Email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com for details or to enroll.

Sharon

Now on virtually all farms I have ever visited, everyone who lives there farms. The children help in the barns, the spouses share the duties – even if there is a gendered division of labor much of the time, as on Amish farms, the harvest or peak canning season overwhelm this and everyone who is present pitches in. It should go without saying that no farm can have anyone who isn’t competent to recapture lost livestock, fix a fence, handle an emergency birth or a medical crisis – because some days one person isn’t there. Nor can all knowledge rest in one person – because who milks or picks the beans when someone is ill, giving birth, caring for a family member or making the money that most farms don’t provide to pay taxes and bills?

Yet we cling stubbornly to the idea that instead of a family of farmers, all equally engaged with the land, if sometimes in largely different ways, that a farm family consists of a “farmer” and a “farmer’s wife” – and that the female partner is necessarily secondary. Gene Logsdon has a great essay about both why this is, and how that presumption is being disrupted by the growing number of independent women farmers:

Women rarely did the plowing however, and that seems to be the key difference. Lots of plowboys, nary a plowgirl. In other field work, women did more than their share. (I have theories but will leave it to someone smarter to explain why women didn’t plow.) The notion that males were the real farmers probably was rooted in the hunting and gathering stage of civilization where men brought home the game from afar (adventure time) and the women did the rest of the work at home (boring).

At any rate, after the plow became the symbol of agriculture in America, the role of women in farming did recede from the public eye. Women were supposed to stick to the kitchen and leave the real business of farming to their menfolks.

This prejudice was astonishingly apparent even at farm magazines. As a journalist working for Farm Journal magazine, I often sat in farm kitchens interviewing farmers and their wives about their business. It was amazing how often the wives answered my questions much better than their husbands and how they so often did this by diplomatically and cleverly putting words in their husbands’ mouths. It was obvious that most successful farms got that way because the wives were smarter and more articulate than the husbands. But the wives knew how to keep the male crest from falling by seeming to defer to their husbands on every occasion. The wives knew they had to make their mates look like top operators so that they could borrow the money they needed to keep on going. Bankers were no different from farm editors. They wanted to deal with men: women weren’t smart enough to run a business like farming.

The answer to the question about why women didn’t do the plowing is anthropological – when tillage was done with digging sticks and handtools, in many societies women were the primary tillers of soil. But as anthropologist Judith Brown long ago observed, there is virtually no society in human history where women’s primary work is incompatible with the care of young children – and plowing behind draft animals is tough to do with a babe in a sling, and hard to do when you may have to stop and nurse, or chase a toddler away from the horse’s feet. Tractors are not good places to haul babies and young kids for long stretches either, and I know from experience you don’t fit well behind the wheel in late pregnancy. Moreover, in the era of chemical agriculture any number of things that are part of the farm experience are best not touched by women who may be pregnant or nursing. For most of women’s history, being pregnant or nursing was a normative experience for many years.

Most of us don’t have a baby every three years anymore, so there isn’t any reason why tillage or organic no-till agriculture can’t be done by women (chemical agriculture is still tougher for women of childbearing age, since so many things accumulate in body fat and breast milk). So is small-scale farming without large equipment – with the modern digging sticks. In the meantime, independent women small farmers are the only fast-growing segment of American agriculture – an entity that we all know is going to have to grow fast just to keep up with the aging population of farmers, and all the more if we are to remove the fossil fuel inputs from our agriculture and untie food and oil.

We have used language to write women out of agriculture – out of its history, out of its present, engaging in the “housewifization” of real agricultural work. The implication that the farmer’s wife is not a farmer, and is thus knowledgeable about only kitchens and babies (as important as those things are) is a diminuation, an act of linguistic violence that erases the multiple competences of farm women, partnered or not.

I look around me at the farm families I know and see women and men with a host of skills that step outside of gender. Sherri, who lives with her aging mother cuts hay for a living. Alice handles the thousand pound draft horses on their farm with skill and grace. The sheep are Rosa’s, not her boyfriend’s, as is the market garden. Louise milked fifty cows a day to her husband’s fifty and drove the tractor while he tossed the hay bales for forty years.

