ramichae101
Registered: August 2016
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I thought, since I grew up on an (albeit small, and uncertified) organic family farm in Northern Michigan that I knew generally what I was in for, signing up for six weeks of work at Cross Island Farms a sustainable organic farm in Wellesley Island, New York. This proved to not really be the case, since at the end of nearly every one of these 42 days I was amazed at how exhausted (mentally and physically) I felt. Tasks like moving and spreading hundreds of pounds of clay mix to seal a hole in a pond, or carrying hand-sawed ironwood (Ostrya virginiana) boles up and down a ridge to be placed in a corduroy road left the body drained. Meanwhile the mind also received little rest, since these jobs had to be done in a certain way that required no small amount of planning and communication. I was lucky to have other people who were in similar positions with whom to screw up and empathize throughout my stay. Some of these were college students like me, living and working at the farm for experience and some were looking to start their own organic farm and wanted to see firsthand how it was done. Meeting these people and hearing how their lives had brought them to the farm was one of the best things about the experience- we shared a camaraderie I can liken only to that I found with fellow hikers on the Appalachian Trail. In another way too, my time at the farm and on the trail were alike, since I slept out in a tent during both trips and was very restricted in the amount of things I could bring. Unlike living at home, I couldn’t always just drive somewhere for a movie, or enjoy some of the other comforts that I am used to, despite the valiant efforts of my hosts to make me feel at home. For this reason, I made my own comforts, like taking a nightly bike ride down to Wellesley Island State Park for a swim.
In the back of my mind all the while during these days on the farm was how this task or practice either fit into the greater complexity of the working farm or furthered the ideals of sustainable eating. Removing fire blight-infested limbs from seckle pears (Pyrus sp.) in the farm’s edible forest garden, for instance, a particularly taxing and time consuming job, was valuable beyond just improving the health of these trees, but also helped me to understand a little more about pathogen control. Like many other things on the farm, I learned from my mistakes here, since it was only after I had done the pruning that I read it was important to sanitize the clippers between cuttings so as not to spread the bacterial infection (Erwinia amylovora) that is the root of fire blight to unaffected branches. The owners and the vision behind Cross Island Farms, Dani and David were extremely forgiving of such instances, using them as opportunities to teach me about the things they love doing. Both of them were inspiring in their passion for their work, with Dani focused on permaculture and vegetable production, while David devoted much of his time and energy to animal husbandry. Each were often given opportunities to show their love for their lifestyle, when tours would come to the farm, usually consisting of families of multiple generations interested in sustainable agriculture. For the last three weeks of my stay at the farm, David was often called away to business trips, giving me the opportunity to act in his role as caretaker of the farm’s cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and goats. This part was one I gladly played, as a lover of animals, and as it helped me to understand the farm as a holistic biological unit, rather than a series of gardens and orchards. When David was around, we spent a lot of time creating fences to make the movement of the animals easier. His system of movement, called ‘rotational grazing’ was one that kept in mind how long each group of animals could stay on a plot given the amount of foragable food contained within. This system not only produces more lean and healthy meat from the livestock, (and on the farmer, who is daily setting up and taking down fences to contain the grazers in new enclosures) but also keeps the pastures healthy, since most native grasses coevolved with a similar grazing pressure from wild animals like bison and deer. With the knowledge gained from activities like these, I was able to lead some tours myself of the farm, before my culminating tour and workshop that was held on August 20th.
For this workshop, I created a poster and press release, sending them to the organizations that agreed to sponsor my event, the Indian River Lakes Conservancy, the Clayton Food Co-op, and the local newspaper, the Thousand Island Sun as well as posting the poster myself at various locations around the thousand islands. I was guaranteed an audience of at least ten, since I had planned the date of the event around a scheduled visit from a group of incoming freshmen from Hamilton college. This group I gave a slightly different tour and workshop, separating them from the group consisting of families with various age ranges, which I conducted Saturday night.
I showed both groups I around the edible forest garden, and the various other vegetable beds where they picked their own fruits and vegetables for a salad at the end of the tour. With each plant, I told them a little about what it can do for our bodies and in our gardens. After the tour, while the attendees enjoyed their fresh salad, I gave a short presentation focused on how you can easily grow some of your own food, and by making easy dietary choices, lessen your carbon footprint and help preserve the Earth for future generations. For the group entering college I was able to focus on some of the scientific correlations between the foods they eat and the changing climate, whereas the next group with four children, I focused more on the things that kept their attention- things like the chickens, the elderberries (Sambucus nigra) and cherry tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum).
The dietary choices I emphasised include buying local ingredients, especially things that grow in your area, such as fresh produce from farmer’s markets whenever possible, lowering your meals’ ‘food miles’ and therefore the amount of energy used to ship your food- a concept called bioregionalism. Practicing bioregional eating also works to strengthen wild pollinator populations, which are experiencing serious decline, since farmers growing native foods will be providing them with an abundance of the plants that they evolved to harvest nectar from. Similarly, buying whole foods, in order to lessen the carbon footprint of your food’s packaging and processing goes a long way not only towards making your diet more sustainable, but putting you in touch more with what you are eating. These choices can easily coincide with purchasing organic products, which are less of a blight on their landscape than their conventionally grown counterparts, since they aren’t grown with synthetic pesticides, and as such are often grown in polycultures in order to biologically limit pests. Monocultures, by way of concentrating the preferred foods of certain insect species, tend to invite these pests to an all-you-can eat buffet of sorts.
The final aspect of a sustainable diet that I mentioned was the restriction of meat, since the current system of livestock production in America is far from sustainable, with more than ten calories of fossil fuel used to create a calorie of beef. While I am not suggesting that everyone must be a vegetarian in pursuit of a perfectly sustainable diet, the rate at which the average American consumes meat is far beyond what can be produced without catastrophic environmental effects.
As an added bonus, I was given the opportunity to lead the incoming freshmen at Hamilton college through the construction of a wigwam shelter at one of the rustic campsites on the farm. This included the gathering of saplings for the initial structure, cattail leaves, to be dried and woven into mats to cover the walls and birch bark, to add for a hydrophobic ceiling, all materials that have been used by the indigenous people of upstate New York for hundreds of years. These were all gathered from the beautiful farm property, one where I was lucky to spend most of my summer; a place where my daily commute was a five minute walk, flanked by wetlands where I might commonly upset Great blue heron (Ardea herodias) and have to avoid Painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) on the path.
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