The primary reason for my recent (4-month, agh!) silence is that I have been in school, learning ‘atmospheric physics’ (weather observation, analysis and forecasting) and I no longer spend the work day sitting at a computer. (Instead I scribble on charts with colored pencils and Sharpies.) That leaves me with little time to fiddle with the details of this site, so the blog has been temporarily relocated to Google’s ever-present and all-welcoming shores: jobrunfarm@blogspot.
A Few Bits Before Our First Mardi Gras Parade
Sunday, February 22, 2009
This blog is ringing all my bells. Tana Butler is pretty smitten with the small farms in the Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay area and she does a good job letting you know why with a few words and a beautiful picture here and there. Thing is, I absolutely loved the area when I was there learning Korean for the Air Force and if Michelle had to choose one place to call home, Monterey would probably be it.
Maybe we would be better off spending at least a few years working for someone else on a farm located in an area we really enjoy? Beyond the attachment to the physical place, Michelle and I get along with folks on the central California coast (or, say… Portland, OR) in a way that we never will see eye to eye with central Ohio farmers. Balancing the desire for that kind of comfortable fit against the family, friends and land available to us in Ohio is going make for a tough choice.
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So I’m listening to some hearty celtic folk rock and rock on last.fm and thinking that I could really do with some real live Dropkick Murphys or some Flogging Molly, so I check their websites to see where they are playing lately. Dropkick is all over the northern US with the middle of March dedicated entirely to Boston (no surprise.) Flogging Molly looks much the same until, what’s that? They’re playing two dates in New Orleans at the House of Blues! …on March 1st and 2nd, when I will be in Ohio. Damn.
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There is an actual statement of purpose for this project coming soon, but trying to encapsulate what it is that I want to do makes my tendency to want to say the ‘correct’ thing go absolutely nuts.
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Now listening to The Velvet Underground & Nico’s Andy Warhol for the first time ever (yeah, I know!) Now I know what Violent Femmes were trying to do. Among others. And now you have an idea how long these posts can take me to write.
But What Does it All Mean?
Saturday, February 21, 2009
“I grew up on a chicken farm farmed in the old way. It wasn’t called organic back then, but it was much kinder to the animals and healthier for the humans too.” – Ruthanna, caller on 09.02.20 On Point – ‘Writing the Unknown Pakistan‘
My last post mentioned Ars Open Forum, one of the most common sources of jump-off points for my thoughts and conversations. This one comes from another source which provides me with a similar bounty of food for thought: NPR. The subject of yesterday’s On Point was Daniyal Mueenuddin, an author whose recent debut collection of short stories has been highly praised. He is a Pakistani who spent part of his childhood in the US and received all of his secondary and college education here. On graduating from college he was offered a choice by his aging father: take over the family’s failing farm in rural Pakistan or go and live his life in the West (with no hard feelings either way.) He chose to stay and now twenty-some years later his stories about the people he knows in his life as a farmer bring him back to this country.
Of course I was struck by the parallels between the life he is living and the life that I am considering and I definitely want to read his book ‘In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,’ but the bit that brings me back to my own plans is the quote at the beginning of the post, from a somewhat rambling caller who compared her own childhood experience with Mueenuddin’s choice to go home and farm. I said earlier that I would try to describe what some of the terms that are being thrown around so freely of late mean in context.
I think that one of the most fundamental errors a farmer can make is to forget that a farm’s purpose is to produce food. I don’t mean to be so idealistic as to pretend that you don’t need to make enough money to support your family along the way, but so many fail because they think of their product only as a commodity with a monetary value and lose track of the literally carnal pleasure of good food. The words slathered liberally across emerging food products on the shelves of your grocery store and in the pages (digital and analog) of the media attempt to re-connect with that idea with varied degrees of success and honesty.
Organic – The relevant portion of the Merriam-Webster definition says “food produced with the use of feed or fertilizer of plant or animal origin without employment of chemically formulated fertilizers, growth stimulants, antibiotics, or pesticides” and that is indeed the core of it. However, the word has come to have very different meanings to different people. Those who (re)developed the idea of organic farming in the US as opposed to commercial/industrial farming intended it to have a broader meaning, not only the avoidance of chemicals, but also a respect for natural systems. The meaning of the word as it is used on food packaging can be unfortunately narrow by comparison. If used honestly it will at least mean that the dictionary definition has been followed, but the laws on food packaging are not without loopholes.
Natural/Green – These two are pretty general to start with and have been over-used to the point of being nearly useless lately. Natural should be easy: what happens if nature is left alone. However, what happens when nature is left alone after we have interfered is not the same as what would have happened before we arrived. We have been interfering since we learned to use tools, so which baseline would you like to use? Green implies positive for the environment although things like ‘clean coal’ and hybrid cars are certainly a very qualified positive.
Sustainable – This one is being abused too, but it is harder to dilute. A sustainable system (on any scale: garden, farm, industry, nation, planet) is one which does not require significant external inputs to keep running over the long-term. Of course, that’s long-term relative to human lifespan since even the universe itself is not sustainable in the unqualified long-term.
Local Food – Food grown and produced in the local area. Generally seasonally appropriate. Money stays in the local economy. Food not transported thousands of miles is fresher more sustainable. If you’re lucky, it might be possible to find such things on the market shelf, otherwise available from a farmer’s market, a CSA (community supported agriculture) or direct from the producer.
Slow Food – More of a philosophical thing, slow food is the opposite of fast food. Slow food is not transported long distances, it is not preserved by chemical means, it takes more time to prepare than a microwavable instant meal and it is not available in the same form, taste and preparation across the entire country, let alone the world. Slow food tastes better than you may know it is possible for food to taste.
