Yes. It’s very easy to think of your farmer as someone who just grows the seasonal delights you tote home in a CSA box or your farmers’ market basket. But growing food is only the tip of the iceberg lettuce when it comes to the laundry list of skills that one needs to run a small farm. A small farm is, after all, a small business and growing food is just a piece of the pie. The smiling, tan farmer who hands you your bag of spinach or dozen eggs does so much more than just grow food. She or he also serves as chief marking officer, along with a laundry list of other non-production oriented responsibilities.

Many folks are drawn to the farming life to work close to the land and nourish their community with delicious food. Undoubtedly, for some there is something so rewarding about laboring outside, toiling daily to the point of exhaustion and cultivating a product with your own hands (or hoe or tractor). However, getting your products ‘to market’, and actually selling it, is just as important as growing and raising the delicious edibles themselves. And for producers selling directly to their customers, sometimes it can feel like a marketing degree is required to actually sell anything. Just consider the branding, packaging, website, market signage, advertising, social media, CSA member signup, travel to the market and newsletter writing stands behind the food you buy.  Ultimately though, the business end of the enterprise is only sustainable when the product actually finds a paying home. Sometimes growing food can be the easy part in comparison, and marketing activities take a big bite out of the time growers would like to spend in the fields (or sleeping at night), not to mention a chunk of the budget too.

Gratefully, there is a groundswell of support from local and national organizations, individuals and institutions all who want to provide some sort of market opportunity, advertising or educational benefit to support small, local farms. As a consumer, it’s easy to think about websites like Sustainable Table, publications including Edible Communities (be sure to look up the nearest to you) or online databases such as Local Harvest as an easy way to find a local farm or learn about the benefits of sustainable agriculture. From the grower’s perspective, these are advertising outlets and campaigns that help boost a market demand for their products. And thank goodness, resources now include everything from CSA coalitions, searchable databases of local farms, food hubs, websites promoting the environmental and health benefits of eating local and many more. You may call it Marketing Together Now, but it’s just another way people who believe in local agriculture join forces to increase opportunities for farmers and consumers.

Here’s just one example. It’s 2012, and the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) concept is becoming more and more common, almost mainstream. In this model, customers ‘join’ a farm, pay the farmer at the beginning of the growing season and then receive regular ‘shares’ of the farm produce regularly throughout the season. Farmers receive much needed cash flow at the beginning of the growing season, CSA members share in the risks of farming and food can be harvested with the knowledge of exactly where it is going.

In the early 1990s, just a handful of US farms operated as CSA farms, and the concept was unfamiliar to consumers. In the beginning, farmers and local food advocates collaborated to educate the community about this new model, planting the seeds for future success. By 1999, these community efforts to enthuse potential customers blossomed, with an estimated 1000 CSAs taking root across the country. And the groups organizing around CSAs grew too. Many became official organizations with a mission to promote CSAs and provide a community for producers too. Their work is instrumental in the rapid growth of community supported agriculture, with 4,571 CSAs listed on Local Harvest at the beginning of 2012.

MACSAC is a perfect example, but you can see them in Portland (PACSAC), Kansas City, New York City and Dubuque. Now they are non-profits, farmer lead, or have a small staff – but are close to the farmers.

A CSA Coalition may play many roles. Most are membership groups, loosely or formally organized, with the mission to promote CSA farms and provide community for farmers. Many promote the concept of CSAs and educate about their benefits. Some of these organizations go further, hosting annual CSA sign-up events, a chance for people to meet their farmers and sign up for a share in person. Some raise funds to subsidize shares for those who can not purchase a CSA at full price. Others organize classes on cooking or food preservation. The pinnacle of positive work is by the Fairshare CSA Coalition of Wisconsin. They partnered with local health insurance companies, encouraging them to offer rebates to those who join CSAs.

The work of a CSA Coalition is not just for the consumers, many provide a way and a place for farmers to gather, unite, have fun and learn through workshops, listserves or events. This is the nature of good food, built on a strong foundation built by growers and eaters alike – while providing much needed ‘professional services’ to make farms more visible too!

