Category Archives: Local Economy

Waiting on the Egg Man

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History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. — Mr. Twain

Light on the farm from the setting sun, after a storm.

Our phone has been ringing off the hook, again, and we are glad. But now I have some questions without ready answers.

In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, small farms did, if not actually thrive, at least fare better than they had for some years before. The population, already primed by Michael Pollan and Food, Inc., deluged us with requests for sides of pork, quarters of beef, whole lamb, chicken, eggs, and produce. We held workshops on foraging mushrooms and raising hogs. We conducted classes on butchering chickens that had real estate agents lined up next to home-school moms, waiting to wield a knife on a live chicken. The job loss, the foreclosures, the crash of the banks — the societal disruption was such that virtually everyone feared being relegated to living a quasi-medieval life before that year or the next was out. For the first time in a long time people thought and acted local. That lasted for a few years.

I have been thinking about that time in this current crisis: What does the future post-COVID-19 hold for small farms? Where will the small farm fit into the economy, or, more to the point, which economy will the small farm fit into? Because, like history, an economy ain’t static.

A recent NYT article mentioned offhandedly that Americans eat 75 percent of their vegetables at restaurants. That stat shows the outsized impact of our consumer economy on what used to be a family or communal experience, that is, whether it be sitting down to shell beans or break bread. We have, in one generation or two, outsourced the love and care of food preparation and delivery to businesses. (Which begs the question of what the heck is in those veggieless home-cooked meals.)

Dan Barber, in his 2014 book The Third Plate, spent several hundred pages eloquently reimagining the dinner plate of the future at his elegant Blue Hill restaurant. One of the questions that still rattles around in my brain is, Does a future knocked from its pedestal by global catastrophe —pandemic, climate change, collapsing resources — really allow for high-end restaurants? Or, indeed, for restaurants at the scale we have today?

A local producer’s economy (or as it is now fashionable to say, the maker’s economy) remains only a twee option in the global consumer economy. I’ve written too many times about the customer seeing “local” as a consumer’s choice: “I bought some lovely pork chops from Winged Elm Farm, honey. Run to Costco and pick up the rest of the meal’s ingredients.” While that “choice” continues, most small farms will be but a rhetorical flourish for the politician, the food writer, and the conversationalist at the restaurant dinner table, a footnote on the farm-to-table menu that proudly announces sourcing local ingredients “when available.”

Small farm culture simply is not relevant in large-scale capitalist or command economies. Indeed, it exists in the margins of most economic models; it endures, in moments of time, as a particular cycle of history expands or contracts. The census used to have a category for the “self-sufficing farm,” an entity that produced the majority of a family’s needs and bartered in a primarily cashless economy for the remainder. That model, while not so sexy to policy planners, politicians, or, frankly, you and me, is closer to how most small farms have existed across the centuries, across the continents. Perhaps the small farm thrives when there is minimal choice?

One day next month or next year, this particular crisis will pass, no doubt. But it has left exposed the limits of global supply chains. It is encouraging that those limits are now being questioned. Yet, I do not hold my breath that good questions or good answers will change our trajectory as a species. Just as likely is that the planet will make the choices for us. Then the question becomes not Where does the small farm fit into the economy? but instead, How does the larger population learn to live a life of reduced choices?

Older farmers in this valley recall that growing up, an egg man used to come around twice a week to collect eggs. He would take them to sell to the family-owned grocery store in the nearest town. He provided some much-needed cash for the farms to buy what they did not themselves produce.

Maybe that is the best outcome we might hope for. When the clearest sign that we have launched ourselves on a new and better course is that one fine spring day, as we are hoeing in our gardens, we hear the sound of the egg man coming up the drive, once again.

Seeds to Acre

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Moonrise over the hay barn.

Woodsmoke awakens me most winter mornings. It drifts in through a vent in our bedroom window, a sign that the closest neighbor is up and preparing for his day as a jack-of-all-trades around the valley. His house, at the bottom of the gravel driveway, is a quarter-mile away. Still half asleep, I wonder this morning how long it takes once the woodstove is lit for the smoke to reach our window.

Winter is the season in which the senses are sharpened by absence. Stars glitter more, stand out in sharper relief, against a cold, dry sky. Sounds carry farther through the leafless trees. Smells, without the rich competition of high summer, laser into the memory with instant understanding and identity.

Twenty years of observations on the farm finds me chiding myself over how little I know or have accomplished. My life will soon enter late afternoon; in another couple of decades it will see the sun setting. Thomas Jefferson said, “I am an old man but a young gardener.” As an old man, will I have the same patience to endure and nurture my own ignorance, to engage with what I don’t know?

This past week, off the farm for work, I chanced into a conversation with a computer scientist experienced in modeling disease outbreaks. For a couple of hours, we parsed the data of the coronavirus, looked at his modeling of the numbers, discussed the true fragility of a global economy. He had, with the exception of his current trip, canceled all work-related travel for the next eight weeks. The system will be overloaded during that period, he predicted.

