Sisters, Oregon: Lynn Miller, editor, The Small Farmer's Journal

I'm working on an editorial right now, I just came up with something.
Sometimes you just put two words together and you think, well why didn't
I ever think of that before? I'm trying to understand what this means.
It could be good, it could be bad, but it's bouncing around in my head.
And the two words are "civilian agriculture." 

Because what we have had is a military agriculture...not militant, but this
institutionalized, industrialized agriculture has lost its...its
civility, certainly, but it's also lost its civilian aspects. And I
figured, if I'm permitted to stay at this for another 10 or 20 years,
I'll get something right.


In the spirit of Spring we thought we would skip around a little, and share our interview with Lynn Miller of The Small Farmer's Journal based in the idyllic town of Sisters, Oregon. Before I write about Lynn I will set the personal scene. Travis and I met while we were both living in the slightly bigger town to the southwest, Bend, Oregon. Sisters is named after a set of three mountains that tower gracefully in the background, known simply to most as the Three Sisters, or Faith, Hope, and Charity to the more detail-oriented. They stand over the town like good reminders and the folks who live there do seem to have the extraordinary community that can accompany a small mountain town, where the owners of the cafes are also the waitresses and they know all the locals' names. Everyone gathers at the unabashedly Christian-themed coffee house for good coffee, conversation with friends, and a game of checkers on the huge checkerboard, or a rock in the rustic rocking chairs.

Besides being an extremely pleasant town, Sisters is home to the Sisters Folk Festival and a world famous quilt show each year, which makes its population bulge with tourists in the summer.  Trav and I timed our arrival to coincide with the Festival, which is my favorite music festival to be at- there are about 6 stages set up throughout the downtown area and talented musicians play all day and into the night for a weekend, with enough variety to satisfy every ear. We both have friends that are like family to us in Bend, so finishing our trip here was like a big homecoming for Trav and I. I spent that week with 4 girls I had lived with and we share a connection that expands when one of us goes and snaps back like a rubber band when we are all together. It was a week of beautiful weather and friends and music and wrapping up an epic journey across the country.

Back to Lynn Miller of the quarterly publication, The Small Farmers Journal (SFJ). Lynn has his office in Sisters; it is a two story building filled with all kinds of things that could start a thousand conversations. There are racks that hold past and present issues of the SFJ, farming implements, Lynn's own paintings all over the walls, and his office is piled high with papers and books which over the course of the interview he often refers to. Lynn himself is a distinguished-looking man with a white goatee and a cowboy hat.  His bearing and speech are undeniably intelligent and passionate in a dramatic sort of way, a product of a life of "more keynotes and presentations than I care to count."

Lynn started the interview off by telling us who his enemies are and why he considers them threats.  The folks who have brought much popular attention to small-scale and organic agriculture, like the producers of Food Inc. or Michael Pollan, outrage Lynn because he believes that they are creating a fad that will pass away sooner rather than later. Boutique agriculture is my enemy.

The public eye is on agriculture in a way that it hasn't been before as most people are far removed from the farm but the public is getting more and more concerned about food supply, cost, and manner of production.  But he sees a great and inspiring movement amongst people of all ages, a new agrarian momentum.

Those 20-something people that you're talking about, that we're talking
with and to and about all the time, they're about the craft of farming.
Not the industry. The craft. That's what they're drawn to. And
they're drawn to those models, examples, where the craft of the farming
will pay the bills for them, give them the character of a life, a
working life, that they feel genetically drawn to. It's like a
genetic memory.

Lynn feels that popular agricultural celebrities, like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, are making capital off of the attention ag is getting without making a substantial difference in the way that people see farmers and farming. Basically, Lynn thinks that anyone who trivializes agriculture is in danger of having the masses lose interest in the "fad" of agriculture that exists right now. Lynn proposes a much more rigorous (and truthful) education for non farming folks, so that they can know that agriculture isn't a trivial matter; survival is what it comes down to.

Lynn gave us some personal history (My mother is Puerto Rican. English is my second language. I grew up in the barrio. I have degrees in the fine arts. I was a professional musician and singer. I was a ballet dancer. I was an actor...) and about how he started the SFJ about 35 years ago. He had experience managing different farm operations, and bought his first farm and team of horses when he was in his late twenties. Farming without tractors was rare and Lynn found that lots of people wanted to know where to get old equipment for horse teams, as well as how to use it. Lynn and his father brainstormed creating a quarterly magazine chock full of information applicable to small scale sustainable farming. The SFJ has an ever increasing following, and with the rising prices of fuel and interest in alternative energy it is sure to keep growing.

