Mountain Gardens in 2009, Photo by Anne Hamersky for Farm Together Now

We are pleased to share this update from Joe Hollis of Mountain Gardens:

“Mountain Gardens carries on along the course indicated in the book.  The gardens have expanded, the plant collection enlarged, we now have a considerable you-tube channel of plant and garden videos, I recently resigned from teaching herbal preparations and medical botany at Daoist Traditions with the intention of starting a herb / permaculture school here (see video on my website www.mountaingardensherbs.com).  I am 78 and, since a car wreck a few years ago, not as speedy.  My efforts to develop a small, consensus-based community to carry on my work have been frustrated (managed to accumulate a core group of three, and they started a feud with each other  – is there an emoji for throwing up your hands in despair?).  

     In response to Covid, we are primarily interested in serving our local community (South Toe Valley).  We are offering a range of immune boosting and anti-viral tinctures and plants based on the latest research from China & US. (sorry, we do not ship tinctures) Emerging viral and bacterial diseases will be the story going forward and pharmaceuticals will not work (viruses quickly develop resistance) – herbs are our main (I think only, but maybe I’m missing something?) hope.  Therefore Mountain Gardens finds itself on the frontline but, to reiterate, we are only trying to save our valley (and be an example of how others might save their valley).  I think Mtn Gdns includes the largest collection of medicinal herbs in E. N. America but not sure for how long – the rising line of the complexity of the project has long since crossed the declining line of my ability to keep track of it.

      Here is a video of Mountain Gardens prepared this spring for the Medicines from the Earth (herbal) Symposium, which was online this year:

See the full blogpost with plant names here: https://www.mountaingardensherbs.com/blog/2020/6/11/a-plant-wal

      Fifty years ago I thought I was creating an example of how people could live on earth without screwing it up, causing war or making themselves unhealthy; now I realize that actually I have been building an ark.”

Joe C. Gallegos (2009)

San Luis, CO (2009)

Devon G. Peña (2009)

Sandra J. Santa Cruz (2009)

As part of our 2020 updates about Farm Together Now featured farmers, we are sharing these updates from Devon G. Peña of The Acequia Institute in San Luis Colorado. We would also like to dedicate this post to Joe C. Gallegos who passed away in December of 2016. Gallegos was interviewed in Farm Together Now with Pena and was a pillar in the community. 

2020 Updates from The Acequia Institute:

“Our work at The Acequia Institute (TAI) is blossoming and there is so much going on I can only highlight a few things here:

1. TAI is now a “grow-out operator” for a Seed Rematriation Project to preserve and return bioregional landrace varieties of corn, bean squash, peas, and orach unique to the Upper Rio Grande communities of San Luis and Ortiz, CO, Taos Pueblo, Vadito, and other New Mex. locales. We have about 3 acres at three different sites (to separate the maize varieties) and these will be returned as seedstock to replenish acequia farmers in these communities of origin and diversification.
2. TAI is also hosting a high altitude hemp production experiment. This involves “Red Kross” a native landrace heirloom that has been grown by Native American tribes for decades and is used as traditional medicine. Red Kross is a 80-100 day auto-flower variety and is drought resistant and apparently adapted to high elevation and extreme hardiness. That is the experiment: How will it do at our new field in San Francisco, CO at 8100′? The project is made possible by our allies, Lightning Horse and Bill Nesbitt of Pacific Northwest Indigenous Farmers, LLC in Oregon.
3. We now have an Executive Director, Buffy Turner (Cherokee) who is leading two major projects: (1) The convening of a council of advisors to begin planning the transformation of TAI from a simple 501(c)(3) into an inter-tribal land trust. We are rematriating the 181 acres of land along with water rights and the conservation easement at the TAI almunyah to a four nation council consisting of members from all the Indigenous peoples with attachments and heritage claims to the San Luis Valley. These include Caputa Ute, Dine (Navajo), Tewa (Taos Pueblo), and Xicanx/Genizaro (varied Mexican-origin) peoples. Two-spirit people are playing a major role in this council. (2) The launching of a capital campaign to construct a series of adobe buildings to house Institute headquarters, seed sanctuary, classrooms, and dorms centered around a traditional ceremonial placita (communal square).
4. Representing TAI as part of a UN certified delegation sponsored by the Asociacion Andes, I was a co-author and facilitator of the Ek Balam Declaration, a manifesto to protect the sacred in corn, and which was presented to the 13th COP of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Cancun, Mexico (Dec. 2016). This grew out of the earlier work of the Voces de Maiz/Voices of Maize network which included collaboration with the “Braiding the Sacred” group, another network of Indigenous corn protectors. The Ek Balam Declaration was followed with an invitation to submit a Strategy Brief to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues which we did in April 2017.”

