Happy Holidays Y’all!
It’s not Santa, just me creeping into your inbox in the dead of night (but if you see him, I have some questions for him). Here’s hoping this email serves as a mini-escape today from however you’re celebrating (or not) during these darkest days of the year. (Also, hide this email from Your Mom, because there are more curse words in it than she’ll be comfortable with. Because, you know, it’s Christmas, and I’m not home, so fuck it.)
F(irst of all), Fucking Hooray!
I was blown absolutely out of the water by this amazing community when we rounded out the pre-order with $30k+ in funds raised. That’s going to be some hefty donations to some wonderful orgs that you’ll hear about shortly, and some amazing #FarmArt on the way (more below!). Thank you all so much. Each and every one of you were the brightest, most joyful part of 2020 for me, and if you have nothing else to celebrate today, I hope that you raise a glass to You, a human being on planet Earth who helped make someone’s dream come true this year (and don’t worry, if you don’t, I will 😂 ).
Why I Won’t Be Home F(or) Christmas
Home for me will always be Wyoming, but this year, I won’t be there, and I know many of you won’t be in your homelands either. Ugh. I’m sorry.
All the “home for the holidays” nostalgia has me thinking a lot about this excellent piece about why rural communities don’t work economically, and this story by the inimitable Savannah Maher (follow this BTF community member ASAP for fascinating reporting on Indigenous issues in the West in particular) on why I, in particular, left Wyoming.
I’m thinking about it because the reason I’m not going home for Christmas is not just COVID-19. I’m not in Wyoming this holiday because I don’t live in Wyoming, and I don’t live in Wyoming because there’s no work for people like me there. Wyoming leaders talk about the issue of “brain drain” a lot (as many as 80% of people born and raised in the state who leave for school never return), and somehow, it gets put on us, the people who leave. It’s my fault, the story goes, that I didn’t move home at 21 and take whatever job was on offer (gas station, fast food, low level administrator in state office, low paid junior professional positions, etc.), and that I didn’t put the community that raised me over my own ambitions and hopes for the future.
For a long time, I shouldered that guilt. I believed that it was a personal, moral failing, that my ruthless, “city girl” ambition had blinded me to the rural values of home and family, and I came to terms with becoming a godless-coastal-liberal elite and all the negative baggage I believed came with that.
And maybe all of that would have been true. Maybe it would have been a betrayal of the people who poured themselves into raising me. If. If my community, my city, and my state weren’t, frankly, full of money. If I had come from a truly impoverished place, where the people, all the people, truly had nothing, and I had stood on their collective shoulders to get out and then turned my back on them. Then maybe I would be deserving of the guilt. But the thing is, duty and responsibility goes two ways. If I had a duty to return to, participate in, and one day perhaps lead the community that raised me, then that community has a responsibility to make a place for me. Especially — *especially* — if that community has the resources to do so. It’s not on broke (or indebted) 21 year olds to make jobs for themselves that fit their skills, especially in communities where people are flush with wealth and just disinterested in sharing. When wealthy politicians and community leaders whine that “the kids won’t come home” but then perpetuate an economic and social environment that actively marginalizes young professionals, that’s just empty bitching, not actual interest in change.
Because the thing is, some of the richest people in the world live in Wyoming. Individual families own tens of thousands of acres of land, and control tens of thousands more. People in Wyoming become millionaires and billionaires mining oil, natural gas, coal, and water. Many people in the city I lived in, Cheyenne, earned their wealth in the military, and retired in extraordinary comfort. They were state bureaucrats and politicians in one of the best funded states in the US (re: oil and gas revenues). And on top of all of that, cost of living is low there— there isn’t even personal income tax. There is plenty of wealth in Wyoming, but there is also an incredible aversion to parting with it; to taxes, to building local businesses, to any activity that would actually create real opportunities for young people like me to return and create a life.
From all of that, I’m working my way towards internalizing that I can’t go home, in part because of my own choices, like who I want to have as neighbors, coworkers, elected officials, etc. and in part due to the choices of the community that brought me up. They made the choice to demand that young people like me come back to Wyoming, despite the absence of real opportunities and, what? Fall on our swords? Make huge, life-altering sacrifices of our careers, mental health and wellbeing, future prospects, etc. because community should mean something to us even though it doesn’t mean enough to the elite to actually part with enough wealth to make it worth our while? That’s not a fair demand, so it does not bind me— or any of us.
So on the off-chance that you sit down to watch a bad TV movie this holiday season about an ambitious young woman who goes back to her home town to get that Grumpy Old Man to sell her company the Christmas Inn/bakery/tree farm/whatever by Christmas, where she promptly falls in love with the grump’s hot grandson and learns that the true meaning of Christmas is husband, just know that the moral there is that “smart women sometimes forget where they ‘belong,’ because the evil ‘big city’ poisons them with the idea that they are productive, successful, and capable of crafting the life they want for themselves. But don’t worry, a one week long relationship involving one dry kiss will definitely make them realize that their real place is baking cookies in their hometown, doing free labor for the local retirees and having babies who will do the same.”