Is there a CSA Coalition or Network in your area?
Dubuque CSA Coalition
FairShare CSA Coalition
Kansas City CSA Coalition
Just Food CSA Network
Hazon CSA Network
Portland CSA Network

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Red Truck Farm, LLC
Amber Baker and Jason Karnezis
Ridgefield, Washington
www.redtruckfarm.wordpress.com

Describe your farm and farming philosophy
Red Truck Farm is a 1 and 1/2–acre specialty vegetable farm located in Ridgefield, Washington, just 15 miles North of Portland. We follow organic practices and are committed to growing high quality produce for our community. Our land totals just over 7 acres with a little less than half in forest and forested floodplain, backing up to Gee Creek. The rest of the property has our home, one barn, one greenhouse, and about 3.5 acres of arable land. We began the farm in 2006 after a number of years of growing on a smaller scale, and working and learning from other farmers in the area. We started out together as apprentices at Sauvie Island Organics where we began with a small bed of experimental varieties that we were excited to try out. We now grow produce for the New Seasons Market, and other local restaurants and cafés.

How long have you been farming together?
Seven years

What brought you to a shared farming experience?
We met during our apprenticeship on an organic farm in Portland.

What are each of your responsibilities on the farm and how do you decide who’s in charge of what?
The best advice we’ve been given is to focus on those things that we each do well and don’t try to do what comes natural to the other person. If there are still gaps remaining, focus on them together to share the burden of what doesn’t come naturally. Nothing is exclusively one person’s or the other. Jason works part-time during the peak of the season and the off-farm job allows him to go down seasonally. He carries the majority of the harvesting, packing, cultivating, and marketing. Amber works full-time year ’round and contributes to packing out, invoicing, record-keeping, taxes, and harvesting. More equally shared are farm projects (greenhouse building, high-tunnels, fence building, greenhouse planting, annual farm planning and seed ordering). We are continually refining what products work well for our current schedule and what might allow for one of us to be full time on the farm permanently. This involves looking at our sales records, deciding on which market avenues to pursue, and taking inventory of what we really enjoy growing and selling.

What outcomes of farming together are most rewarding?
Shared success, be it with new customers, a completed project, or just deciding when to stop for the day each has its own rewards. It is a lifestyle, and a commitment to doing it exclusively your way. You choose how your systems and approaches fit your standard of living and can make a very clear connection as to how you choose to farm to influence how you live your life.

Most challenging?
Deciding on the right systems and approaches in an ever-changing world, most of which is completely out of your control, and committing to how you want to live your life. 

Least expected?
Owning our own land sooner than we thought. Given how we’ve structured our life, it made sense to buy sooner than later, but it’s still sinking in.

Any advice for others choosing to farm with their mate?
Make your relationship as much of a priority and goal for success, as much as you make the success of your farm a goal. Dedicate time away from the farm in the crazy season to allow yourself a break and gather perspective. Dedicate that same amount, at a minimum, in the not so crazy time of year to rejuvenate. Don’t be afraid to discuss the farm whenever it’s on your mind, just don’t get mad when it’s not on your partners mind.

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Dancing Roots Farm
Shari Sirkin & Bryan Dickerson
Troutdale, Oregon
www.dancingrootsfarm.com

Describe your farm and farming philosophy
Our farm is on 10 beautiful acres above the Sandy River, about 18 miles east of Portland. To the locals, this area is known as Springdale. In addition to our fields, we have a few acres of woods, tons of blackberries and lots of refuge for songbirds and wildlife.

We bought the farm in the fall of 2002 and spent most of 2003 fixing up the old farmhouse. The fields sat fallow for over 30 years, and our plans call for creating an ecologically sound and productive working farm. Our vision includes orchards and grapes, year round produce, educational programs, on-farm composting, and farm animals such as sheep, ducks, and bees! We use only ecologically sound practices, such as crop rotations, natural amendments, cover crops, drip irrigation, and provide ample habitat for beneficial insects, bugs and birds; we use no pesticides or herbicides or synthetic fertilizer.

How long have you been farming together?
We bought our farm together in 2002, and have been farming together since.