Here are some photos to accompany update, from the final stage planting of the Rematriation Milpa #1 at Rancho Chiquito (San Francisco, CO). Native land race hemp variety known as “Red Kross” used in traditional medicine across Turtle Island. In partnership with the Northwest Naive American Farmers, LLC (Oregon).

Dulce, Xicana and P’urhpecha daughter of our mayordomo

Anatniuq Gonzalez-Molina, seventh generation land grant heir. Planting the hemp in little pockets of organic compost soil.

Luis, the 8th generation.

First irrigation with sunset alpenglow on the 80,000 acre common lands, La Sierra.

Sisnaajini, sacred mountain of the Navajo (Dine), on the far horizon at sunset.

Sisnaajini and the Rematriation Milpa.

First sprouts of Red Kross.

Milpa #2 of the Seed Remartriation Project (landrace corn, bean, squash). Freshly sown at The Acequia Institute Almunyah, Viejo San Acacio.

This was moonrise as we completed our planting of the Red Kross.

Starting next week we will share some updates from farmers who were featured in Farm Together Now back in 2010. For now, feel free to read some of the interviews from the book here:

Angelic Organics Learning Center, Aquaranch, God’s Gang, Hunger Coalition, Jim Knopik, Joe Gallegos & Devon Pena, Joel Greeno, Mountain Gardens, On-the-Fly Farm, Sandhill Farm

This post is a continuation of the first part of my interview with Mark Kimball of Essex Farm, which you can check out here if you haven’t had a chance yet. In the first part of the interview, I talked with Mark about the philosophy and practices he employs on his farm in Essex, New York. You can also find a short introduction to the incredible Essex Farm in that post. Here, you will find more about Mark’s philosophy on farming, as well as some fascinating thoughts surrounding the issue of labor on the farm.

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Simon Willig: How has your philosophy and thinking about farming changed over time, as you have done more farming or done more faming in this specific place?

Mark Kimball: I think that my life has been a series of both deeper philosophical questions––deeper than let’s say, “what am I having for breakfast?”––and then practices. I think for me philosophically it has only been through time and farming that I have distilled the idea that agriculture can be more broadly defined than it is usually, and that it’s basically the foundation for culture, and that we can look at agriculture and industry united on landscapes to meet human needs.

I think when I started out I wanted to see, on my practical goal set, it was: can I make a living growing vegetables? I think now the shift is: can I, with a team of people, meet our human needs with a given landscape or landscapes and do more good than harm? I think there are echoes of that in my early thinking and writing, but I don’t think I really touched and tasted that until I learned how to build barns and homes and learned how much gas I go through every year using car to visit family and relatives or taking a plane somewhere.

I think what’s changed philosophically is that as I get more skilled in the physical world, I understand cause and effect a little bit more. So while it’s incredibly convenient to have UPS drop off our next day supplies to the farm or go to the hardware store, I also understand a little bit more of the global infrastructure necessary to do that. And I think every time you do something in the physical world you get more connected to those pathways just by understanding that, for example, to move a ton of something across the farmyard takes as much tractor or horsepower as you’re talking about what it took to move a ton of seed from another farm to here, or what it took to move a ton of food to Plattsburg from Killy [two nearby towns].

