(My first course was a weekend spent learning alternative print processes – cyanotype and van dyke – with Leah Sobsey.)

For the Intro class when had to do a short presentation, up to five minutes on a documentary idea. It could be any form, and I chose to make a short film. I filmed the Crop Mob in Carrboro, read the New Blood for the Old Body essay into a narration track, strummed on the banjo to make a 30 second loop and came out with this -

Crop Mob is primarily a group of young, landless, and wannabe farmers who come together to work and build an interconnected agrarian community. Crop Mob is also a group of experienced farmers and gardeners sharing knowledge with their peers and the next generation of agrarians. The Crop Mob is open to all regardless of experience, background or age as it is intended to be a community effort.

Now, freshened from rest and with plenty of built up demand to participate, the plan is to complete four mobs in two months with two of the mobs organized as “mini-mobs” with several nearby locations getting mobbed simultaneously.

In August we returned to Spence’s Farm to do some of the tasks that we do best – pull weeds, make large piles of compost disappear and lay down mulch.

This past Sunday we split up to hit three location in Durham. The Interfaith Food Shuttle’s urban farm plus the home gardens of several long time mob participants.

Kristin and I attended the mob at Steph and Steven’s house, turning a lot full of English ivy and wire-grass into several nicely cleaned up and mulched garden areas.

I am excited to see many, many first time crop mob participants. Ever expanding and pushing the model forward, I am still in awe at how it all continues to come together and function so well.

To date there are active Crop Mob groups in 22 states in the US, 99% of which formed after the end of February of this year. At some point the originators of this new model of agrarian community building have to let go, get back to our work in the present – in our own community – and let evolution do its thing. And it is evolving; it is debatable how much leadership this idea needs on a national level. There is no doubt that a solid foundation and at least a minimum operational framework is needed. After that is established, all we can do is look on as the roof goes up and the furniture is moved in.

Crop Mob is a very sexy idea right now. As such it is subject to an intense scrutiny of its methods, its participants and its goals. “White, hipster slackers participate in a real life Farmville” might as well be the new media headlines. From what I have been reading lately, you would think that what started as a way to get young and landless farmers together has turned into just another urban fad for the fixed gear bike crowd. This is untrue and utterly ridiculous. Is there anything that a group of young people can do that can’t be turned into something that it is not?

Some recent comments on the online version of a story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (‘Crop Mobs’ thrive in farmville):

Hipster doofuses. Your parents play Farmville now, on to the next thing.

…there is more to experience than diggin’ in the dirt in a garden. I am just wondering why this hipster/feel-good activity is news.

Farmers do not get enough freebies from the government, they also get FREE Labor from the idiot taxpayers that subsidies them in the first place….WEIRD. People are stupid.

The best part is they do it once and they never come back. Instead, they run back to their homes in the city and wait for more government handouts. There is no such thing as hard work anymore.

Small farms are great, but do we really need a story about hipsters who have never done real work in their lives going on a feelgood, look-at-me fieldtrip? There are great stories of small produce farms (many of them owned Hmong, Mexican or Somali immigrants) who are providing much of our local produce…

Look at me! I’m “farming”. More hipster douchery.

…typical nonsense from the fringe that will disappear when the next fad is discovered.

WOW. I wish I had so much time on my hands that I was so bored I wanted to go work on a farm.

I honestly don’t know where the hate for this idea comes from. I wonder if the detractors tear apart every other volunteer activity that is discussed in the media? Are we really the only group that has to examine our privilege every time we set out to do a crop mob? Do we really have to take note of every participant’s motivation for showing up?

No, we don’t have to answer to anyone but the farmers we are working for and the community we have formed. The media eye will move on but we will not.

In mobs we trust…

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.

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.

The experienced farmer is humbled by the presence of what constitutes a large sampling of the next generation of practitioners of sustainable agriculture, showing up on their farm, to work along side them and step through the same rows.

The mobbers are humbled by the ease with which they have access to lessons learned and practical advice, not only on that day but from that day forward until – if it is even possible – the relationship is exhausted.

But then maybe humbled isn’t the right word.  Awe?  Wonder?

Which leads to an opening of the debate on who is standing in who’s shadow…

Guerrilla Growfair is a group of agrarian rebels, many with substantial farming experience, that get together to swiftly combat a big project. The group uses unconventional tactics in the form of ambushes and raids to attack its enemies who are less mobile, but larger in force. Enemies include, but are not limited to; wiregrass, Johnson grass, crab grass, infertile soil, and impervious surfaces.

The type of work done could range from installing a garden at someone’s house to cultivating a field for a farmer that is behind on planting this season. The goal of the project is not to offer free labor, but to unite the community for the simple cause of feeding everyone. There is a lack of cheap nutritious foods in certain areas of Raleigh and these areas are known as food deserts. In a food desert the only type of food you’ll find is fast and greasy. Our goal is simple… to erect an oasis in every desert.

The Guerrilla Growfair tagline? Lending hands on the lands.

I’m not a fan of the metaphorical old orchard.  I have been rolling away from it for a long time now, even rolling through some more recent orchards at the expense of all the good times under the canopies.  At some point I will end up in an entirely different orchard under entirely different species of trees – maybe under hickories and I am an apple or maybe under pears and I am a paw paw.   Or maybe there are no trees at all, anywhere, and I am rolling around among thyme blossoms in full sight of the various stars of a southeastern summer.