Lynn, a regular speech-giver, was one of the most poised and articulate interviewees we encountered.  Read on for the full interview, including insight into agricultural movements, pig roasts, and some poetic views on how we all connect to farming...

Ag Video Thursday: Polk County, North Carolina

Kacy, one of the authors on this blog, works with the Polk County Agricultural Development Office in Mill Spring, North Carolina. Polk County is south of Asheville and Hendersonville, just up from the South Carolina border and includes the towns of Saluda, Columbus, and Tryon.

Eric and Lynn Turner have an HD Media company based in the same building as Kacy, an old being-renovated-at-the-moment brick school building with a lot of potential. In that building, a community is forming that includes Soil and Water, ag development people, artists, and farm marketers.

Last year, the Turners produced this lovely "Meet Your Farmer" video, with the simple intent to promote agriculture there in Polk County. The music comes from Tim McMorris, a talented and uplifting songwriter.  It just makes you feel good to be (or want to be) a farmer on any scale!  Enjoy.

Galatia, Illinois: Randy Anderson

You know, we ARE trying to be stewards of the land.  I look at it like this.  I look at the land and it's almost like a vehicle.  Okay, if you take this vehicle out here and you drive it back and forth to town just as hard as you can drive it, every trip you go, there's not going to be very many trips left in that vehicle.

In Benton, Illinois, on a hot day, we stopped at the local library to do some research and cool down.  We chatted with the librarian about our project, told her of our search for farmers, and she vanished for a few minutes.  When she emerged she had a sticky note with Randy Anderson's number and a smiley face on it.

Currently, Randy is recuperating from an injury that has his arm immobilized in a sling.  Two young boys played on the floor of his home, playing with John Deer tractor toys.  Their house is set on the same farm that Randy grew up on, amongst long Illinois crops, with typical grain storage bins in the driveway.   He farms about 3,000 acres of corn, soybeans, and winter wheat.  In this interview, he speaks of Roundup Ready crops and Bt corn.  These both refer to genetically engineered crops, a hot topic in agriculture.  

I'm part of the system and I'm part of the victim.  All of my soybeans are Roundup Ready.  Yeah, it's nice and easy to do.  The thing is, trying to grow traditional soybeans, there's not enough seed companies out there, and the majority of the companies are not concentrating any of their new development bringing any of the new traits, new genetics to the forefront as a traditional seed.  Meaning increased yield.  They put everything into this here other seed that's already got all the traits to it and then they send it out here...it's kind of like walking onto a car lot and you got this model here to choose from but every model has got the same stuff on it except each one of them's a different color.  And then you go over to these other models and they don't got nothing.   They got stick shifts and no air conditioning.  That there's kind of like that traditional seed.

Randy seemed more skeptical than many of the farmers we spoke with, first suspecting us of having an "environmental" bent to our project.  We assured him that we didn't, and he started talking; nearly 20 minutes went by before we even asked our first full question. 

 A lot of people has a view that, you know, the farmer's out here and we're destroying the environment and we don't really care about what's going on.

Just seems like things is just not always as good as what they used to be.  I mean, there's so many things that I don't quite agree with anymore...I feel I produce as good a product or anything that I can out here on the farm, but by the time it gets to the consumer it's been messed with; I feel somewhat inferior.

I recommend reading this full interview; from a commodity farmer's perspective he speaks of politics, genetic engineering, pesticide use, and family history. 

Click here to read the full interview.

Thursday is Ag Video Day! The Plow That Broke the Plains, a 1937 propaganda film about the dust bowl.

This is a record of land...of soil rather than people--a story of the Great Plains; the 400,000,000 acres of wind-swept grasslands that spread up from the Texas panhandle to Canada...a high, treeless continent, without rivers, without streams...A country of high winds, and sun...and of little rain...

In 1937, this film was released by the Resettlement Administration, and generally wags a finger at American farmers and farm policy.  As a contemporary film to the dust bowl, the Great Depression, and the New Deal, it provides a fascinating bit of insight (and remarkable footage) into that era of agriculture.