So I think flip Middlebury’s no vo/tech [vocational/technical training] here policy on its head and I would say, “Let’s not just limit ourselves to who can make a weld waterproof” but look more at what tools welding is conferring on our bigger relationship to society and the environment. And so for me there is a great excitement in trying to bring to higher education an integration of visceral, physical world experience and highfalutin philosophical and scientific thought, because I think that without one the other becomes less feasible. Without understanding metallurgy, it’s not as fun to join two pieces of metal, but you can still just do it. You can just learn “Here’s how you strike the welder, here’s how you make this weld, go home” but it’s also really fun to think about how the metal influx is lining up, etc. That’s a little tangent to where you were going, but I think that I really have come to see that if I were in charge, if I could play god with higher education, it would start out with very physically grounded questions of what makes things work.

SW: So I think I’m hearing that over time you have had your physical, on-the-ground experiences contribute to your larger philosophies. Do you feel that it’s also gone the other way and that over time your larger philosophies have contributed more to your on-the-ground experiences and practices?

MK: As a short answer, I think that contextualizing your physical world activities and tying them to goals and philosophy brings more meaning to them. So in other words when I milk a cow, knowing a little teeny bit about cow digestion and pasture management, thinking of it in relationship to dairy product, and the whole raw milk debate, adds some sort of sub-conscious or conscious benefits of milking. And I think connecting consumers to their product and the philosophy of the farm makes it so that when I’m milking cows I’m not just creating a commodity that disappears, I’m creating something that within a day or two is going into people’s mouths and that’s connected to the process of digestion and human effort and food.

So yes, I think it does go both ways in that some of the deeper goals of the farm end up really giving you a reason to take a deep breath while you’re milking the cow and not feel like a vo/tech welder who is just going to try to make a pay check for the rest of your life, but instead say “Oh, this was in line with our bigger goals because it does this and this and here’s where it’s not in line.” So yeah I think it does work both ways for me, but because I don’t get to do as much of the routine work on the farm I think it becomes all the more poignant and fulfilling to be able to do that stuff.

SW: Going back to what you were saying earlier about trying to do more work with horses, who performs the work on your farm (animals, humans, tractors, etc.) and how do you approach and look at that?

MK: It’s a question to which we’ve failed to create the answer we looked for in the beginning. Our goal was to find a group of people who would work along side us over time and get better at this practice here on this piece of land with these goals. And what we’ve become more known for is that we’ve trained dozens of young people and given them experience to go off and start their own operation.

But on a more sort of “how do we do it?” level, we use horses, tractors, underpaid labor, paid labor, volunteers, visitors, by any means necessary to get the job done. I think when we first started the farm, more farmers spent more time on horses, which left a lot of the work to these other farmers using fuel [to grow the feed and bedding for our horses]. So at first, we sub-contracted a lot more purchase of hay, grain, and bedding then we do now, and now we’re doing most of that in house so we are using a lot more fuel as a business but before we were hiring other people to use fuel.

And we hired migrant labor this year for two weeks to help us with fall harvest. But I think the other way we get it done is that we spend a lot of time asking people to help us, so we call people up and say “Hey, can you help with this? Are you willing to do this?” Recruitment and enlistment are essential, whether it’s the Middlebury team that comes over and knocks it out of the park with squash sorting and clean up or summer kids who come for a summer and basically destroy their bodies and laugh while they’re doing it. It’s a mixed crew, but what are missing mostly, what we look at building next year, are skilled farmers.

It’s much easier to find post-production people than it is to find skilled farmers, so we’re consistently finding people who can solve the recipe for making sausage and do that well. It’s maybe not so much that they’re a professional butcher, but these kind of “front of the house” people are easy to find. I think it’s much more challenging to enlist people who really understand how to farm. For example, we had two pigs farrow [give birth to a litter of piglets] this fall and somehow our animal team, which has done farrowing before, didn’t provide them with enough shelter so we lost two batches of piglets to mismanagement and lack of communication. And Kristen and I look at each other and we raise eyebrows every time it happens. And we just say, “What part of this didn’t we go over? Why didn’t we know that this was close? Where did we mess up? And that’s always a challenge.