What brought you to a shared farming experience?
Shari started farming in 1997 on rented land around Portland, and with a variety of farm co-partners. Bryan was, and still is, a professional musician and music teacher. He has always been supportive, but farming was “Shari’s thing” in his eyes. We lived in our tiny house in Portland, and Shari commuted to the farm. After a few years, Bryan got more and more into it. We had a CSA pick-up at our house, and he got very engaged through that process. When we decided we wanted a farm, animals, fruit trees – things we couldn’t do on rented land or our lot in Portland. We agreed, and we started looking for a farm. We wanted to be close enough so Bryan could continue as a working musician. Since moving to the farm, he has been my farm partner. Having him, he’s my farm partner for sure. We have meetings. We figure things out together.

What are each of your responsibilities on the farm and how do you decide who’s in charge of what?
We have really defined roles. Shari does all the marketing, paperwork, accounting, everything legal or insurance, all the office stuff, for the farm. She also does the crop plan, selects varieties, the seed order. She’s the harvest manager, what’s grown when, where and how much. Bryan is the infrastructure guy. He deserves a spandex Superman costume with big “I” for Infrastructure Man. He is totally in charge of remodeling the farm house. He built all the outbuilding, irrigation, propagation house, green house and re-arranged the road. Anything with infrastructure is for him. Plus, he does almost all of the tractor work and implement maintenance. He designed our own transplanter and spreader. He’s still learning names of vegetable varieties, that’s all new to him. What we share are the staff issues. We always interview together. We each talk to the crew.

Our struggle is not making, or having, the time for US to have meetings to be on top of what each other is doing.

What outcomes of farming together are most rewarding?
We both feel so blessed, really lucky to be doing work that we love and that we are passionate about and that’s meaningful to us. That we get to do together. We get to go to farming conferences together and feed off each others’ excitement and enthusiasm. We’ve been together 21 years. For the first part, before we were farming together, we had our own worlds, with mutual appreciation and support. But now, getting to do it all as partners, that makes us feel really blessed.

Most challenging?
When we have our struggles, they are not with roles, but time constraints. Shari is living in total day-to-day, triage, one step below crisis management. It’s the peak-season of invoices, harvest, drop-offs and detail management. Bryan is not in triage. Shari is in the moment, and Bryan, because of his role, he is in the future three, four, five weeks out. He wants to know what beds to spade up so they can rest, what can be weeded. That causes tension. That’s an area of struggle. But mostly, it’s not a struggle.

Also, because we farm and Bryan is still a full time musician and teacher, we don’t get much time off together. We both can’t really leave, together. That makes it harder to do things like take vacations, and we don’t even have animals!

Least expected?
This is what comes to mind first. We’re lying in bed at 10:30 at night, and we’re talking about tractor implements. Irrigation plan. Raises. Farming plans. I never thought that would happen.

Any advice for others choosing to farm with their mate?
Advice? Take Sunday off and make it your family day. We should be having at least a monthly date to go out, just the two of us. Try to make sure to do non-farm stuff together. But, that’s the one level. The other advice is if you are getting into it, just be sure that you both have the same level of passion for it. Neither of us do this work for ourselves, we do it because we feel really called to do it. We feel committed to do it. We feel like we’re making a difference in the world. I just can’t see it working if one person was doing it to please the other person. You can’t do this kind of work for someone else, you have to do it because you care.

A passion for growing food, and finding someone with whom to cultivate the land, makes the farming experience sweeter, stronger and more fulfilling for many. That said, there are unique challenges and dynamics inherent in living, farming and working under the same barn roof day in and day out.

Over the next week I will be posting a short Q&A with three different farm couples who have agreed to openly share the stories of their agricultural adventures, how they came to a common vision, the unforeseen of farming together and advice for partners considering starting a farm. The first profile is from Puzzle Peace Farm in Bostic, North Carolina.

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Puzzle Peace Farm
Thomas Carson & Lindy Abrams
Bostic, North Carolina
www.puzzlepeacefarm.blogspot.com

Describe your farm and farming philosophy
We are blessed to have family land available to us, bordering beautiful Puzzle Creek, hence our name. The landscape is diverse, ranging from fertile bottom-land to sloped and terraced upland. Each terrain presents its unique advantages and challenges, both of which we learn more about each year.

