May 26 2009
Crop Mob - Guerrilla agrarians in the information age
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.