SW: How do you approach pest and disease management?

MK: I think we balance the idea of animal-positive and plant-positive solutions with more direct pest control. In other words, improve animals’ feed quality, improve their fertility and if something becomes a major economic or health concern then start looking at disease control and pathogen control. I come about it with a philosophy of “Just grow more, let’s grow it better each year, yeah we’re going to have losses, go forward.” So I think we’re walking pretty nicely through a balance of: on the big picture let’s create healthy systems, and on the small picture, when we screw things up, let’s look at short-term solutions for killing rats, and improving our farrowing rate, for example. Kristen and I are now talking about for next year, “How do we do better pig farrowing? If we have beginners doing it, what are the systems we need in place to really get people better at that and how do we do that?”

SW: You’re always talking about trying to get people on the farm and getting people excited about farming. Additionally, farming and getting back to the land are becoming increasingly attractive to young people. In light of these things, can you share some thoughts on this increased interest, the perspective these young people bring to your farm, as well as the possibility of people romanticizing or idealizing the farm life?

MK: It’s a perennially challenging workplace as an employer and an employee. There are people out there, typically migrant workers, who are used to repetitive agricultural tasks like milking, harvesting, and sitting in tractors. Then there’s a group of other people who are looking at it more from a philosophical, environmental angle and don’t have skills and don’t have the patience to just do the same things their whole life. And being able to juxtapose both of those at the farm is always great because it sort of leads to excitement.

And I think that the key is, if you have an inclination toward agriculture, follow it at all costs, but realize that as of yet, there’s not a road to you’re physical or fiscal security. You’re in a high-risk physical job; your body could get hurt; you’re doing a lot of work. And fiscally there’s no bottom line yet to farming. It tends to lose money wherever it’s practiced. Our government has created ways to keep farms alive, but just barely. So when you go into it you have to be aware that both your body and your bottom line can fail.

I fully support people that are walking down the farm road. And I think that you owe it to yourself as somebody in a country where we are, entirely subsidized by larger socioeconomic and environmental choices to go bravely into it. In other words, don’t listen to other people and if your gut sense is to go into farming, go into it. So I highly recommend it, with the cautionary tales that are concomitant with farming: be careful, make sure you have people that can help you out if you make economically or otherwise stupid decisions. Make sure you’ve got some people around you to help you get out of those consequences.

* * *

I hope you enjoyed reading about Essex Farm and all the ideas and practices behind it. You can learn some more about Essex at their website and their Facebook page. Thanks for reading!

Simon

Last month, I had the opportunity to talk to Mark Kimball of Essex Farm and ask him about his practices and philosophies. Mark, his wife Kristen, and a shifting crew of farmers and workers together run Essex Farm on 850 acres in Essex New York. They produce about 50 different types of vegetables, several different types of grain depending on the year, hay, meat, dairy, and eggs.

One of the things that makes Essex Farm unique and well known is their full diet CSA sales model, a twist on the typical CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). In a CSA, consumers purchase a share at the beginning of the growing season and receive a weekly mixed basket of whatever is growing on the farm at that moment, rather than buying individual products. In Essex’s full diet, all-you-can-eat CSA, families pay for membership on a per-person basis, and then visit the farm every Friday to pick up whatever food they might need for the following week, and however much they need. Customers therefore get nearly all of their dietary needs met at one place. The share includes different meats, dairy, flour, herbs, a huge variety of veggies, and maple syrup.

I have visited Essex Farm a few times and have really enjoyed being there, talking with Mark, and learning about their operation. I wanted to interview Mark to hear more about his philosophy and thought behind the farm.

