The day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves.

Plexus: a garden refuse collage by Annie Bingham.

I encourage you to catch one of my mentors,

Dougald Hine

if he passes anywhere near your home this month, including an an event that Sam and I are organizing with him in Burlington, Vermont on Sunday 9/22. There is no charge for tickets, but, given the space limitations reservations are required. Read more HERE. For the full tour details, click below:

The Gifts in the Ruins

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Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I attempt to describe this Farm—at once a project, a plea and a prayer for humans—in a hundred different ways.  Here’s one of my favorites: this is a place where we practice for the day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves. 

I found those words during my first summer on this sandy hilltop, in conversation with a rough-voiced, leather-skinned man named Mike.  Hardened by his days and his trade, Mike came to the Farm as a moonlit concrete contractor.  It was hard to hear him working up the hill from the house and not walk up for a visit, which I did most evenings.  I love working folks, perhaps more than the average person.  I love unapologetic un-classiness.  Grit under the nails, a cigarette on the lips, and a swear word or two for emphasis.  I can’t pull it off myself—blame the ivy league degree and a monastic orientation—but I can admire.  And I can attempt to express that admiration in gesture and in language.

Still, I wondered what Mike would think of me, the proud new owner of one of the most valuable properties in town.  My stained, threadbare work pants and rusty old Honda hatchback made the plot a bit of a headscratcher, I imagined.  I carry an incongruous set of class markers.

One evening I shared a condensed version of the story with Mike.  Stopped selling anything on the first day of the pandemic, two years and change prior.  Before that, monthly feasts in the Town Hall.  During lockdown, a weekly soup and bread stand.  Neighbors of all sorts joined the grazing, planting, harvesting, cooking and serving.  A monthly budget request, covered by folks from near and far.  The landowner, tiring of the hubbub, urged me to push on.  No stored money.  This Farm was offered to me as a gift, half a million in one lump sum.  That gift included the $7K I would use to pay Mike’s final invoice. 

I must have sounded like the dream-catcher sort, or a religious fanatic, or something else utterly foreign to Mike.

He paused, looked up at me, and said, “It sounds like you all were creating a real community.  Those are so rare these days.”

If you’re lucky, someone might come along one day and hang your musty closet of conveniently-forgotten class prejudices out to dry in the sun.  In our many conversations, Mike described the decline of neighborly spirit in town over the course of his life, the way the churches used to be full on Sundays, the way the kids have lost their respect for hard work, for elders.  I started leaving packages of frozen beef on the front seat of Mike’s truck when he wasn’t looking.  It might be a stretch to say we were becoming friends.  Neighboring is a different dance than friend-making, a project driven by proximity rather than preference. 

A few weeks later, Mike had the concrete forms completed.  For the day of the big pour, he has called in some of the late teen and early twenty-something guys he oversees at his day job as a foreman on a concrete crew.  A couple of them arrive before Mike.  I can tell from the way they speak that they do indeed respect him, even if public deference has gone out of fashion.  Mike arrives and places the appropriate tools in their hands.  The concrete has to be moved into place quickly to ensure a smooth finish on the pad.

But the concrete truck is still a few miles out, so there is time for some leaning on shovels.  The crew has been working for weeks laying forms at a giant confinement chicken operation.  They can’t get the stink out of their clothes.  One of the guys asks if he can bring his girlfriend over to see the cows.  “She loves cows, but there aren’t so many around anymore.”  After a lull in the conversation, Mike says, “Adam here is going to start a school for old-fashioned farming.”  A dozen young eyes turn in my direction.  From his tone, I get the sense that Mike was glad to be associated with me.  I’m not sure what I am supposed to say next.

Eventually, I break the silence with this: “It’ll be a good thing if a few people still know how to farm without machines and chemicals on the day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves.” 

A long pause and a few cigarette puffs later, one of the young guys says, “I know what’s going to happen when the grocery stores have no food on the shelves.” Another pause. “Everyone’s going to pick up their guns.”

The boys nod and grunt in satisfied agreement.  I look over at Mike.  He’s looking at me.  He moves his head silently from side to side.  The concrete truck thunders up the drive, drawing the conversation to an abrupt end.

