Every so often we will re-publish work which has been printed in limited-edition contexts in projects related to Farm Together Now or by one of the contributors. Today we start by sharing an essay from “Beneath the Pavement: A Garden” which is a project by Amy Franceschini and Myriel Milicevic that was commissioned by Radar at Loughborough University. According to the organizers “Beneath the Pavement considers biological forms in relation to political and social systems”. The project included a garden, some walking tours, performances and a publication from which we will be reprinting this essay, On Gardens and Politics by Brian Duff and Maria Rosales. You can view the entire project here, download the book here, and you can purchase the printed version of this document from Half Letter Press.

On Gardens and Politics

By Brian Duff & Maria Rosales (pdf of the text can be downloaded here)

In the history of political thought, metaphors that associate politics with the activity of gardening have been among the most influential and compellingly articulated. They are also among the most destructive ever devised. In this essay we seek to rehabilitate the metaphor of gardening for politics. While many of the projects documented in this book consider the way that gardens might illustrate political systems, we consider the way the experience of gardening might inform our thinking about the activity of politics – in terms of citizenship in addition to political systems broadly conceived. In particular, we suggest that the activity of gardening is a useful way to conceive of a politics in which citizens can develop profound and deeply rooted commitments to experiments regarding the best way to live in a community with others. These experiments, like gardening, will require hard work, creative thinking, problem solving, and sustained commitment. But most importantly, gardening reminds us that sometimes experiments fail. No matter how carefully we plan and how lovingly we cultivate, disasters occur, and the unpredictable happens – hail falls from the sky, blight appears out of nowhere, and insects quietly devour. We must abandon some plants, pull up roots, and try it a different way next year. These are lessons that we can usefully apply to politics, which works best when citizens feel and act upon deep commitments to a notion of the good, but in which citizens are not fundamentalists regarding their commitments. Instead, they are open to reconsidering them, criticizing them, debating them, and abandoning them for a better approach.

Cultivation and politics in the ancient world

In the Greek polis, the ancient community most influential to subsequent political ideas, the tilling of soil and cultivation of plants played a crucial role in the political imagination. Politics was defined as an activity specifically opposed to the drudgery and perceived predictability of working with the soil. Politics shunned matters of sustenance and necessity, and instead concerned itself with considerations of the great and the glorious. A concern with nature and working the land was associated with slaves and women, whose lives centered upon this sort of work. In Athens, for example, citizens literally entered the space of politics by leaving their small farms and going into the walled center of the city to participate in the responsibilities of politics.

A politics that shunned predictability and necessity in the name of the risky and the glorious resulted in many triumphs. Evidence of Athenian glory remains today, in the Parthenon and other monuments to Athenian glory built in this era, or the profound tragic dramas written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. But this sort of politics also resulted in profound disasters, which helped to trigger a reconsideration of both the garden and the values of cultivation in politics. In particular, a ruinous war with Sparta and her allies triggered a retreat behind city walls where intense crowding contributed to a devastating plague. Pursuing the fight in an effort to reclaim the glory of Athens, the Athenians also became complicit in betrayals and genocide. The pursuit of glory for glory’s sake led Athens to lose her way.

It was in this environment that Plato introduced a new conception of politics that would rehabilitate the concept of careful cultivation associated with gardens. Teaching and theorizing in a garden located outside the city center, Plato’s reorganization of politics centered upon careful cultivation carried out by a wise ruler in possession of a master plan. Plato’s political community, described in his Republic, was modeled on his image of an ideal social organization. These ideal “Forms” are accessible only to the wisest – a ruler (or rulers) who organizes society like a gardener does her plot.

Rather than tinker with laws, Plato argued the rulers should cultivate the people through a carefully planned educational system, so that they would grow up to know what they should do without needing specific legislation to guide them. They were to be shaped when they were young, like fruit trees espaliered in a courtyard.

Plato goes so far as to suggest the ideal political community must start like any garden, with a tilling of the soil to begin anew. He would banish all adults so that the ruler might start afresh and place every member of society in their proper place like plants in their rows – deciding who will live where, do what sort of work, and even who will reproduce with whom. In Plato, the messiness and unpredictability of Athenian politics is replaced by the virtues of a garden – the calm and reassuring beauty of everything in its proper place, citizens given just what they need to grow in the way appropriate to them, and contributing precisely what is most appropriate to their capacity. Politics becomes cultivation. While Plato believed that his ideal city, like everything on earth, would eventually decay and die, he primarily presented his goal as establishing and enforcing stability. He spends a lot of time, for example, discussing various forms of censorship, trying to keep harmful emotions and ways of thinking out of the Republic – the way a gardener might keep rabbits and gophers out of the vegetables.

From cultivation to the political machine

Plato’s vision of politics had a profound legacy. Nietzsche entitled a chapter on Plato’s influence on the two thousand years that followed “The History of an Error.”  To Nietzsche the essence of the error was Plato’s hostility to what is messy and unpredictable in human existence – Plato’s desire to escape from life’s ambiguities and inconsistencies into the clarity of ideals. This impulse was intensified in the Christian centuries in the form of a denigration of our sinful earthly existence in favor of the perfections of the heavens and the afterlife. Political power rightly belonged to God’s representatives here on earth. Proper citizenship, to the extent it existed, consisted of meek obedience. For the Christians the first paradise was a garden free of toil, and the difficulties of earthly existence, including the work of cultivating the earth, were simply to be endured.

But the rise in secular politics, both in terms of modern political thought and in terms of modern political systems, did not mark the end of the Platonic metaphor. Some secular moral and political philosophies recreated the Platonic ideal in contemporary terms – for example in moral philosophies like Immanuel Kant’s, which suggested the possibility of human reason guiding citizens toward perfect virtue. G.W.F. Hegel imagined we could approach an ideal in which human freedom is fulfilled through membership in a well-ordered state. In another direction, rather than seeking to escape our distaste for the messiness, difficulty, and unpredictability of life, we sought to conquer it through knowledge, technology and expertise. Thus this period saw the rise of the bureaucratic state, in which experts and functionaries conceive of politics in terms of the management of the population and the economy. In this era politics is often conceived in terms of “policies” that encourage the safety, health, productivity, and wealth of the populace. Scientists, social scientists, policy experts and technocrats seek to manage the nation in a way that is analogous to Plato’s vision of the ruler with unique access to knowledge of the good.

One reason it might be useful to reclaim gardening as a metaphor for politics is that in reconfiguring Platonic ideas in empirical terms, these politicians and political thinkers pushed beyond the metaphor of politics as gardening or cultivation, and began to think more in terms of mechanics and machines.

The idea that the government should be an efficient machine was widespread by the 19th century.