The dust bowl changed the face of the country; I often wonder...if all of those families hadn't been forced to tie their chairs to their Fords and abandon their homesteads...how many of their descendants would still be there in the Midwest?  Would L.A. have been smaller, and Wichita become a more major city?

At one time, during the homestead days, much of the Plains were divided into 40- or 80-acre parcels.  Servicemen were offered many of them after WWI.  But when most of them wandered away, those who stayed found thousands of acres available again, and those titles became consolidated...it was natural that 80-acre farm families suddenly grew to 500-acre farm families.

The next generation, many children went to WWII.  If they returned, they had more options to move to cities, to go to college.  Again, was it not natural for them to relocate, leaving their parents to sell off their farm eventually?  Suddenly, a 500-acre farmer had more land available as his neighbors retired, and became a 1,000-acre farmer.  As of 2007, the average South Dakota farm size was 1,401 acres (and the vast majority are still family operations, contrary to popular belief).  This continues, and, amongst the popular small-farm and local-foods movements happening now, I wonder if there will ever be a movement to resettle the plains.

I have to wonder.  In the meantime, enjoy this 1937 film about how the grasslands turned to dust, how "Wheat will win the war!", and why so many families headed to California in the '30's as their plow was covered over.  It's 30 minutes long; make yourself comfortable and have a snack.  And think about where that snack came from.                    --Trav--

LeRoy, Kansas: Lyle Fischer, LeRoy Coop Association.

I lived here all my life.  My dad worked in construction and farmed a little bit, but he never made a real livelihood out of farming. Had cattle and some hogs...raised seven kids.  Took a lot of food to feed seven kids.  I went on to school for four years and got my bachelors degree in business administration; had a buddy that was going to go to Cargill to work, and I said, "yeah, that wouldn't be so bad, working in a farm-type atmosphere."

Over in Burlington, Kansas, we drove down one of the extremely wide roads that made up the main street.  We were looking for farmer contacts, and we spotted the local Farm Bureau service office.  Popping our heads in, we were greeted by a couple of wonderful folks, all smiles and handshakes.  One of them was Larry Gleue the local agent.

Larry listened to our story, told a few of his own (like the one about the farmer who has had a suspicious number of insurance claims for lightning-struck cows, or the one about Larry's aging father who refuses to be told that he's too old to farm...Larry won't let him on the tractor anymore), and then pulled out his cell phone to start calling farmers for us.

One of the contacts that he gave us was Lyle Fischer, who manages the LeRoy Co-op Association, a nearby grain elevator and agronomy service.  Two days later, after enjoying the Coffey County Fair and a parade, we drove a few miles out to LeRoy to call on Lyle.

...Went to work here in 1976 as the assistant manager, getting the feed, the seed, all the supplies, worked the counter.  We started spraying row crops back in '75, so we bought a sprayer pickup a couple of years later and I drove that in the summertime for awhile.  Got to where that was taking too much time and I wasn't getting my stuff done in the office, so I quit doing that.  2001 I took over as general manager...nine years went by, and it doesn't seem like nine years!  I don't know, I really don't have a good story to tell.  It's just work!

A cooperative is member-owned.  In 1960, fifty years ago, the farmers wanted something better for them.  Competition-wise, they wasn't getting a fair shake in the market.  So they decided to start a cooperative and own it themselves.  From that it's grown to the membership we have now.  But a co-op is member-ownership; you earn your membership by doing business there, or you can buy membership.  Any money that's made at the end of the year is shared back to the people that have done business that year.  So all the assets, the income, is returned back to the members, based on their annual purchases, unlike an independent elevator or grain business, where it goes in their own pocket.  

We were sitting down with Lyle on his porch with an unobstructed view of his beautiful backyard and grain bins.  He took us on a bit of an economic overview of the past few decades in farming; in the 70's and 80's when he was just starting out in the business the real issue was farmer debt and high interest. Interest on loans made to farmers was as high as 18% and many farmers were not able to keep afloat during those years.

1980 was a tough year.  It was a dry year.  Very, very dry.  That hurt too, back with the interest and the dry year, people didn't raise a crop.  And not too many people had crop insurance then. 