Our main focus is on diversified produce production… from asparagus to zucchini and many in between.  Laying hens are a part of this as they are rotated through our fields leaving their fertile manure. Their delicious eggs are an added bonus. We have dairy goats for ourselves and have raised some goats and hogs for meat to sell in the past, and possibly again in the future. For now though, the meat products are on hold so we can better hone our vegetable growing skills.

We are committed to sustainable growing methods. Though we are not certified organic, we do abide by the standards. In some respects our personal standards go above and beyond those of organic certification. For example, we don’t use plastic weed control because it is disposable from year to year, petroleum-based (or corn-based, which is about the same in the end), and doesn’t contribute to soil health. We use natural mulches instead.

How long have you been farming together?
This is our second year farming together.

What brought you to a shared farming experience?
We both had been farming independently for a couple of years and met at a farmers potluck. We showed each other our farms and fell in love shortly thereafter.

What are each of your responsibilities on the farm and how do you decide who’s in charge of what?
Tough question. We started with equal say in all matters and soon realized how different our methodologies were. Basically we each have our favorite vegetables and on those crops we each have the final say. As for other general decisions and chores, there is no decisive method in stone. We just get things done from day to day, usually based on our own strengths or weakness.

Thomas is a green-blood, and has been working on farm equipment since he was very young so most welding and tractor work falls to him. Lindy values the stability of the routine and does chores associated with the hens, and the greenhouse, handling most of the transplant production.

What outcomes of farming together are most rewarding?
We both get to share in the accomplishments. Our good days are good for both of us, making it a great day. And who better to share this amazing food with? We eat like royalty.

Most challenging?
It’s impossible to separate our farm life from our home life. In comparison with the last question, when there is a disagreement in the field or about something to purchase, or how to prioritize something… it is hard to put it all aside when you walk in the house for lunch. The farm is your life, so you have to love it for it to work.

Least expected?
The evolution. Though I expected change in our mindsets it is impossible to know what change will come. As a minor example, I was determined to expand into meat goats. With some frustrating experience and some debate and persuasion from my partner, it is likely that won’t happen. Which is fine by me. But on my own I’d probably be out there right now chasing goats out of the chard patch.

Any advice for others choosing to farm with their mate?
Thomas: Farm Internships. Do it as a couple if possible. Though it won’t prepare you for everything by any means it will give you a feel for the life.

Save as much money as you can and make sure you are both on the same plane of frugality going in to the venture. Cash flow will be stressful on your own, much more so when one of you think you need this particular implement to continue and the other thinks you should expand into rabbit production instead. Learn to improvise with what you have and be willing to compromise greatly.

Lindy: Listen first, then talk.

Occupy Our Food Supply is bringing together the Occupy, sustainable farming, food justice, buy local, slow food, and environmental movements for a global day of action on February 27, 2012. Inspired by the theme of CREATE/RESIST, thousands will come together to creatively confront corporate control of our food supply and take action to build healthy, accessible food systems for all.

Industrial agribusiness corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, ADM and Dupont have gained runaway control of our food systems and to take them back, we’ll need all the collective power we can manifest around the world. There are few things more personal than the food we put into our bodies every day. Let’s ensure that we can stand by the food we eat from farm to fork.

Read more at Occupy Our Food Supply and Find An Action Near You!

We propose a systems based model for urban growth which considers food as an integral part of the energy infrastructure. In contrast to the current urban model where food is an input and waste is an output, ours is an integrated approach considering the urban region as an ecological system with the potential for a closed loop of energy, nutrient and waste cycles. There is a long history of agriculture benefitting from the waste of the pre-industrialized city and while much research has begun into modern techniques our primary focus is on the spatial organization of such a system.

To test out their ideas they developed a case study for the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City. Check out the link and an image from the proposal:

The most recent Farm Bill, the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, remains in effect until the end of 2012. When passed, the 2008 Farm Bill included about $284 billion dollars of mandatory funding for food and agriculture related programs, along with a significant chunk of discretionary funding too. This giant piece of policy is divided into titles, each title highlighting a different focus area. For example, the existing Farm Bill including everything from Energy to Nutrition to Commodities to Conservation to Forestry titles.