In the U.S., Andrew Jackson spoke of his “hope of reducing the General Government to that simple machine which the Constitution created…”. The “political machines” exemplified by Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall dominated the American politics of the late 19th century. Max Weber worried about the compromises a politician necessarily makes to get such a machine to work for the purposes in which he or she believed. This was especially the case in the service of an ideal. “He who wants to establish absolute justice on earth by force,” Weber wrote, “requires a following, a human ‘machine’” ((Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Columbia Press, 1980).  More generally, Weber believed a culture dominated by rational instrumental calculation – though that culture imagined itself the culmination of history – had produced a modern citizen who was best described as a “nullity”.   He condemned the “iron cage” of modernity, in which society could settle into “mechanical petrification” as the “living machine” of bureaucracy dictated more and more of our lives.

These twin strands, utopian ideals about justice and order on earth, and confidence in the application of modern expertise to achieve it, were reconfigured in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, and many of the authoritarian regimes of today. Political theorists like Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben have all explored the ways in which patterns of thinking regarding politics as the quasi-scientific management of populations makes it, as Agamben puts it, “possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust” (Agamben, Giorgio.Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.)

Cultivating the middle ground of politics

It is in such a political environment, where the metaphor of politics as cultivation has been superseded by politics imagined as something more mechanical, that the activity of gardening might be reclaimed for political thinking in a more useful way. Gardening offers ways to conceive of a middle ground that might be usefully cultivated between several sets of extremes in thinking about politics.

Most broadly speaking, the activity of gardening might help us think about how to strike a balance between idealism in the Platonic tradition and those who would reject idealism extravagantly. The metaphor of gardening can help us to think about how citizens might make genuinely felt assertions about better and best ways to live as democratic citizens – and act upon them with diligence, deliberation and creativity – but also how we might be open to the contingency our assertions necessarily entail, and to the possibility that our projects might fail and have to be abandoned.

Political theory is just now emerging from a period in which many thinkers, often labeled “post-modernists,” contributed to the effort to show that apparent truths, ideals and notions are in fact fragile, contestable, constructed and contingent. It has been a worthwhile project, and one that has only sometimes earned the cartoonish characterization that post-modernists merely think “everything is relative” and that any idea, interpretation, or truth claim is as good as another. But certainly post-modern political thinking has put most of its energy and enthusiasm into the project of “deconstructing” established ideas rather than asserting new conceptions of how to live or organize a society. Foucault, for example, simply refused to speculate on the matter. But recent trends in political theory have sought to move beyond, as Stephen White describes it, “postmodern critiques of liberal political institutions whose attacks are long on hyperbole and corrosive language, but short on affirmative conceptualizations and orientation to concrete practices and institutions” (White, stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). White would like to encourage more of these affirmative conceptualizations. And while we agree with him, below we suggest reasons why, metaphorically speaking, we are better off tearing up the concrete and digging into the soil below.

One way to think about how gardening informs political activity is in terms of a spirit of dedicated experimentalism. A common way for gardeners to discuss their projects is to say about one plant or another: “we are going to try brussel sprouts this year.”  It’s a way of thinking that emphasizes both effort and unpredictability.

Each cycle brings about newexperiments, informed by previous knowledge, but nonetheless uncertain.

Those experiments will require hard work and getting our hands dirty. We will have to respond to unexpected obstacles. While we might plan carefully and apply our reason, there is no sense that our plans can be exhaustive, nor that reason can anticipate or solve every complication. In gardening, as in politics, our experiments and projects are unpredictable, and we undertake them anyway. It is what makes gardening so absorbing.

And what gives gardening these qualities is that we are always confronted with the unpredictabilities of organic life, rather than the cleaner realm of pure ideas or clear calculations. As the theorist E.M Cioran argued in his Short History of Decay, seeking to banish Platonic reason from political thinking: “Everything that breathes feeds on the unverifiable; … Give life a specific goal and it immediately loses its attraction” (Cioran, e.M. A Short History of Decay. New York: Viking Press, 1975). While in gardening one has a goal or set of goals, we know that because we are dealing with the living our goal cannot be too specific and our methods cannot be fully known ahead of time.

But it is certainly one of the advantages of gardening as a political metaphor that gardens involve deliberate work, hard choices, and taking charge of a plot and asserting our will upon it. Too many political thinkers on the left seem eager to imagine a politics in which all obstacles (both ideological and practical) have disappeared and politics takes on a quality of ecstatic spontaneity. For example Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their influential book Empire, argue that were humanity to no longer be “deluded in the pursuit of the ethical ideal” – ideals like those articulated by Plato and Kant – then “the multitude” might “organize itself spontaneously and [express] its creativity autonomously” (Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). While gardening certainly provides an opportunity for creativity and self-expression, it also requires deliberate work and planning – necessary elements of politics.

The garden and methodical thinking

Before Hardt and Negri, the political theorist Hannah Arendt defended a notion of politics that she specifically contrasted to work. For Arendt, politics should be about humans interacting with each other and revealing themselves to each other. It must avoid fixed goals and instrumental thinking, which hinders the unpredictability and creativity, the “spontaneity and purposelessness” (Arendt, hannah. The Human Condition.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) that she believes is unique to the political realm. For Arendt, work implies mechanical thinking – which can transform politics into a process marked by, (as Mary Dietz summarizes), the “distortion of all things into means for the pursuit of allegedly higher ends, violent appeals to new orders and final solutions, and utter contempt for human personhood and individuality …” (Dietz, Mary G. ‘The Slow Boring of Hard Boards’: Methodical Thinking and the Work of Politics.The American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 – Dec., 1994) But Dietz suggests that politics and work might be conceived in terms of methodical thinking rather than mechanical thinking. Dietz borrows this term from the theorist Simone Weil. Weil, like Arendt, is concerned with the mechanistic and automated quality of so much of modern work and life. But rather than leap across to automation’s opposite – a sort of spontaneous creativity – Weil imagines a sort of work that might be both creative and deliberate; truly human and yet productive. Dietz seizes upon one example offered by Weil:

A team of workers on a production-line under the eye of a foreman is a sorry spectacle, whereas it is a fine sight to see a handful of workmen in the building trade, checked by some difficulty, ponder the problem each for himself, make various suggestions for dealing with it, and then apply unanimously the method conceived by one of them, who may or may not have any official authority over the remainder. At such moments the image of a free community appears almost in its purity. (1994, 878, quoting Weil’s Liberty and Oppression)

Weil’s vision is an appealing one, though Dietz rightly scolds Weil for her impulse to think in terms of purity. Dietz suggests we might use this notion of methodical thinking to conceive of a methodical politics “where political phenomena present to citizens… challenges to be identified, demands to be met, and a context of circumstances to be engaged (without blueprints). Neither the assurance of finality nor the security of certainty attends this worldly activity” (Dietz, Mary G. ‘The Slow Boring of Hard Boards’: Methodical Thinking and the Work of Politics.The American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 – Dec., 1994).