In the 90's, the price for commodity crops were at rock bottom, which has changed today.  While commodity crops command a better price these days, the catch for many farmers currently is the high price of inputs. Any natural or synthetic additions a farmer has to apply to the soil or crop is usually very expensive.

Lyle also has seen a lot of farmers working hard to reduce their pollution from chemicals and runoff. The government requirements are getting tighter and tighter and in this area nitrogen has been found in drinking water and phosphate in the lakes. Lyle believes that the government will continue to demand better and cleaner systems, and he has seen that most farmers are willing to comply with requests even before they are requirements. A lot of farmers in this area have lined their streams with filter strips which prevents runoff to some degree.

We asked him about the increasing size of these Midwest crop farms...are they getting bigger because they want to or because they have to to stay afloat?

I would say that most of them are getting bigger because they have to.  Now, there's a few, I'm sure, that are getting bigger because of pride.  You know, "I want to be bigger than the other guy."  I could tell you a few of those.  Most of them, I'd say, are getting bigger because they see the need to farm more acres to make their machinery pay.  To me, I can't understand how they can put a quarter million dollars into a combine or $200,000 into a planter, and plant two or three thousand acres and make it work.  I guess they have to.  I spend $200,000 for a sprayer, but I can spray 30, 40,000 acres, generate a lot more income.  Not necessarily profit, but a lot more income, cash flow, out of that machine.  But when you run a quarter million dollar combine over 2,000 acres, I don't know, that's a lot of money per acre.

We also asked him about the negative press that chemicals often get in popular press, and how he feels about it:

I think the word "chemical" sounds like a hazardous material.  Maybe the word "chemicals" is the wrong word to use.  "Herbicide" is a better terminology to use.  Herbicide is used by our customers to control weeds.  Then there's pesticides.  Pesticides are more for pest control, insects.  Gosh...how do you tell the consumer that these chemicals are not hazardous to the food?

Herbicides are safe!  They're out there to control weeds.  The plant that grows, like the corn or soybean, is tolerant to those herbicides, so it doesn't bother that grain that's growing.  I don't know.

I don't know if the consumer actually knows what it takes to raise a crop, to make the bread on his table and the eggs in his frying pan, I don't know if they do or not.  Sometimes you wonder.  I think...to me, the naturalist or whoever that thinks that we can feed the world on the way it was 50 years ago, is going to go hungry.  We can't feed the world on 50-bushel {per acre} corn, 20-bushel beans.  We have to have genetics, we have to have fertilizer, we have to have herbicides...we have to have those traits in these crops to make higher yields. 

The GMO is the traits that they put in the plant so that the plant is resistant to the corn borer.  Well, think about that.  The corn borer, the corn root worm is being controlled genetically in the plant instead of using a pesticide.  So the use of a true pesticide, the organophosphates that we used to use to control corn root worms, we don't use them anymore.  We don't have to!  Because the plant itself has got the gene in there to control that pest.

So the pesticide use has gone down bunches in our country, in corn and soybean country.  Because we don't use them anymore! 

To society I think that farmers offer a lot.  They're independently owned.  They're their own boss.  I'm not sure how to answer that, except that farmers are just a huge part of this society, in these communities.  Now Kansas City or Wichita, you know, they get overlooked.  What do you think?

I think there's a lot of people that wish they could be more involved in raising their own food, having their flower gardens...farming to me is just a livelihood.  I don't know how anybody could beat it, to be a farmer.  You're your own boss, you're out there working with your animals, you know nobody's telling you what to do everyday!  The young people that don't ever experience those thoughts even, or the joy of it, being out in the country, they're missing a lot.

Read the full interview here, and learn about the complex grain marketing system, government regulations, and a year in the life of a grain elevator. 

National Ag Day promotional video.

Hello folks!  Today I want to depart from the interviews for just a moment and show a video.  It's like those wonderful days in school, when the teacher didn't get the lesson plan together in time and you get to just watch.  I encourage you to take 5 minutes to watch this one, promoting National Ag Day, in March, on the first day of spring.  For two reasons:

1) I like thinking that spring is almost here.  My seed catalogs have all arrived, and I'm eagerly waiting for the ground to thaw;

2) The video does a nice job providing images and quotes that, I believe, reflect the diversity of agriculturalists in this country.  The attitude that I've generally felt amongst farmers and ranchers is not one of secrecy, but one of transparency.  It's increasingly obvious that consumers want to know details about their food production.  Supermarkets are all starting to put up signs featuring their growers, and government funding is coming down the line for increased food education in schools.

