Floods, gluts, abundance and depletion: Part I

After eight inches of rain and hundreds of pounds of tomatoes, we're getting what we asked for, and wondering why we asked at all.

I am tired of abundance. As a word, abundance shows up everywhere, but particularly permaculture books, self-help seminars, and among some certain sub-sector of finance bros, manifesting that abundance mindset for what else but the gaining of private wealth and resources. We too have manifested abundance, and become its victim here at Fox Holler Farmstead recently. The abundance we are yoked with has become a burden. Hundreds of pounds of tomatoes and beans, ripening all at once, unceasing gallons of milk, summoned by our own hands from the tall grass paddocks daily, and the inexorable march of fattening ducks all threaten to crush us under the tax and strain of responsibility for all these potential calories. It’s easy to want to grow food. Between the simple joys of home-grown tomatoes extolled by YouTubers and the inevitable necessity brought to the forefront for many average, modern folks by inflation, pandemic, and supply chain crises, getting our hands dirty and bringing a bounty to the table is an attractive fantasy for many. Managing, distributing, preserving, and, heaven forbid, monetizing all those calories, however, can quickly become an overwhelming proposition.

And that’s where I am this week: twitching and straining under the burden of abundance. 

It finally rained a significant amount here. It’s been what we call a gully-washer, and it has quite literally riven deep cuts in the road, washing buckets of gravel downslope. If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been bellyaching about the lack of precipitation. I’m ready to complain about too much rain now.  I don’t know how much rain we’ve gotten this past week… our rain gauge only goes to five inches and it was full to the brim. My mother lives up the road, and she shelled out the extra money for an eight-inch gauge, and hers was topped out too. We’d been using a hand sledge to pound portable fence posts the past two months, and now they pierce the earth with ease. I’ve been sliding whole cow pies into the cracks in the soil all summer, and now the cracks are gone, the pies forever interred in their narrow graves. This is a technique you will not learn about in Successful Farming, or even one of those damned, lie-filled homesteading YouTube channels. It’s like a cheat code for being able to say we’re a regenerative operation, not that anyone’s really keeping score.

In a span of only a couple of few hours, those eight-plus inches came down with the all the thundering fury of a cow pissing on a flat rock, or at least that’s how it sounded from up in my tin-roofed attic bedroom. It rained enough to strangle a toad and send the worms up a tree… just as I was finally about to hang the abundant laundry we’ve manifested.

As any gardener knows or eventually learns, a heavy rain with ripening tomatoes on the vine is a recipe for split fruit, and split fruit must be harvested and processed pretty quickly, if the gardener didn’t have the time or forethought to pick prior to rain.  As I write this again, there are several canner batches of tomatoes splitting in the rain right now, but I’ve burnt through enough dry clothing for the time being that I’m going to wait it out.

We’ve picked approximately 150 pounds of heirloom tomatoes within a week and a half span, and I’d be willing to bet we have that much or more waiting for us now. We’re low on canning jars, and the solar dehydrator won’t work in the rain, so our remaining options are to temporarily freeze them until we can handle the onslaught (we have a whole beef coming back from the butcher any day now), sell them (I’ve managed to unload at least two whole pounds in our farmstand, and the purchaser did not list their name for billing), or convert them into pork. It is true that we brought pigs into our homestead system to act as big, nutritional batteries that can convert excess and cull produce and dairy into fat and flesh, to be harvested later. In fact, there are parts of Spain where the tomato paste industry is paired with tomato-pomace fed pork production. And I can tell you from experience that taking a couple five gallon buckets of tomatoes and flinging them across the pig pasture, watching the hulking, grunting beasts dashing about with greedy joy, well, it is a lot of fun. Still, it’s emotionally difficult to put months of work into a crop and have it come on all at once, almost violently. We are able to can this year’s supply of sauce in two weeks, which normally takes six weeks. And the paste tomatoes have only begun to ripen! Okras are protruding all over the garden, pounds of long beans dangle from the roof of our high-tunnel hoophouse, and I know that there’s bucket or two of eggplant to pick as well. Abundance, yay.

Now you might view this burden of abundance as a very priveleged problem to have, in comparison with a widely food-insecure global population. It isn’t lost on me, and we’re going to get there.

But first, the dairy. Every day. You can leave tomatoes to rot on the vine, but you cannot just stop milking cows or goats in the height of their production. For the past few weeks, dairy has been very tiring. Actually, it’s been tiring for years, but that’s beside the point. In order to justify the labor of love that is home dairying, we rely heavily on three things: cooperative help and support from neighbors in our community, regular summer cheesemaking internships, and raw milk enthusiasts who are willing to jump through a few hoops to get their hands on the good stuff. But the past month has been a struggle. The bulk of our cooperative members have been traveling, unable to help with or consume the glut of dairy (5 gallons of cow milk, 1.5 gallons of goat milk daily stacks up quick), let alone participate in our frequent care and moving of the livestock. Then, our cheesemaking intern had to suddenly quit and go back home for personal health reasons. Finally, as a last straw, our biggest purchaser of milk up and vanished for a minute. I’m going to get into it, just a little bit…

I have never sold drugs. I have never sold black-market firearms. I even fill out all those USDA census surveys that show up in the mail asking obtuse questions about acres in production, under threat of federal prosecution, as it says on the envelope. But we are positioned on a border with a state that up until recently did not allow the sale of raw milk. And sometimes, that milk has traveled across state lines. Here in Missouri, fireworks dealers also have a tendency to set up shop real close to state lines.  Sometimes I accidentally leave raw milk where I shouldn’t, and find envelopes of cash in the same vicinity, and on the same day. My motivations are primarily economic, but it does feel good to be able to provide a valued product that is raised and produced with environmental and ecological integrity. The problem with all this, it turns out, isn’t that it’s potentially illicit. 

