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:

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

Yeah, capitalism is dead to me, but mine is a minority opinion.  I’ll dance on that grave someday, and my own grave too, thank you.  But what happens when people decide that a symbolic gesture is in order, a mock procession of ecstatic mourners cheering the burning hulk of centuries of mistreatment?  What happens when a funeral for capitalism gets disrupted by folks who simply don’t want to believe it is dead?

To back up, in late November Kristin and I were planning to go to a street party in Chapel Hill to celebrate the death of capitalism.  The plan was to have a funeral in the street and then dance in the same street.  But that night was cold, so we decided to stay home, stoke the wood stove and get under the blankets.  We figured the industrialists, et al wouldn’t miss us at graveside.

Many other folks thought it too cold for a funeral as well, but eventually enough people showed up to actually make the party go on.  The cops didn’t like the idea, started shoving and pressing and yelling and spraying and doing all the things that annoy all the people like me who have any sense of the rights and responsibilities of anti-authoritarian living.  Just try to get your dancing condoned in the streets of Chapel Hill!

Police Chief Brian Curran said his officers dealt with the situation appropriately. He said police do not condone dancing in the street and had not issued a permit for the protest.

As the clash went on, several un-arrests were made, but one person was taken to jail.  It is that one person that brought about the need for another party.

Nick Shepard, 24, the manager at International (sic) Books on Franklin Street, was the only person arrested. He was charged with assaulting an officer.

This is where the story pretty much starts for me.  I love knowing that if I were in a similar situation, a hundred people have my back even if they don’t know me very well or know me at all.

Friday night Kristin and I went into Carrboro for a benefit event billed as “Punk ‘N Pie”, a date auction where the winner of the pie gets a blind date of their choice with the pie baker.  After the auction would be a re-enactment of the defeat of the police using puppets, then a smashing of a capitalism pinata and finally a bunch of bands.

Yeah, we made a pie - a chunky, buttery, local sweet potato pie made with Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes, local honey, local eggs and sweet cream butter from Homeland Creamery. No, it wasn’t a vegan pie, but I wanted it to be different and supportive of local farmers.  Local fat is hard to come by unless it is from a creature.

There were a dozen or so other pies on the table when we got there, many with multiple bids on them.  There was the dumpstered pie with the added slogan “Let’s Paint the White House Black” with a black flag decorated on the side.

There was the giant apple pie with a heart cut out…

…a vegan pot pie and several cookie pies.

Then there was the “Let’s Make a Pie Together” date pie…

…and a Mud and Flowers pie that was really a pie pan filled with mud, leaves, sticks and flowers.

The auction raised several hundred dollars for a legal defense fund for Nick.

Kristin won our pie despite some other pretty high bids.  So I got that date going for me.

More to come…

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.

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!!

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…

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 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.

For the record, most of the anarchists I know are brilliant and strong organizers.  Their strategies for building a community that leaves the individual intact but creates a greater whole are unparalleled.  They give without leaving their name, and that is perhaps the biggest problem.  When anarchists shun the praise for their ideas and actions, the world is left to wonder about what it is that we do and why our ideology is so much more relevant than any of the self serving garbage that seems to always be on display.

For the first Pittsboro Pecha Kucha night - a series of presentations featuring twenty slides with twenty seconds to speak during each slide - I decided to discuss what to me is an idea that makes perfect sense.  Franchise anarchism, the spreading of non-hierarchical organization, is something that a few others have spoken about in passing.  I have found sparse references to it in the ether, and the general idea is the same - spread the idea without taking ownership globally.

Maybe I should just let the presentation speak for itself…

Slide 1: “Franchise Anarchism” is a pretty simple idea. Communities, like weeds, can and will organize themselves more efficiently and more successfully outside the help of government, big non-profit and multinationals. An idea can spread and be successful in any part of the world without rules handed down from an overarching hierarchy.

Slide 2: Our leaders are lost out there; they don’t have the time, capacity or desire to understand the needs of every citizen they claim to represent, those needs can easily be understood by a neighbor or another community member. While politicians write the laws that run our lives, coming to visit us only when it is politically necessary,

Slide 3: to cut a ribbon or have a fundraising dinner, we are here searching for ways to get out of the loneliness and vapidity of the television, to cut through the lies and build a real community that responds directly to our needs and we to its needs.

