The Farm Report, Part 1: The Lay of the Land

I'm penning this post by candlelight, the first time in a long time I've written without electricity. I feel suddenly, thrillingly authentic: connected by tendrils of dripping wax to Thoreau in his cabin above Walden Pond, to Tolstoy in his country estate. And, though my work will eventually be transmitted to you through electronic pathways those writers could not have imagined, it’s fitting that this post originates with such a time-honored light source. Fitting, because I’m writing about agriculture – man’s earliest profession and the root of all culture; the institution that made us recognizably human.

Well, that was a grandiose prelude to a banal job. I’ve been working at Hell’s Backbone Grill, an organic restaurant in the Middle of Nowhere (aka Boulder), Utah, for about ten days now, with three weeks to go. I work not at the restaurant, but on the farm that supplies it, a job (rather, a volunteer position with all-you-can-eat compensation) that entails harvesting, planting, and yanking up clusters - no, thickets - no, forests of weeds.

Hell's Backbone Grill: where the epicurean magic happens.

We weed, literally, until our hands bleed. Every once in a while this tedium is punctuated by a thrilling interregnum like, say, chicken coop maintenance. These diversions are few and far between, though, and if we’re on the job, odds are we’re tugging dandelions. That’s not to say it’s bad work – there’s ample time and space to think, and talk, and listen to the whir of grasshoppers as they flee from the trowel. But scintillating labor, it’s not.

***

Farm work is monotonous, and it’s tackled by millions – safe to say billions? – of people on this planet. Why, then, does it feel so exotic to me? To begin, it’s simply not something that a person of my situation would ordinarily pursue (or so go the stereotypes). And what’s my situation? Over-educated, urban, coastal, and, why not, Jewish: not too many Chosen People davening in the Corn Belt. Not that any of those descriptors are inherently obstacles or aids to the farmer, just that they’re not often associated with the agricultural arts. How many Amherst graduates go into farming? Well, about as many as go into professional bowling, or trapeze artistry, or blacksmithing (smithery?). The waters I’m swimming in may be familiar to most of the world, but within my societal cabal, they’re pretty uncharted.

***

Thoreau may have written by candlelight, but he sure didn’t ply his quill within an aluminum-sided, bullet-shaped Airstream trailer.

I couldn’t imagine a better living situation than my Airstream. The trailer’s interior looks as though a bed-and-breakfast owner had been hired to spruce up the cockpit of a space shuttle: every displeasing steel and plastic surface is adorned by throw pillows, prayer flags (the restaurant's owner is a Tibetan Buddhist), and candles.

And candles, and candles. On my window ledge alone there are eight, stout green ones and thin red ones and white ones in little brass holders caked in wax. (For some reason I can’t help thinking of a pajama-clad, wizened old Englishman using that brass holder to investigate the many chambers of his Victorian mansion late at night, in search of a prowler or a midnight snack.) The other countertops are likewise festooned, and necessarily there are matchbooks everywhere. The trailer, in short, is the most flammable object this side of the Cuyahoga, and before I go to bed I check and double-check the wicks for even the faintest glow of orange life. Trapped in a stainless steel broiler isn’t the way I want to go, thanks.

My metallic, candle-lit sanctuary, as seen at 7 am.

As homey as the belly of the trailer is, its interior can’t rival its location. The farm is three miles from the restaurant, and situated at the culmination of a dead-end dirt road wending through a labyrinth of fields that sustain every crop from alfalfa to llama. (The Red Rockin' Llama Farm uses them as sherpas on canyoneering trips, and they're purportedly excellent pack animals. No matter how many times I pass them, though, these camelids always seem misfits – escapees from a petting zoo, sick of five-year-olds whacking them in their muzzles.)

In the morning I wake by 6:45 and, as often as my habitually cramped hamstrings allow, run up the dirt road to the restaurant for breakfast (saluting llamas along the way), as the sun breaks orange over the eastern mesas and floods our green little valley with pale light. The huge Belgian horses in the Ryans’ paddock have begun to stir and the air breathes with manure, and I’ll tell you, cow shit has never smelled sweeter.

The other farm workers are scattered amongst houses and campsites along this rutted stretch of road, making me the only farmer who actually lives on the farm; my trailer, then, is the only regularly occupied human habitation for half a mile. This has many benefits, chief among them being that I can swim in my pond naked.

