I have been involved in the Crop Mob since the first time the group convened to do work last October. I missed the initial meeting of people who created the idea and named it, so I take no credit for its inception only its implementation.  I push the idea whenever and wherever I can, attending every call of the Mob in the process.

I have been a strong proponent of the young agrarian movement, writing essays, giving interviews, taking photographs. The Crop Mob is the physical realization of all those words and images, the sinew, muscle and breath behind the imagination.

With the Crop Mob there exists the possibility of something beyond what we usually perceive of as farming.

The idea is bigger than barn-raisings, more technical than workshops, more thoughtful than textbooks. It is guerrilla agrarianism in the information age. Maybe that isn’t an apt description, but when I watch shovels hitting dirt on a foreign farm with a crew assembled using email, social networking and word of mouth, it surely feels like it.

The Crop Mob is unstoppable, yet flawed on some levels.  Reciprocity from the farmers we have helped is greatly lacking.  We are all busy, yes, but if we are to keep donating our labor, the labor pool must continue to snowball and include previous beneficiaries of that labor.  On that end we can improve our pitch, farms can understand better what they are getting and everyone involved can get what they need out of the day.

We are not unskilled; we bring decades of combined experience in dozens of areas – bed building, fencing, transplanting, harvesting, permaculture, food/farm activism, media outreach – so we are capable of making substantial impacts in a handful of hours.

Where to from here?  The next step may be to franchise the idea or mutate it or trim it down or use it differently.  In the meantime we will continue to do what we have been doing – showing up and getting shit done.

Who: Crop Mob
What: a million things, eating good food, building community
Where: Circle Acres farm
160 A W Buckner Rd (1964 Jessie Bridges Rd) – Silk Hope, NC
Why: why not
When: 10am-3:30pm Sunday May 24th

We (Danielle, Gray, Kristin, Noel and Trace) at Circle Acres farm are planning a work weekend for May 22nd-24th.  We are also calling out for a Crop Mob on Sunday the 24th from 10-3.

We have plenty of camping space available for both Friday and Saturday nights.  Parking at the farm is interesting, so please fill vehicles to the max…

Here are some of the things we might get into -

- sheet mulching “lumps” for the pumpkin patch
- removal of privet and bio-char demonstration
- building sheet mulch beds
- prepping land for a living fence
- untangling and testing used drip tape
- plugging mushroom logs
- pulling new electrical wire in the house
- ripping out plumbing
- digging a gray water trench
- building a solar shower
- playing around with cob mixtures

For food, please bring snacks, drinks and whatever you think you might want to have on hand for the weekend.  We will cook for the Saturday dinner and Sunday Crop Mob lunch; we’ll do our best to provide for other meals, but any help is appreciated.

Please RSVP as soon as you can and let us know what days you will be at the farm.  Also let us know if you have any special needs, dietary or otherwise.

One last note – please leave your dogs at home.

When I see black plastic mulch and wide open fields, I have to wonder about the possibilities involved in removing both of those from the farming landscape.  Short rows, shady fruit trees, living mulch.  We are on to something, but we just might be alone…

After the pie auction, folks could be seen in every corner of the room eating and sharing their pies.  A few people dug their fingers into our sweet potato dish.

I’m not sure which pie bakers ended up with dates, but I don’t think that was really anyone’s intent.

With pies filling bellies, it was time for the entertainment to begin.  A puppet re-enactment of the victory over the police, presented in three hysterical segments…

Then on to some anarcho-country folk punk from Dan Mac.

My favorite song from Dan was about liberals, their hypocrisy and how they are part of the problem and not the solution.  My distrust of the right is often eclipsed by my distaste for the inaction, posturing and verbal drooling of the left.

i’m sick of you
and your goddamned hypocrisy
if peace is patriotic
i’m starting a fight

they’re not my soldiers
and they’re not my astronauts
we can all be leaders
and we don’t need fuckin’ cops

clear cut the forests with hybrid machinery
Brutus and Judas have nothing on us
don’t say the “R” word, just write to your congressman
we’re here and profiteers, traitors of trust

The recent Obama selection of big-ag, cloned meat cheerleader, GMO loving, ethanol guzzling, bio-pharmaceutical conman, and all around jerkstore cowboy Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture illustrates the last verse perfectly.  When you trust a politician, sooner or later you lose.  Now we’re losing sooner – maybe there won’t be rainbows, peace on Earth and gold raining from the sky on January 20th after all.  Thankfully, we can still rely on each other instead of the so-called representatives.  Can we just call them “self-described representatives”?

Anyway, the last band to play was From the Depths.

Their set was energetic, but it was the crowd that made the show.  Animated and dynamic, many of the folks were pulling out some of the old dances, but I saw some new things during the show as well.

Intensity was not lacking…

During the From the Depths set, someone said that they voted for Obama because he promised to make punk lyrics understandable and audible.  They are going to hold him to that promise…

From that seed
A mighty root
And it grew