With this basic introduction to Essex covered, I will provide my interview with Mark, below. Because of the length of the interview, parts have been removed or edited. However, I have maintained the meaning and integrity of Mark’s ideas. Also, it helps to know that I attend Middlebury College, which is why Mark brings Middlebury up in a few instances.

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Simon Willig: Can you talk a little bit about the reasoning behind your full-diet CSA?

Mark Kimball: It just seems to me that it meets a lot of my needs as a consumer to have a full diet from one place. And then the model also makes sense for a producer to have, given that waste streams from grain production become bedding for animals. Integrating these processes on both sides seems like a pretty good direction to head.

SW: What is at the core of your philosophy on farming? How do your broader philosophies about things such as the environment play into this?

MK: I think the first thing is: can I live in a way that does more good than harm? I want to derive my life philosophy from that. I think that’s still an open question, and I think there are some sort of obvious answers and some answers that I think are hard to pin down. As it translates into farming, I see farming fairly broadly defined as the production that goes into meeting human needs and inherently using the land as the substrate for that. So, then, farming is combining sunlight, soil, geothermal, wind, and whatever it takes to meet human needs in the most creative way. And to me that involves going way beyond food production, although here we haven’t done much of that besides firewood for the members and for ourselves. And I guess we’ve also met human needs in terms of a place where people can socially commit to each other and to a landscape.

I think the first step for me in redefining how I want to measure my success as a farmer or failure (and I think it’s probably likely to have failure before success) is: can I set up a way to see how much sunlight I can capture, maybe even through wind and photovoltaics, but primarily through plants, to meet those human needs in a long- and short-term strategy? So one of the equations I say (in sort of faux chemistry geekdom) is: who can catch the most photosynthate, keep it where you caught it, and still provide the most benefits for society?

So those are all very high in the sky ideas and I think the reality is we are much more constrained by fiscal and social constraints than we are by environmental ones at this point because we’re not having to pay the cost of our negative environmental impacts. I have a much harder time figuring out how to pay my bills and train my labor force, so I don’t really have time to address some of those more fundamental questions. Just on a financial or employer/employee relationship, I’ve got a lifetime of work ahead of me. So it’s interesting to have all three metrics (the fiscal, personnel, and environmental) running around inside.

And I think the challenge for me as a leader here is: can I make meaningful steps (that can get assessed, revisited and improved upon) toward these broader goals as a farm? So the other philosophy I’m working towards is how do you make day-to-day decisions given these lofty goals. And I think that’s another fun part of the human condition that I get to play with here.

SW: How does your philosophy on something like climate change fit into your philosophy on farming?

MK: That’s a good question because I think everybody is now in the kind of progressive environmentalist camp. Everyone is thinking and talking about ways to do that. So I guess there’s sort of a two-part answer.

One is at a very economic level: what are the best, most economically viable practices agriculturally to regenerate soil, air, and water? While air is the most directly tied to climate change, obviously water and soil are still hugely important. So if we’re going to sequester x tons of carbon in the soil, what does that do and who feels it? I think there are the broad economic questions that I have seen very few satisfying answers to. For example, you shared earlier that grass-fed cows might produce more methane. So how would we adjust that production if that is true? And do we go down that road and look at that? So I think there are tons of granular details that I need to understand to make wise production decisions.

And then I think there’s another side, as a way to meet a short-term sort of hopeful goal. And that is: is what we’re doing socially in this community with our members, and in New York City with our New York City members a constructive step towards mitigating climate change? In that by enlisting members to cook whole foods we’re changing their buying patterns to support what they ingest, at a sort of crass way to say it. But by that they’re actually changing where their atoms come from, and becoming more connected to the fact that the atoms they ingest are land-based in a way that every food is, but this way at least they’re conscious of it.

