Gift. Economy. Farming.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

My name is Adam. I pen these newsletters from an old Farm on unceded Mohawk and Western Abenaki hunting, fishing and foraging ground. The food from this place, now called Sand River Community Farm, is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. This food-gifting practice animates the work here. Sand River Community Farm offers no grand plan for re-working the food system or overthrowing “the market.”  Rather, offering food as a gift invites us to encounter “the market” that lives within us, to become acquainted with it’s fearful, grasping and de-animating ways.

I stopped selling food on the first day of the Pandemic, and this ongoing refusal has led to some grand adventures. Through year’s end I will be attempting to complete a first draft of the manuscript for a book of those stories and learnings, some humbling and painful, others that sparkle so bright they still have me squinting years later as I labor to write them down. It seems an enormous responsibility to do right by the stories, each one tremblingly alive and thereby vulnerable to being harmed.

All of my regular posts here at The Peasantry School are sent out to all subscribers as a gift. However, as I work out sections of the book I will occasionally invite a smaller subset of you all to read and offer comments, critiques, suggestions, reflections. So, when you see the “paywall” below, you can select-in by replying with the message, “I would like to request a gift subscription” or by clicking on the button to become a financial patron of my work.

My labors are sustained by the conversations that arise from the stories, as well as by personal financial gifts. My $500/month stipend request has already been covered by a group of ninety-odd readers, so any additional financial gifts will go into a fund for the possibility of an in-person school here. On to the book preview.

Gift. Economy. Farming.

Longing for home in a displaced time.

There seems to be something missing from the urgent and necessary debates about sustainable agriculture: they forget that the word agriculture has two parts.  The first means field.  The second isn’t quite as easy to define.  This book will concern itself with the fact that we have great difficulty defining the word culture, no less imagining a healthy or sustainable one.  This book will go looking for the nearly-extinct work of making human culture—the sustainable farming practice left for dead along the side of the widening highway of modernity.