I found myself wondering if it was wrong to find a kernel of hope in the prospect of a global slowdown built on the bones of a possible pandemic. Ten years after the great recession brought housing expansion in our valley to a halt, the maw of our species is being stuffed once again as wooded lots are bulldozed and foundations laid. This frenzy too may end only with the close of the day. The sun sets on everything, eventually.

Jefferson, in his farm notebooks, gives tried and tested information on the ratio of turnip seed per acre as a winter forage for sheep. It is his thoughtful exercise in self-providing that I’m struggling — in a world of impeachments, elections, health concerns, aging family, needs of the farm, care of the land and animals, global ties, and limits of all sorts — to understand and to implement. What is the properly scaled relationship, the seeds to acre, for this life?

Amid the overload, how do I provide those in my charge enough forage for the season, yet leave enough that the same may be repeated in countless seasons to come? These thoughts come to me while I stand on the porch in the dark morning, glittering stars above and smoke in the air from below. I indulge in the questions, exercises without answers, sharpened by absence.

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Reading this weekend: A Place on Earth (W. Berry). The Social History of Bourbon (G. Carson)

B&J’s: revisiting an ode to the meat and three

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B&J’s in Darien, GA

This past week I was passing through Darien, Georgia. A hard scrabble fishing village on the coast with plenty of character. A town, in my opinion, that was lucky enough to have been passed by in the scramble to reinvent those Southern coasts into one undistinguished and overdeveloped theme park of high-rise condos and golf courses.

Since it was lunchtime, I pulled off the highway in hopes that B&J’s was still in the meat and three business. It had been ten years since I had last visited. But they were still open, and they were packed.

Once inside the restaurant, I found a chair open at a crowded long communal table and sat down. They had catfish, fried chicken, meatloaf, and chicken livers for the meat choices. I settled on the fried chicken with sides of green beans, collards, mac and cheese, and banana pudding for dessert.

The crowd was local and knew each other with plenty of “hello’s” bouncing around the room. And, although I didn’t know anyone, I still received my honey fix. As in, “Honey, would you like some more sweet tea?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The classic presentation (at B&J’s)

Which all reminded me of this piece I wrote some years back on the topic. I hope you enjoy it and it inspires you to go find a similar spot to have lunch this coming week.

The Ode

Oh, how I yearn for the return of the meat and three. The simple joy of knowing that with a quick turn off the highway, any small town in the South yielded a diner that served up the sacred trifecta — that assurance brought comfort to restless, dark nights.

The daily break for lunch, the communion with one’s people. They have given way to the blight of Hardees and its ilk, the shuffling herd inching forward at the drive-through, devouring at the wheel, afterward pitching leftover hamburger wrappers out the windows. Our collective soul has been starved, even as our collective waistline has expanded.

We were a people of the garden once, the content of our favorite diner’s lunch fare reflecting the abundance of the seasons. Served in modest portions that allowed us to eat healthy, but not to excess or somnolence, the choices were varied and yet consistent: two or three meats, perhaps six or more vegetables. The daily decision was made while waiting for the iced tea to arrive.

The chicken was a smaller bird, the cuts done to maximize the number of servings. Each breast was cut in half, and when it was served on a small plate, it did not dwarf the other choices. The meatloaf was divvied into small squares, the country ham shaved in modest slices, the vegetables simply prepared with minimal seasoning.

“Yes, ma’am, we are ready to order. Hmm, I will get the chicken today, dark meat, please. And let me have the okra and stewed tomatoes (which still counted as one side), turnip greens, and the crowder peas. Roll or cornbread? Cornbread, of course. Yes, ma’am, that is all today, no dessert for me. Peanut butter pie? Oh, that’s tempting, but, no.”

Y’all have a good day. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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Reading this weekend: Wide as the Waters, the story of the English Bible and the revolution it inspired (Bobrick)

Farming in the Fog

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Trying to be a good farmer? Let’s start with the old chestnut, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Sound enough advice on the surface, particularly for a small farm like ours with a focus on self-sufficiency. Freezers full of pork, we have been busy curing hams and bacon, making sausage, and rendering lard. All enjoyable efforts, they provide added value, of sorts, to the routine of farm life. Yet, we are part of the larger economy, where income is still essential. We’d prefer that our customers engage in the same preservation activities, reap the same rewards at the groaning table, but we’d also prefer our own freezers to be closer to empty and our farm account closer to full.

Which brings me to this thought: Just when does the man drown? When his lungs fill with water as he sinks to the bottom? Or is the die cast further back in time — as he first stepped into the boat, bought a boat, played with a plastic boat in the bathtub as a child? One might as well ask when a Republic fails. Is it when the caesar takes over, when the wealthy first use their clout to block access to office, to markets, to land? These are rat holes into which one could pound sand all day and still have room.

In two decades on the farm, I’ve learned that it is of benefit to accept the gray over the black and the white. The latter is certainly more comforting — simply point to one aspect of life, society, or politics and say, “That was the turning point: I became middle-aged; that was the golden age; if that bastard hadn’t gained office, then….” But the realities are infinitely more bewildering and messy.

I like to think that we are symbolically engaged in either a communal effort to, as the old left described it, build a new society in the shell of an old, or playing an important role in pruning an old orchard to keep it in production. But those may just be more platitudes I hum under my breath to stay awake.