This started out as my farm, with my husband who was happy to give me credit, happy to do the heavy lifting, but not so interested in plants. It has become a project of two overlapping people with related interests and the ability to do one another’s work. The bees are his. The native plants and herbs are mine, the livestock are both of ours, the work is shared inside and outside as preference, pleasure and ability define. The daily applied science of agriculture is worked out between us. The pride in it is shared, and neither of us would demean our contribution by suggesting it comes primarily through the other, as “farmer’s wife” does.

The question of where the next generation of farmers is going to come from is an important one, because we’re engaged in an experiment with no historical precedent – for the first time in history, the majority of new farmers will have to come from off the farm – for decades we have been able to reduce the number of farmers by drawing off many and destroying farm cultures and communities, while still having enough to meet our needs, but the farm population is rapidly aging, the next generation of farmer’s children have already left the farm, and now we must ask who will replace them?

The answer so far is that women are a part of the answer, and I hope this will be the end of farmer’s wife syndrome and the emergent recognition of the fact that farmers come in many packages, and that a way of life is something that circles round and encompasses everyone who lives it.

The whole idea is to get the positive sense of your accomplishments – it is easy to think we haven’t done anything to move forward, but in fact, we all do, almost every day.  We just think of accomplishment as a big thing – a whole day spent putting up applesauce or a hundred tomato plants.  The Independence Day project makes us count our little accomplishments and see that we are moving forward.  So for each week, tell us what you have done in the following categories:

Plant something: A lot of us were trained to think of planting as done once a year, but if you start seeds, do season extension and succession plant, you’ll get much, much more out of your garden, so I try and plant something every day from February into September.

Harvest something: Everything counts – from the milk and eggs you get from your animals to the first dandelions from your yard to 50 bushels of tomatoes – it all counts.

Preserve something: Again, I find preserving is most productive if I try and do a little every day that there is anything, from the first dried raspberry leaves and jarred rhubarb to the last squashes at the end of the season.

Waste not: Reducing food waste, composting everything or feeding it to animals, reducing your use of disposables and creation of garbage, reusing things that would otherwise go to waste, making sure your preserved and stored foods are kept in good shape – all of these count.

Want Not: Adding to your food storage or stash of goods for emergencies, building up resources that will be useful in the long term.

Eat the Food: Making full and good use of what you have, making sure that you are getting everything you can from your food, trying new recipes and new cooking ideas, eating out of your storage!

Build community food systems: What have you done to help other people have better food access or to make your local food system more resilient?

And a new one: Skill up:  What did you learn this week that will help you in the future – could be as simple as fixing the faucet or as hard as building a shed, as simple as a new way of keeping records or as complicated as making shoes.  Whatever you are learning, you get a merit badge for it – this is important stuff.

Ok, you can sign up in comments, publicize on your blog and tell the world – let’s see what we can get done!

Happy Independence Days!

Sharon

1. I did empty out the pantry room and move things into the extra little kitchen or in our room.  Unfortunately, my room is still a mess.  That’s on tomorrow’s project list.  But we do have that guest room back, which is good, because the thermostat is in there, and during the coldest periods, keeping the door closed in there gets a little scary (also the furthest spot in the house from the stoves).

2. I sorted out some of the games and also cleaned out the game closet – I didn’t get rid of all the boxes, mostly because the kids were concerned they couldn’t see what games we actually have that way.  Still mulling over how to do it.

3. Got my stash of goods for sudden arrivals of foster kids somewhat depleted by the group of four, but this prompted me to do much more sorting and organizing and keep better lists of what I need and don’t need – I’ve now got enough girl clothes in most sizes that I can look for specifics when I go thrift shopping , which is useful, because now I know I need warm pajamas,  sweaters and leggings and bathing suits for girls and cloth diapers for babies, but not necesarily pants and t-shirts in most sizes.  Was able to get through five days with 4 kids without shopping for anything but diapers and formula – which is really good, since I had no time to do any of those things .  Sorted and reorganized the laundry room, put all the boys’ old clothes away in better-organized fashion.  Sorted out shoes (also often needed on the fly – kids almost always come in too-small shoes, because hey, shoes are expensive) and winter gear (same as shoes).