But workmen in the building trade do have blueprints in most cases. Their goal is often quite specific, and their solutions highly technical, even when they are creative and clever. The gardener’s deliberate work to cultivate living things in a particular way comes closer to the more unpredictable and constantly shifting work of politics. It does more justice as well to the tragedies that politics so often entail  While there is always a way to get a building up, sometimes our garden experiments go horribly wrong. Sometimes the work we put into them goes too far – we kill what we hoped to protect, in cultivating one plant we allow it to choke others out of existence, or a battle with pests becomes a scene of slaughter.

It was because of the possibility of such tragedies authored by leaders and perpetrated by functionaries that Arendt sought to contrast political activities from the relentless demands and bottomless justifications of life’s necessities, dictated by the “circular movement of biological life” (Arendt, hannah. The Human Condition.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). But politics, especially in our era, will inevitably engage the biological: health and sustenance, the quality of people’s daily lives. Politics will make impositions on how people live, it will affect populations, it will do violence to some lives and provide assistance to others. We should not indulge in fantasies that politics can escape such engagements with the biological, even as we remain vigilant in our critical attention to the potential of abuses and pitfalls. The metaphor of gardening helps remind us that even as we carry out plans and cultivate a certain organization of the biological, we must attend to and respect the willfulness and autonomy of the life we encounter and with which we work. And these encounters will necessarily change our plans and elicit creative responses. Gardens do help produce our sustenance, but they are rarely only that: we value their beauty, and the time we spend at work in them. Unlike industrial farming, gardening does not invoke images of the use of technology, pesticides, and genetic monstrosities to accomplish our goals.

To offer a more explicitly political example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt responding to the Great Depression by calling for a period of “bold, persistent experimentation”. Such experiments, in the form of massive social policies, can profoundly impact countless lives in unexpected ways. This does not mean they should not be attempted. But it does mean we should be attentive to these unintended consequences, elastic in our approach, thoughtful about the lives affected, and should never lose ourselves in our drive to achieve a particular goal and never resent the messy unpredictability of our political efforts. In a political environment where no political intervention is immune to comparisons to communism and National Socialism, the garden can be reclaimed as a more complex and nuanced metaphor.

Politics between the city and the wilderness

So gardening as political metaphor might be reinterpreted to complicate the Platonic notion of escaping the messiness of politics for the stability of rule and cultivation and to complicate this concept’s modern manifestations in the bureaucratic state. If Plato’s turn to order and ideals is one way to escape politics, the escape into the wilds of nature is another. Hardt and Negri, advocates of spontaneity and autonomy, clearly long for the wild when they suggest that political analysis “has to descend into the jungle of productive and conflictual determinations that the collective biopolitical body offers us … . The analysis must be proposed not through ideal forms but within the dense complex of experience” (Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Such longing for the wild was most movingly articulated by the first of the great theorists of modern democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But Rousseau’s own attraction to uncivilized nature can help illuminate what is useful about the metaphor of the garden as a middle ground between the wild and the mechanistic excesses of modern life and politics.

Many of Rousseau’s contemporaries and modern predecessors had embraced the notion of applying reason not to the heavens or Platonic ideals, but to nature itself. In the 16th century (as Hardt and Negri note) Sir Francis Bacon called for bringing a “better use and a more perfect technique of the mind and the intellect” to “the most distant realities and the occult secrets of nature” and Sir Thomas More made “the ‘immense and inexplicable power’ of natural life and labor as foundation for political arrangement” (2000, 72-73).12 In the 17th century John Locke suggested that the use of our labor and the application of our reason to cultivate a particular plot of land was the origin of the right to private property and the foundation of political communities. Writing in the 18th century, Rousseau did not buy it. He wrote,

The first man who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say This is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men, “Do not listen to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!” (Rousseau, Jean Jacques. The Basic Political Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987)

Rousseau described in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality what he preferred: the existence of a prehistoric “noble savage” who was no farmer, but rather lived independently, wandered the forest, and found in the wilds of nature all he or she needed to survive. But such a life, while noble and independent, would Rousseau admitted have been unbearably lonely. Elsewhere he admitted that,

Although in civil society man surrenders some of the advantages that belong to the state of nature, he gains in return far greater ones; his faculties are so exercised and developed, his mind is so enlarged, his sentiments so ennobled and his whole spirit so elevated that, if the abuse of his new condition did not in many cases lower him to something worse than what he had left, he should consistently bless the happy hour that lifted him for ever from the state of nature and from the stupid, limited animal made a creature of intelligence and a man. (Rousseau, Jean Jacques.  The Social Contract. New York: Penguin Books, 1968.)

The question was how to avoid the abuses of civil society, which Rousseau saw as principally an obsession with status and opinion.

Such, in fact, is the true cause of all these differences; the savage lives in himself; the man accustomed to the ways of society is always outside himself and knows how to live only in the opinion of others. (Rousseau, Jean Jacques. The Basic Political Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987)

This distaste with society and its obsession with status drove Rousseau to become a bit of a noble savage himself in his old age, wandering alone in the countryside and pursuing his favorite habit of botany. Even then Rousseau indulged his distaste for the deliberate cultivation of plants, in terms that bring to mind the perils of Platonism, Kantianism, and contemporary technocratic politics. As he explained in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, “confining our attention to…the botanical garden, rather than observing plants in their natural setting, we concern ourselves solely with systems and methods … .” (Rousseau, Jean Jacques.  Reveries of the Solitary Walker.  New York: Penguin Books, 1979.)

But Rousseau also betrayed an unmistakable yearning for the garden as a middle place between the lonely wilds of nature and the busy, shallow sociability of city life. He described himself in his old age as a dying garden, with “a mind still adorned by a few flowers, even if they were already blighted by sadness and withered by worry” (Rousseau, Jean Jacques.  Reveries of the Solitary Walker.  New York: Penguin Books, 1979.)  He missed the days when he had attempted more than mere observation, when he had sought to be political. Describing his attempts to avoid any human encounters on his way “to go botanizing,” Rousseau recalled the pleasure he used to take in human interactions, and lamented that “so unfortunate a destiny as mine leaves little hope of performing any genuine good deed that is both well-chosen and useful.”  Rousseau turned to the wild because he “knew that the only good which is henceforth in my power is to abstain from acting, lest unwittingly and unintentionally I should act badly” (Rousseau, Jean Jacques.  Reveries of the Solitary Walker.  New York: Penguin Books, 1979.)

The study of wild plants became Rousseau’s to escape the risks and unpredictability of acting with others – it was his form of a resignation from politics.

On the final page of that final book, however, Rousseau recalled a happier period where “in the space of four or five years I enjoyed a century of life and a pure and complete happiness, whose delightful memory can outweigh all that is appalling in my present fate.” In those happy years a young Rousseau, living with his protector Madame de Warens, did not merely observe nature but rather worked upon it in her gardens. There “all my hours were filled with loving cares and country pursuits.  I wanted nothing except that such a sweet state should never cease. My only cause of sorrow was the fear that it might not last long, and this fear … was not unjustified” (Rousseau, Jean Jacques.  Reveries of the Solitary Walker.  New York: Penguin Books, 1979.)