Slide 4: Our differences are on display daily, from what we drive to what we eat.  but in order for the community to function we can’t be labeled as bicycle hippies or SUV driving jerks.  We have to realize that we have common enemies as well as common friends.

Slide 5: Miami, 2003, the site of the latest Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiating talks, the FTAA being the state’s version of free trade, which is never free.  Miami, 2003, up to that point the single largest militarization of the domestic police force in United States history.

Slide 6: The power of the state is not benign, looking out for the little guy, the middle class, the “hard workers”.  The power of the state is manifest concretely in the military weapons it provides its police, the silence encountered when a police officer was asked for their badge number or to “please, lower your weapon – I am simply searching for my right to assemble.”

Slide 7: The realization that I had in Miami – after seeing the bloodied faces of journalists, the welts forming on the backs of those trying to escape the concussion grenades, was that our place in organizing as anarchists had to occur in other venues besides the street.  We had to engage our community and do it in a way that released all the political ideology to the wind.  The Really Really Free Market was born in Miami in 2003.

Slide 8: The RRFM is the newest iteration of franchise anarchism.  The idea is simple – bring what you don’t need and take what you do.  No money, no advertising, no bartering, no trading.  No swap meets, no charity events, no ticket booths, no entrance fee.  Put simply, everything is free.

Slide 9: The RRFM builds community by directly engaging its individual pieces through the word that everyone loves - free.  There is nothing too small to offer, nothing turned away.  Music, haircuts, juggling lessons, recipes, plants, seeds, bike repair, puppet shows…

Slide 10: The idea of the RRFM is built on several concepts that had come and gone in the activist underground for decades.  The Diggers in San Franscico pioneered the idea, forming a community whose purpose was to give away the waste and the excess of the system.  Then came free stores, guerrilla gardening, Critical Mass bicycle rides…

Slide 11: It is a way to reach children, show them the value of interacting with all types of people, teach them a new skill or send them home with something they may not have had access to otherwise whether it is an idea or a piece of clothing.

Slide 12: Free markets are great ways to distribute clothing, shoes, infant products to underserved or homeless individuals, thrifty parents, not-so-thrifty parents, students, elderly on fixed incomes… Bringing a large cross section of socio-economic classes together serves to build the framework in which the community in the free market space can see through differences and focus on common goals.

Slide 13: Another aspect of free markets in the idea of self-sufficiency especially in the realm of food security.  Seed saving skill shares and free plants create a situation where a small component of an individuals food needs may be offset by their own work.

Slide 14: RRFMs since 2003 have spread to dozens of cities around the country with some of the most popular and longest running in North Carolina.  Greenville, Raleigh, Carrboro, Greensboro, Wilmington, Boone and Asheville have thriving markets and community continues to build around them.

Slide 15: Offshoots of free markets often occur in the form of food banks, skill share workshops, bike repair programs and the like which occur outside of the free market hours.

Slide 16: A large component of the RRFM is Food Not Bombs, perhaps one of the best known and most popular examples of franchise anarchism in the world.  Starting from one location in the 1980s, Food Not Bombs now has hundreds if not thousands of events worldwide.

Slide 17: The idea is very simple – cook free food recovered from the waste stream and serve it to the hungry.  The organizational concept is easy to fit wherever there is food waste and hungry people., which, by the way, is everywhere.

Slide 18: The Really Really Free Market concept, in my mind, is a way to use what has worked from the old models and appropriate those things to build a solid franchise.  The basis for are the tenets of anarchism: community based, non-hierarchical, inclusive, effective, non-governmental, do-it-yourself, consensus-based, and sustainable.

Slide 19: All of that is great, but resistance to building the kind of community where nothing is for sale can be a bit strong.  Food Not Bombs is frequently shut down using laws that prohibit the sale of food without a permit.  Police and politicians are unfamiliar with the idea of “free” anything and thus are a huge obstacle in the creation free flowing, non-permitted community activities.