4. Did nothing with garage, but trained dogs to sleep in the house in cold weather.  Hey, you win some…

5. Reorganized the kids’ room – mostly.  They have mostly unorganized it by now .

I need to do a major kitchen reorganization next, and also my seed and gardening supplies.  That, and some infrastructure (electrician here now for rewiring that has needed doing for ummm….a long time, plumber coming soon for similar problem…), including better gates for the bottom of the stairs and the wood cookstove will just make life a lot easier.  I also am doing more cooking ahead and storing some kid-friendly meals so that when we suddenly go through the sharp learning curve of getting to know new kids, we don’t have to rush around cooking or order pizza.

How about you?  Did you get your projects done?  Got any new ones?

Sharon

We are back up to 1 billionish hungry people in the world, and 1/3 of all food goes to waste worldwide.  Now I’d like to say that none of it went to waste in my house – after all, I’ve been writing about food waste and food security issues for years, and I really have tried hard to ensure that everything gets eaten here.  It does – by someone.  But the best use of my lentil-kale soup is really feeding the people in my house, not the chickens, and embarassingly often, some human food gets fed to dogs, cats, rabbits or goats.

A summit of farmers and food policy experts in Germany makes the stakes clear:

Consumers in rich countries dispose of 220 million metric tons of food waste every year, equal to the entire food output of sub-Saharan Africa, Jose Graziano da Silva, the director general of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, told 64 agriculture ministers meeting in Berlin over the weekend.

“We must change our way of thinking, we must have more education, we must have discussion about best-before dates,” German Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner said. “Every food item thrown away is wasted.”

One third of the food produced in the world every year is lost or wasted, amounting to 1.3 billion metric tons, according to Graziano da Silva. As many as 925 million people faced hunger worldwide in 2010, based on the FAO’s most recent estimate.

In rich nations in the global north, the majority of food is lost not in the fields, but somewhere after it begins the process of getting to your table – in shipping, processing, at the store and in our homes.  In the global south most food is lost in the fields, due to lack of adequate capacity to process it.  Food loss in the global south could be reduced by very small increases in available resources – large scale dryer to dry grain crops damaged by moisture, dehydrators and collective refrigeration.  In the north, most of the food loss is *ENABLED* by our fossil energies – it gets freezer burned and tossed in the deep freeze, it gets damaged by fluctuating temperatures during long haul trucking, it isn’t pretty enough to sit out under flourescent lights or it turns green the fridge.  We use vastly more energy in our food system, waste similar amounts of food, but only after we pour fossil energies into it.

What does this have to do with the “eat the food” category of the Independence Days challenge?  Someone once observed to me that they found it harder to eat the kale, or get the green beans before they got overripe, or make sure they cooked with the organic vegetables they were buying at the farmer’s market than they did shopping or growing them, and I don’t think this is a unique experience.  Ultimately, the problem of managing the food in our pantries and our gardens and everywhere else is a task that requires an attention that most of us haven’t given in the same way that we may have given our attention to the learning curve of actually starting seeds or cooking.  We don’t want to waste, we don’t intend to waste, but the art of making full and good use of everything is one that we have not treated as requiring the same attention and thought as the rest of the food project.  There will never be a fully waste-less society, and indeed, our livestock are grateful for a little extra – but a little is what they need.

One of m goals for re-starting the Independence Days project, then, is to be more artful in my use of food, taking full enjoyment from what we have and ensuring we don’t over buy, don’t miss the windows of opportunity for enjoyment, and that we make good meals from what we have – all of it, whenever possible

Sharon

I’m debating expanding the categories a bit to cover non-food related sustainability activities, but I don’t want it to get too unwieldy – I’d welcome thoughts on how to do so, or what you’d like to see.

