Wrapping it up

During the summer, the weeks and months become a blur: the picking never ends; we pack boxes twice a week; inexorable nature waits until winter to let up and hibernate.  While many of you mourn the passing of fresh, tender produce, we as farmers take a moment to exhale, reflect, and celebrate.  We have weathered the threatening storms, hefted the 10000 bushels, navigated the normal unpredictable eventualities.  The process is simple yet mysterious, grueling yet beautiful, and it is time to prepare for the next go-round.

We get here to the end by virtue of grace and generosity.  We succumb to the finality with peace and plenty.  It is a wonderful year indeed when we approach winter with bountiful provisions: the squash is piled high; the garlic is both stored and planted again; the onions and sweet potatoes are prepared to provide for months to come; the parsnips and carrots reside in the soil’s protective embrace; and the hardy greens welcome frozen nights to come.  For this, for being here to give thanks for our continued nourishment, we count ourselves blessed indeed.

Thanks for choosing to know your farmer.  Thanks for believing that such knowledge matters.  Thanks for the work that you have put in, be it weeding, picking, transporting, planning, washing, chopping, cooking, praying, forgiving.  Thanks for sharing in the joy of admiring, smelling, tasting, indulging.  Together we work, and together we strive.

I truly believe in Community Supported Consuming.  Much of what plagues our globalized world is our distance from what feeds us.  When we don’t know the hands and backs that break and bend for us, we can make of them an abstraction or, worse, forget they even exist.  If our luxury is the product of exploited and suffering people, what kind of luxury is this?  When we live too far from the places on earth that are cultivated to satisfy our desires, we lose sight of the nature of the demands we make.  If our sustenance results in poisoned waters and desecrated skies, what is being sustained?  We are made more whole by being more wholly aware of our getting and spending, by recognizing the connections that bind us to the interconnected world we live in, by appreciating what makes us belong to each other and this planet.

Although it might be more convenient to be a bystander, to consume with less consciousness and more “freedom,” to let others concern themselves with these acts of creation, the path of participation is greatly gratifying.  There is a plainly palpable pleasure—an enlivening intimacy—in knowing the food, in knowing how and where it comes from, in plunging our thirsty roots down deep into the rich network of soil that gives us life.

A journalist we met through the Healthy Foods, Local Farms conference wrote this piece, in which our little family makes an appearance, about our neighbor and friend Wendell Berry.

http://grist.org/food/faith-and-fears-in-wendell-berrys-kentucky/

Thanks again, and keep up the good work.