I would love to hear your comments, and your arguments.  Yes, there are a number of discrepancies in the industry, from labeling issues to complex safety standards.  It's a complex system, and I hope to be a part of the discussion.

Are there people whose opinions or views you'd like to hear?  We will do our best to seek them out and interview them, so ask your questions.  Enjoy the video!

--Trav--

Richvale, California: Dennis Lindberg, 86. Rice farmer.

Well, I was born here in 1924.  On July 23rd, 1924.  When I was a senior in high school I grew my first rice crop as an FFA project.  I bypassed college and all and went to the School of Hard Knocks or whatever you want to call it.  

This year I planted my 69th consecutive rice crop.  Somebody asked me when I hit 50, "well aren't you gonna retire?"  And I said, "Hell no!"  I've been very fortunate in those years.

 In the spirit of welcoming the unexpected, let us leave the midwest in the sweltering last days of July and fast forward through a few states to an interview that took place in Richvale, California.

Richvale is nestled north of the fertile fruit and vegetable valleys that supply many of us non-Californians with carrots and lettuce in the winter months.  The first farmers to inhabit Richvale tried to persuade wheat to grow here, but the climate and terrain were unsuitable for that crop.  It wasn't until Dennis Lindberg's father started farming the land around 1911 that he and his peers realized this land was perfect for growing rice.
  
I have a great respect for my father and other people who settled this community in the years beginning '11, '12, and '13.  We just celebrated our 100th anniversary of the founding of Richvale.  They came here to what was primarily wheat land.  And not very good wheat land at that.  There was some farms established that'd been abandoned.  Well, then a group out of the San Joaqine Valley Realty Firm came up here and formed what the called the Richvale Land Colony and they started promoting, selling this land.


This was as early as '09 and '10, if you will.   Rice was just in its infancy in California at that time.  The first rice was grown in probably '09 or '10 on an experimental basis down and out west of Gridley from what I understand.  Then, of course, as things went on, by 1915 the land developers were gone.  They grabbed their money and left, if you will.  

So it was left to our founders to get an irrigation system.  It didn't have proper drainage; there were a few wheat farmers out here, and when they were farming rice it would leak out onto their wheat, and of course they didn't like that.  And there were no improved roads.  So our founders went through a living Hell, if you will, till they got something established and founded this [BUCRA].  This facility was founded in 1915.  My father was one of the founding members and on the original board of directors.


So, I feel a great debt of gratitude in those of us of second and third generation to our forebearers, forefathers, who founded this community and provided a place for us to do something with our lives.

 

 Dennis, or "Denny", as he is known in his community, exudes excitement, an abundance of civic pride, and a passion for growing rice.  As a hobby he also grows watermelons of generous proportions.  He and his son, Gary Lindberg, farm about 400 acres of rice in this region of around 500,000 acres.  We were connected to him, for all intents and purposes the local historian, by Jim Morris at the California Rice Commission.

The Butte County Rice Growers Association (BUCRA) building where we met Dennis also contained evidence of his artistic abilities; the front waiting area had one of his hand-fashioned metal duck sculptures featured.  He creates these metal ducks with different themes (the Fire Department Duck and the Evangelist Duck, for example) and sells them as fundraisers for the town of Richvale.

It's a city without a real city government, if you will.  They call me kind of the ipso facto mayor around here.  I don't live here anymore; my son lives on the farm.  We live over in Thermalito.

Richvale had been a boom town that could have been on its way to busting in the early 1900's, but its citizens wouldn't hear of it.  When the economy started tanking back then, and the townsfolk were abandoned by the developers, this hamlet rolled up its collective sleeves and started planting rice and helping each other get through.  There is a definite Bedford Falls feel here and Dennis could easily play the role of George Bailey, town enthusiast and champion.  The fire department, a local cafe, and schools are operated and maintained in a large part through donations and volunteer power from the community.  Dennis describes his town as a "self-help community."