I’m also going to push the “challenge” part of this harder and publicize it more – after all, this is just plain fun stuff, right?

Thoughts?

Sharon

As you may or may not remember, we had ten kids for about 24 hours in November, when we took a short lived placement of five (several of the kids were allergic to cats, everyone moved to a cat-free home) shortly before M. who had been with us for a month, left to live with his Aunt.  The next week was Thanksgiving and one of our biannual trips to my family near Boston, and then I plunged headlong into the book, so it is safe to say that nothing has been cleaned or organized more than the bare minimum for some weeks.

Taking such a large sibling group, even for a short time, was eye-opening.  Due to legal requirements about shared space (kids over 7 can’t share rooms with opposite gender siblings) and different possible numbers of kids, it is hard to know exactly how many rooms we’ll need or how we’ll want to arrange them.  We have an official “kids room” but may need more space than that.  Medical needs of children might also shape how we arrange things, as might just plain getting-along issues.  We have a six bedroom house, so there are a lot of options, but not only do we need to be able to make adjustments fairly quickly, but we also need to have more flexibility, and ideally, want it done before the next time we go to ten kids .

This is actually a good time for us – hectic for most of the rest of the nation, Chanukah is a minor holiday, celebrated mostly in quiet ways at our place.  Eric’s semester ends soon and the exams and other grading chaos will ensue, but all the more reason for the rest of us keep busy, and by the 20th or so, he’ll be able to help.

So the next few weeks will spent doing the following big home projects:

1. Cleaning out and reorganizing the laundry room into a “family closet” kind of like this. I actually did this years ago, and I thought I’d invented the idea – I moved all the kids clothes, and then ours onto open wire shelving in the laundry room, so that I didn’t have to constantly haul laundry around or deal with the kids throwing everything out of their dressers.  It has been one of my favorite things – but making space for 2-6 more kids will require some revisions and restructuring.  For example, the dryer which we haven’t used in 6 years, is still sitting there taking up space because in order to get it out, I have to take everything out and move the washer.  I am finally going to do this.  Meanwhile, all the kids’ out of season clothes have been kept in bins below the open shelves – those are moving out and into upstairs closets.

2.  Our food storage has taken over one of our spare bedrooms.  Remember, we’ve got six bedrooms, of which, until this year, only two were occupied by sleeping people.  So we turned one of the smaller bedrooms into a pantry space.  The problem is that we may need that room back – it is a logical candidate to be a kids’ bedroom – or a housemate’s bedroom.  So most of the food storage is going into either the spare kitchenette in Eric’s grandparents apartment, or up to  curtained off segment of our room. Of course, that means I have to clean out both those spaces first.  Someone in a previous post expressed fear that we’d be sleeping in a pantry – no worries, our room is so huge you could play raquetball in it, so there’s  plenty of room to isolate food storage.

3. The games closet.  We are board game fans and we have a ton of them – they take up an entire enormous closet, and frankly, are a huge mess – every time my kids take out one game they mess them up, and things spill, etc…  I am going to try a new system, in which all the pieces are kepts in cabinets, the boxes are disposed of, and the boards are labelled and stacked in a bin – at a minimum this should allow the mess about 1/3 as much space, even if it doesn’t keep them tidy.  I’ll keep the boxes for a while, just in case I regret my decision.

4. A reorganization of the boys’ room.  Over the years a room that was mostly designed for little kids to play in has become more the room of bigger kids who spend their time writing, cartooning, drawing and rampaging, rather than playing with toys per se.  Time to move things around and make the room into the big-kid space it actually is.

5. The garage.  Let’s just stop there and leave that.  Also, before it gets really cold, we need to get the garage set up for the winter.  Mac the Marshmallow, who hates to sleep in the house and refuses to do so can be persuaded on the worst nights to take refuge in the garage, so it needs dog space, and to be cleaned out.