I might not be making a lot of friends today, but sometimes, the raw milk people can kinda be weird. I often find myself nodding my head and saying “yup, uh-huh” to various fringe ideologies during these transactions, or fielding bizarre questions about the quantum vibrations of the cows, or going over basic math with unschoolers so that I can get properly paid. Our environmental, social and ecological goals in agriculture sometimes mean less to these folks than the mere, unregulated nature of the product. I’m a little weird myself, to be fair.

I love raw milk, I won’t drink pasteurized milk if I can avoid it, and most of our customers (certainly any of the ones we have now, and who are reading this) are all good people looking to enrich their lives with clean food from a trustworthy source that cares about its impact. I love raw milk so much I have a herd of animals to provide it. But it just so happens that many folks turn to drinking the stuff because they are incredibly particular, finicky, and fickle by nature. It gets exhausting, and twice this year we’ve had to part ways with major customers who are, for lack of terminology, out of their gourds. I am glad to not be dealing with these people any longer, but the result has been a real abundance of milk; income not so much.

Yes, we can make cheese with the milk. It takes all day, and, sorry, I don’t have all day.

I much prefer the term glut to abundance. Abundance is something you get from crystals and conference events. A glut is something heavy, squishy, burdensome, and altogether belaboring. Like piles of pillowcases full of tomatoes. That’s what we’ve manifested here. Glut. 

While our project could arguably be described as permacultural, consisting of designed systems that interact with each other and exchange energy and nutrients to provide an abundant harvest and a well-stewarded farm ecosystem, I’ve long been critical of some of the more woo-woo aspects of this movement, along with scalability issues and its occasional flirtations with colonialism. Putting that aside, I have a pretty deep appreciation for permaculture’s ethics: Care for People, Care for the Earth, and Equitable Distribution of Resources (AKA “Fair Share”). And this is where I take aim at the notion of abundance.

While I am not entirely free of my sense of doom, I do have enough experience engaging with and working in agriculture to conclude that we do have enough resources to provide enough nutritious food to feed everyone on Earth, and many more generations, and in a way that causes minimal disruption to ecosystem health. We don’t need any more abundance or glut, we need equitable resource distribution, resilient supply train infrastructure, increases in diversity of regionally appropriate crops and fair market conditions for farmers. 

Are there models for spreading the glut around, and building true abundance? Yes, and more that we’ve yet to invent and perfect. One model that I’d like to explore further is mutual food aid. In one sentence, mutual food aid is a system whereby a party with reasonably abundant economic wealth pays a fair wage to farmers with reasonably abundant food to provide said food freely to those who need it. Naturally, it is important that schemes like these have built-in checks for fairness and integrity throughout the process, so that we don’t risk discrediting them. Cooperatives, where resources and obligations are shared, can also yield more collective benefit than all of us struggling individually under the gluts we bear, and the dearth of economic exchange we might receive in return. Imagine the potential for decentralized, resilient food distribution that could exist in a system where farmers are free to focus on feeding their neighbors, and benefactors both great and slight can use their surplus to encourage fairness, resilience, and yes, abundance, for those without. 

The irony in all of this is that capital doesn’t rot or spoil, but a lot of our food does. It’s much easier to horde money, at least if you can get it. While various social safety net services provided by our government (and included in the next Farm Bill) are intended to address these issues, they address them with the efficiency and enthusiasm we expect from our bureaucratic institutions. Until that gets sorted out, I think it’s once again on us to care for each other, like so many things.

When I began my journey into growing food, it began as a way to opt out of a system I saw as unjust. My motivations were, in a way, naturally selfish. I did not want to pay rent and stay remain stuck in a wage labor cycle in which my traceable income could be siphoned off to the military-industrial complex. I did not, and do not, want to be stuck in a rut, bankrolling war and subsidizing corporate interests. In being able to access land through a Community Land Trust, I could decrease my reliance on unwieldly and corrupt systems, exchanging it for decentralized reliance on my local community, I could feed myself and my family, and attempt to steward, regenerate, and build relationships with ecological systems, all while living below the poverty line, so as to not contribute to further injustice and degradation. And gradually, I came to see that our work, growing food, was less and less about merely evading these unjust systems.

Farmers often point to their motivation to feed the world, and I trust that this is usually a sincere expression of altruism. In the past few years, we too have held that lofty goal. Sometimes, bit by bit, I find that we’re even accomplishing it, at least in my local community. But one of the perennial problems of growing food on this side of the scale is that the grower must also be the marketer, smiling through the stress and tears that come with this profession. We have to hunt for those with the means to buy from us, deal with all their peccadilloes (and the higher the class, the more peccadilloes they have, trust me on this), and often, we get put into a situation where we must ignore the folks who need access to what we have the most. We have more than we need for calories, and somehow we cannot afford to give that away. Blame it on my scarcity mentality, but I’m beginning to suspect we never really escaped that system entirely. 

On that note, when it rains it pours, and it’s pouring out there again right now. I’m headed out to grab another cart of tomatoes before they burst on the vine, and then I may take a milk bath. Only raw milk for my bathing needs, though, from vibrationally aligned cows only. This is the lavish abundance I have manifested.

Yours in depletion and abundance, glut and dearth and infinite ketchup,

BB

(P.S. as a sidenote, there are lots and lots of examples of groups and organizations devoted to mutual aid and food equality. I am leaving the comments on this post open for you to share anyone doing good work in this field. For the past few months, we’ve been supplying eggs for City Greens Market, who has a pretty sweet alternative business model that provides healthy food at wholesale prices in St. Louis, with community support. Believe it or not they’re way more fun to deliver to than random garages with conspiracy theorists and quantum physics trolls in them.)