So is there a way to address climate change by increasing individual consciousness to the food we eat? I think that’s a question not a statement. It may be that we’re just convincing ourselves that small, diversified farms are somehow more sustainable and by eating that food we’re becoming better more responsible human beings. And those could all be false assumptions, but I think on some level that may be the most that we’re doing right now. That is: children and families, now some of them have gotten 50% of all of their food-borne atoms coming from this little piece of dirt, and the farmers here that are tending it.

So maybe we look at that one of the ways that people can get reconnected to some of these questions at least and sort of pass the questions forward to the next generation and we say “Okay, we created a template, a palette, a springboard for you to make way better decisions than we’re able to make because we don’t have the time, information, or societal commitment to these goals yet.”

But I think individual health is, if nothing else, good for itself and I think individual health might be a microcosm of creating planetary health. So looking at your own body as an organism maximizing its health, I think is a nice starting place for looking at the health of the biosphere.

SW: You touched on this a bit, but within this philosophy what are the goals that you are constantly striving for?

MK: I think that is a separate question in some ways and if we get down to how to you take philosophy and wake up and live it, having looked at the last five years of production here, where I’m heading in the next short-term is: let’s start measuring things that are easy to measure. It may be the kind of thing where I talk to people at Middlebury and say, “Hey can we get some undergrads and grads to help us measure simple things? If you’re here for a year do you want to measure all of our fossil fuel inputs?” And that depends on how much diesel, how much grease, how much motor oil, how much electricity, how much whatever. So starting to measure whatever baseline inputs that we’re bringing on to the farm seems like a good starting place for a goal agriculturally for me.

And I think more than that, a good thing to measure is how many horse hours we put into the farm, and for the short-term coming up with a way to measure how many hours we hitched this year and how much we did during those hitches. Maybe then the second part of that is: how much would that have taken with tractors? And maybe even going further, deriving some of the pros and cons of the two different systems we have going on at the farm here. So I think the short-term goals would be: can we increase our solar (which we have here) and horse-based production per gross dollar of income? And we can create a fraction and figure out horse hours per dollar and go forward and say “Okay, we did 0.2 horse hours per dollar this year and we’re aiming for 0.25 next year.”

The other short-term goal is––looking at Wal-Mart as maybe the most successful one-stop shopping to meet human needs in the light of consumer demand thereof––how many of those goods can we create in a regional way that allow consumers the same sense of “Wow I just got all my stuff and it was cheap and it met my needs”? How do we add a higher value than what Wal-Mart does? That could involve asking: should we or could we get high-efficiency European [wood] stoves imported into this region so that we can burn firewood cleanly? Looking again at the needs of food, shelter, water, entertainment, which is the lowest-hanging fruit, both for the farm and as a bunch of consumers? And we should have the goal be to ask that question honestly and say “Alright, what are we good at? What can we provide reasonably? Who’s going to do it? And then what’s our short-term goal for that?”

So I think that’s the bigger question in agriculture: can agriculture move beyond the food movement to look at fiber and fuel needs and shelter needs? And what are reasonable ways to do that in a really economically efficient, global market place? How do we deal with economic inefficiency if it’s more environmentally efficient? So that wanders a little bit from your question, but I think it’s important to be aware that within that goal of doing more good than harm, there may be alternatives to just growing carrots.

So maybe we say, “If you’d like a firewood share, you have to buy one of these high-efficiency stoves and if you do that then firewood will be included in your share price.” So then there’s sort of a buy-in. But trying to figure out specific examples that work on all levels would be great. And I’m not saying it’s firewood and stoves. It could be drive-in movies and then we have local entertainment instead of people having to drive to Plattsburgh. That’s a ridiculous example maybe, but looking broadly at what humans are consuming and figuring out which of those things could be tied to a piece of land is a really exciting proposition that usually leads to more complexity and intrigue, which I think may be part of the solution to the bigger human problems.

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Due to the length of the interview, I have split it into two more manageable posts. The second part will include more about Mark’s philosophy and practices as well as the fascinating topic of labor and what powers Essex farm. You can now find the second part here. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the second part, which will come in about a week.

Simon