Agrarian Pursuits

I recently spent a weekend at a farm in Iowa. Three days without a shower, without cell phone service, without junk food. No Facebook, texting or TV for 60 straight hours.

It was wonderful.

To many college students, this might be the closest thing to torture one can imagine and, while I was less than thrilled about the lack of running hot water, I thoroughly enjoyed being disconnected from the outside world and connected instead to the things that really matter—the earth and the people, plants and animals that inhabit it.

There’s something magical about a crisp, quiet fall morning where the grass is crunchy with frost and the cows are grazing contentedly in the field waiting to be milked. We woke up minutes before the sun, fumbled around in the pitch black for as many warm layers as we could find, slipped on our rain boots and trudged through the field to milk the cows. I could feel the earth warming gently as the sun began to slowly peak over the horizon. Soon it was a brilliant, golden orb casting beams of light across the pasture and melting the glistening frost that encased each delicate blade of grass.

We spent the day shelling dried beans, clearing out the barns for storage and preparing the farm for the cold months ahead. In between tasks everyone joined together for delicious meals as fresh and home-grown as they could possibly get: beef from a grass-fed cow butchered a few months earlier, kale picked right outside the kitchen window, eggs collected from the chickens just an hour prior to breakfast. We knew exactly where each ingredient came from and which animals and people had been instrumental in its short journey from the field to the kitchen.

Being this connected to your food is an amazing feeling. While a McDouble is concocted from a random assemblage of beef that came from so many different cows it is literally impossible to trace their origin, high fructose corn syrup grown in various Midwestern states and processed until it no longer even faintly resembles the plant from which it came and lettuce shipped from half way across the country, this food traveled a maximum of 300 feet from pasture to plate.  

You know your food is local when it is grown so close to home that you can point in the direction of its origin. When someone asks you where your food came from your answer can be, “Farmer Ben” or, even better, “my backyard”.

         Getting involved in the process of growing, tending and harvesting is a great feeling. You feel very accomplished and satisfied when you sit down to a steaming hot plate of home-grown food and know that you were instrumental in its creation. Better yet, you are thankful for the people and animals that contributed to your meal. As agricultural hero Joel Salatin puts it, we must respect and honor the animals that we intend to consume. This brings us closer to them and, in turn, creates a beautiful and humane carnivore-animal relationship. In the same way, if we tend our plants with care we appreciate each crispy pea pod, each tender leaf of lettuce, each spicy sprig of cilantro. 

I recognize that it is not possible for everyone to grow their own food but even a simple change in mindset makes a world of difference. Maybe we don’t have fifteen acres of lush grassland on which to raise cows but we can source our meat from local farmers and suppliers who treat cows as the grass-eating herbivores that they are. If we don’t have the time to grow 25 varieties of produce in our backyard, we can shop at farmer’s markets and support our local economy. If we aren't able to raise our own chickens, we can purchase free-range eggs and meat from farmers we know do not subject their animals to the atrocities that are rampant in factory farms. Perhaps we can’t spend three hours preparing every dinner from scratch but we can avoid processed products that travel an unfathomable number of miles to arrive on our grocery store shelves.

We can contribute to the proliferation of sustainable, locally grown food if we learn to appreciate the plants and animals we consume and avoid the dreadful modern habit of thoughtless consumption.