I got lucky.  Two Octobers ago I sat at my desk at ECO, barely one month into the new job, still adjusting to a living situation that had me alone most of the time.  One of the Piedmont Biofarm folks – Jack – came into the office and asked if I wanted to help pick some sweet potatoes after work.  A group of folks was on their way over to help out with the harvest.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Crop Mob was about to move a big piece of dirt.

That dirt was me.

One of the reasons Kristin and I moved out of the city was because we felt that we had exhausted what we could do in Wilmington. The city was and probably still is unreceptive to the kinds of things we were tying to do. Most of what we started got some traction early on, but once we set them out on their own, folks quickly lost interest and things folded.  We became babysitters when what we wanted to be were peers – peers empowering other people to step up and get things done.

Worst of all was becoming a disappointed babysitter, cleaning up the messes of people who knew better but continued to act as if anarchism meant you never had to be responsible.

So yeah, Crop Mob came and got me and shook the Wilmington right out of me.  I simply had to tag along, give it all that I knew how to do and watch as other strong people filled in the holes, making the project a fluid and replicable and respectable entity.

And with the strong people comes the strong growth and with that comes the growing pains and the discussions about how best to proceed with this entity that we have created.  For better or worse, all the media attention will fade.  When that happens, some of the sexy will wash off and we will be left with a few fronts to engage.

1 – The original work area of the original Crop Mob group.  Do we split into individual county groups or do we continue to function as we have as a three county group?  My take has always been that we stay together as a three county group.  The camaraderie of engaging with my peers from Hillsborough, Chapel Hill and Pittsboro is enough to make me hold out and not want to dissolve into smaller groupings.  Crop Mob events are some of the only times I get to interact with this larger agrarian culture, and I feel like the benefit to the group of this mixing outweighs the slight possibility of the group becoming watered down with long distance commuters.

2 – The rapidly expanding Crop Mob universe.  We are looking at facilitating the creation of at least 20 new Crop Mob groups in the US.  As these groups get established, more will follow from their examples.  How do we best maintain the core principles of the idea and replicate it without micromanaging every aspect of each groups’ formation? Again, for better or worse, we have to let the idea evolve on its own and accept that sometimes it won’t work out in the ways we might want or expect. We have to trust that we, by our own boots-in-the-dirt examples, have created an idea that needs minimal governance and minimal tweaking in order to accomplish work and build a community.

Christine Muhlke of the New York Times Magazine spent an overcast January day at a Crop Mob event right around the corner from Circle Acres.  She said the article would be out in April, but it must have gotten bumped up somewhere along the line.  A few weeks ago she gave me the heads up that it would be out at the end of February.  The online version is up now, but if you have access to a newsstand you can get the print version of the magazine this Sunday.

The farmer Trace Ramsey, who is part of the Mob core as well as its documentarian, has watched the young-farmer phenomenon explode. ‘People are interested in authentic work,’ he said. ‘I think they’re tired of what they’ve been told they should accomplish in their life, and they’re starting to realize that it’s not all that exciting or beneficial from a community perspective or an individual perspective.’ At 36, Ramsey joked that he’s the old man of the project — remarkable considering the average American farmer is 57. But as people of all ages become involved, he said, ‘what started as a young-farmer movement is just becoming a farmer movement.’

Full story – Field Report: Plow Shares by Christine Muhlke

Saturday morning the first set of piglets were born on Okfuskee Farm.  Okfuskee is just a few miles from Circle Acres and the source of the first pigs we raised last year.  This year we are getting four pigs from Okfuskee.  We’ll raise them through November, repeating most of the same process as last year.

This year there is a new shelter, a scavenged bamboo and baling twine number that I built over the course of a few days.  It isn’t much to look at, but it is dry and, more importantly, lightweight.  Moving last year’s pig house was a nightmare.  It was heavy and unwieldy; I cursed it, the pigs destroyed it as they aged, knocking out the floor and the walls.  Now its shell sits with last year’s scarecrow along the forest edge, waiting for new purposes and locations.

The new house is basically a tent with one open wall.  It can be staked down after moving in case it is windy.  But that is all boring stuff… Who wants to see the two day old piglets!

Five weeks from this coming Saturday the piglets will be weaned (according to the Animal Welfare Approved time line).  Shortly after that, the pigs will come home and join the rest of us animals.

innovation n 1 : the introduction of something new 2 : a new method, idea or device

Crop Mob is simply an innovation in farm work and organizing.  Taking the old idea of community labor, a small group of farm interns created a new model, a model of organizing that takes experienced and novice farmers (and other interested folks) and puts them in a shared space at a particular farm at a particular time. Within this space, the group tackles a set of tasks using the directions given by the host farm and the experience each person brings to the space. At the end of a few hours of work they share a meal.  Along with the meal is the extended value of a shared experience, an experience unique for each farm and to each participant.

According to sociologists, there are five stages in the adoption or rejection of any innovation (called Diffusion of Innovation).  The first step is the exposure of an individual to the idea without them having any prior information about the idea. This was basically the mindset of the originators of Crop Mob and anyone who comes upon it without ever hearing about it beforehand.

The next step is the individual actively seeking out information about the innovation or idea.  This can be asking another participant, doing web searches, emailing. Through this information the individual proceeds to the next step, which is making a decision to accept or reject the idea.

This step is worth exploring, as I feel that misinformation about Crop Mob really affects this stage. With any innovation there is skepticism, there is doubt, there are wildly off-the-mark perceptions.  One of the most frequent is that Crop Mob is a magical free labor pool that simply appears at your farm or garden and runs through the to-do list.  The Crop Mob is sometimes also misconstrued as an idealistic gang of urban lefties, off to do their good deed in the country and shed some of that built up liberal guilt.

Yet another amazingly false idea is that Crop Mob is a group of inexperienced idiots who don’t know one end of a shovel from the other. They will wreck your years of careful farm planning and layout, damage all your equipment, let your chickens out to the swarming wolves and hawks, and destroy all your saved seed by mistaking it for lunch. I personally feel that this misconception is keeping the Crop Mob from interacting with some of the more established sustainable farms in our area.  I know there are many of these farms that would like to share their experience with young and new farmers but are afraid that we just don’t have what it takes to restrain ourselves in their space.

The fourth stage of the process is execution or use of the idea. Folks show up and work with the mob for the day, using their experience to further evaluate the idea for themselves. If they don’t like it, they won’t come back and do it again.  It is hard to evaluate how many people have chosen not to come back to Crop Mob.  There is no way to really measure their reaction since we are not setup to do exit interviews with every participant.  Reasons for not coming back are probably extremely variable – not feeling welcomed, the work was too hard or too easy, the weather was horrible, expectations were not met.

Again, many of these reasons should be explored.  How can we as a group be more hospitable? I think an easy way would be to ask mobbers who have been to several mobs to look for new faces and make sure they are properly introduced and welcomed. This does not mean to inundate them with hugs and handshakes, but rather make sure they are oriented and introduced, make sure they are comfortable with the task they are taking up, and, if they are inexperienced, make sure they are partnered with an experienced group or individual. Through this single task, I think we can get more returning mobbers.

The final stage is a confirmation. The users of the Crop Mob idea return to use it again or set off to start their own mob in another part of the state, country or world. The idea becomes known for its viability and ease of use.