 

When asked what he'd like to see change in agriculture, he spoke, among other things, of the need to remind people that this rural Californian community exists out here, producing an incredibly important food crop.  He references Lundberg Rice, a neighbor who specialized in organic growing (no relation, by the way, between the Lindbergs and the Lundbergs.  Both families were early settlers here):


Public acceptance that we're out here.  And we want to remain here!  We got to keep this commerce going.  You know, out at Lundbergs, there's 250 employees in that facility over there.  Right here at Butte County we must have 50!  We got an irrigation district with 12 employees, we got a drainage district with 4 or 5, we got a school...you gotta keep those things going.  And rice is what's doing that in this case.  I want to see that continue.

 

Like some of the other farmers we've talked to, Dennis relates how much technology and equipment has been improved over the last decades.  He is working on his 69th rice crop this year and he grows a short-statured variety.

When the Lindbergs got their first harvester it could harvest in a day what a brand new harvester could do in an hour today.  Denny used to let his fields lay fallow every other year but demand has become so great for rice that he plants every year now.  Water rights are an issue we heard many farmers express concern about, but Richvale has impenetrable water rights that keeps the ever growing population of southern California off their backs.
  
I saw this industry...I consider it a privilege...I'm 86 years old by the way...I got to see horses working in the field as a kid.  I've seen this industry come from the horses and the hundred-pound sacks to stationary harvesters.  I even pulled the bundle wagons if you know what they are.  They put the rice in shocks about so big around, and you went around with a bundle wagon, pull it with a tractor.  When I was 13 years old, pulling that bundle wagon out and over to the harvester, where you unhooked and went and got another bundle wagon.


In those days they hired transient workers, hobos if you will.  They were coming out of Oregon and Washington up there in the grain harvest.  They'd hit here about October.  Well, come Saturday night or if it rained, you paid 'em off you didn't always see 'em again!  {laughs}  So my dad had to get me out there one bad winter in 1937 when I was 13.  So I got exposed to some of that and I begged to continue.  I though, "boy, this is cool, man!"  Not that I didn't enjoy school.  I was a good student; I was a straight A student my first two years, but then I got more interested in farming than I did school.

Lundberg Rice, also based in Richvale, is the leading grower of organic rice in the country; Dennis mentions that they "put this town on the world map".

Dennis estimated that 60% of the rice grown here is sold domestically, and 40% is exported.

 

Like most farming communities, time is made and set aside for recreation, especially if it involves agriculture.  Before we hit the road, Dennis drove us out to his rice paddies and just beyond, where he has his watermelon patch.  Every year he grows 4 or 5 gargantuan melons to be used in a weight-guessing competition; whoever is closest to the actual weight takes the melon home.  Travis and I were sworn to secrecy (melons have been stolen in the past) about the location of the patch, and Dennis took us to a seemingly overgrown portion of his field.  After furtively glancing around to make sure no one was watching, he surreptitiously bent down and pulled back a layer of grass to expose the promising green-striped shell of a watermelon already the size of a mini-refrigerator.  As quickly as it had been uncovered it was inconspicuously tucked back into its hay bedding and Dennis straightened up and had us renew our vows to keep mum about the location of the watermelon.

 

As a parting gift he gave us two lesser melons and the sparkling wisdom of a man who has seen his fair share of harvests- "when you cut 'em open they should go 'snick!'- that's how you know you've got a good one!"  

A few weeks ago, Dennis wrote to us again to update us on the aforementioned watermelon.  Below is the 90 pound monster.  Dennis' son, Gary (right) and Donald Rystrom (left) each guessed within a pound of that.

 

Read the full interview after the jump, including stories of growing up in rice country and facts and opinions about the industry...

Update: Harry Young, one of our interviewees passed away this week.

 Harry Young, one of the farmers interviewed for this project, passed away this week in Kentucky.  Our previous write-up of the interview is here.

Harry was a fascinating fellow, 83 years old, with a unique situation.  He has been fighting to get his land and honor back after he was forced off of his lifelong farm and it was auctioned off.  Much of our discussion was about the hardship of being a small farmer, his frustration that this could happen over what he says is a financial misunderstanding, and about the racism that he felt in the area.

An author and friend of his, Monica Davis, provided the following readings associated with his life and struggles.  It's worth a read, especially for people such as myself who were raised in a very different region:

 82-year-old Black farmer arrested, charged with making terrorist threats, May 17, 2009.