This is always the risk of experimenting with gardens, with politics and with ways of living: the results are uncertain and things may not work. Even when they do work they may not last.

But these risks did not dissuade Rousseau from imagining worthwhile ways of living. They almost always occupied a middle ground between the wilds of untouched nature, and the busy uncertainty of modern society. He did so in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, where he told the story of the development of civil society, from the simple self-sufficiency of the noble savage to the wretched state of modern society in which  everyone is a slave to the opinion of everyone else. There Rousseau described the age where the savage had settled down into simple family life:  “This period of the development of the human faculties, maintaining a middle position between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch” (Rousseau, Jean Jacques. The Basic Political Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). But this era of small families cultivating small plots planted the seeds of its own destruction, as people began to observe each other’s successes and failures, and jealousy was born.

Rousseau’s other great works depict similar interludes of rustic virtue, no less inspiring because they were so ephemeral. In his letter condemning the theater he described the simple lives of Swiss peasant families, each cultivating their own plot of land. In Rousseau’s Emile the title character explores the civic politics of his day, but decides to live in the countryside and till the soil. In his Julie, the Wolmar family cultivate a perfect rural community. Each of these rustic utopias is eventually undone. The Swiss get a theater and lose their simpler virtues, Emile moves to the city and watches his family be destroyed, Julie is undone by love and dies too young. But it was the beauty of Rousseau’s visions of an ideal, not his bitterness at their passing, that inspired Europeans to seek to transform their lives and their politics, and made Rousseau a saint both to revolutionaries and to quieter citizens.

Gardening as a fruitful metaphor

Two centuries on, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty offered a philosophical account of the liberal democracy those revolutionaries and citizens went on to create. There he praised experimentation and argued against viewing politics as mechanical. Humans, he said, cannot develop their capacities if they must act in rote, mechanical ways. Even worse, when humans stick to the same ideas and ways of doing things, “there is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything really alive, and there would be no reason why civilization should not die out …” (Mill, John Stuart.On Liberty. London: Watts, 1929). Humans do best, he argued, when they can make original plans and try to carry them out. No polis is perfect and precise, like a wellfunctioning machine, and if it were it would be too fragile, so humans gain when they make plans to try to improve the world while recognizing the inevitability of change. This is not because Mill believes that people will always make excellent plans and carry them out well. In fact, he thinks most plans will fail: “There are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice” (Mill, John Stuart.On Liberty. London: Watts, 1929). Even if most of the plans fail, the spirit of experimentation originality itself is valuable.

It was important to Mill that these experiments not be shallow attempts, but something deeply rooted and diligently pursued. This is where he uses the metaphor of growing and cultivating—the metaphor of the garden. He compares people to trees, and says that each person needs the proper soil and the “air of freedom” so that each has the space “to grow and develop itself on all sides … .”  He carries on the metaphor, saying that many believe humans need to be carefully constrained, “just as many have thought that trees are a much finer thing when clipped into pollards, or cut out into figures of animals, than as nature made them” (Mill, John Stuart.On Liberty. London: Watts, 1929). Politics should not be a topiary or a row of lollipop trees, but something that more closely resembles a cottage garden. In a cottage garden, there is a great diversity of plants connected by boundaries such as paths and fences. The plants grow into new spaces and often self-sow, so the garden changes not only from season to season but also from year to year.

Mill wanted these experiments to be so deeply rooted that he thought the most important of all political freedoms was the right to develop new approaches to the education of children. It is a useful reminder that political experiments, if they are to be fruitful, cannot be shallow efforts and should not be subject to fad – but rather must be carefully developed and pursued, and that their largest effects are likely to be on others rather than ourselves. It is this combination of deliberate, careful, and dedicated cultivation coexisting with the possibility of failure and a willingness to adjust or start anew that makes gardening a useful way to think about politics. One of the boys educated by Plato in his garden was a young Aristotle, who grew up to teach in a garden of his own. There he rejected aspects of his teacher’s idealism, and spoke of a golden mean to be discovered between extremes in all aspects of life. The garden as political metaphor might help us find a useful middle ground, and to cultivate it fruitfully.

John Kinsman Interview Conducted live by Daniel Tucker at the

Jane Addams Hull House Museum (Chicago, IL)

September 27th, 2011

Daniel Tucker (DT): Your parents farmed during the Great Depression. You have said it was easier for farmers then than it is for farmers now. Why is that?

John Kinsman (JK): At that time, we were diversified farmers. We had cows, pigs and chickens. We raised wheat, oats and barley. And when we didn’t have enough money to buy wonderful white bread, sliced white bread, my god we had to eat wheat bread, we took it to the mill and ground it, hated it and now we love it. And we are looking for it all over. So that is part of how we lived but it was not a problem. And it was a leisurely life, believe it or not. We never worked on Sunday. Nobody in the family had to work out [off farm] to support the farm. A farm now is almost a hobby for some people. The man and the woman have to get a job to support their hobby. My parents were able to go to the world’s fair Chicago in 1933 and this is during the Depression. And I remember my grandmother came and took care of us. I forgot how old I was but not old enough to run the farm. And they did that, my grandparents went to California. And I have a picture of that, my grandma with goggles on, she and Grandpa went on a flight in an open cockpit plane in California and so on. Well, anyway it was a more leisurely time. We ate berries everyday so we picked berries. Wild berries and a few tame ones. I remember the gooseberries especially because they were prickly. And my mother canned them. And now we know that berries are very healthy. But, we had berries for almost twice a day and we ate them fresh or canned. And so, it was a good life in spite of the so-called Depression.

DT: You’ve said that you agree with a recent UN report saying “supporting low carbon and resource preserving small holder farms” is the only kind of agriculture that will cool the planet – in reference to global warming. You have farmed organically since the 60’s but you didn’t always. Can you talk about your transition to organic farming and what you have learned from this approach to agriculture?

JK: Certainly. The UW Madison, the College of Agriculture was the best friend of my father and myself. And as time went on, it was like things were changing. We were getting into technology that we had questions about but we thought we had to do it. You know the story of the frog? You put the frog in water and you turn up the heat a little bit and a little bit more and pretty soon the frog is boiled and it doesn’t even jump out. And this happened to us. And I started using herbicides thinking “well, this will save me a lot of time”. And I ended up in the University Hospital with some serious burns. They would never say what it was because of the research going on. But the doctors said, “What’s your name? What’s your occupation?” “Farmer.” “When was the last time you used herbicides or pesticides?” And the same with the med students who examined me. Same thing, exactly. So I knew what it was and yet there wasn’t ever anything in the records that said what it was.

DT: And these were herbicides that they had given you? Is that right?

JK: This was what they promoted at the University and then we started looking…and I became organic overnight. That was almost 50 years ago. And I was in that direction but we were led away from it by the research. We didn’t know that these chemical companies were funding the research and the rest so we did a FOIA search one time and found out a lot of things . . .

