Last week Kristin and I traveled back to my hometown near Buffalo, NY for Christmas.  My brother, his wife Kristen and nine month old Charlie (my first nephew) also made the trip from Fort St. John, British Columbia.

Traveling back is usually a culture shock.  I don’t use television, microwaves, automatic dishwashers or disposable plates, but those are just the basics of my family’s lifestyle.  Christmas morning, Uncle Television screamed as we opened gifts and tried to talk to each other.  It didn’t really faze anyone else, but Kristin and I realized that no one was even watching the stupid thing.  That morning was the first of many where I asked that it be turned off.

We watched my brothers play video games for days.  Guitar Hero and some other games for the Nintendo Wii shared time with random shows about how peanut butter is made and Shirley Temple movies.

I gave in and played some bowling on the Wii.  It was pretty fun - all the fun of bowling and you can quit any time you want.

Discussion of taxes crept into every daily conversation.  A new “obesity tax” on soda drinks proposed by the governor of New York has members of my family up in arms.  My response - “don’t buy soda” - was met with weird looks.  The best anyone living around there can do is complain, stay uninvolved in any decision making process, watch television, eat crappy food, and complain some more.  It drives me insane to see so much apathy attached to so much moaning and groaning about the state of things.  And no proposed solution makes any sense to them.

“Food is too expensive”. Have you tried growing more of your own?  “Vehicle registrations are going up in price.” How about ditching one of your vehicles?  “The gas taxes are crazy.” How about driving to town once a day instead of four?  It is always the same whenever I visit; nothing is ever good enough or cheap enough or easy enough.  My response can only be that we live in a world of our own making.

I had some complaining to do myself.  Besides the television being on all the time and eating on Styrofoam, I had issues with the same old racism and homophobia that plagues my family.  Not much to do with that except argue and inject some acidic comments into the mix.

As if all that were not enough, a ten acre field of carrots rotted in a field across from the house because the industrial sized farm (where I worked as a teenager, by the way) had met their quota at the cannery.  As an aside, my father insisted that the owners of the farm didn’t receive much of anything from the federal subsidy system.  A quick search of the federal database says that each of the four brothers received $52,000 in subsidies last year.  So the farm received a total of $208,000 last year.  That seems significant to me.

Tons of carrots will stay in the ground not because there isn’t a market or people aren’t hungry, but because an arbitrary threshold has been crossed at one processor.  All the labor, fuel, time and thought that went in to tilling, planting, weeding are wasted.  Not to mention all the energy that went into growing and shipping the seed…

We managed to rescue a few carrots from the field for our salads, but most were so large as to be impractical for anything but the processing facility.

For food, we made a pumpkin lasagna based on a recipe from a recent local lunch.

On the way from the airport we stopped at Lexington Co-op to get the needed supplies, looking out for local ingredients.  Local milk, acorn squash and butter made it into the dish that we would end up eating for four meals.

The alternatives were not appealing:

When I left Wilmington, I generated a new version of the 100 mile diet circle.  Gone is the vast expanse of salt water; in is a nice chunk of rural Virginia and a bit of country in South Carolina.  Many of the farms included in the old map are still in the new map.  After all, I did stay in the same state.

All that said, I have to admit that my local food habits hit a rut when I first moved.  I was eating peanut butter and canned crap for a good four week period before I realized that I was missing out on what the new circle held.  I started eating five mile salads and thirty mile meats.  Locally grown and milled flours, grits and rice made their way back onto the table.  I also found my way back into a box of Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes.

Through Eastern Carolina Organics, I also have access to produce from the entire state of North Carolina, from Valle Crucis to Ivanhoe, Edenton to Hurdle Mills and back to Bakersville.  Occasionally things get culled due to poor quality and I of course get my hands in the boxes just like back in Wilmington.  My scavenging eyes are returning and - without my staff discount from the coop - I am looking for ways to slim down the food budget.

Basically what I am getting at is that I am back in the food bubble.  I am also looking forward to producing more of my own food in the coming year.

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.

Carolina Farm Stewardship Association now runs two farm tours per year, one in the Spring and another in the Fall.  The Spring tour has been going on for quite some time, but the Fall tour is in its infancy, this most recent tour being the third annual.

Our first stop this time around was Edible Earthscape, about a half hour drive from our land.  Edible Earthscape, home to a one acre farm intensive incubator farm, is also home to the Piedmont Biofuels Cooperative.  Edible Earthscape is farmed by Haruka and Jason Oatis with the help of several interns.  One of the interns, Brandon, gave us our tour.

On many levels, Edible Earthscape is committed to sustainability and biodiversity within their small farm setup.  Their primary irrigation system uses runoff from the greenhouse stored in a series of 275 gallon totes.

All vegetable rinse water is recycled back into the irrigation system through pipes connected to the wash sinks.

Fall cover crops of cowpeas were recently sown among the freshly mulched raised beds.  Adding leaf litter and other mulches gives our primarily clay soils more “spring” and allows for better drainage.  Over time, heavy mulching also helps with everything from water retention to freeing up nutrients that might otherwise become locked up in the heavy clay.

Bamboo is harvested locally and serves as trellising systems throughout the farm.

The farm focuses much of its energy on Asian heirloom varieties with an added emphasis on seed saving.  Burdock root is grown using a small bamboo chute or trench in order to train the root.  Normal burdock root grows deep and is difficult to remove from our clay soils.  The bamboo chute allows easy access to the root for harvest.

Turmeric (in the ginger family) does moderately well in our climate if removed from the ground and placed in greenhouses to overwinter.

Hops also grow well in our climate, the ones in the picture below were recently harvested for beer brewing.

Flowers add to the biodiversity of the farm both by having the flowers themselves and by attracting beneficial insects.

One of the awesome sights on the farm were the huge trellises of beans, gourds and squashes.  Asian varieties of noodle beans, cucumbers and more formed dense walls of green in contrast to the red clay below.

Add in stevia, borage, Thai bottle gourds, Japanese purple sweet potatoes, echinicea…

A diverse farm is also home to plenty of creatures -

Tomato hornworms (Manduca quinquemaculata) are quick destroyers of the leaves of tomato plants.  They can quickly defoliate entire plants in an organic system.  However, braconid wasps (Cotesia congregatus) will parasitize hornworms in the biodiverse system of yarrows, clovers, and lemon balm that Edible Earthscape has created.

The white cocoons on the hornworm are the developing wasps, which have already started the process of eating their host.  Once most of the wasps emerge, the hornworm will be dead or dying.

What small farm would be complete without a chicken tractor?

And finally the wild edibles that can be found in the places where agriculture is not considered a war on the land.  Winged sumac (Rhus copallinum) supposedly makes a decent lemonade type drink.  Kristin thinks it might be a bit too sour though.