I’m not satisfied with any of these ‘definitions.’ Figuring out what these words mean to me an others is going to be an ongoing project.
If I Had a Million Dollars
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Someone posted a thread on Ars Open Forum (you’ll hear that phrase out of me an awful lot!) this morning where they asked how we would spend a theoretical ‘several million dollars’ (a couple million invested and one million liquid to re-arrange your life with. Apparently both he and his wife were mid-level Wall St hotshots that got out while the getting was still good and are now settling down to a quieter life. I have no idea whether all that is true, but I dashed off a quick response (if I sat down to think too much about this then this would be ten pages long.)
1) Get out of the military. Actually I wouldn’t have any choice in the matter, they don’t let you stay in if your economic situation is that disparate from that of your peers.
2) Sell or give away the bulk of my stuff for now, stash the remainder with my family and spend a few years traveling with an emphasis on immersion, not just seeing the sights. Britain and the continent, India, New Zealand, Taiwan, China, Korea, Japan and somewhere nicely secluded in the south Pacific would all be on the itinerary. Somewhere in there, probably in China or Korea, spend at least a year teaching English and learning the language (more better in the case of Korean or from scratch w/ Mandarin.)
3) On returning to the US, another year of travel, this time around the country with visits to various cities and many small farms. Possibly by bicycle or motorcycle.
4) Go back to school, finish my Bachelor’s and likely pick up a Master’s (just because that would be an excuse to take more classes.)
5) Do what I’m hoping to do in a few years anyway: build a house and establish a small farm. Only with more security and possibly a more appealing locale.*
6) Set up funds to support my family and the development of my community.
*Having this kind of money available would make it even more tempting to try to find a place outside one of our favorite cities rather than sticking with what is available to us in the world of real money.
Indecisions, decisions, decisions.
Monday, February 16, 2009
I’m sure no one has been checking up on this site frequently enough to catch too many of the variations it has already been through, but it’s a good thing this isn’t a professional project or I would likely be fired for doing all my testing on a production system. Things are slightly more stable now: instead of replacing one CMS with another I’m running three at once with the same content just to play around and see which one I like best. This one is on WordPress which is certainly the easiest to use and would be fine if all I ever planned to do with this site was to host a single blog. The second can be found at http://job-run.com/txp and it is running TextPattern. TxP is a bit more esoteric, but also more powerful in some ways. The third is at http://job-run.com/dpl and it is running the relatively heavyweight Drupal. If you’re bored and want to see how those work out on your end, any feedback is appreciated, especially as regards speed and ease of use. Aesthetic feedback is helpful too, but really any of the three can be made to look just about any way I want so the choice between them comes down to functionality.
For now, my bookshelf is my toolbox
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Books read & books to read
Over the past few months I have been reading far more frequently that I had been for years. These are the books that have joined my library lately. The stack on the left is what I have read so far and the stack on the right is patiently awaiting my attention. The two in the middle are a bit different, the latest works from two of my favorite authors will make for a nice break somewhere in the middle of all these farm and garden words.
In Very Broad Strokes
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Within the next five years or so I would like to be producing and direct-marketing sustainable, natural, organic, green, slow, local food. I’ll get into what that ridiculous list of words (along with others such as polyculture, permaculture, and rare breeds) all mean both to me and to others as we go along. For now let’s just say that I want to run a small farm and a big garden with a minimum of chemicals and machinery. At the moment my vision is a little idealistic and in spots it is as contradictory as an Amishman with an iPhone, but the details are beginning to work themselves out and I have plenty of time to get them all in place.
Once Michelle and I decide that this is really going to happen, the most fundamental question is where it will happen. The most obvious and most likely answer is my family’s farm. Michelle and I are very fond of the ocean and mountains as well as the cultural advantages that can be found in a proper city and we would love to settle near Portland, OR, Boulder, CO or San Francisco, CA. Unfortunately it is unlikely that our preference for such locations can come anywhere close to outweighing practical concerns such as finances and the availability of local knowledge, wisdom and experience.
Not nearly as important to anyone but me, the operation will need a name. My brainstorming list of ideas and possibilities has grown to more than 200 words. Originally I was planning on using the same name for this blog as for the farm, but I have decided that this will be a more personal record and there will be a second, more business-like blog in the future when there is something more concrete to write about.
Here We Go Again on Our Own
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
With a typical weakness for the grandiose my first impulse is to try and sum up everything this is supposed to be about in one post. Having already attempted to make essentially the same summary in several letters and a lengthy forum post I know that any such effort is going to wind up being far too long to make a good blog post and far too short to cover everything I have in mind. Worse yet I would be so concerned with its perfection that I would put off the writing of it indefinitely. Instead I will make a beginning and from there fill in all the bits and pieces as I go.
I have made numerous attempts to establish a place for self-expression online. I maintained a blog at LiveJournal for several years, I participated in various social networking sites as they waxed and waned and I developed a personal website that went through at least three major revisions over the course of six years without ever being posted to a server. No matter how much content I added I couldn’t escape the sense that it was nothing more than a spare and wordy version of an old Geocities page; self-indulgent and of little use to anyone.
The fact that these words now appear on this site and not just scribbled in a notebook or half-finished in a random text file on my hard drive is due to my having found a purpose for them beyond trying to define myself. Now that I have an external goal to write about, it would be great if I could spare you that self-indulgence, but I am afraid there will still be a great deal to wade through around here. Unfortunately it is a fundamental part of how I think and therefore how I write. I hope to reign in that tendancy in my writing, but it will take practice and time. In the meantime, if you choose to accompany me (and I hope you will) then I must beg your indulgence.