Crop Mob
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28food-t-000.html
The New York Times
February 28, 2010
FoodField Report: Plow Shares
By CHRISTINE MUHLKE
Published: February 24, 2010“Who brought their own wheelbarrow?” Rob Jones asked the group of 20-somethings gathered on a muddy North Carolina farm on a chilly January Sunday. Hands shot up and wheelbarrows were pulled from pickups sporting Led Zeppelin and biodiesel bumper stickers, then parked next to a mountain of soil. “We need to get that dirt into those beds over there in the greenhouse,” he said, nodding toward a plastic-roofed structure a few hundred feet away. “The rest of you
can come with me to move trees and clear brush to make room for more pasture. Watch out for poison ivy.”Bobby Tucker, the 28-year-old co-owner of Okfuskee Farm in rural Silk Hope, looked eagerly at the 50-plus volunteers bundled in all manner of flannel and hand-knits. In five hours, these pop-up farmers would do more on his fledgling farm than he and his three interns could accomplish in months. “It’s immeasurable,” he said of the gift of same-day infrastructure.
It’s the beauty of being Crop Mobbed.
The Crop Mob, a monthly word-of-mouth (and -Web) event in which landless farmers and the agricurious descend on a farm for an afternoon, has taken its traveling work party to 15 small,
sustainable farms. Together, volunteers have contributed more than 2,000 person-hours, doing tasks like mulching, building greenhouses and pulling rocks out of fields.“The more tedious the work we have, the better,” Jones said, smiling. “Because part of Crop Mob is about community and camaraderie, you find there’s nothing like picking rocks out of fields to bring people together.”
The affable, articulate Jones, 27, is part of the group’s grass-roots core, organizing events and keeping them moving. The Mob was formed during a meeting about issues facing young farmers, during which an intern declared that better relationships are built working side by side than by sitting around a table. So one day, 19 people went to Piedmont Biofarm and harvested, sorted and boxed 1,600 pounds of
sweet potatoes in two and a half hours. A year later, the Crop Mob e-mail list has nearly 400 subscribers, and the farm fests now draw 40 to 50 volunteers.The Crop Mob works well partly because the area around Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham is so rich in small-scale, sustainable farms, and the sustainable-agriculture program at Central Carolina Community College draws students from across the nation who stay put after graduation.
One of the biggest issues facing sustainable agriculture is that it’s “way, way, way more labor-intensive than industrial agriculture,” Jones said. “It’s not sustainable physically, and it’s not sustainable for people personally: they’re working all the time and don’t have an opportunity to have a social life. So I think Crop Mob brings that celebration to the work, so that you get that sense of community that people are looking for, and you get a lot of work done. And we have a lot of fun.”
“It’s good to get off the farm you’re farming,” said Jennie
Rasmussen, a 25-year-old Indiana native who traded an office job for community gardening before moving to the area to farm. “It’s great to meet other people who have the same challenges and just network and build community.”“Networking” and “building community” popped up in almost every conversation I had that day, and it never came across as slick or earnest. Both have real context here, as these mostly farmless farmers hear about internships, learn about affordable land and find potential dates. For those who don’t farm, it’s a way to explore getting their fingernails dirty. One woman, who recently moved to the area from New Jersey after losing her job in the financial-services industry, was eager to plug in to the vibrant local food scene. “I’m
trying not to hinder the effort,” she said with a laugh as she
distributed twigs on a hügelkultur bed made from dead trees.The farmer Trace Ramsey, who is part of the Mob core as well as its documentarian, has watched the young-farmer phenomenon explode. “People are interested in authentic work,” he said. “I think they’re tired of what they’ve been told they should accomplish in their life, and they’re starting to realize that it’s not all that exciting or beneficial from a community perspective or an individual perspective.” At 36, Ramsey joked that he’s the old man of the project — remarkable considering the average American farmer is 57.
But as people of all ages become involved, he said, “what started as a young-farmer movement is just becoming a farmer movement.”By the end of the afternoon, the transformation was remarkable. The towering piles of soil and mulch had dwindled to child’s height. The greenhouse beds were filled and the walls framed out by older volunteers who knew what to do with the table saw. The Tamworth pigs had a new fenced-in grazing area to uproot. Thickets and trees were removed from the edge of a field, a bonfire built from the haul.
