Cultivating reverence

I'm afraid I may be jumping the bounds of agriculture and straying into social commentary more than usual this week, but the topic of this post has been on my mind lately. I'd like to share a few thoughts on our society's relationship both to food and to death and dying, and why those relationships are at the heart of many of our environmental, social, and psychological problems. The complexities and specialization of the modern world, I believe, have distanced us from the processes that bring food to the table and that bring our lives to a close. While modernity has brought us inarguable benefits, our decreased intimacy with and therefor understanding of the most basic processes of life and death has serious ramifications.

These thoughts were rekindled last week during a conversation with a dinner guest at the farm who is studying to be a palliative care nurse. I shared with him that my father passed away two years ago and spent the last two weeks of his life under hospice care--first at his own home and finally at Monterey Hospice House. While hospice care didn't make the loss of my father any less painful, I believe it helped my family integrate his passing with the broader scope of his life. That sense of integration has brought me some understanding, comfort, and sense of peace. So often, the aging and dying process is hidden behind the doors of nursing homes and hospitals. I think we all suffer on account of this--those isolated by their age or illness and those of us who have become unfamiliar with death and dying. Consequently, we understand very little about death. We fear it and avoid facing it all the more. The fascination with death and violence in our popular media reflects a deep alienation from the dying process.

Our relationship to food has become similarly detached and opaque. Because we only participate in the final stage of the process--consumption--food has been reduced to a commodity. Most of the process which brings food to our supermarkets is now hidden from view. Yet for millennia, agriculture was a primary way in which mankind studied, understood, and appreciated the workings and rhythms of the natural world. This intimacy with natural and semi-natural ecosystems fosters a reverence for life which manifests logically in an attitude of respect, conservation, and stewardship. Now that less than 2% of of Americans are directly engaged in agriculture, and those who do farm are increasingly pressured to do so in a way that is more industrial than ecological, it is not surprising that we face an ecological crisis. Alienation from the natural world is a much bigger threat to the environment than an army of Humvees because the latter stems from the former.

The 20th century thinker Krishnamurti wrote, "Our problems--social, political, religious--are so complex that we can solve them only by being simple, not by becoming extraordinarily erudite or clever." Gardening is in some ways a simple act. But it is helping me cultivate a deeper understanding of and reverence for life, death, and the processes of the natural world. And because actions are ultimately extensions of our attitudes, I find such cultivation to be a most practical step in addressing in my own way the complex problems of our time.

Community Supported Agriculture

Tuesday morning was cool and foggy--par for the course in Santa Cruz and excellent weather for our first big harvest.

We convened in the fields and gardens to receive our marching orders. The chalk boards listed about 20 crops and the amount to be harvested of each. 200 heads of lettuce. 80 pounds of spinach. 200 pints of blueberries. When all had been cut and cleaned, boxed and bundled and packaged, we moved the produce to the picturesque old barn where the farm's Community Supported Agriculture members pick up their weekly bounty.

Small farmers are faced with the challenge of selling their produce in a food system that favors large, industrial growers. Hundreds of thousands of small farms have succomed to this economic calculus in the past century. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is one of the more compelling models that has evolved to meet this challenge. Members of a CSA purchase a share of the farmers produce in advance of the harvest season and receive a regular supply (typically weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly) of fruits and vegetables. The farmer benefits by receiving his capital up front and is assured a steady market throughout the season. Some of the financial risk of his operation is effectively dispersed through the "investers" in his enterprise. Members obtain high quality produce at a reduced rate and enjoy a sense of connectivity to the food they eat, the land it was grown in, and the farmer whose labor brought it to being.

The CSA evolved independently and uniquely in Japan and Europe after World War II. The first CSA in the US, largely based on the European model, began in 1986 in New Hampshire. Today there are upwards of 2000 CSA farms in the US, ranging in membership from 10 - 1000. Farmers and members have developed countless varieties on the CSA theme. Some CSA memberships entail some involvement in farm labor, while other CSA members simply receive their reqular box without much interaction with the farm.

CSAs present their share of challenges as well. Developing a membership base, managing a large cooperative, creating newsletters, etc. are additional and often time consuming responsibilities that are added to the farmer's plate. Furthermore, CSAs typically offer a wide variety of seasonal produce to attract members and thus present farmers with more complexities than a monocrop operation.

Many of our 100-plus CSA members arrived early on Tuesday, often with their children, eager to pick up their first share and make bouquets out of our CSA flower garden. Their boxes included a dozen or so crops, including spinach, strawberries, rainbow chard, and -- to everyone's great delight -- two pints of fresh blueberries.

laboring for strawberries

On Saturday, I drove 10 miles north of Santa Cruz on Highway 1 to Swanton Berry farm. Swanton's farm manager, a former program participant, had said they could use a few extra hands for their peak strawberry harvest. So, four of us ventured up the coast for a square meal, $8/per hour, and an education in the daily reality of manual field labor.

We hit the fields at 10:30am and maneuvered our harvesting carts down the rows until 4pm with a half-hour lunch break. By 12:30pm, with knees and back beginning to express their displeasure, I had established what I thought to be a respectable pace of one flat (12 one pint baskets) per hour. Then the crew arrived. 30 men -- mainly Mexicans and a handful of Salvadorians -- marched onto the field and swept like a wave down the rows. In one hour's time, they had picked the adjecent field clean at a rate of 4 1/2 flats per person per hour. Then they were gone and on to the next field.

Swanton is one of California's oldest organic berry farms. Relative to most farms, they provide their workers with very good compensation: health care, housing, $8-10/hr wages, and overtime pay (after 60 hours). Yet there is no getting around the fact that this is back-breaking work. During picking season, workers spend 60-80 hours per week in the fields. In the winter months, many relocate to the fields in Yuma, Arizona. Job security is very low, and workers spend months and sometimes years away from family.

Cheap labor is the backbone of California agriculture and has deep historical roots. Our present system can essentially be traced to the Spanish period, during which time indigenous peoples were forced to cultivate mission lands. After the precipitous decline in the native population, a long line of impoverished immigrant groups have renewed the labor pool: Chinese, Japanese, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, Okies, Filipinos, and a second wave of Mexicans (and other Central Americans). This historical background explains in part why California agriculture remains so labor intensive when compared to farming practices in regions like the Midwest, where labor has increasingly been replaced by technology.

In a previous post, I suggested that food should occupy a higher place on our collective priority list and should, by extension, cost more. Just as there are hidden environmental costs in the pursuit of cheaper and cheaper food, there are manifold hidden social costs.