This Thanksgiving, I am most grateful for the family members and interns who work on Sap Bush Hollow Farm. For the last nine months, I have seized every moment possible to sneak away to conduct research for my forthcoming book. Consequently, folks on the farm had to pick up my slack as I traveled from state to state, eventually crossing the entire nation. My goal was to record the voices of people across the country who are consciously working to heal the planet and create a cultural evolution through a simple, yet profound transition. Rather than focusing their energies on consumer-driven lifestyles, they are making their homes, families and communities the center of their lives. Initially, the intent of these interviews was to explore the range of domestic skills these homemakers have re-kindled (many of which have been lost in our culture for nearly three generations). But as we sat at their kitchen tables, another body of information emerged: the nature of true wealth.
These “radical homemakers,” as I have come to call them, no longer measure their assets by the mere accrual of dollars. Instead, they measure their fortunes by their garden plots, their ability to darn a sock, preserve their harvests, cultivate enduring relationships, and to celebrate the joy of creating something useful and nourishing, rather than relying on an empty consumer culture for provisions and shallow amusements. This quantification of wealth is universal to these homemakers, whether they live in city apartments or bungalows, suburban neighborhoods, rural villages or remote homesteads. Those who don’t have the acreage or are forbidden by local zoning regulations to produce their own food gauge their wealth by their proximity to farmers who can. Countless times, I heard homemakers say “thankfully, there is a grassfed farm near here who can provide what we can’t grow…We’re so grateful to the family that operates it.”
We regularly hear similar comments from our customers. I am ashamed to admit this, but in the past I’ve accepted such kind words as part of the mere pleasantries of community and commerce. Certainly, having a grass-based farm has been a source of my personal wealth – it provides much of our food and we collect dollars when people buy our products. But I hadn’t considered that the presence of a sustainable farm in the community would be regarded as a source of wealth for individual customers. Sure, farms like ours have value to our community – we protect the open spaces, help pull excess carbon out of the atmosphere, and contribute substantially to our local economies... But in this new emerging society, these enterprises are becoming a genuine asset of true wealth for our community. Our presence offers significant daily nourishment and long term food and health security.
By that same logic, our absence is a form of impoverishment. Less than 2% of our population is farming; when we consider the number of sustainable growers – those who produce food with little or no use of fossil fuels, who restore soil fertility, who capture “greenhouse gasses,” and supply food and economic pulse to their own communities - that number reduces further. The fossil fuel-intensive factory farms producing cheap meat will not be able to feed our population without petroleum. Quite frankly, if we don’t increase the number of local sustainable farms, and share our abundance, our culture (and that includes everyone – farmers and citizens alike) will eventually face malnourishment and hunger on a massive scale, and the ensuing tragedies and injustices that inevitably follow. Therefore, each fellow sustainable farmer that we help -- who is able to build a viable local business, nurture the land and contribute to our community food security -- becomes a source of our own personal and communal wealth and well-being.
Beyond a doubt, I am still thankful for the Sap Bush Hollow community that has allowed me the freedom to learn these lessons this year. But as I think on this some more, I am also deeply grateful for my farming neighbors who, together with us, have nourished thousands of local community members, making our region a source of abundance. In turn, I give thanks to the rest of you, across the country, who are doing the same for your own towns and cities, and for those of you who choose to buy our foods. As our customers, you are keeping us viable while we are still relegated to the status of “niche farmers,” so that we will be strong and ready when local sustainable farms, in tandem with backyard and urban gardens, become the primary providers of all food. Here’s to a beautiful, peaceful and sustainable future. Happy Thanksgiving.
Shannon Hayes is the host of grassfedcooking.com and the author of The Farmer and the Grill and The Grassfed Gourmet. She works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York. Her newest book, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, is due out in Spring 2010.