DT: So can you say a little bit more, just give us a sense of what your farm is like and what your farming practices are like?

JK: My passion is tree planting and farming. Because I am a sustainable tree farmer and my family have planted over a 100,000 trees, but we have no place to plant anymore because every inch that there could be planted a tree is planted already. So, it’s just a joy to see what that does to the environment and becomes the most valuable part of what could have been cleared and so on. That’s part of it. What was the rest of the question?

DT: And tell us a little bit about your dairy operation.

JK: Okay. We have 36 cows; maintain that number and it’s an intensive rotational grazing. My cows get fresh pasture, green grass and clover every 12 hours. And if they don’t get it, they complain. So, but they spread the manure, they spread the fertilizer and they carry the milk in and they carry the fertilizer out. So we have a very low carbon footprint. Many farmers, especially the factory farms think I am not a farmer. In fact, the UW College of Agriculture doesn’t consider me a farmer because I am not running the tractor 12/14 hours a day. But, my cows are doing their work. And that’s where the cheese you will have today and so on. It came from my cows.

DT: I want to step back a little bit in history and talk about some of your civil rights and anti-racist activism throughout the US and in Wisconsin, in particular. Project Self Help and Awareness or PSA is a 40-year-old organization that you became involved in very early on and played a lead role in. You coordinated other white Wisconsin families to host a visiting… hundreds of visiting Black children and teenagers from Mississippi for 3 weeks every summer. And this in an ongoing program. Can you tell us a little about the motivation behind these exchanges, this exchange program and how it related to the Civil Rights Movement?

JK: It was actually 45 years ago. And, a Black woman, Eula Washington who hosted this man, Malcolm Gissen, who was a University student and was one of the freedom riders, and she said “now we can’t end this here. We have to continue in some way because this is the first time my children have ever had a good relationship with white people”. And so, they then patched this plan that was excellent and after about…we were in the 2nd year, and after that it became so difficult, he turned it all over to me. And so it was very difficult. We did 12 round trips with an old school bus that we refurbished to bring these children matched with coordinators in Wisconsin matched with coordinators in Mississippi to give them an experience that would raise their self-esteem. That was the whole part of it was to make them feel good about themselves and to not be a hand out. It was solidarity. It was a way to make them feel that they were equal; they could do anything they wanted. And the poverty was so great the first time I was there. I stayed in a home in Carroll County in the hills. Part of the house had a dirt floor. There weren’t no…no electricity. And this was typical of many of the rural people. And so I learned a lot. I cried a lot too. But you don’t make friends by crying so…they would say why are you laughing? You wanna see me cry? So, it was tremendous. So, these 12 round trips would bring these children up we started taking adults down and college students to do Headstart work and just to immerse themselves. That’s the only way. You can’t explain it of how great it is. I could see the courage and joy that the most poverty stricken state in the union and some of the most poverty stricken counties and some of them still are to see all of these people and celebrate and make you feel good.

DT: You told me a story about how this was kinda transformative for you and an exchange you had with a woman named Rosie, Rosie May Hosey I think her name is. What did Rosie say to you?

JK: Rosie was one of the people that her children came to Wisconsin. She lived a very tough life. Just an example, one of my neighbors hosted her children and so she went and stayed with Rosie for two days. And for breakfast, Rosie borrowed a hot plate from a neighbor and warmed up some fat back. And then for the noon lunch, they went to a local Juniors convenience store and divided a bag of Cheetos. Anyways, Rosie was always a happy person. And just a great person to be with. Wisconsin Public Television interviewed Rosie and I saw the documentary film. And in it, he asked Rosie questions.

“Who are the white people that you got to know?”

She went on and named a few.

“And then there was John Kinsman, naw but he is one of us”.

I will never forget that. That was one of the greatest compliments I have ever had.

DT: Yea, that’s great. When we talked on the phone, you were telling me a little about your ancestry and saying that your ancestors were settlers. And that that was something you were critical about. And since you have done work in Wisconsin to defend Native land and farm sovereignty. Can you give us an example of these experiences?

JK: My great grandparents came by covered wagon and oxen from the East. And they settled. But when I think about it now, there were people there. They were settlers and that’s not the way it is supposed to be.  And, they took the land. The Native people, now and all over the world are…Landgrabbing is going on. And that was landgrabbing also but it was not named that. And of course, there were savages. In my grandmother’s diary, she and her younger sister who was Jeanette. She was 16 and my grandmother had just married, she was probably 20 or 21. They were going from one area to another and a band of Indians had moved in. And they went down to talk to them twice. They had no fear of these savages, so called. It was interesting. But, they were still settlers.

DT: And what were some of the exchanges or activism you had around Native land in Wisconsin?

JK:  Well, we The Crandon Mine was a big mine about ten years ago proposed by Exxon in Native land in northern Wisconsin. And it would have destroyed their wild rice beds, headwaters of a beautiful river that went through the reservation. It was very destructive so we did a, a sort of a hearing. And I represented farmers of North America. The rest of them didn’t know it but eh…we had Native people, indigenous people from South America where they had a history of mines and all the way into the Southwest. This was on a reservation in northern Wisconsin and all the way to Canada, up to Alaska. Everytime, it was a path of destruction. They did not hire local people. They brought in people. They did not clean up. They just destroyed the community. There was prostitution. There were drugs. There was everything going on after they left. And there is another one we are fighting right now at the headwaters of another river, the Bad River that is on the Bad River Reservation. So, it’s never-ending.

I am going to repeat this. The price of justice is eternal vigilance. And justice is just us. And so it’s something we have to think about. And there will never be peace unless there is justice. So Winona La Duke…Do you know the name? Winona ran for vice president under Ralph Nader at one time. She is a very good friend of the John Peck and myself and the Family Farm Defenders and she invited us to have our annual meeting on the White Oak reservation and it was tremendous. Tremendous to just be able to sit down with the people and help, exchange and do solidarity and do the battles with people.

DT: And there is something else I am wondering . . .You mentioned Family Farm Defenders. I wanna jump off from Wisconsin and talk more about global work that you have done. In 1994, you were part of a group that started Family Farm Defenders. And through that group and the National Family Farm Coalition which is an umbrella coalition, you built international solidarity through another larger international network called Via Campesina, the international network of peasant farmers. And you have started to call yourself a “peasant farmer” and refer to yourself in those terms that Via Campesina has proposed. So I want to ask you about one of the groups that you have interacted with through these travels and that’s the Landless Workers Movement or the MST in Brazil. You have been to Brazil several times, met these organizers in other countries throughout the world. Can you tell me a little bit about your experiences with MST and how they influenced you?