It’s pro-rural, anti-brain drain propaganda, pure and simple, where all the onus is on the people who slipped down the drain to drag themselves back out, and there’s no responsibility taken by the people who took out the plug.
But speaking of…
Hallmark Channel Original Christmas Dairy Cows(hit)
So it’s Christmas Eve, right, and we’re sitting down to watch a Hallmark Channel Original Christmas Movie (it’s on Netflix, but let’s be real, this is a genre, summed up as “what if a pencil drawing and one hollow line from a greeting card was a movie?”). It’s called A California Christmas. The synopsis; “With his carefree lifestyle on the line, a wealthy charmer poses as a ranch hand to get a hardworking farmer to sell her family’s land before Christmas.”
First of all:
Obviously. But we can’t stop there. For the exhaustive and much more fun and lighthearted breakdown, I recommend you hop over to Twitter (the tl;dr is):
but I just want to talk about this key quote here.
RancHer: “Yeah sure, we have some cows, but it’s just enough for some local production.”
RancHand Job Imposter Playboy dude: “Do you make a lot of money?”
RancHer: “Like most ranchers out here, we barely get by.”
RancHand: “Then why the heck do you do it.”
RancHer: “There’s more to life than money.”
RancHand: “Yeah, but it doesn’t suck, having money. I’m sorry, I’m not who you think I am.”
RancHer: “Oh, I know exactly who you are. You woke up one day and thought, ‘I’ll learn how to muck a stall, round up some cattle. I’ll get a free bed to sleep in and then I’ll charm my way into doing as little work as possible.’ You’re working for trade housing with a little bit of stipend. If you’re here for the money, you’re in the wrong place… so what do you say, are you up for it? Or do you want to go work somewhere else to make some big money?”
…
“Day starts at 6am around here. One strike and you’re out… meals are not included in this job… you have a truck right?”
So this part plays like it’s suppose to be “strong independent boss B lays down the law for the pretty boy.” But the thing is, a lot of farms treat their farmworkers like this, and that is fucking appalling.
A brief recap; this farmer is implying that their employee has decided that they’re so desperate for a bed, they’ll take up farmwork. Does she realize that homeless shelters exist? Her reasoning makes no sense. Then she goes on to proudly proclaim “You’re working for trade housing with a little bit of stipend.” No meals, and he has to use his own truck for work. So basically, he’s going to, at best, net neutral in terms of income on a full time job. At worst, this job will actively cost him money.
Y’all this is indentured servitude.
This is an egregious violation of labor laws, and honestly, would be 100% worth reporting, you know, to the non-existing/non-enforcing labor authorities and then *aggressively* shaming publicly. This is not chill, tough farmer stuff. This is, “I expect you to work full time, in exchange for staying in an un-electrified mobile home with no running water, to buy your own food and gas, maintain your own vehicle that you use for work, and oh yeah, we won’t reallllly be paying you.”
As you watch the movie, it’s suppose to be funny and acceptable because it’s a wealthy playboy getting his comeuppance, but the thing is, this is the kind of deal that actual, vulnerable farmworkers get offered, with the threat of their lack of documentation looming of their heads all time. This is not cute cinema or a fun plot point. This is making light of our extraordinarily exploitative agricultural system, and making it a mark of masculinity, grit, and (astoundingly) anti-capitalist “love of the land/work” nobility to be able to “tough out” straight up abuse and exploitation.
And all of this from a multi-millionaire lady farmer who is forcing her sickly mother and actively child-laboring kid sister to stay on the farm when it’s actively not in their best interest. Oh yeah, and she’ll go on to cultivate a sexual relationship with this employee so, just a flaming garbage can all the way around.
Fuck this shit. Farmers who treat workers this way are not admirable or defensible in any way. They’re reprehensible. And shame on Netflix for ordering a sequel to this god awful movie.
Full About F(ace) to #FarmArt
To lighten the mood, here’s another excellent piece from Alyssa Welker. I love the visual of an anatomical heart, because it reminds me of an important life lesson from my high school agriculture teacher, Mr. Cress. It’s not really a lesson so much as it is just the idea that when we’re out in the world, we should have big hearts, so big that they take up our whole chest cavity.
I think about that visual a lot. Obviously, anatomically, it would be impractical. But tied into the idea of this piece, I think, it works well, because just having a big heart is not enough. Your heart must also grow. Maybe not three sizes all in one day, but we have to expect that they’ll change and evolve, like any living thing. The food we eat, the food we love, the ways we grow it, all of that is part and parcel to who we are, what we do, and shapes how our hearts grow.
We are what we love.
Last F(ew) Things
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” and “We Found Some Animals and Now They’re In Prison” (the last one was a real crowd pleaser if what you need today is a laugh).
That’s all friends. Thanks for spending a little time with me on your holiday. I hope it’s safe, peaceful, and as joyful as possible. 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.
Jingle on,
Sarah