Did I mention I have a pond? I do – a small one, used for irrigation by the farmers, and spawning grounds by the desert toads, whose tadpoles, by now sprouting nascent hind legs, teem in the shallows. The water’s cold, perfect for a dip after my fellow farmers have stumbled back to their own houses and tents to clean tumbleweed spores out of their hair. I stay behind and sit in waist-deep water, scooping up tadpoles to monitor the progress of their metamorphosis, until the hills cast shadows over the pond and the wind wrinkles its surface, and it’s time for dinner.

***

Farming is probably the worst imaginable application of the liberal arts education.

To beat a dead horse: The liberal arts education is, by teaching its students how to think instead of filling their heads with reams of technical minutia pertaining to a single field, molding an adaptable if unspecialized workforce, one prepared for whatever unforeseeable new jobs the capricious global marketplace prizes in the future.

Farming does not fit within the liberal arts model, for two reasons.

The good farmer, first, must have an incredible command of the technical minutia that lib-arts frowns upon. The good farmer must know how which variety of onion is adapted to his latitude’s allotment of daylight; which species of weed provide beneficial shade and which run too rampant; which crops prefer nitrogen-rich soil and which prefer poor. The good farmer must have proficiency with the entire John Deere catalog: the tractor, the tiller, the baler. The good farmer must know how to react to a cold April, a dry July, an early frost. The farmer must possess an immense body of knowledge (one far greater than any, say, consultant's) to keep his patch of land afloat. No matter how intelligent a person is, no matter how dynamic his systems-based thinking skills, he is a worthless farmer if he has not ingested this mountain of information.

I may know jack shit about the growing cycles of the Purple Top White Ball Turnip,
but that didn't stop me from being proud as hell of this beaut.

It is incredibly difficult to glean all this knowledge without growing up on a farm, which brings me to the second reason that the liberal arts education is nearly useless to the farmer: it is not a hot profession; in fact, it is ice-cold. I hate statistics as much as the next English major, but here are two telling ones:

1) The average American farmer is age 55.
2) 300 farms have gone out of business per week for the last decade. No wonder freshly-minted Ivy League grads aren’t exactly knocking down the barn door.

***

But, though farming is hardly taking off (not even the organic kind, which is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance), it’s not going anywhere, either. (At least until some worshipper at the Altar of Convenience invents a pill that supplies all the body’s nutritional demands at once – not a world that I expect to see, or would wish to live in.) It’s the world’s oldest profession – sorry, prostitutes – and easily its most important: sorry, financial (dis)services sector. Absent those pioneers who decided to settle down and raise food, we’d still be nomads throwing sharp sticks at wild boars, waiting futilely for the dawn of something resembling civilization. What job could be nobler than farming: agriculture has birthed society, settlement, Culture.

In the minds of many, however, this venerability is a strike against farming, not a point in its favor. One of the attendant pressures that comes with being society’s Best, Brightest, and Most Creative Minds is the pressure to innovate, to get in at the ground floor of some burgeoning industry and blaze trails. Hard to trailblaze an industry that’s existed for some 15,000 years. Most of the technological advancements in farming have been detrimental – think feedlots, pesticides, genetic modification – meaning that socially conscious farming hasn’t advanced all that much from its primitive origins. 98% of the labor at Hell’s Backbone is conducted with no more than a shovel, a trowel, and two very blistered hands. We’ve got a couple of old pickup trucks, maybe, but the work’s not all too exciting despite those machines. The job might be hot, literally (Utah in the summer must be like working in the engine room of the Queen Mary), but nothing about it is new.

***

I’m not urging you to drop your future and become a farmer – heck, I’m not going to, even after 1500 laudatory words on the subject. Merely, I write in defense of farming, a call for respect on its behalf. We, America’s present and future seekers of elite jobs, tend to disparage professions that don't involve keyboards and weren't created from thin air within the last two years. But farming is no provincial anachronism - it's every society's most vital pillar, and it's in desperate need of young and skilled workers. I may not be asking you personally to milk goats or sow radishes, but I do wish farming was considered a viable, respected profession for our country's upper tier of college graduates. Tom Vilsack, get on that!

End.