JK: They are a group of people that in Brazil that went through bloodshed to occupy un-used land that big landowners in Brazil took over and most of what was stolen from indigenous people, through landgrabbing. And it lay idle.  And they had so many privileges that they did not produce anything. So these people simply took over and settled on their own land actually. They were so well organized in what they did over the time that they found they were recognized by the government after they went through a year and a half of living in a plastic camp with only dirt for floor.

They’re impressive…The water was hauled in…that was another thing that always sticks in my mind. It was hot. It was under the trees and a man came out and set a chair under the tree and brought me a glass of lukewarm water. It was like giving a million dollars because that was all he had to offer. But, it was so grand to see that. And then we went to where they had built up the communities. Beautiful community centers. Everyone had a plot of land. There was a nice house. They had animals. It was diversified.  And they are doing so well that now it’s moving, I think 300,000 people have been re-settled onto their land and are productive, producing food that the country needed. And now they are going into Africa with the same model.

Via Campesina members have visited us many times [in Wisconsin]. And so we have organized tours of our farms and local entrepreneurs and things that work and some things that don’t work. They have been a big inspiration but I have to say that it started with the Bovine Growth Hormone. How many are aware of the Bovine Growth Hormone? The first genetically engineered product to enter the food chain. Well, it came to us 30, no 27 years ago in the University of Wisconsin had a gathering of scientists and telling us that farmers are not smart enough to understand it. That’s a mistake. Some of em’ aren’t but most of em’ are.

So we could not get attention from the press, because one half of all the dairy products sold even in the University of Wisconsin cafeteria, even in their hospital came from that experimental herd. And the people did not know it. And we could not get press. And so, I had been to all these protests in civil rights era in Mississippi and so I made this crude sign that said “Are you aware that you are all guinea pigs or a product?” And I had handouts that were pretty crude at first and stood in front of the Memorial Union, the biggest concentration of students and faculty and staff. And immediately, we had international attention. There were cameras all over because of this information and the fact that we were standing up to it.

And so within six months, I was invited on a ten month, ten day tour of Europe and speak on this because at the same time the people, the farmers, they had decided not to allow it in Europe. And they said it was so exciting [for them] to see the farmers marching on the university. I said, “Here I am”. All these students and all these other people and this big crowd [gathered on the tour]. And so, sometime if you don’t even know what you are doing, it works. And so, that’s how that got going. And National Family Farm Coalition did not accept it till Family Farm Defenders and myself had to practically drag them kicking and screaming to accept that you need to fight these things and look at what they are doing and who is paying for it? All the money and so that is the way it went.

DT: And just to clear up the names one more time for everyone, Via Campesina is the name of the international network. And that’s how John ended up in Brazil and Europe through this international network of peasant farmers. And the National Family Farm Coalition is the US representatives or chapter of Via Campesina. And they are based in DC. And that is something that John Kinsman has been deeply involved with, networking on a national level. And Family Farm Defenders is the group that John works most consistently with on a regular basis and they are based in Madison, Wisconsin. 

And so through National Family Farm Coalition and Family Farm Defenders, you have done a lot. So you have done a lot of building with people on a national scale. A lot of the direct organizing and solidarity you have done has been on the scale of the US. You have sent farm equipment to farmers in the south after Hurricane Katrina. Most recently, you have been working on sending hay to farmers who have been experiencing drought in Oklahoma and Texas. And so I just want you to say a little bit about your decision to do this kind of direct service and direct action on the national scale. And any thoughts you have about food policy and what we can do here in the United States, on the turf that we exist on?

JK:  Family Farm Defenders became international like I say overnight because people, we had a message that was international because we could see the connections always. I have been to every continent except Antarctica. And these people paid my way and often, John Peck’s way to go these international meetings. I was part of Via Campesina when it was being formed. I have worked with these people for 26, 27 years.

As far as locally just as an example. . .so I started, well myself and my daughter and a few others working locally around food. That was a common denominator: everybody ate food. Otherwise, it just didn’t work, it seemed like.  And so we got to four local churches that were in a cluster. They had a “peace and justice committees” and the biggest thing they could do was a bake sale. They didn’t know what else to do. So, we just went on with that. And I was able to show them the “seven principals of food sovereignty”, which included “justice for workers”, which “organics” does not include. We have formed the fair trade neighborhood…so after these meetings with our local people, the Amish people were a tremendous part of it. And others, we would come home from the meeting and our heads were moving so fast at night, and we can’t sleep at night. But, this is really working.  We are doing a lot of local foods; we did a community meal, last Sunday, in the community.  It’s the biggest crowds we ever get. Monthly meals that we do maybe three or four times a year.  All local.

DT: And recently you had a chance to go to Iowa and you bumped into um, our buddy President Obama and had a chance to talk to him. What happened in Iowa?

JK: This was the “rural economic summit and listening session” about two months ago. And we were [only] able to get another farmer Joel Greeno and I tickets because there were less than 100 people and half the staff of Obama. And somehow, I had a seat in the front, in the middle and Obama’s right there. I don’t know how I got that seat but we had fine seats…maybe he thought I should listen. It was good. They did campaign like we expected, a little bit and then they divided us into workshops sort of and different staff people like secretary of agriculture, secretary of transportation. I was in the one with Ray Lahood, Secretary of Transportation.

DT: So what did you say to Ray Lahood?

JK: So, I got his attention and I said, “I lived through the Great Depression. That was not as bad as this is.” And I told him some of the things I am telling you. And I told him I had lived through a number of these economic problems, downturns and emergencies. And I said they are all politically motivated.  It’s big companies buying the government. . . I also [criticized] the FTA, the Free Trade Agreement you know they are trying to [start] in Korea, Panama and Bolivia and now Columbia. I was invited to South Korea three months ago. And so I could say [to Ray Lahood that] ‘I was in South Korea two months ago talking to these people. It’s going to put 40% of their farms off the land. Don’t you think it’s better that we work to cooperate instead of trying to compete? We’re competing with the whole world. How can we compete with China and India? And I know people from India. . . [like]Vandana Shiva, you know her?  She says “we were self sufficient, and our population was stable before colonization”. And she said these free trade agreements are another form of colonization’.

So I asked the whole group, “isn’t it more important to make friends than to try and compete for the lowest”? And that’s what they do.  It’s a race to the bottom in prices, wages and environmental degradation.  And so, with a big silence. [But] I can take as much time as I want to cuz I have lived through all the things I was talking about.  And there was more of course. And so they didn’t know quite how to stop me. It changed the way this whole conversation went. A woman, a lesser staff person, a Black person said, “my father’s farm is being is in danger of being lost”. [There was] Silence.

And then the Future Farmers of America were invited, the officers of three or four states because that looked good, to have FFA.  And so, I was sitting next to one and I talked to him while we ate and then [someone called on him to speak] and he said, “I want to farm but I can’t because the prices are so low and the conditions are or the expenses are so high”. And he said, “Not one person in my FFA chapter is going to farm”. Of course they didn’t want to hear that. Then the guy next to me spoke out.  He says, “My passion is farming. I want to farm. But, I can’t.” Not only I can’t but I am going to have to move out of the community. And they didn’t want to hear that either. So, there was a lot of good testimony.

