Farm as Community

A couple of weeks ago I started writing a draft talking about the community at Simpler Thyme Organic Farm, but after a few hundred words I hit a wall and couldn’t keep writing; the words that my fingers were typing didn’t feel like the truth or the whole story. I started that rant by first describing how this farm consists of a core group of people who have lived here for years (Ann and Mike; Bill; Charles who has an apartment and job elsewhere but still works a 40+ hour week here); with a few ‘wwoofers’ who are here on multi-month/full-season stints (Keith, Josh, Sarah Figan and her toddler Evin) and then many other short-term ‘wwoofers,’ mostly international backpackers, who come and go and treat this place as much as a hostel and a place to practice English then as a place to learn about permaculture; and then there are one of Ann and Mike`s adult kids (Patrick) and Ann`s brother Dan plus his part-time caregivers; one of Bill`s sons; and another guy named Jon who has a tipi on the farm.

I then delved into an analysis and critique about the transient nature of the community, and how as a “farm” there are some problems here: namely, that Simpler Thyme does not always or consistently have enough ‘wwoofers’ (workers, farm-hand, interns, apprentices, labourers, whatever word you want to use) on site to get all required jobs done due to its transient nature [we had a couple of weeks back in June when we were behind on weeding and almost going to lose some crops]; and by constantly having experienced workers leaving and new people coming, tasks need to be constantly re-taught and quality and efficiency are sometimes compromised. I felt that this process of constantly having new people come into the community for mere weeks at a time was somehow unsustainable; I had the buzzword “social sustainability” in mind, not totally knowing how I defined it, but somehow assuming that a ‘socially sustainable’ farm would have to be a community, and that a community needs to be numerically dominated by long-term or permanent people.

But I couldn’t go anywhere with the critique beyond blanket statements. I couldn’t explain how or why having new people coming and going on a weekly basis was problematic to this farm as a community. In fact in the time since I put together that draft, I have reconsidered what I thought was a problem and realized it’s actually quite a beautiful and productive thing that is going on here at Simpler Thyme: by having people come into the community for mere weeks at a time, we longer-term members are constantly challenged and thus learning (example, how to teach someone how to harvest or weed, while they only understand 10% of the English language, or while they just simply don’t know what’s what, what we’re doing and why), we are constantly reenergized by new blood, learning new things from new people from places we’ve never been (Ann likes to say “I don’t need to travel the world, it comes to me”), sharing new inside jokes and so on. When you see people at meals, on break in the afternoons, or even while working on the field who are laughing and sharing stories, it warms your heart and calms your mind. When you see the cultural exchange and mutual respect going on at this place, you have hope for where the world is heading.

A big thing to look at too is “what are Ann and Bill trying to accomplish with this so-called farm?” Of course we are trying to produce and market a diversity of organically grown food, and to produce more than we eat and thus help pay bills and taxes [while Mike’s off-farm job further helps]. But other than that, their philosophy here is that we don’t just want to feed “consumers” and have “labourers;” we want to share food and knowledge with people, make them conscious of food and how it’s produced, give them the opportunity to learn how to grow their own; and we are not just looking to give people a place to eat and sleep in exchange for work, but again, we want people who come here to leave with an appreciation for the joys and pains involved in growing food, and the passion to grow their own. Be it a day, week, or month that someone spends here, Ann and Bill (and Charles and Mike) seem to thoroughly enjoy it when people come for a “farm experience,” getting their hands dirty and doing something totally new.

So this place is about people more than food. This place is not just about producing a surplus of calories and nutrients for sale in farmers markets and through our CSA. It is about “earth care, people care, and fair share,” to pull Permaculture into this. It is about creating the type of society we want to see: a place and time where people work together on tasks which are useful and productive; where people share what they know, feel comfortable to ask questions and learn more about what they don’t know; where people get outside of their comfort zone and feel free to act goofy. At this farm you can’t go more than 20 minutes without hearing laughter, without hearing someone ask someone else “what do you think” “what is ____ like where you’re from” “how do I do this.” You can’t more than an hour without hearing people offer stories about themselves and their past.

If I were interning at another organic farm in this area like Plan B or Manorun, I think may have ended up learning how to hoe more efficiently, but I wouldn`t get the chance to teach German and French and Japanese people about which weeds are edible and which trees will give us fruit or nuts in years ahead. At other farms it seems people focus more on crop productivity than they do on building relationships and how to be creative teachers and learners (which is what we focus on more so), while not necessarily ending up with more productive growing spaces.

So until two weeks ago I thought farming was about farming; I still see that aspect, but I am learning that farming is really about people and community. As I write these last sentences I hear happy laughter from the next room over as Keith is teaching a Japanese wwoofer Mizuno how to say common phrases that will help her day to day; a guy from California named Manual is showing Ester from France a song he just learned how to play on the banjo; and Ann is on the phone talking with a repeat wwoofer who has been here three or four times, someone who came here years ago as a stranger is now practically family in her eyes. What binds us all together is that, well, Ann is one of the main farmers here, and everyone else came here on their own prerogative to learn something and expand as human beings.