Slide 20: We are replacing a culture where neighbors are feared, We are replacing a culture where industry treats communities like dumps, We are replacing a culture where children play in the diseased clay of bad decisions, We are replacing a culture that says representative democracy is good enough, We are replacing a culture…

Freedom Farms raises Dexter cattle, an endangered breed originally from Southern Ireland.  Dexters are the smallest true cattle, suitable for a small farm where a mixed use cow is important.  The Dexter is both a milking and meat cow, producing milk that is high in butterfat and a great tasting meat.

If you have ever wondered, we found out that nose rings are required for bulls over one year old if they are to ever enter a show ring.

Freedom Farms runs a breeding program with their cows and takes them to shows all over the country.  Most of the cows are shown by kids through 4H programs.

The cows are imprinted within twelve hours of birth, then the cow/calf pair are left completely alone for two weeks.

There are currently only 750 red dexter cows in the world, which highlights the importance of Freedom Farms’ breeding program.  The cows are bred at fifteen months, so the numbers can only increase at a slow increment (although during the birthing season the farm has one calf every ten days).

Freedom Farms had a couple of freezers full of Dexter beef for sale during the tour.

Mike and Noel were all over it, everything from ground beef to liver.

In late breaking news, Freedom Farms is now for sale…

The first twenty-two peppers were part of a Seeds of Change variety trial.

Triple 4, Ferrari, Cal-Wonder, Celica, Bendigo, Leher, Hershey, Double Up, Sprinter - the list seemed endless.  I ended up cutting some of the peppers for the tasting and found that there was a pretty big difference between many of the varieties.  It seemed some would be better suited for cooking while others were awesome right off the knife.

Once on the table, the color breaks looked great; various shapes and sizes held to a colorful tablecloth.

A few dozen people showed up for the event, so I hope that Doug received some great feedback for all his work.

The tasting was such a success that there is talk of a pepper festival next year.

There is also a forty foot underground slide, a Corn Cube filled with dried corn (think of the ball jump) and a pumpkin slingshot.  And it was busy.

In a parking lot full of vehicles, ours was the only one there for the farm tour.  Farmer John Vollmer was kind enough to personally take us on the tour.  I liked John right from the start; he is the type of farmer who can make a friend in sixty seconds, sell you a bushel of pumpkins and keep on going.

Originally a tobacco farm, the transition to pumpkins brought along the transition to organic and the beginnings of the theme park.  While John still raises organic tobacco transplants, there are no other tobacco plants on the land.  Vollmer Farm now focuses a lot of energy on u-pick organic strawberries and pumpkins as well as a 150 member second-year CSA.  Seven and half acres are currently certified organic with another three in transition.  Strawberries and asparagus are the main draws for their CSA membership.

This year Vollmer added eight different varieties of blueberries for a continuous harvest from June through September.  Trickle irrigation was installed for the root zone while overhead sprayers serve as frost/freeze protection.  By covering the emerging flowers with ice, the developing fruit stays above freezing thus saving the harvest.

A few years ago, John received a SARE grant to convert his tobacco greenhouse to vegetable production.  He now runs a baby lettuce operation, which he bags and sells at his farm stand.

Photo by schlag!

The greenhouse is also home to thousands of strawberry transplants.

At the farm stand were piles and piles of squashes.  Cushaw squash -

Turban squash -

Indian River pumpkin -

Pie pumpkins -

Photo by schlag!

Long neck butternut -

Photo by schlag!

No farm tour would be complete without a dog accompanying the trip.

We returned from the tour to a much fuller parking lot, and still no one else coming for the farm tour.  Maybe folks came out for the tour but got sucked into the amusement park.  Either way, the farm was very busy and seemed very successful.

I do not look up to the people that mainstream culture considers heroes and role models.  Sports figures, TV personalities, cops, and politicians do nothing to inspire me or make me believe that they live any type of life that I would want to emulate.  My heroes are my friends, the people who are making things happen in their daily lives that have the capacity to change how the world works and change it for the better.

It is profoundly more satisfying to sit on a porch talking with your heroes rather than watching them act like another person on television or race a car around a track or beat up people practicing what is left of their rights.

My heroes dig in the dirt, work in offices, have short hair and long hair, piercings and tattoos, crisp shirts and ties.