Meanwhile, my friend Joel was in another extension where Obama came in and he gave him the whole thing. . . Joel just gave him everything. And Obama stayed there too long. Joel wouldn’t let him go. And the secretary of agriculture [Tom Vilsack] was there and Joel said, “Do you know me?” He said, “I sure do”.  And he took a long detour around me that day too. We confirmed that.

DT: What you said about emphasizing cooperation over competition is pretty essential especially as you are describing the entire disillusion of the farms across the US and the farms across the world. I wonder what note you would like to end on?

JK: So what I am saying is what counts is local foods…if we all demand to know where our food comes from, if you can’t find your farmer that’s producing and know them personally…at least question where your food comes from. And we want to change policies. One woman is on our executive board, an urban woman [from Milwaukee] and they did.  She asked about where does her milk or cheese come from [and if the] cows were injected with Bovine Growth Hormone. Well, the grocers don’t know. She says well, I’m sorry we will just have to go somewhere else and buy our groceries. No, no, no, come back. And so, they came back in a couple of weeks and they changed their policy. It took two people to ask that.

I will just repeat the price of justice is internal vigilance and there will be no peace without justice.  And John Peck and I have both received awards because of what we are doing and we never talked about peace but it is this kind of thing that will bring peace. You are all part of it. And you can all make a difference. It only takes one or two to rattle the whole cage. Thank you.

The introduction states:

Since 1995, more than 253,000 farmers have been reported to have committed suicides in India, making this the largest wave of suicides in the world. Other than a few conscientious journalists like P. Sainath and Jaideep Hardikar, the mainstream media has largely ignored this historically unprecedented event. Busy with crafting a palatable picture of “shining” India, the mainstream media has neglected its duty to report on the lives and livelihoods of the largest group of working people in India: farmers. The Indian government’s actions on this issue has been equally, if not more, deplorable. Other than making vapid pronouncements and organizing high-publicity visits of Prime and Chief Ministers to the region, the Central and State governments have done little to ameliorate the conditions of the miserable farmers. No wonder then that the abominable phenomenon of farmer suicides continues with unmitigated ferocity. As a reminder that business-as-usual means disaster for the aam aadmi in Shining India, it was recently reported in the press that a fresh wave of suicides have occurred in various states in India in 2011.

 

Read the rest of the report by The Sanhati Collective here.

The world can feed itself, without corporate America’s science-experiment crops and expensive chemicals. (reprinted from Other Worlds)

By Jim Goodman

Farmers have been through this before — our lives and livelihoods falling under corporate control. It has been an ongoing process: consolidation of markets; consolidation of seed companies; an ever-widening gap between our costs of production and the prices we receive. Some of us are catching on, getting the picture of the real enemy.

The “99 percent” are awakening to the realization that their lives have fallen under corporate control as well. Add up the jobs lost, the health benefits whittled away, and the unions busted, and the bill for Wall Street’s self-centered greed is taking a toll.

(Brennan Cavanaugh / Flickr)

It’s not the immigrants, the homeless, the unions, or the farmers that have looted the economy and driven us to the brink of another Great Depression. The public is catching on.

When Occupy Wall Street (OWS) welcomed the Farmers March to Zuccotti Park in New York on December 4, a natural rural-urban alliance — the Food Justice Movement, gardeners, farmers, seed growers, health care workers, and union members — was formed at Wall Street’s back door.

Change can come only when you confront your oppressors directly on their turf. That makes them uncomfortable, it gets attention, and it wakes up the distracted public.

The Occupy movement is doing exactly what the prominent student activist Mario Savio spoke of in 1964, when he declared: “There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop — and you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from running at all.”

The people who are now forming a movement to occupy the food system agree with this sentiment too.

The food system isn’t working. People eat too many calories, or too few. There’s too much processed food on our plates. Too many Americans lack access to food that is fresh, nutritious, and locally grown. This is the food system that corporate America has given us. It’s the food system it’s selling to the rest of the world.

Clearly, this system doesn’t have the best interests of the public at heart. Nor does it consider the interests of farmers or farm workers or animals or the environment. It has one interest: profit.

We all have to wake up.

Farmers need access to farm credit, a fair mortgage on their land, fair prices for the food they produce, and seeds that aren’t patented by Monsanto or other big corporations. Consumers need to be able to purchase healthy and local food, and to earn a living wage.

The parallels are pointedly exact. It may be the Wall Street banks that are controlling our lives, or it may be Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont, Kraft, or Tyson’s. The system isn’t working.

Why do agribusiness profits continue to grow while farmers struggle to pay their costs of production and more Americans go hungry? We can’t feed our people if we are forced to feed the bank accounts of the 1 percent.

Agribusinesses insist that we have the responsibility of feeding the world. Growing more genetically engineered corn and soy isn’t going to feed the world, nor will it correct the flaws in our food system; clearly it has created many of them.

The world can feed itself, without corporate America’s science-experiment crops and expensive chemicals. The world’s people can feed themselves if we let them — if we stop the corporate land grabs and let them develop their own economies for their own benefit.

The message from the Occupy movement needn’t and shouldn’t be a specific set of demands. It should be about asking the right questions.

Wall Street, the government, and corporate America need to answer one basic question: Why did you sell us down the river?

Here is a video from Indian activist and scientist Vandana Shiva addressed t the participants at Reimagining Work:

Check out out the Occupy USA Today video by Michelle Fawcett and Arun Gupta on the promotion of localism in the context of Occupy actions across the country.

Anne Hamersky on location at Native Seeds/SEARCH in Arizona

Check out this exhibit featuring photographs from Farm Together Now by Anne Hamersky along with some other great food-related art projects at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, CA

Food for Thought: A Question of Consumption

Featuring: Edith Abeyta, Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young), Anne Hamersky, Lauren Kasmer, Mark Menjivar, and Jessica Rath

Curated by Rebecca Trawick

January 17- March 24 Reception for the artists: January 18, 6-8pm In Food for Thought: A Question of Consumption, artists Edith Abeyta, Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young), Anne Hamersky, Lauren Kasmer, Mark Menjivar, and Jessica Rath use food as the impetus to explore food politics and activism in complex ways.

LA-based Edith Abeyta is a visual/performance artist, writer and curator who mines our culture’s fraught relationship with The Black Panther Party in her performative, Panther Lunch Club. A multifaceted installation of outreach, education, and social engagement, the Panther Lunch Club positions artist, Edith Abeyta in the roles of activist and organizer. Inspired by The Black Panther Party’s Service to the People Programs, Abeyta posits that the government has continued to fail us and that we must work cooperatively to change and empower our daily lives when it comes to everyday necessities such as food. Instituting a weekly lunch program in the patio of the museum, Abeyta co-hosts an open free meal with artists, activists, scholars, and representatives from government agencies to discuss the practicalities, politics, access, and solutions to our current food crisis.

