New Year’s Resolutions motivate many people. Others resist. Studies show such goals are surprisingly effective, 40% or more resulting in significant change. Whether resolutions work for you or not, we are grateful for your resolve to be involved in our farm and support local food production. We welcome the drama of supporting new resolutions people make that involve our farm or local, organic food in general. Meanwhile, we celebrate the lovely and more subtle ways of
Hens embracing change
change — when a new way of doing things simply takes hold and persists. We are very grateful that you make your way up our dirt road each or many-a week. Some of you have now been doing this for more than 125 weeks. We marvel at how resolute you are and appreciate what a difference you make for our small farm and for our society’s evolving food system.
For our part we resolve to continue to grow some of the cleanest food possible. Our practices and our geography make this possible. Take a short walk, ski or snowshoe from here and you can stand on the hydrological divide. All water that falls here flows toward the Atlantic Ocean but some goes via the Bay of Fundy, the rest flows more southeasterly and winds up in the Long Island Sound. Few are as lucky as we to have no upstream concerns.
We, together with our livestock, further resolve to continue to occupy area pastures and woodlands.
Piglets Encamped
Housing for our flocks is quite typical of Occupy gatherings. Liberal use of tarps, scrap materials and informal sheds! Thanks to our practice of moving our encampments every 12 hours to three days (except in edge seasons when sacrifice zones become necessary), we don’t have the same hygiene concerns with which many a mayor has had to grapple. We resolve to keep feeding organic grains even though it makes for high prices and low margins. And though many products are approved for use by the national organic standards, we resolve to continue to use few, if any, to grow our veggies. We resolve not to externalize costs of production to downstream neighbors or future generations. We hope the sum total of our resolutions (a.k.a. our farm’s quintuple bottom line or blended values) continues to produce quality food that makes our farmstand glow and shoppers rave.
Still, we humbly resolve to keep our ears open and egos in check so we’ll know if and when we miss meeting your expectations or when our rants simply get too self-righteous. And we hope to hear random bits of feedback, like the seasoned photographer’s comment “your animals are so clean” that let us know our practices do make a difference.
Look forward in 2012 to all sorts of fun at the farm! Give us ideas of new directions you would like to see us take as we farm the world we all want to live in. Look forward to more music and gatherings and opportunities to learn more about root to stem cooking and other national sustainable food trends, how to prepare delicious offals and how to cook a cold winter’s share into an Indian feast.
We love sharing our farm and therefore invite you to continue to Occupy our farm in 2012 and
Occupy Food T-Shirt screened by Lisa Guido
beyond. And whether you are amongst those who find the human megaphone of Occupy movements to be endearing or annoying, please do continue to be the human megaphone for sustainable food. Against the background noise of hyper-processed and subsidized industrial food, we are going to have to do more than vote with our forks. As Willie Nelson suggests, we are going to have to occupy the food system.