Many folks perceive the farm bill to focus on topics like agricultural subsidies for commodity producers. However, subsidy and commodity programs only account for 15% of Farm Bill funding, followed by 9% for conservation programs and 8% for crop insurance. There’s a push to rename it the Food and Farm Bill, and for good reason. More than half of Farm Bill spending, about 67% of mandatory funds, are directed to USDA food and nutrition programs – namely the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as the Food Stamp Program. That’s a pretty high priority placed on providing supplemental food dollars for those who need it. If you do the math, about 1% of Farm Bill funding falls into a category other than the ones listed above, programs that are incredibly important to small, new or diversified farms across the country like the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Programs, Value-Added Producer Grants and the Farmers’ Market Promotion Program. These smaller programs place priority on supporting producers who grow or process the food we are more likely to eat fresh and lightly processed, like fruits and vegetables.

This is a good time to engage in Farm Bill advocacy (or agvocacy as some folks like to call it), and voice your opinions about what you would like to see in the upcoming Farm Bill. The good news is, you don’t have to start from scratch. Two bills incorporating support for local food systems have already been introduced in Congress. Although these pieces of proposed legislation will never become the Farm Bill, the hope is that they will become incorporated into the Farm Bill as it develops. Keep your eyes peeled for the following two bills, and encourage your legislators to support them.

• Local Farms, Food and Jobs Act: Introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME-1) in November of 2011. With the support of 35 original co-sponsors, this proposed legislation promotes producer and consumer aspects of producing and accessing local food, including strengthening the food supply chain.
• The Beginning Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act of 2011: Introduced by Representatives Tim Walz (D-MN-1) and Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE-1) along with Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) in the Senate, this bill aims to support opportunities for new and beginning farmers and food entrepreneurs. This legislation addressed the barriers new farmers face, including access to land, markets and credit.

It can take over a year for the fine folks in Washington to agree on the contents of this behemoth piece of legislation. The process also leads to unexpected alliances between rural and urban representatives who join forces to gain traction for both the production (rural) and consumer (primarily urban) aspects of the Farm Bill. It’s always hard to predict what will happen, but there’s room for all of us to have our say. You can keep up to date and learn more about Farm Bill agvocacy with a focus on sustainability through organizations like:

• National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition
• Environmental Working Group
• Food and Water Watch
• New York Times Farm Bill Index

We’ll also keep you updated on the progress of the Farm Bill, along with the perspectives of farmers who are working to improve our food system, so keep posted. And don’t forget to start to conversation with your legislators so you can make your Farm Bill voice heard too.

Please offer your support for the Chicago soul food history project Garlic & Greens, who are producing a multi-media artist book that will also incorporate elements you can touch and smell. Learn more about their work and contribute to it their Kickstarter page.

More about G&G:

GARLIC & GREENS: accessible soul food stories offers programs showcasing the intersections between food heritage, migration history, social justice, the arts, and disability studies. The current focus is an oral history archive about food heritage.

GARLIC & GREENS was first established as the educational component for edible gardens designed for people with disabilities at the north end of Chicago’s Washington Park. While working at this site, it became clear that adjusting a garden’s physical infrastructure is just the first step to becoming accessible. Connecting vegetable gardening to cooking traditions through a tactile documentary book is an innovative response.

First launched in an historically Black neighborhood, GARLIC & GREENSwelcomes participation from everyone while focusing on stories about soul food traditions from those of African ancestry. During the Great Migrations, people searched for a respite from racism and more job opportunities in northern cities. This human movement was accompanied by the journey of southern American food traditions including soul food ingredients like okra, beans, yams, and various dark leafy greens among others.

GARLIC & GREENS is making a special effort to reach audiences with low or no vision because Black Americans are at a higher risk for sight loss from glaucoma, diabetes and hypertensive retinopathy. The good news is that these diseases can be prevented with a healthy diet and regular access to health care. GARLIC & GREENS will help participants make stronger connections between cultural heritage, culinary traditions, food access, and health and wellness.

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.