A year and some later I stop by Mike’s house with a Feast invitation in my hand.  I am surprised to find him at home on a weekday.  “I’m sick as a dog with Covid,” he tells me as we stand in the driveway in warm, early-October sunshine.  “But I’m glad you stopped by, because I have something that I’ve been meaning to bring over to you for months,” he says as he disappears into the house.  He returns with a quart jar of maple syrup.  “I made it this spring,” he says proudly.  “Your check last fall helped us with our winter bills,” he tells me.  I part ways with Mike and head home, awash in neighborly longing.

Before I met Mike, I was focused on training a team of oxen as a primary strategy for becoming useful to my neighbors on the day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves.  I scanned the countryside for old hay mowers and buck rakes serving as lawn ornaments.  But that moment in the driveway elevated the distinct possibility that antique agricultural technologies functioned alongside patterns of neighborly care and concern to sustain human life.  I began to see neighboring as one of the most essential sustainable farming practices.  Wendell Berry writes, “A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity.”¹

How will we act on the day the industrial supply chains inevitably fail to deliver on their fantastical promise of an unlimited life?  Will we build taller fences and gather our munitions?  Or set the table with everything we’ve got left and invite the whole neighborhood over for supper?

On that day we are likely to do whatever we practice now. 

A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration.  It reveals the human necessities and the human limits.  It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to one another.  It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well.

Neighboring simply isn’t a project of personal preference any more than it is an exclusively-human activity.  Neighboring amounts to a practice of attentive, life-sustaining restraint.

Two years have passed since I met Mike.  I have been humbled ongoingly by the discipline required to train steers to the yoke, and humbled by the courage it takes to knock on neighbor’s doors with a box of beef or a quart of soup with a Feast invitation in hand.  Most of the time I feel like I’m spreading myself thin and thus falling short on both fronts. 

Tigger and Maria, the Farm’s two hard-working Jersey cows, have raised a pair of stunning and well-matched bull calves this summer.  Later this month, I will bring them into the barn to begin halter training—my third attempt at breaking a pair.  At that point they will receive names. 

Last fall, I began the same process with that spring’s calves, named Tommy and Tiernan.  A couple of months in, I got the sense that my attention would be of greater service knocking on doors and writing a book, so I hung up their training yoke and let them back out to pasture.  All these months later, the steers still walk up to me and allow me to take them by the collar in the field.  I will slaughter Tommy and Tiernan next month, as it doesn’t make sense for the Farm to feed them through a second winter.  When their bodies come back from the butcher as steaks and hamburger, we will divide the frozen cuts into small boxes and begin knocking on doors. 

Again and again, the offer of a box of frozen beef as a gift elicits the same response from people of every class, age and political orientation.  “Surely someone else needs this more than I do.”  You simply won’t overhear that statement in the grocery store aisle. 

Gifts, and the relationships they engender, appear to awaken our capacity for village-mindedness.  Neighborhoods arise from a shared commitment to relational restraint.  Co-habitation conveys limits and responsibilities rather than rights and freedoms. 

Two summers ago, just before that concrete truck rumbled up the drive, Mike locked eyes with me and shook his head side to side, a silent refusal to nod along with a story of inevitable human self-concern. 

A healthy culture is “a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity.” But Wendell doesn’t stop there.

A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safeguards a human intelligence of the earth no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace.  The growth of such a culture was once a strong possibility in the farm communities of this country.  We now have only the sad remnants of those communities.  If we allow another generation to pass without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden the possibility now perishing with them, we will lose it altogether.  And then we will not only invoke calamity—we will deserve it.

How will we be on the day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves?  Will we fiercely defend our amassed securities or set the table with everything we’ve got left and invite the whole neighborhood over for supper?

If you’re lucky, you might find yourself trusted by a young steer who has traded the freedom to do as he pleases for the possibility of a shared, interspecies life.  You might find yourself trusted by a human neighbor in a similar way. 

But once you’ve been deemed trustworthy, you might begin to notice that the invitation rests heavily in your hands: to proceed as if they might not be wrong about you—they being the humans and nonhumans who live next door. 

Refusing to give up on ourselves and our fellow humans takes immense courage in our time. Finding such courage requires teachers, mentors, practitioners, neighbors.  I have been lucky enough to find my way into conversation with a few such people in my days, even some in human form.

Blessings to you and yours,

Adam

1. from The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.