I wonder how much the Crop Mob is about agriculture and how much is simply about enjoying the company of like minded people?  We came from all over to dig beds and spread mulch for someone most of us had never met, yet we did it with skill, enthusiasm and the efficiency of seasoned laborers.  This is only the second time the Crop Mob was used; for a third of this group of 24 this was their first experience with the group.

An outsider would question our motives as would some cynical old-timers or jaded sustainable agriculture veterans.  I wouldn’t even bother with those folks.  My main thought is not on convincing the skeptics that our agenda is one of filling a need, but rather my main thought is Where do we go from here?

Three months out of Wilmington and it is finally settling in that I am in a very different place.  Things move quickly here and things get done by folks who say they will do them.  I can feel some of my own cynicism fading away as I leave behind some of the vapidity of Wilmington, its slow moving, energy-sucking ambivalence flaking away like dead skin.

I am starting to warm up to the people that spin around in my daily interactions.  I’m trying to build the sorts of friendships that emulate family.  The Crop Mob is helping me with some of my apprehensions about new people and my own motives for entering a new world as an automatically standoffish person.

I have had a hard time, wondering how I would fit in when my experiences with building community in Wilmington often met with horrible failure.  I came into a ready made yet evolving community, ready to take my place yet unsure of what that place would look like.

It seems that my role here could be one of role model or experienced advice giver, but mostly, in the first few months, my role has been that of a lost explorer.  Things that I know how to do – cook, forage, dumpster dive – have been lost temporarily as I try to figure out the basics of living.

Cooking without anything resembling a kitchen has been frustrating; washing dishes without a good source of water makes cooking more of a chore than it needs to be.  What that has to do with the Crop Mob is beyond me, but it does affect my interactions.  It has also made my first impressions harder to shake.  Adah (pictured above) has tooled on me about my peanut butter and white bread lunches, but for me that meal has been easy, quick and comfortable in this time of transition.

Now that some of those issues are worked out, I feel like I can join this community in a functional capacity, sharing what I know and accepting learning opportunities as they present themselves.

And yet I am still not a talker.

To bring it back to the Crop Mob, the rhythm of the work is often set with old camp songs.  The one I have heard at both mobs is about sweet potatoes and biscuits -

Sweet potato biscuit that’s what I said
sweet potato biscuit dancing through my head
went to the cook’s table askin’ for some bread
found me a biscuit but the cooks was all dead

Sweet potato, sweet potato biscuit on the run
gotta find me a biscuit, gotta get me some of them
Sweet potato, sweet potato biscuit on the run
gotta find me a biscuit, gotta get me some

Standin’ on the lookout since the day before last
saw a line of biscuits stretchin’ into the past
Jesus on the hillside you know what he said
he said take this biscuit this sweet potato bread

Standing on the banks of the river wide
hop on a biscuit and catch yourself a ride
ride to the devils house all the way
share a biscuit with the devil on the judgment day

Sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit
sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit

sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit
(whispered) sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, (shouted) BISCUIT!!

There are only two months to go before the other half of Team Buckner moves to the farm.  The reality is that the house is barely ready for Kristin and I, even though we are only inhabiting 250 square feet of it for the foreseeable future.  The house is about 1600 square feet total.

Our little “apartment” holds the wood stove (our only source of heat), our new fridge, toaster oven, bed, two tables, a dog, a cat, and the day to day possessions of the two of us.  The place is pretty snug, but we are getting used to navigating it.

We now have running water, but no hot water heater.  We also have power, but only one working outlet.  Small steps seem to take forever, but in the larger picture the pace is not really all that bad.

The rest of the house is in a state of rotten.  The floors collapsed or were in the process of collapsing.  All of the timbers that hold up the house frame have been eaten away by water and termites.  They literally crumble into dust when touched.

The original construction of the destroyed parts of the house was done with any available materials.  The pilings that hold up the place are merely stacks of field rocks and random bricks.  One section of the house is held up with two scrap pieces of firewood.

In order for Noel and Danielle to take residence in the upstairs portion of the house, the bottom level has to be rebuilt in order to hold the weight of two people and their stuff.  At the moment it would be sketchy to even think about living above the disaster.

I’m not sure how the stairs are even held up.  They float above the dirt floor like a ghostly transporter to the upper floor.

The large chimney was built on top of a pile of rocks with no other support.  It is no wonder that the chimney itself is turning into its own pile of rocks.

The floors came out pretty easily with the help of a sledge hammer and reciprocating saw.  Mike and Noel tore it up in a short period of time.