Photo by John Cranford

My heroes have trembling voices, strong voices or sometimes no voices at all.  They are all ages, from various backgrounds.  I learn from them and they learn from me, sharing practical information on fixing bicycle tires or picking wild edible plants, creating the type of community where no one wants for anything if they are willing to participate and work for each other and themselves.

Art by Brandi Lee

My heroes are everywhere, and I meet more of them everyday.  They grow like weeds, through the cracks and crevices of society, immune to the herbicides dumped upon them.

Be Your Own Hero!

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.

quitter #4: Every once in awhile you read a zine written in beautiful prose. It’s great, you don’t have to commit to read beautiful and complex descriptions for a whole book; instead you get a brain massage for just a few moments while waiting for the bus. My favorite story was on the author’s experience living out in nature for three months studying birds: “Early on in the study I passed the time chewing on birch twigs and inventing commentaries, developing arguments against the domestication of humans, and settling philosophical disputes between pebbles and sticks, using a slow flowing creek as the adjudicator.” Other stories discuss an unnamed health condition and a treatise on fish sticks; “plastic wrapped… fully reduced from sentient parts of an underwater ecosystem into full color anthropomorphic cartoon representations of happy fish enjoying a full plate of their own ‘fingers.’” Trace [$1.50 everywhere, or trade 20XS :15] –ailecia

Last week I was able to attend a free field day about pastured poultry at Perry-winkle Farm.  After wiping our feet in a bleach bath to eliminate any chicken diseases we may have inadvertently brought with us, we walked to the brooding house where up to 125 chicks are raised for three weeks before going to the pastures.

The chicks are fed a non-medicated feed mixed with molasses, garlic, olive oil, comfrey and cayenne pepper.  After they start laying, the chickens are moved to 17% protein feed to supplement their pasture diet of grasses and bugs.

Perry-winkle averages 250 laying hens in three movable chicken houses.  Each house has a couple of roosters in the mix just to make it interesting.  A dozen or so roosters are needed to get any sort of good fertilization, so a few roosters in a pen may be more of a protection for the flock than anything else.

The first house we visited contained two year old hens that were laying well.  The second year is the best laying year for the hens; after their third laying year they usually end up in stew.

Mike Perry, our host for the field day, said that reusing trailers and campers for chicken houses had mixed results.  He recommended starting with a flat wagon or trailer unless you wanted to add to your work load.  The chicken camper holds 65 birds at a time.

The original idea for the chickens was to get them into the gardens before planting.  The largest chicken house (the Egg McMansion) is situated among the farm beds.  Planting of crops comes behind the chickens.  The Egg McMansion holds over a hundred birds at a time.  As a general rule, one nest box is required for each five laying hens.

The roosters kept busy with their noise during our visit.  One rooster almost fell over every time he crowed just from the extra effort he seemed to be giving for the crowd.

The chickens are kept behind non-electrified poultry netting during the day.  They return to the mobile coop each evening and are closed in to keep them safe from predators.

While at the farm I checked on the pigs that I photographed on my first visit to Perry-winkle.  The pigs were down to three in number, and soon they would all be processed.  They seemed happy and oblivious to their impending change from playful dirt diggers to packaged human food.

Inside that facility there are also plenty of other components such as R&D, an analytics lab and a design/build team that works on making new facilities and fuel reactors.  Oh, and add to that a new piece that will do glycerin refining.  Wait, and the reactor that makes bug spray our of rue.  And the hydroponic greenhouse.  And the giant vermicomposter.

With all these components comes plenty of people and personalities, running past each other as they work or play or occasionally do both at the same time.  At most points in my day, the length of time I could have a conversation if I wanted to is minimal (and those who know me know that I am not a talker).

In this hectic environment, the folks around here came up with a nice speed-bump called Local Lunch Friday.  The idea is for teams of people - involved with The Plant on some level - to cook lunch for everyone else.  Once a week, everyone comes together to share a space and a meal made from as much local content as possible.

This past Friday was my first Local Lunch.  It was also ECO’s turn to make food, so I got to cook for thirty people in my first week on the job and without knowing many of those same people.

We made pepper slaw with peppers from Green Dreams Farm in Pittsboro, Baba ghanoush, flatbread and crackers.