Black farmer files lawsuit to regain farm with $750000000 in coal deposits.

Land, Legacy and Lynching: Building the Future in Black America, a book by Monica Davis.

And, a summary of our visit with Harry for the Stewards Project. 

St. Louis Missouri: Stephen Inman, New Roots Urban Farm

It was a sultry, humid evening in St. Louis when we arrived at the urban farm project maintained by Stephen and a core group of a few other volunteers.  The farm is planted on a postage stamp lot and has a greenhouse, chicken coop, and picnic table toward the rear.

"I'm more prone to calling it a garden this year.  Before it was like, "don't call it a garden!  It's a farm!"

We sat at the picnic table and watched the sun set on the abundant crops while Stephen told us about the challenges and perks of being an urban farmer.  This garden has been functioning for about seven years and Stephen told us the story of the four individuals who got New Roots going.  Everybody is a volunteer and they have initiated or helped with several other food and social justice projects in St. Louis.  The produce that is harvested supplies an impressive number of CSA boxes for its size and it barely pays for the next season of the garden's existence.

It is difficult to operate not knowing if the yield will bring in enough money for another season of planting and harvesting, but that is the reality of most farms, rural or urban.  One of Stephen's goals is to have this garden produce enough to pay for a gardener who will lead the project and volunteers, since that position doesn't exist right now and the garden is run on hopeful volunteer labor and luck.  The volunteers do get to walk away with some of the food, but the whole project started when the founders realized that they couldn't afford their own produce on their rural farm outside the city.  A garden that won't sustain the folks who work it seems doomed to failure, or, at the very least, ironic.

Despite the typical volunteer and practical urban issues, the kale is looking lovely, and as we sit chatting with Stephen a few neighborhood folks wander in to check on the crops and do some harvesting, thankful for this abundant gift of food amidst the hustle and bustle of the city.  We watch the sun set and the city sky turn purple over the distant skyscrapers and abandoned brick neighborhood buildings...

Click here for Stephen's story in his own words...

Council Grove, Kansas: Don and Doris Cress

On a hot Sunday morning, after sleeping at the Canning Creek Cove campground in Kansas, we pulled into the small town of Council Grove.  The town, located roughly between Salina and Topeka, is historically significant for being a key stop on the Santa Fe Trail.  As such, we were not surprised to find ourselves having breakfast at The Santa Fe Cafe, eating a remarkable breakfast burrito.

The Santa Fe Cafe had just changed hands and a family of four was there to greet us and take our order.  Our waitress looked to be about 9 years old and when we ordered 2 breakfast burritos she scrunched her forehead in thought and put her pencil to the order pad and scratched out "2 brayfast blotos" then happily skipped back to the kitchen where her dad was waiting and whispered loudly "Two breakfast burritos dad. But I didn't know how to spell that."

The burritos, or blotos as we now call them, arrived and they could have fed an army with as much eggs and vegetables as were stuffed into that fragile tortilla.  She came back to get our empty plates, offered each of us a raspberry candy and then went outside to hail in the passing motorcyclists that were roaring through downtown slowly on a Sunday morning drive.  There were swarms of motorcyclists out to take advantage of this beautiful bluebird day, and, as we left, a few came in and took our place to order their own blotos.

Trav and I decided that our next course of action would be to go to church, as we figured those Kansans who weren't riding around on their motorcycles would most likely be in a church on Sunday morning, and we wanted to meet people.  I called my dad, who is a minister, to consult and see which denomination would be most likely to have the best snacks and we ended up going with the Presbityrians.

There was a great time of singing and then we sat through an interesting service in which a woman told of her recent experience with a missionary school in Guatemala.  A youth group rafting trip that had been planned for the day before had been cancelled, so as we filed out of the sanctuary we grazed on all the Subway sandwiches that would otherwise be doomed to perish, as well as some excess cucumbers from a parishoners garden.  Between bites we introduced ourselves to the minister and got to telling him about our project with farmers.  With a light in his eye he snapped out his cell phone and called two church members who had just retired from their farm and moved into town, being 91 and 87 years old.

Don and Doris Cress are the oldest farmers that we had the pleasure of interviewing, and their stories about how things used to be were a pleasure, a history and a warning all at the same time.

Click "read more" to see what they had to say in their own words.