We found evidence of other residents.  A pile of deer ribs, half a corn cob and a turtle shell told the tale of a scavenger living among us.

Another entrance to the house has been consumed by water damage.  A ruptured pipe under the house and a leaking roof provide plenty of standing water and rot.

Outside the house Danielle, Noel and I also found time to scour the woods for downed cedar trees.  These will be used for fence posts to hold in the goats and keep out the deer.

Planting time is coming soon, and the decision to take on a farming apprentice in February (more on that later!) is making the house and land preparations all the more urgent.  I have been hauling horse manure and cardboard like a crazy person, getting the building blocks for the farm beds together.  Let’s start the countdown…

Last weekend a crew of folks came from the other side of the county to gather up what, at this point, is the only crop that Circle Acres produces – American persimmons (Diospyros virginiana).

These native fruits are very much a southern tradition.  It’s uses in the folklore of the South are many, from making tea from the Spring leaves to predicting the Winter weather by the shape of the innards of the seed.  We cut open a batch of seeds only to find the bad news – they all had “spoon” shapes, indicating a snowy Winter.  The seeds can also be roasted and made into a hot drink that tastes like coffee.

The trees we have are really tall, pretty much at the top end of height for virginiana.  I hauled out the ladder with the intention of just climbing to the top of the ladder and shaking the tree.  By the time I had the ladder out, two of the persimmon crew were already up the tree, shaking the top branches.  As the fruits came down, everyone had to duck and cover under the pelting and splattering of the small projectiles.  The tarps caught the majority of the fruit, but the grass still became sticky under the rain of orange and red.

The tree climbing was the most impressive part of the afternoon.  Adah and Moya were fearless in their attack on the heights, leaving me to worry, ultimately unnecessarily.

The second set of trees did require a ladder to get to the first set of branches.  After that, Adah and Moya again tore through the branches, leaping back and forth between the trees like a persimmon hunting video game.

The fruit piled up as it fell, getting all mixed up with leaves and twigs in the process.

The really ripe fruits taste like soda pop; the unripe fruits taste a little sweet but with a heavy chalk aftertaste.  The unripe fruit are also very astringent, drying up a person’s mouth with just one bite.

I haven’t tasted any of the finished product from the gathering.  I’m hoping to get some of the seeds back to try and make that hot beverage out of the roasted seed.

This was the first visit to the farm for most of the folks that came out.  As we move the farm into production in January, I’m hoping that they come back to see what else we have going on.

The number of landless and itinerant young farmers, working alone or with a few other people, is a pretty large demographic in my world.  What is sometimes missing is not only land ownership but the sense of community that can come from an agrarian culture.  None of these farmers wants to farm alone, removed from the company of like minded people.

The reality is that the work of farming requires a lot of time, and extra time is not always available to pursue the sort of friendships and bonding with other area young farmers that make the experience more fulfilling.  Farming might not be as sexy as the New York Times sometimes makes it out to be, but can definitely be as fun as it looks.  However, it can also get lonely and monotonous.

Fortunately there is enough social thread around here to keep everyone together, whether it is through interactions in sustainable ag classes, conferences, or the newest idea around here – crop mobs.

A crop mob isn’t necessarily a new idea.  Migratory groups of farm laborers, starting with “hobos“, have been a part of the American landscape for quite some time.  And if you attended high school in the United States you might remember reading The Grapes of Wrath, the Steinbeck novel about traveling farm workers.  Yeah, poor traveling farmers have been on the road a century and half.  That doesn’t seem to be ending even as the number of farms available to work on diminishes.

So what makes it different this time around?  For one thing, the idea of economic hardship as the driving factor has been removed.  Most everyone involved is likely enduring some sort of financial or structural ruin in their lives.  I don’t have running water, but I own land and make a mortgage payment; another lives in a tent, but lives rent free and worries very little about buying food.

We all have our problems, but none of them are sufficient enough to demand that we wander around the country doing meaningless labor for horrible wages.  We demand and get better treatment and farm in the places we want to farm, for the experience it provides.

We farm because we want to, not because we need to.  At some time or another we were infected with a desire to give and take from the dirt, whether it is the red clay of Chatham County or limestone infested soils of Western New York.

What brought this group together was the need to establish a community of people going through the same sorts of movements, many of which keep folks separated during most days.  Classes, part time jobs, internships, harvesting and living far apart from each other keeps us in our own little bubbles.

This new crop mob goes where it is needed, does the work that is needed, creates the community that is needed and gets us out of those bubbles.