There was also apple crisp out of Caroline Red June apples from one of our farmers in the mountains.

My contribution was a chunky squash and tomato soup seasoned only with honey.

A crowder pea pie made with spaghetti squash and potatoes served as the main dish.

Farmers, fuel makers, interns, friends and guests; all turned out for a great lunch where the food disappeared in minutes.  It was a good exposure to the people populating The Plant.  Hopefully I can get over myself and start to talk to folks more, get over my stand-offish outer appearance and spread more of the “hey, come talk to me” spores into the wind around me.

Tidal Creek Co-op produce manager Trace Ramsey bills himself as an anarchist, but his desire to pull up stakes and help build a self-sustaining farm with four friends is part of an organized plan.

Ramsey left his Tidal Creek position last week to the dismay of customers who, for the past five years, relied on him to keep the cooperative stocked with fresh local fruit and vegetables. Now, on 12 acres in Chatham County, he’ll raise animals and grow organic vegetables, working the land without mechanical tools.

- Continued -

Anyway, as produce manager for Tidal Creek I purchased small amounts from Eastern Carolina Organics over the years through various means of transport.  When I was in Pittsboro (home of ECO) I would try to haul home a carload of veggies or try to convince a friend or two to do the same.

The ECO model is pretty straightforward, but not simple - farmers get together with a manager who focuses on the marketing and sales.  This leaves the farmer to do what they do best - grow food - instead of trying to sell their goods all over the place.  The manager focuses on what they do best, which is getting the produce into the hands of chefs and retailers.  This model simplifies the process on both ends of the sale.  The farmer gets a distributor and the buyer gets a place that offers produce from a couple dozen of those farmers.

I was at the CFSA Sustainable Agriculture Conference in 2004 when the creation of ECO was announced.  ECO was born out of a modest grant from the Tobacco Trust Fund awarded in late 2003.  ECO became its own farmer-owned LLC in 2005 and hasn’t looked back.

I’m excited to become a larger part of the local food system, excited to get to know more North Carolina farmers personally and continue being part of something I believe in.  I’m also excited to be working at The Plant, an eco-industrial park of sorts with a farm, a biodiesel plant, a hydroponic greenhouse, a vermicomposting greenhouse and a billion energetic and dedicated people all over the place.  Count me in…

He (Trace) has been putting out his zine Quitter since 2005. After publishing five issues, he has decided to collect the whole lot into a 40-page hand-made book and he was kind enough to send me copy #35 (I know because each copy is numbered). The object itself is a little jewel, with a great color cover and color and b/w illustrations throughout. And then there’s the writing, of course. Put it simply, I believe that the best writing is the kind that 1) manages to be engaging regardless of the subject; 2) makes me think; and most of all 3) makes me feel like I want to take highlighter and pen and cover the pages with comments and orange marks. Quitter managed to do all these things.

Trace writes what he calls creative non fiction, and through the years has developed the ability to put common words together in original combinations. He manages to be sophisticated in a natural, unassuming way. At the same time, he anchors his rants with stories taken from his memories. Sometimes he will write something like ‘I was born with an extra pair of ribs’ and the reader (or at least a dumb reader, such as myself) will search for hidden meanings until he realizes that is the plain truth. Apart from the autobiographical notes, the common theme that returns in all the five issues is Trace’s decision to ‘quit’ the kind of world that humankind has turned into a huge pile of garbage. Quitting a job he hates and translates into ’someone else’s hopes and mortgage and car payments;’ quitting unconscious consumption; temporarily quitting the civilized world in order to live for three months in ’solitary confinement’ in a forest and study the breeding habits of a small songbird… What he will not quit is fighting to ‘preserve the history of (…) an idea that would often be considered irrelevant by the dominant culture,’ and writing ‘for an audience that is resilient in its opposition of being taken for granted.’ What can you ask more from a zine?

I worked at Tidal Creek for most of five years.  Well, I took a few months off in 2004 for a short lived veggie-oil fueled car trip, but other than that have been on the clock at the co-op.  Here is the notice that went into the latest co-op newsletter:

In December of 2003 I found myself working a register at Tidal Creek Cooperative Food Market.  I was happily