All orchards have a lot of contrast, like grass growing between the yellow lines of a rural road.  Similarly, our agrarian places at night have no comparison to our agrarian places during the day.  At night, moist tree frogs attach themselves to any available surface, calling into the dark and into the ear membranes of potential mates, barely puncturing the drone of the various crickets scattered through the grasses.   It isn’t quiet, but it is still.  This is a contrast to the blur of a peaking sun, the quick clanking movements of hand tools among unloved rocks.  Sweat seeps off what looks and feels like a crying body; full and uninterrupted shade is a distant wish.

We move through it all, knowing that any craving for a cold-front is counterproductive to the goals of growing plants for consumption.  So we sweat and we grit teeth and we get headaches and we keep moving.  If we stop we realize how hot we are, how soaked our clothes have become, how miserable we must look.  Compare this to how we look in the blackness and dampness of rural summer; the clay stained knees and greasy hair hide among the sleeping cardinals in the privet clumps.

But what do we really care anyway?  If you are self conscious about being dirty and looking dirty, don’t work with the soil.  Just remember:  Dirt Don’t Hurt.

What would we do otherwise? We can’t go back to any previous life.  To what? To old cities or hometowns, old beer haunts and pool tables, grave markers and faded Christmas trees?  Nah, there is nothing romantic among the ruins and elders.

I have to think about my elders, how I can’t offer them the respect they think they deserve just because they are “elder”.  I used to have a bookcase full of political books with a “Respect Certain Elders” sticker on it.  In this young agrarian movement we are all elders, and we should fully appreciate when others begin to roll away from us and into their own orchards.

We’d have to throw the rocks into the tree line or into a tractor bucket, breathing the dust as it split with the crevices of the basalt and granite and diorite brought to the surface with the most recent bottom plowing.

The rocks arrived long before we were thought off, catching a ride on the gray belly of a two mile thick glacier.  In the deposits that followed came everything from the boulders – now sitting in front yards painted with house numbers or enveloped by lichens – to the baby minerals of feldspar and hornblend and all those magnificent magnetic bits of iron.

Picking up rocks is as fun now as it was when I was eight years old, which is to say that it is no fun at all.  It reminds me of work for no pay.  It reminds me of long summer days away from friends.  It reminds me of responsibility that I had no need or want of.  It reminds me of time ill-spent laboring for someone I could care less about.

But that all changes with the crop mob…

Sometimes I know that rocks need to be picked and weeds need to be pulled.  These tasks are best accomplished with more than one person, in a mass of asses and elbows, jabbering on and on about everything other than rocks and weeds and tasks that really have no end.

Weeds decay into their components of minerals and carbon and nitrogen within days.  A person could watch the whole process if they had the patience and justification.

Rocks decay much more slowly and, without the aid of the outside crush of a human or machine doing some work, they will not likely decay within a person’s lifetime.  You can watch if you want, but you might want to bring something to eat while you wait.

So picked and piled rocks will remain picked and piled rocks wherever we place them at least until some other monkey comes along and moves them again.  Maybe they will be hidden under weeds as the years pass only to be rediscovered by a passing lawnmower or an unprotected toe.

Only when I was a teenager did I realize that there existed mechanical rock pickers that pulled behind tractors and did the work we did in seconds rather than hours.  This made me realize that dropping off kids at the edge of a field was just a convenient way to get rid of those kids for the day.  Tasks without end make good kid-sitters.

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.

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.

Farming was at best some idyllic retirement scheme, never a seriously considered career possibility.

But then something happened.  In the previously steady route of our lives, a shift occurred.  The soil moved under us somehow, got stuck in the creases of our pants, in the ridges of our shoes, in the lines of our palms.  Suddenly white picket fences, situation comedies and mutual fund returns didn’t seem so interesting anymore.  The big ball game and the driving range became distractions from the reality of a new love affair.  We got hooked on the possibilities of growing our own food and also providing that food to others.

The epiphany was likely different for many of us.  Maybe a friend took us to a farmers market.  Maybe someone had a plate of local hamburgers or collards at a picnic.  Maybe the news of some global food disaster made us question the monocultures piled high on our plates.  Maybe a real life farmer entered our life.

For a few of us, those with farming in our past – a childhood spent in the fields of the big farms or the family plots, throwing rocks into the hedgerows for little or no pay or watching over milking machines in the stench of industrial sized barns – there was no love, no kind of encouragement, no appreciation for our part in the dynamics of food production.  We were simply limbs and calluses then, small gears in a giant cranking clock.  We left the farm to pursue something else only to be pulled back hard when it became apparent that we could abandon everything that farming once meant to us.  We could make it ours.

Still others came to farming from DIY and anti-authoritarian backgrounds, building urban community gardens or putting up food in anarchist collectives.  Gardening always had a community aspect to it, but we wanted something more.  We knew that we could do the work, that we had the right vision and skills.  We just needed the access and the resources to get started.

Regardless of how we arrived at this point, here we are; we will call ourselves farmers from now on.

Our new loves – with their sharp hooves and unfamiliar odors, bright green leaves and bee covered flowers – give all the confidence to continue and pursue every goal we can imagine.  Our new hates – hail, crop failures and rain on market days – fully test our tolerance and keep those same goals in the territory of attainability.  Throughout all the highs and lows we can look at ourselves over and over again knowing that, if we stick to our ideals, we can do noble and appropriate work no matter what happens.

Local and sustainable farmers are our peers and our heroes, the most supportive, loving and steadfast community we could ever hope for.

We young and new farmers have the opportunity to change the features of the agricultural systems we have come to inherit.  Through the way we speak, act and work we can change the old infrastructure, market by market and county by county.  We have the time and ability to influence extension agents, educational systems and other institutions to make them function the way we need them to function in order to attain a sane and purposeful community based food system.

We are the new blood in the old body.

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!!

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.