You're a Farm Kid, Too
Hello Big Team!
It’s morning again in Washington, D.C., and I’m proud to say that so many phenomenal organizers (including at least one Big Farm Teammate who is fiercely private and a fiercely wonderful organizer, farmer, and friend) have been fighting particularly hard since last Wednesday to help keep our city safe. They succeeded in getting AirBnB and HotelTonight to cancel all reservations in D.C. scheduled around next week’s inauguration. (Find out about and support the efforts of people trying to keep D.C. and its residents safe this week here and here.) They have set the pace for what it means to keep organizing and making noise— beyond election day, beyond the ballot box, and beyond social media. And with Biden picking Tom Vilsack, a former ag lobbyist who’s preparing to settle back into his old role as Secretary of Agriculture, we have our work cut our for us in the food and farming space.
Farm (and Other F Words) News
A few choice F words have come to mind as the revisions process continues, though it is a nice distraction from *gestures broadly*. In addition to being a few chapters deep, I’ve also started working with a designer on the cover art. The exciting news is that I get to show you all the art and we get to vote on it soon! Democracy in action, y’all.
You’re a F(arm Kid), Too
I don’t know how to tell you this, but if you were raised in an English-speaking household, you were almost certainly raised with the help of some farmers.
The most popular farmer my parents deferred to was probably Old MacDonald, but it may have been the Farmer in the Dell or whoever is answering on behalf of the Baa Baa-ing Black Sheep. Even when moving beyond the explicit farmer mentions; from Mary and her Little Lamb to the Little Piggies at the ends of our feet to Little Bo-Peep, they all live in our conscious and unconscious minds, not just as playful melodies and quaint images, but as underlying expectations about something real— farms and farmers.
It’s not just Mother Goose and nursery rhymes either. Children’s books, TV shows, movies, toys, playmats, decorations, you name it. It’s all carefully calibrated to lean into the primary colors, animals, and simple words of the classic pastoral setting; a red barn, a green truck, a white sheep, a yellow duck.
They tend to be heavy on the simple, picturesque goodness, light on explanations of why or what for. Which makes sense in a world where we’re trying to engage children while still shielding them from the concept of animal slaughter for meat (as a non-parent myself, I will see my way to having no comment on that front). In this way, we learn a lot about farms (not real farms, mind, but idealized, mythical farms) at a very young age, and this helps us internalize that they were safe, nice, gentle places, fit for children to learn and grow— because that’s what they were for all of us.
Researchers know that our long-term memory is fundamentally associative, meaning we remember new information better when we have similar, old information to pair it with. The more deeply rooted the old information, the more likely the new information is to stick with us. Children’s music hits all of our memory sweet spots; the rhyming and cadence make them inherently easier for us to place in our semantic memory, and the way we learn it, perhaps cradled in a parents lap while they wiggle our little piggies, makes it an emotional memory as well.
In other words, we know something like a beloved children’s song makes for a sticky memory, one that’s easy to build a mountain of supporting evidence around. Every new piece of information we ever learn about agriculture goes up against these memories in the battle to stick in our brains, because every fact that doesn’t jive with what we already know is a little harder to remember than a competing one that reinforces our prior recollections.
It is absolutely critical for us to recognize and reckon with the bias that comes along with this upbringing. Many of us were raised with an inherent bias in favor of farmers— we associate them with being nice, gentle, caring, and nurturing. This, I can only assume, is where people are coming from when they make declarations like “the vast majority of farmers are good people” and expect no one to object. (Imagine any other profession where you’d be willing to defend that the vast majority of its practitioners are even good at their jobs, let alone good people writ large.)
For us, what matters now is that we know. We know that we have been conditioned since we were little farm kids ourselves, E-I-E-I-Oing here and there, to be biased in favor of the unimpeachable goodness of farmers. It’s our responsibility to recognize that bias and adjust. Approach claims of extraordinary goodness amongst farmers with skepticism and examine evidence rigorously and dispassionately. We all have our biases. But that doesn’t mean don’t have to work on them.
The good news is, no cheese stands alone on a Big Team Farm.
#FarmArt
Move over American Gothic. This incredible print is non-commissioned, it just exists in the wild because of the indefatigable work of Melanie Cervantes at Dignidad Rebelde.
A Fannie Lou Hamer’s quote, as highlighted by the artist,“‘Now, we've got to have some changes in this country, and not only changes for the black man, and only changes for the black woman, but the changes we have to have in this country are going to be for liberation of all people--because nobody's free until everybody's free.’- Fannie Lou Hamer, Speech Delivered at the Founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus, Washington, D.C., July 10, 1971.”
In addition to organizing with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and being an energizing leader of the civil rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer also founded Freedom Farm, a farm and food cooperative that served the Mississippi Delta area and provided healthy food for families, jobs for Black men and women, especially former tenant farmers who had been evicted for exercising their rights to vote, and provided space for healing and new opportunity. To learn more about her work, I can’t recommend Freedom Farmers by Monica M. White highly enough.
Fannie Lou Hamer has more than earned her placed among the greatest agricultural leaders in American history. I think this image finds her there— a patron saint of real American farming.
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”, “We Found Some Animals and Now They’re In Prison”, “We Won’t Be Home for Christmas,” and Farm You, America.
An interesting Forbes piece came out yesterday pointing out that Bill Gates is now the owner of the largest private collection of farmland. If you’re interested in digging into why Bill Gates owns farmland (pre- the book, which will cover this exhaustively!), I’d recommend Chris Newman’s recent “American Farmer: The Birth of a Myth” (and hey, if you’re in the most populous parts for VA, MD, or DC, you can order meats from Sylvanaqua Farms to be delivered to your door— I work there with Chris!)
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