13 August 2009

Basil, Beans, Cabbage or radicchio Cucumber, Eggplant, Garlic, Leeks, Lettuce, Pepper, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Radishes, Squash, Tomatoes

Several organizations in Western Massachusetts recently received a little Federal stimulus money to fund summer youth employment programs. These programs, which aim to instill life skills in kids, will be great for the region, according to the people involved, because teenagers who get their hands on money tend to spend it quickly. Thus these government-funded wastrels will give the local economy a small infusion of cash right away. Bravo, a life skill well taught. After all, how are we going to have a strong economy if we don’t teach yet another generation of Americans to spend everything they have—and then some—as fast as they can. A strong Chinese economy, that is.

I cannot help thinking there was a time in this country’s history when people would not—or at least not so blatantly—have celebrated a fellow citizen’s inclination to spend all his money as fast as he earned it. While it is true that in an earlier draft Franklin wrote “a penny saved is a penny pointlessly kept out of the local economy,” his friends, sensing the tenor of the times and afraid that such a saying might harm Franklin’s potential endorsement deals, prevailed upon him to alter it to something more marketable.

Perhaps we lost our taste for thriftiness when we ceased to be a significantly agrarian society. There’s something about farming that makes you a little slow to get your money out of your pocket. It could be the joint pain and muscle fatigue, of course, which leave farmers slow to do much of anything. It could have something to do with the large number of pockets farmers tend to have on their clothes, causing them to have to hunt around for a while to find their wallets. It could also be the perennially meager profits, which tend to reinforce any miserly tendencies. Or the traditional need to set aside some of each year’s harvest to plant the next year’s crops. And it is possible that having all your efforts at the mercy (such as it is) of the weather teaches you to set something aside just in case.

There are drawbacks to such a cautious approach to spending. Farmers tend to avoid investing in new techniques, preferring the safety of the familiar. Risk outweighs potential. This slows the spread of innovations that might well make farming easier, more profitable, safer and less polluting.

The culture of saving also helps breed an ethos of self-reliance that makes effective communal activity difficult. If dairy farmers in this country had agreed to a milk quota system they might have avoided a lot of the financial hardships of the past thirty years. But there was no way they were going to agree to impose limits on themselves for the general good.

Fiscal conservatism has also tended to translate into political conservatism, though the two need not go together. It is hard, in light of our current farm subsidy program, to say that farmers have exactly suffered politically for this. But it has led the farming community to adopt a number of positions—many of them at best tenuously related to agriculture—that alienate many people who would otherwise be disposed to support its interests, and to stick to a system that fails to serve the needs of many farmers. I would be happy to trade those subsidies, which of course don’t go to farmers like me, for programs offering serious support for things such as farmland conservation, habitat protection, regional planning, education and marketing. Instead of paying a relatively small number of farms to grow more corn, we could be giving grants to lots of farmers to make capital improvements, develop new products, control fertilizer runoff, build worker housing and place easements on the best pieces of ground.

Still, even if we farmers are a bit tight fisted and stodgy and Luddite and too proud for our own good, I cannot help thinking we might find better life skills to teach kids than how to dispose of disposable income. Such as how to deal with adversity, stick with a hard job or enjoy simple pleasures like a dry day or the flight of a blue heron or a ripe tomato.

Actually, given the way things are going this season, I don’t know if a ripe tomato counts as a simple pleasure. It is turning out to be a bit more complicated to come by them than usual. For instance, we (by which I mean Jan) have had to spray the plants weekly with copper to ward off late blight and try to control the bacterial disease that has run amok in the greenhouse. Obviously, our efforts are paying off. I do, however, given the amount of spraying we have done, have to warn you to wash the tomatoes in your share. It is worth the effort. I have eaten tomato salad several times in the past week and don’t show any signs of getting tired of it yet.

I have also been eating a fair amount of coleslaw happily. I have been making a dressing with oil, vinegar, a little cream, a lot of mustard and a bit of soy sauce, sesame oil and chile oil. You could use some finely diced hot pepper instead of the chile oil.

As for the other 12 crops in the share, if you are not sure what to do with them come out to the farm this Sunday between 10 and 2 and I (and perhaps some other members) can offer suggestions. Plus you can see the farm (including the giant pig), check up on vegetables you will get in future shares, have a picnic, ask the farmer questions, look for newts (we dug one up in the potato patch), and pitch in with a small farming task to find out what life lessons weeding can teach you. I hope I will see you here.