Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [58]
Farming is not for everybody; increasingly, it’s hardly for anybody. Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the life’s work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break. The loss of a farm is a darkness leading to some of life’s bitterest ends. Keeping one, on the other hand, may mean also working in a factory at the end of a long daily drive, behind and ahead of the everyday work of farming.
Wherever farms are still living, it’s due to some combination of luck, courage, and adaptability. In my home state, Kentucky, our agriculture is known for two nonedible commodities: tobacco and racehorses. The latter is a highly capitalized industry that spreads little of its wealth into the small family farm; the former was the small farm’s bottom dollar, until the bottom dropped out. In my lifetime Kentucky farmers have mostly had the options of going broke, or going six ways to Sunday for the sake of staying solvent. I know former tobacco growers who now raise certified organic gourmet mushrooms, bison steaks, or asparagus and fancy salad greens for restaurants. On the bluegrass that famously nourished Man o’ War and Secretariat, more modest enterprises with names like “Hard Times Farm” and “Mother Hubbard’s” are now raising pasture-fed beef, pork, lamb, and turkeys. Kentucky farms produce flowers, garlic, organic berries and vegetables, emu and ostrich products, catfish, and rainbow trout. Right off the Paris Pike, a country lane I drove a hundred times in my teenage years, a farmer named Sue now grows freshwater shrimp.
If we could have imagined this when I was in high school, that our county’s fields might someday harbor prawn ponds and shiitakes, I suppose we would have laughed our heads off. The first time I went to a party where “Kentucky caviar” was served, I suspected a trick (as in “Rocky Mountain oyster”). It wasn’t; it was Louisville-grown fish eggs. Innovative cottage industries are life and death for these farmlands. Small, pioneering agricultural ventures are the scene of more hard work, risk-taking, and creative management than most people imagine.
Among other obstacles, these farmers have to contend with a national press that is quick to pronounce them dead. Diversified food-producing farms on the outskirts of cities are actually the fastest-growing sector of U.S. agriculture. The small farm is at the moment very busy thinking its way out of a box, working like mad to protect the goodness and food security of a largely ungrateful nation.
These producers can’t survive by catering only to the upscale market, either. The majority of farmers’ market customers are people of ordinary means, and low-income households are not necessarily excluded. An urban area in eastern Tennessee has a vegetable equivalent of a bookmobile, allowing regional farmers to get produce into neighborhoods whose only other food-purchasing option might be a liquor store. Though many eligible mothers may not know it, the U.S. nutritional assistance program for women with infants and children (WIC) gives coupons redeemable at farmers’ markets to more than 2.5 million participants in forty-four states.
Likewise, the Seniors Farmers Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP) awards grants to forty states and numerous Indian tribal governments to help low-income seniors buy locally grown fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Citizen-led programs from California to New York are linking small farmers with school lunch programs and food banks.
Even so, a perception of organic food as an elite privilege is a considerable obstacle to the farmer growing food for middle-income customers