What is the definition of a farmer?

pic from civileats.com

How about we just redefine the word farmer?

I for one am tired of calling a middle aged business man a farmer. A guy who buys produce from the produce auction in Vineland NJ and slaps his name over it isn't the guy who farmed the food. The same guy who manages a bunch of seasonal migrant workers to do the labor while he does the pricing and marketing is not a farmer either. According to the dictionary on my computer, a farmer is a person who owns or manages a farm.

I want to know how owning 30 acres in one of the wealthiest counties in NJ makes you a farmer? It doesn't. And the notion of what a farmer is has got to be changed if we are to see food growing in our county. Most of us know that agribusiness has been a big contributor to the environmental destruction on this continent, but we do not consider the notion of small monoculture being a detrimental thing. Why blueberries and cranberries are wonderful economic boosts for our department of agriculture here in the garden state! Why question that?

Farming on a small scale with diverse crops is a fading art that is wanting to be brought back to life by the youth that is waking up from the sleep of the past couple generations. Greenhorns abound but here in Northern New Jersey they are often pushed out by the politics of the day. Mainly the business men who have been around much longer and the market managers who aren't quite educated about the politics of food or what a farmer is.

What if the definition of a farmer was anyone who grows food? "Then every housewife gardener would be at the farmer's market selling her bumper crop, how ridiculous is that?" Comments one well established poultry farmer who has just entered the business of market garden management. Yes, and if everybody was at the market competing prices would go down, friends would be made, and community gatherings would ensue. Maybe people would agree to get together and take that bumper crop of tomatoes and make a bunch of sauce and give it to the local food pantry instead of just throwing it on the compost heap at the end of the day.

Maybe if we broadened our view of what farming was we wouldn't be so attached to neat rows of the same crop that require fertilizers and pesticides. Maybe the notion of bigger is better is wrong and maybe a small dose of diversity is the medicine of the day. Maybe? Maybe not?

What do you think?

Next, we redefine farm...

baseball field turned into organic farm

The Garden State

As I was walking down the rain drenched streets of Vancouver with a virtual stranger this evening, he asked me where I was from. I told him, with a bit of reluctance, New Jersey

New Jersey, everyone has got the wrong idea about the place. I mean, shoot, I’m thankful for The Sapranos, The Garden State movie AND soundtrack, and the new founded ‘cool’ in blue-collar heroes like Bruce Springsteen, but really, we are so much more than that!

New Jersey, you know the place… “the girls with big hair”, “the land of shopping malls and greasers”, “the armpit of America”. Too many people have the wrong idea. Tonight, as I walked through this quiet rainy Canadian city, this man informed me that “New Jersey is one big suburb”. His comment was made from his observation from the interstate. His observation as he drove through the state was one made of ignorance, one made by someone on his way to somewhere else. He didn’t know the Jersey that I knew.

As people drive through the ‘garden state’ like addicts on their way to their next fix they don’t see all that I know of this beautiful land. I would bet my last Atlantic City dollar that they never put a spade in the earth and witnessed just how deep and rich this garden state soil is. I would bet that same dollar (now that it is two) that they have never planted a heritage tomato seed brought to NJ by the struggling Italian great grandparents of the now flourishing mobsters. Have they watched the massive green fruit grow darker and deeper in its hues of red to match their European skin, as the days grow even hotter and brighter in the July Jersey sun? Have they even tasted a Jersey tomato? Maybe. But one of mine? Doubt it! The soft, sweet, ruby flesh dripping onto the cutting board after a sharp stainless steel knife slices through it. Ya wouldn’t fuhgetaboutit.

Have these people who have ‘been through jersey” driven the back roads? Where for miles all you see is old deciduous forests accented with meandering rivers and train-tracks and then, out of no where you are in a beautiful old town that has sat among these hills for hundreds of years. Not only do the buildings speak of their age, but also one visit to the cemetery and the crumbling gravestones give you the sense of the antiquity of this state.

I imagine the same ignorant people who talk trash about Jersey are the ones who have moved there with their multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies and chemical plants. These are the same people who stand to make a profit off of people agreeing that Jersey IS a dump. Because if you think it ain’t worth anything then why would you defend it? It is not the people and the land that stink, it is the corporate pollution.

It really wasn’t coined ‘the garden state’ for nothin’ and I just really want them to know that.