Fallen Fruit is an ongoing art collaboration that began with creating maps of the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles and other American cities. Their participatory projects have expanded to include Public Fruit Jams in which they invite citizens to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours; Public Fruit Tree Adoptions that invite the public to plant trees on the margins of private property. Fallen Fruit’s visual images include an ongoing series of narrative photographs, installations and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. The three artists of Fallen Fruit, David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young, think of fruit as the lens by which they look at the world.

Focusing on the farmers who are committed to alternative food systems, Anne Hamersky’s photographs give us access to the farmers who are fighting to maintain small, sustainable agricultural models throughout the United States. The work in Food for Thought: A Question of Consumption comes from a 2009 cross-country trip with San Francisco-based artist Amy Franceshini and Chicago-based documentarian Daniel Tucker. The result of their trip is the compendium Farm Together Now, a book celebrating America’s agricultural revival.

Lauren Kasmer uses textile design, public participatory performances, peoples own recipes and stories about food to investigate our relationship with food and consumption. Kasmer is creating a series of public events and food fete’s to engage us as a community with her installation Thoughtful Food.

Photographer Mark Menjivar explores the interiors of people’s refrigerators in his series You Are What You Eat. Menjivar uses the personal landscape of one’s refrigerator to provide a space to think about what we consume and what those choices mean for us personally and as a society. Menjivar is a Texas-based artist who spent over three years traveling the United States taking photos of diverse Americans and their food.

LA-based Jessica Rath was directly inspired by Pollan’s book and after reading it launched a many-year project that eventually led her to the USDA/Cornell University Plant Genetics Resource Unit where she worked to document the various apple forms and colors found in nature. She’s created a series of porcelain rare apples where she stayed focused on representing their individual types, and a series of large-format photographs of the trees of the USDA/Cornell University Plant Genetics Resource Unit. Raths succeeds in creating scientific portraits and works of art simultaneously in her highly poetic and thought-provoking work.

Visit our website for additional programming to be announced including artist talks, workshops and performances: www.chaffey.edu/wignall

Young Farmer from the Hunger Coalition in Atlanta, GA - Featured in Farm Together Now

New Survey of 1,000 Young and Beginning Farmers Reveals What the Next Generation Needs

Download Report (PDF)

The National Young Farmer’s Coalition released a study today showing that the nation’s young and beginning farmers face tremendous barriers in starting a farming career. Building a Future With Farmers: Challenges Faced by Young, American Farmers and a National Strategy to Help Them Succeed surveyed 1,000 farmers from across the United States and found that access to capital, access to land and health insurance present the largest obstacles for beginners. Farmers rated farm apprenticeships, local partnerships and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as the most valuable programs to help beginners.

“If Congress wants to keep America farming, then they must address the barriers that young people face in getting started,” says Lindsey Lusher Shute, Director of the National Young Farmers’ Coalition. “We need credit opportunities for beginning and diversified farmers, land policies that keep farms affordable for full-time growers and funding for conservation programs.”

Report findings include:

• 78% of farmers ranked “lack of capital” as a top challenge for beginners, with another 40% ranking “access to credit” as the biggest challenge.
• 68% of farmers ranked land access as the biggest challenge faced by beginners.
• 70% of farmers under 30 rented land, as compared to 37% of farmers over 30.
• 74% of farmers ranked apprenticeships as among the most valuable programs for beginners.
• 55% of farmers ranked local partnerships as one of the most valuable programs, and 49% ranked Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as a top program.

Lack of capital was found to be the biggest challenge for beginners. Although the USDA’s Farm Service Agency offers loans to beginning farmers, current loan rules often disqualify even experienced farmers with good credit and small loans are hard to come by. For real estate transactions, FSA loans take too long to process — up to thirty days to qualify and up to a year to receive funds – and the $300,000 loan limit doesn’t go far in many real estate markets.

Land access was the second biggest concern. Farmers under the age of 30 were significantly more likely to rent land (70%) than those over 30 (37%). Over the last decade, farm real estate values and rents doubled making farm ownership next to impossible for many beginners.

“In Nebraska the main barrier to new and beginning farmers is access to land.  Unless an aspiring farmer inherits land, it is very difficult to have access to it,” says William A. Powers, farmer and Executive Director of the Nebraska Sustainable Agriculture Society.

The National Young Farmers’ Coalition recommends action at the local, state and federal level to help beginning farmers. At the local level, communities can create market opportunities for farmers by starting Community Supported Agriculture groups and shopping at farmers markets, as well as protecting existing farmland through zoning and the purchase of development rights. States can preserve farmland and even offer tax credits for farmers that sell their land to beginners. At the federal level, Congress can include the “Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Opportunity Act” in the next Farm Bill, which supports many of the specific recommendations in the report.

Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, is calling for hundreds of thousands of new farmers nationwide. Over the past century, the total number of American farmers has declined – from over 6 million in 1910 to just over 2 million today. For each farmer under 35 there are now 6 over 65 and the average age of farmers is 57. The USDA expects that one-quarter (500,000) of all farmers will retire in the next twenty years.

The ‘good food’ movement is inspiring many young people to farm, both from farming and non-farming backgrounds. These farmers have the potential to offset the numbers of retiring farmers and keep family farms active, but land tenure and lack of capital are getting in the way.

“Young farmers are poised to redefine the American landscape along with our food scene”, says Severine vT Fleming, Director of The Greenhorns, “We are strong of will, and determined to make farming sustainable in this country.”

“With the release of reports such as this one, the agrarian revival, this influx of young and beginning farmers, gains status – we’re not just a few people spread across the country, we’re a well organized, politically active group that can be documented,” says Tierney Creech of the Washington State Young Farmers Coalition. “We know who our senators and representatives are, we vote, and our friends and families vote.  We need USDA and government support to succeed and we’re going to let the nation know that.”

Download Report (PDF)

City Slicker Farms

Listen to this podcast to learn more about their work.

Then in April at the annual protests against the Chicago Mercantile Echange led by his group Family Farm Defenders:

And most recently in the form of a live lecture/interview at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum:

In the future, look out for some of my writings on John Kinsman’s work.

*Special thanks to John Peck and Joel Greeno from the Family Farm Defenders.

There have been some really provocative dialogues going on ranging from Civil Eats to Grist to Justseeds and Mother Jones about the now-famous urban agriculture group based in Milwaukee Growing Power’s recent acceptance of a huge donation from Wal-Mart. Check out the article in the Chicago Tribune and the response to criticisms from Will Allen (leader of Growing Power).

This is undoubtedly an important debate to have with growing interest in urban and sustainable agriculture from all directions, including those driven primarily by profit. For a great explanation of the challenges presented by corporate “green-washing” see Heather Rogers’ book Green Gone Wrong, which was reviewed on this blog over the summer.