To be clear, we are not drowning, because we never swam. Our farm has always generated just enough to pay our way, cover our bills. But it has never been an economic success story. We are waders in the shallows.

The small farm that grows and provides quality products needs more than simply market access. It also needs a base of buyers who truly value its existence. Who see the small farmer as more than just a commodity choice or an archetype (Let’s buy from the hip chick, support the old man in overalls, go multicultural this week). Who instead see the small farmer as an essential part of the community. But that is wacky-talk. It presupposes that any of us are rooted in a community at this stage. In our modern world (even if we can possess the truth as we imagine it), when we shout from the rooftop, our message becomes just so much noise among the other shouts, irrelevant and unheard in the cacophony. Ignored in a price-is-right babble.

So, here is my final question: What is good agriculture? It surely isn’t just the farmer or the farm; it isn’t just access to markets. It most certainly is not providing for a society that binges on empty calories, is not driving an hour and half to sit at a farmer’s market for six hours and sell $25 of peppers to the bourgeoisie. You don’t get there from here by placing a pin on a starting place or on an ending, by pitting urban against rural, community against individual, or by offering access to the digital universe while ignoring the true majesty that surrounds us.

It is not just land use or a freezer full of pork. It isn’t a one-word answer in black or white. If I climb up on the barn roof in the gray fog on a cool fall morning and shout the question, all I get are echoes off the nearby ridge in reply. In this fog it is hard to hear, but I think it’s saying, “It is not three hams curing under the stairs when you only need one.”

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Reading this weekend: One for the Books (Queenan)

Small Town Resilience (a repeat)

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We have spent a busy weekend making mead, bottling some older mead, butchering chickens, harvesting produce, and preparing to harvest apples and pears. So, I’ll leave you with this older piece on a different kind of resilience.

The aftermath of butchering chickens.

Last week a colleague spent three hours advancing 15 miles in the cancerous landscape of Atlanta.

Around the same time, I was commuting in central Missouri down a two-lane highway through a largely depopulated land of corn and beef cattle ornamented with the occasional red-brick one-room schoolhouse sitting in a grove of trees. The schoolhouses, long empty, were universally well kept, no broken windows, grass mowed—buildings cared for symbolic of the hope or expectation that they might once again serve a purpose.

The housing stock was older, yet well cared for and solid. But it was a lonely landscape of older couples and few children. I drove past the occasional activity of men in distant fields loading hay onto trailers using tractors built to accomplish much, the work done with such little effort as would have stunned even their grandfathers. Little effort and fewer people, freeing up the children and grandchildren to follow the classic road to town and city, a well-worn path since the ancient world, but one accelerated by our fossil-fueled innovations.

I stopped for the night in Boonville, Missouri, on the banks of the Missouri River. Boonville is not a prosperous town. Its trail of empty strip mall architecture dribbles from the outer fringe of the town’s core to the interstate, signaling a raising of the drawbridge, a calculated retreat against a yet unacknowledged enemy. But the core is still vibrant with neighborhoods, small-town hardware and furniture stores, plumbing and electrical businesses, an elegant restored hotel, a diner, and a bar and grill.

That evening I walked from the old hotel to the bar and grill, a place called Maggie’s, for dinner. The Midwest small-town bar and grill is unique. It is the genuine third place Ray Oldenburg spoke about. Warm and friendly, with people of all ages and classes: farmers, workers and professionals, town and country, producer and consumer. These gathering spots are spread across the agricultural heartland. They are the glue to the community, providing face-to-face time between neighbors. Time not gained in a traffic jam.

I am not naively asserting a rural idyll, without strife, tension, unemployment, severed families and the ills of too much idle time. Yet the small town is fundamentally more resilient, resilient because of its smallness and its proximity to productive land. Rural communities, with their face-to-face interactions, have provided the template for human existence for the past thousands of years.

Communities within a megacity are a mere echo of that life. They can nourish and sustain in the ascendancy, but their larger host survives only as wealth is pumped in from the outside world. When the pump is turned off, the decline is inevitable and rapid. Consider Rome, from a city of a million to a village of thousands in the space of mere generations. Or the specter of Detroit, reduced by half in one generation.

Perhaps these Boonvilles, these freshly painted one-room schoolhouses, these Midwestern pubs are the starter-cultures for the wort, the yeast for the fermentation required to restart the small farm, small-town life, a way to redirect the human trajectory from the cancerous growth to the healthy organism, from the complex to the comprehensible?

The cities like Atlanta in our landscape offer nothing but a promise of continued sprawl, congestion, and three hours and 15 miles stalled in the present. And if history is the judge, they offer us nothing in their inevitable decline.

For all the problems in that rural Missouri landscape, it is still one of latent hope. The problems it faces are fundamentally local and scalable. And if the survival of our future allowed bets, mine would be on the Boonvilles and rural counties in this land.

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Reading this weekend (2019): Underland (Macfarlane) and iGen (Twenge). The former is another terrific read by the author of The Old Ways (among others). And, the latter is a data driven survey of the generation that has grown up with the i-phone (be afraid, be very afraid).