There are a bunch of smaller projects as well, so that’s what I’ll be doing in the dark of the year.  Oh, and winterizing the barn, breeding the does, butchering chickens, getting the calves butchered, cooking and throwing a couple of parties during Chanukah – but after the book, that seems easy.

What about you?  What are your projects?

Sharon

“I just lost my job, and after a lot of late nights and panicked budget making, we think we can get along on just my husband’s income, but it will be very tough and there will be no money at all for extras of any kind. We’ve always used our discretionary income to support things we care about – in the last few years this was local farmers and craftspeople, and making ethical choices when we shopped. Now I feel like I don’t have the luxury anymore – I know a lot of things that I can do to save money will be environmentally sound as well – turning down the heat, cutting back on the lights, buying more used items, but I hate to go back to choosing the supermarket for food and Toys R’Us for gifts because they are cheaper, but they often are. Do you have any suggestions for frugal sustainable shopping?”

This is a great and timely question, and I do have answers, but unfortunately, I’m head down in the last bit of my book and don’t have time to respond right now. Thus, I pass it on to you, my readers. How do you balance the need to save money with making good and ethical consumer choices that support things that are important to you? What do you suggest to Gwen?

Thanks everyone!

Americans carry enormous sleep debt – if you put the average American in an extended sleep study, exposed to natural light and allowed to sleep as much as their bodies demand, they will sleep 14 hours a day for the better part of a month, until they catch up and naturally begin to average out around 8 hours. We spend a lot of our lives ignoring our natural sleep patterns, and at some real cost to ourselves. 10,000 car accidents a year occur as a result of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is associated with depression, anxiety and the development of hypoglycemia and even diabetes. Because of sleep deprivation, we consume enormous quantities of caffeine, with negative effects on the gestation of our children, our blood pressure and our ability to sleep…which causes us to spend almost a billion dollars each year on medical sleep aids which in turn….

While there certainly are intractable and medical sleep issues out there (as a parent of an autistic son with sleep issues, that’s something important to remember), the evidence suggests that the solution to most sleep related medical problems for MOST people  is simple. Turn off the artificial lights as much as possible. Go to bed at the same time each night. Get as much rest as you really need.  Move your body more during the day.

Now for some of us, this isn’t realistic. There are people who have to work nights. New parents are probably never going to get as much sleep as they’d like. There are some people whose bodies really do seem to be implacably on a late night cycle. But most of us aren’t – sleep studies show that even “night owls” when exposed to enough natural light and darkness tend to move their cycles back towards everyone else’s.

Now if we were to obey that advice, what would the environmental consequences be? What would they be, for example, if pretty much everyone in the US turned off their lights at 10 pm and actually went to sleep for 8 or 9 hours?  If instead of pushing harder, we went to bed earlier when days get short and nights are long?   If we all turned down our heat, flicked off the power strips and otherwise simply did what their bodies were telling them. What if we unplugged the coffee pot?”

Trust me, I am not innocent here at all – I have a tea habit of my own, and the tendency to burn the candle at both ends.  One thing, however, that years of chronic child-related sleep deprivation have taught me, however, is that few things are worth more to me than some sleep, and that I’m happier if I go to bed rather than playing late with the computer or trying to make myself as productive at night as I am in the day.

These are small things, of course, but they are significant. And think about what kind of *people* we’d be if we were getting enough rest. We’d be less grumpy with each other, maybe a little better at making community. We’d be better able to face the physical burdens of a human powered economy. We’d be less prone to illness, saving ourselves a great deal of money, discomfort and lost wages. We’d be better able to face change – tired, grumpy, overwhelmed people never look on difference as a good idea. Would it change the world? Probably not. Would it save energy and improve our lives in a host of ways? It just might.

When the nights get long, my first impulse is to put on the lights and push hard – admitting that the change of seasons changes my body and my needs can be difficult.  The rewards, however, of sleep are great, and I’ve learned over the years to appreciate the long nights and the time to rest.

Naps are good too, but that’s another post.

Sharon