Dream #4

The Dream: to be a farmer.

Now when I say I want to be a farmer, don’t picture me on thousands of acres of cornfields in a ginormous air-conditioned John Deer tractor harvesting the unnaturally perfect rows of genetically-engineered-pesticide-and-herbicide-and-fertilizer-contaminated-corn.

When I say I want to be a farmer I mean I want to be an environmentally conscious, self-sustainable, small-scale, organic farmer of a variety of veggies, legumes, fruits, and grains.  I would also like to have some hens so I can have their eggs, cows so I can have their milk, some bees for their honey, sheep for their wool, and llamas and alpacas for their fur (and just because they are really cool animals).

I haven’t really decided if I just want to farm to have enough for my family or whomever else I’m living with, or if I would want to produce more food so I could sell it to other people.  Probably the latter.

Where this dream came from:

I’ve had my own little vegetable garden in my backyard for the past few years.  I have two raised beds that are each about 3 by 6 feet.  I cram as many plants in there as I can (which I know I’m not supposed to do, but I do it anyways).  I’ve grown tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, red and green peppers, jalapeño peppers, cucumbers, and cabbage.  I love watching the plants grow.  It’s so cool to see vegetable grow from the tiny plants- it’s almost like a miracle to go out to the garden and one day see things that resemble real live vegetables.  And there is nothing better than going into your backyard, picking some broccoli, cutting it up, and then eating it within 2 minutes- doesn’t get any fresher than that.

This year I’m growing my plants from seed (in previous years I bought little plants from a store).  I ordered seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange which is an organization located in Decorah, Iowa that is dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds.  I planned poorly and ordered my seeds too late and thus got the seeds started too late, but the baby plants are doing pretty well (they don’t look as perfect as the plants you buy at the store though).  I planted them in my little garden a couple weekends ago.  I feel like a mother to my baby plants.  Don’t judge me, but I’ve been talking to the little plants and encouraging them to grow.

This year my church started a community garden, which I am SO very excited about.  We planted a whole bunch of different vegetables, fruits, and herbs.   All the produce is going to be donated to local food pantries and to PADS (an organization that works to end homelessness in our area).  I volunteered to plan the planting of the garden and I thoroughly enjoyed planning it all out, learning about the different kinds of plants that we planted, and I am so excited to watch the garden grow over the summer.  (If you want to see the progress of the community garden over the summer, check out this blog.)

A couple years ago I read a book by Barbara Kingsolver called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.  In the book, Barbara writes about the year she, her husband, and two daughters committed to eating only locally grown food which involved growing most of their own food.  I loved reading about their adventures, the creativity they had to use to eat locally, and the difficulties and blessings of living off the land.  Just reading the book made me want to have my own farm so I could do what they did- to be as self-sufficient as possible.

Our globalized world is becoming more and more dependent on oil, ever-advancing technologies and machines, and enormous multi-national corporations.  Perhaps not everything about this globalized world is bad, but it has come to the point where we have next to no idea where our food comes from, who grew it, what’s in/on our food, what resources were used to get the food into my grocery cart, etc.  And it shouldn’t be this way.  The less knowledge we have about our food, the less we are able to make good decisions about the environmental and social costs of the food we eat.  I want to be able to make good decisions about what I put into my mouth.  After all, you are what you eat.  If I produced my own food then I would know almost every single detail about the food I was eating and I would be able to ensure that the food was produced in an environmentally and socially conscientious way.

What I would need to do to make the dream a reality:

• Learn more about farming
• Have land to farm on
• Obtain some farming equipment
• Find other people with farming knowledge and experience to help me 

Obstacles to making the dream a reality:

• There’s not much land for farming left in the suburbs so I might have to leave the burbs or make do with less land
• Actually surviving on what I grow
• Finding other people to help and join in my farming