Garden rows were tidied while someone sang. And he hügelkultur beds were handsomely finished. The dreary mess of winter had been cleared to make way for a well-ordered spring.There was even time for a pecan-tree-planting demo before the buffet lunch. (Farmers are required only to feed the workers; no money is exchanged.) Tucker, bleary from exhaustion, thanked the smiling gang. The group then threw around ideas for which farm should be Mobbed next. When it was agreed that a volunteer’s employer would win the
reciprocal-labor lottery, she hopped around in excitement.The idea is catching on, Jones said. Requests for advice on starting mini-Mobs have come in from around the state. Two Crop Mobbers are traveling to Spain to talk to farmers. In cities, Jones added, there’s no reason that backyard and community gardeners can’t mob, too. Because anywhere there’s dirt, a community can grow.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Winston Warfield:
This is tremendously exciting. It synergizes electronic commo (twitter, cellphones, internet) with the sustainable farming movement. Now we have in Boston farmers markets popping up in every neighborhood, and they are attracting a lot of customers. The next step would be for retail buyers to join crop mobs, helping out the local farms, especially during spring and fall. We could work in exchange for food, or food credits, doing an end run around the money economy nexus, a boon for the unemployed and homeless. Inflation? What inflation? I can even envision this as a nascent survival strategy for cities (albeit downsized), so completely dependent on the industrial food chain, and therefore vulnerable to its IMO inevitable breakdown as petro-based ag unravels. Something like this is what is meant by self-reliance and creativity, breaking out of the professionally-dominated paralysis of something as basic as food itself.
1 March 2010, 12:50 pmBruce F:
I found some cropmob contact info on twitter -
http://cropmob.org/contact
1 March 2010, 5:56 pmDeAnander:
I have just been watching “Food, Inc” (with the notion of writing a review) and this crop mob article was just the antidote I needed to the massively depressing picture of corporate factory ag…
flash crowds meet sustainable ag, the wireless-enabled version of barn raisings and shelling bees… what’s not to like?
2 March 2010, 12:08 amaskod:
Love this. Simply love this.
2 March 2010, 3:43 amStan:
Them’s our Durham folk. (: Also check Bountiful Backyards (which overlaps with the Mob in many respects).
Here’s the photo archive for BB, my spouse Sherry has the power drill making the mushroom log. (: The Trinity House pix (it’s on Trinity Ave, in the hood) are of a very old downtown house that was refurbished and taken totally off the electric grid. The pix sequence the transformation. Owners Rebekah and Steve Hren have a book called The Carbon Free Home, an easy-to-follow how-to, well worth a look.
2 March 2010, 7:42 amWinston Warfield:
Detroit may become farmland again. Check this out from Huffpost today. Detroit is serious about returning to agriculture, i.e. erasing abandoned buildings and unused infrastructure and returning it to the raising of crops. The whole city, industrially crippled and dying, would be “downsized”, as it were. Now, my instincts are all buzzing that this will somehow get screwed up under rentier capitalism, and become just another racial supremacist exercise in gentrification, but the kernel of the idea is interesting. As in we have been talking about survival, deindustrialization, dismantling the vertical nightmare of the metropole, and returning to a more sustainable way of life. Could this be a model for the survival of cities, in the context of radical transformation?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/08/detroit-wants-to-save-its_n_490680.html
8 March 2010, 6:33 pmCurt:
I saw this report this morning that there are increasing numbers of young people in Germany who are going dumpster diving for their food. They are not taking their food out of the dumpsters because they are poor they are taking the food out of the dumpsters becasue they are outraged at the amount of perfectly good food that is thrown away, especially by food stores, including Bio food stores, simply because a new shipment is comming in and they have to make room for it.
This is not the way that free markets are suppossed to work when there is a surplus of food at a store they are suppossed to report that and the next shipment should be reduced or cancelled, inventory should build up in a warehouse and then the food should be shipped to somewhere that there is no food unless everywhere has more than enough in which case land should be taken out of food production and transfered to wood, or flowers or cotton or wool, or whatever.
Is this problem to difficult for our capitalist magagerial class to figure out?
