Introducing Sand River Community Farm
A Farm Budget Request
Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
Today I will try to make this “Peasantry School Newsletter” a bit more concrete by pleading with you to part with a few of your dollars to sustain the work here at Sand River Community Farm.
At Sand River Community Farm, we long to recover our deeply human capacity for mutually sustaining relationships, both human to human, and human to all that is not human.
I was born into the owning class—comfortable suburban home, ivy league education, no college loans. My choice to pursue farming was always tempered by the fact that I also baked and sold bread—a significantly more profitable endeavor. I stopped farming for business in 2015 with a 50K construction loan for my new bakery facility, which, untethered from a farm business, paid that loan off in a year and a half. Once the pandemic arrived, I began offering the bread for no charge as well. By that point I had amassed 25K in savings. All through the early years of food gifting at Brush Brook Community Farm—an “experiment in agricultural gift economy”—I had that 25K buffer. I began to write about voluntary impoverishment back then and asked the neighbors, and the readers of the weekly newsletter, for a monthly stipend request. People chipped in to cover the Farm’s monthly budget every time we asked.
Finally, almost four years into the experiment, I have succeeded in getting my personal savings down to zero. Voluntary impoverishment, in order to do its work on me, had to get real. Autonomy is a mighty tough habit to kick. That 25K, along with a financial gift of 550K, became a plea called Sand River Community Farm—see the farm’s full vision and mission statement at the end of this email. I serve on the board of the nonprofit organization that will soon assume custodianship of the Farm, currently in my name. Gifting over the land title will be one more baby step towards leaving the owning class. The name “peasantry school” carries some of this longing. In Lewis Hyde’s important book, The Gift, he describes the devastating loss of the commons in sixteenth century Germany, as diverse local codes gave way to Roman law, which knew only private property.
The Peasant’s War [in Germany in 1525] was the same war that the American Indians had to fight with the Europeans, a war against the marketing of formerly inalienable properties. Whereas before a man could fish in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found there were individuals who claimed to be the owners of these commons. The basis of land tenure had shifted. The medieval serf had been almost the opposite of a property owner: the land had owned him.
Might our current trajectory of ecological self-annihilation be tempered a bit if we could remember how to be owned by the landscapes that sustain us? This longing sits at the heart of the work at Sand River Community Farm. Instead of declaring war, we try to break the twin spells of scarcity and private property by offering food as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. Rather than a sword and shield, we propose a generously laid table with no price tag. By refusing to defend itself against human exploitation, the landscape sings a love song of human redemption. The Farm simply attempts to follow suit, and I simply try to keep up with the Farm.
Over the past four years, I have found humans to be quite miraculous creatures once they’re given the conditions required for blossoming and bearing fruit.
My personal stipend of $500/month has been generously covered in full by folks who read this newsletter. But the remaining 8K in the Farm’s bank account will be gone by mid-winter. Some of you who receive this newsletter live in this town, and you’ll likely see me on your doorstep asking for a few dollars in the weeks ahead. Others live thousands of miles away and receive nourishment instead from these written stories.
Sand River Community Farm’s first Budget Request of $7500 will pay for major site improvements (water and power service to create a year-round kitchen and allow us to stop hauling drinking water from down the road) and winter butchering costs, ensuring that this food will continue to go out each week.
Would you consider making a financial gift to sustain the Farm?
An online gift will have no hidden fees—the service provided by Zeffy is designed for nonprofit organizations and relies upon voluntary contributions. All financial gifts toward the Farm Budget Request are tax deductible. From the bottom of the well here, thank you for your consideration. If you would rather mail a check, please make it out to Sand River Community Farm and mail it to the address at the bottom of this email. With great care, Adam
Vision and Mission
At Sand River Community Farm, we long to recover our deeply human capacity for mutually sustaining relationships, both human to human, and human to all that is not human. We grow and glean food which is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. Through practices of radical hospitality and intergenerational table fellowship, the Farm sparks a lively conversation to imagine how we might feed one another without buying and selling food.
Farm Story
Sand River Community Farm sits on a sandy hilltop above a lazy bend in the Ausable River. The Farm grows grass, vegetables and fruits, sheep, cattle and community. Long home to the Mohawk and Western Abenaki people, this unceded land was given to Matthew Adgate by the State of New York after the Revolutionary War and remained in the Adgate-Schermerhorn family until the last caretaker of that lineage, Henry Schermerhorn, died in the old farmhouse in 2004. The Farm sat quietly rewilding for seventeen years, until a single community member stepped forward and offered $500K of inherited family money to disentangle the Farm from the real estate market. This would be the first and last time the Farm would ever be sold.
The gift-giver, named Ava, entrusted Adam Wilson with the title with no strings attached except the request that he proceed as if he could be worthy of such trust—that he could be trustworthy. This is a surprisingly demanding task in our time. Being entrusted is very different from being entitled. Adam had been experimenting with gift-based, non-market community farming and feeding about thirty miles away in Vermont for a few years. That project, which he cofounded, was called Brush Brook Community Farm.
The enormous responsibility of being “entrusted” with land has informed the work at Sand River Community Farm—to create some sort of modern “commons.” Imaging a “commons” in a time where nearly every formerly-common-good and every formerly-neighborly-service has been turned into a commodity to be bought and sold is no small task. Changing the structure of the deed on an old Farm doesn’t magically flip a switch in our brains and hearts. Adam describes, “If I were to sell you a pound of lamb, I would be trafficking in the illusion that the animal’s body—a miraculous bundle of sunlight, soil and rainfall—was ‘mine.’ Once you handed me the requested number of dollars, it would become ‘yours.’ At some point I stopped being able to see it that way. My heart could no longer bear that story.”
Just a few generations ago everyone ate local food and almost everyone participated in that growing. If food wasn’t raised sustainably, there simply wouldn’t continue to be food. Sustainability wasn’t abstract back then, and that wasn’t that long ago. It’s not so much that a return to sustainably raised, local food will be “too expensive.” The payment this food asks is our attention—turning our gazes back toward a complex web of interspecies relationships that have been forsaken for the limitless and lifeless aisles of the grocery store. The story of more-of-everything-all-the-time went down easy for a while, but the heartburn is coming on fast. The devastating loss of local farmers runs in parallel with the breakdown of local communities, a deepening loneliness epidemic and the rapid deterioration of the planet’s capacity to sustain life.
How did human beings allow themselves to be reduced to consumers? How did we stay alive before we were consumers? How did we neighbor back then?
Sand River Community Farm offers no grand plan for re-working the food system or overthrowing “the market.” Rather, giving food as a gift invites us to encounter “the market” that lives within us, the one that suggests it would be safest to become self-reliant, autonomous, and, ultimately, alone. Remembering our capacity for mutually sustaining relationships seems to be, quite literally, an act of re-membering. At Sand River Community Farm, this intimate, conversational work begins by inviting the neighbors over for supper and serving the food family-style.
Having been honored to join in the thinking around Brush Brook Community Farm, I am both humbled and odd at how its spirit lives on with more hands joining together to share in another way of thinking about how we inhabit this earth.