Farm living is the life for me...

I've moved to a farm.

"But WHY?" you say.

Well, farming is-

"But you had a JOB!  With BENEFITS!  And a RETIREMENT PLAN!"

Ok, yes, but I found this-

"AND NOW YOU'RE COVERED WITH MOSQUITO BITES AND DIRT!!!"

Which is true.  So let me start at the beginning.

Early this year I started volunteering at Ambrose Farms, on Wadmalaw Island outside of Charleston.  (It's the bomb-- highly recommend their CSA and U-Pick-ANYTHING. http://www.stonofarmmarket.com/AmbroseFamilyFarm.html )  Turns out I loved it.  It was beautiful, therapeutic, and fun.  So I started looking at other opportunities, and getting more into it, and discovered two interesting things.

First of all, the local and organic foods movement is huge and growing (that wasn't a discovery, that's just true). Second of all, there is an urban farming movement that doesn't just grow food, it grows kids and communities.  Check out Grow Dat Youth Farm, or Urban Roots for examples, or just read on to get an idea of what I'm talking about:

So, picture a low-income community, your stereotypical "bad" neighborhood with all the garnish that goes with that.  I like to add in tennis shoes hanging from the phone lines and the occasional abandoned house in for flavor.  Now, because it's a "bad" neighborhood they don't have grocery stores-- because my imaginary low-income neighborhood is rife with all the factors that generally add to the sorts of statistics that keep Publix far, far away.

So to get to the store, you gotta roll up the road-- and in my imaginary neighborhood, people are hurting for money and don't have cars.  So now you're walking to the bus stop, riding up the road, walking to the store, then doing it all again in reverse except with all the food for your family for the week.  My grocery runs involve three trips to the car and it's just me, so for my imaginary family, this basically sucks.

Now, my imaginary family has other options that are closer, and possibly cheaper, namely: McDonald's, or the Hot Mustard Chinese food and hot wings place (which is amazing, if you haven't been.  It's in downtown, check it out.), and Circle K has some pretty sweet microwaveable burritos.

Obviously, for all the normal reasons (for more info, watch any of a number of terrifying food documentaries. I recommend Food, Inc. or Fast Food Nation to start.  You'll be scared straight in no time- right up until you smell a cheeseburger....) these are pretty terrible options, especially if they're your long term dinner-for-the-fam solutions.  You know this, I know this...Look, when I was a teenager I ate McDonald's or Dominoes every night for dinner for about 2 years, and now my sister feeds her baby organic lamb chops or something and my dad is a vegetarian.   It's a changing world.

Ok, so...Enter Urban Farm into my imaginary community.  On about 2 or 3 acres of abandoned land (my imaginary neighborhood has desolation very similar to the real life low-income neighborhoods you may be imagining right now), a naturally grown or organic farm moves in.  To work the farm, teenagers from the community are hired, providing jobs and job skills and all the good things that go along with that like self esteem and less unstructured free time and socialization in a working environment, blah blah blah.  They also learn good environmental stewardship, and start to care about more that just the people in their community, but the physical land itself.

Or whatever, they just care about the pay check, but they LEARN all the rest of that stuff.  I've worked with teenagers for a while, sometimes you have to bribe them into caring about things.

And, they grow things.  Not to get too weird on you but growing things is good therapy-- you bring it to life and care for it and if you do a good job, it is physically, visibly evident.  Very satisfying.  Good for the soul.  But more than that, they things they grow are FOOD, and not for strangers but for friends, family, neighbors, cook outs, Sunday dinners, etc.  That's powerful stuff!

Finally, on top of that, all those friends and neighbors start to care about the farm, cuz 1) they buy their food there, 2) it's in their back yard LITERALLY in what used to be a sketchy abandoned lot, and 3) their kids work there.

See, it's cyclical: kids care about job, start to care about garden, healthy real food goes into community, community cares about farm and kids, kids are proud of farm and selves, everyone is proud of their community.  My imaginary neighborhood is happier and healthier now.

So this is what I am interested in, and it turns out it's something that exists: check out http://growdatyouthfarm.org/ or http://www.urbanroots.org/ or http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/ and then you can get really excited about all this too, and come join me on the farm.

In order to work in places like those, however, I need to know how to farm...and how to run a farm.  I need some agricultural credibility-- so on Sunday I moved out to the country to start my internship.  I'm working with 7 other people to take care of 10 acres of organic veggies.  There are also pigs, chickens, sheep, and cows on the farm (but I don't work with them...yet).  I stay out here in a big, nice farm house with my own room, and we get to eat everything we want from the farm, and get other supplies from the store that is associate with the farm.  It is stupid how good the food is.  It is absurd.  Truly.

And just to capture all the other things that may be absurd, or moving, or intriguing, or weird or whatever about my time here, I'm starting this wacky blog.  Check back and see what's shaking...and if I made any grammatical mistakes, hollar (looking at you, Alix).

I'm going to eat some homemade cookies and see what I can do with dinner: fresh okra, pole beans, peppers, and muscadine grapes for dessert.