Is this an example of an unsolvable problem? Can the Rebel Army recongnize this as a problem? Or is it only a problem if the food is thrown away by Starbucks coffee?
@m.c. I heard a report that in America the pro gun nuts are going in to Starbucks coffee with guns straped around their waste (waist ?) have you heard anything about that or actually seen it first hand? That is really funny.
9 March 2010, 10:56 amI am pro gun myself. I am just against bullets. OK a few bullets is a good thing, 2 for example. If you can’t hit the duck or the deer by the second shot you should stick to eating ice cream.
MMMM:
wow, great initiative!
i’d like to share another phenomenon that is emerging that i find to be related. there are a couple of sites i know about, namely help-x and workaway, which act as agencies to put together guests and hosts. check them out.
i started with help x last year, and am working with both this year, my first guest is already here.
the deal is as a host you describe your situation and needs, you can add pix and video to your post, and guests read your posts and those attracted email you through the site, and from then on directly.
in the emails all the specifics can be discussed, personal questions answered mutually, and arrangements for picking them up at the local station. ages of workers range from late teens to 60’s, with most between 23 and 30, most unskilled but a significant proportion also experienced professionals.
host posts range from relatively basic ‘help cleaning house’ or ‘taking care of aged relative’, to madly exotic ventures like restoring a medieval monastery to serve as temple to the religion of musical performance, (!), but most are small farms, as indicated in this initiative blogged here at FS.
in my case, folks are helping me with my donkey and horse, fencing, rockwalling, wood cutting and gathering, small building gigs and the like.
last year i had a couple, she scottish, he NZ, who came for a week and stayed a month. they were intelligent, thoughtful and willing.
you can strike your own deals with workers, mine is 4 hours a day in exchange for room and board, the guests pay for their own travel, but don’t spend a dime while staying.
i’m starting to realise there is a huge pool of fresh labour that will seek one out, and it’s a godsend, as local labour hired for the work would be 10€ an hour, and the attitudes to working with pleasure much less.
this is quite understandable, as there’s no novelty for a local teenager to come weedwhack here, it’s boredom incarnate!
(insert surly mumble).
whereas for someone to come from the wilds of suburban london, out here to the ‘civilisation’ of boonie italy, it’s a treat because it’s so different, and they can move on when and whither they arrange to individually.
obviously there’s lots of good faith, and a measure of risk involved. i am quite nervous when heading to pick them up!
maybe i’m lucky, but the people who have come through have been willing, industrious, and wonderful company. for the most part middle class (over?)-eddicated gap yearers, but also some who have slipped the moorings, and lead nomadic lives, where they work say canning tomatoes for a couple of months, and parlay that smallish saved sum into a year-long round the world working adventure, during which they may have learned cob building, installing grey water systems, yada yada, or ust had a good time yakking and swapping stories round a table full of fresh garden produce sometimes that they helped grow.
through help x i found someone to housewatch for 2 months and i was able to travel for the first time in 7 years, so to say this discovery is radically changing my life is no understatement.
the cameraderie is the best part, and the wonderfully enriching privilege of meeting so many hip, bright, clued in, extremely well-travelled young people.
this year i mentioned that i am a composer and instrument collector, and of course this has skewed the response, and i look forward now to a summer full of budding songwriters, suzuki piano teacher, flautists, guitarists and digital recording geeks as well as the mosaicist, treehouse builder, electricians etc.
ditto mentioning i’m a massage therapist to some applicants, now i have a girl who’s accepted in osteopathy college, giving herself a gap year, chinese med students, thai masseuse, acupuncturists, you tell what you like, they show up…
it’s wild, i love it to pieces, there are so many ‘kids’ of all ages who can’t find a career niche who are hitting the road and taking what they can gather from coincidence. (dylan?)
this is the future and i look forward to doing some guesting myself once i have this old farm in better shape, there is so much i can learn travelling in this way that will be useful to return with.
many americans, i had a guy email me from brazil saying he was ready to drop everything and buy his ticket as soon as i gave him the word…
i passed on that one, too desperate, and too much responsibility if it didn’t work out, the profile didn’t speak to me strongly enough to merit risk on that level.
have any here tapped into this kind of networking before?
22 March 2010, 4:40 am