Prince & Me (because I’ve already seen everything. In the universe.), and was treated to some very 2004-style small family farm fealty. When the main couple (the Scandinavian prince pretending to be a college student and his girl-next-door Midwestern love interest) heads to the woman’s family farm for thanksgiving, the prince spends some time milking cows and running after cows and charmingly eating shit in the cow pen. Afterwards, the farmer/dad gives this nice little speech about why he and his teenage sons work “24 hours a day":”
“We gotta work twice as hard as the corporate owned farms just to stay afloat. At this rate the family farm will be extinct in 20 years… What the big boys need to understand is that we’re all interdependent. And if somebody loses, eventually, we’ll all lose.”
His family is *clearly* over his speechifying, but the European princeling is not. He takes it very much to heart. So much so that later in the film, while mediating a negotiation between organized labor and the industry that employs them, he parrots back the line about interdependence, adding, “so we better start caring for our opposition as much as we care for ourselves.”
The confusing thing about these lines, is, well, everything. If “corporate farms” are working half as hard as family farms, to such an extent that they’re going to put family farms out of business, then in what way are those two groups interdependent? They are direct competitors, and given that private land ownership is one of few truly zero sum games in the world (if I own land, you can’t own the same land, generally) they are not interdependent. If they (the small family farm) loses, it’s in fact a win for “the corporate-owned farm” because it means theres more cheap farmland and cows to buy.
There is one way in which these farms are interdependent, though I doubt it’s what the farmer/dad, or the screen writers, were thinking. “Corporate farms” today are generally dependent on “small family farms” to perpetuate the ideal image of the pastoral, universally beloved farmers. This image provides cover for bad actors at every scale of farming. And at the same time, “small family farms” rely on the political and economic clout of “big corporate farms” to bulldoze environmental and labor regulations and ensure that lucrative farm programs remain in place. In this way, farms large and small are interdependent in maintaining a false facade, which protects the whole of the industry in a “just a lowly farmer” veil of poverty and secrecy.
I guess 2004 was a simpler time. If you’re looking for a throw back, might I recommend ‘04s Napoleon Dynamite instead.
Last F(ew) Things
If what you need is a laugh, I have a strategy for you. Watch this Wishin’ Boot video (and enjoy the heavy themes of food, farming, and rural life). The first time you watch it, you’re going to say, “huh, that wasn’t that funny.” Then I’m going to need you to watch it again. The second time, you’re going to be tempted to quit part way through. Don’t give up, you’re no quitter. In the midst of your third watch, you will giggle. And by this afternoon, you’ll be whispering “the wishing boot, the boot is you” to whoever you live with, and exclaiming, “the whole dang time that dog had been the boot!” to strangers on the street. That’s a Sarah Mock Guarantee. But you’ve got to watch it a weird number of times. Once it feels weird, you’ll know it’s working.
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”, We Won’t Be Home for Christmas,Farm You, America, You’re a Farm Kid, Too, I Volunteered as Tribute from Wyoming, and He Dairied to Dream.
Stay safe and well out there, friends. And 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.
Rock on,
Sarah
maaaan, I don't know what was funnier the clip or the dog bit punctuated with "That’s a Sarah Mock Guarantee" XD
fwiw, laughed the 1st time through.. right at the dog bit :D