Couples Farming
I've met more than one person who thinks Rich and I are crazy for working, living, raising hellions, and sharing one bathroom together. But that's the only way we have existed since crossing paths...morning to sunset with each other. Like stars, we collided at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture where we were both hired as livestock apprentices in Pocantico Hills, New York. Freshly graduated, the only way I could afford to live in that spectacular area on an apprentice's salary was to bunk up in the apprentice house: a magnificent two-story clown car full of some great personalities. The place was energized by young folks drawn to learning how to work with the land...the veggie apprentices socking away their soil-laden roots, tubers and organic tempeh in our group fridge, us livestockers leaving our boots on the front porch for the sake of everyone. Rich commuted from his childhood home for a bit. But within a short time, my resistance to getting into a long-term relationship melted away and we found ourselves at inevitable Ikea shopping for a queen-sized bed to replace my twin. I remember my sister verbally gripping me by the shoulders over the phone: you're buying a bed with him??
Anyhow, it seemed more like common sense than anything. We would wake up together, scramble the eggs we had harvested from the pastured hens, and walk down the Rockefeller Preserve Trail to start morning chores together. Hours later, back we'd amble down the path to walk off a day of physical bliss reaped by caring for a myriad of pastured livestock in a most bucolic place. We'd close out most nights on the front porch with the veg heads, their instruments and almost always a shared bottle of something. I'm not sure you have a choice but to get to know someone intimately and quickly when working in the elements together, at some points fully exerting all that you have in you, and watching life and inevitable death throughout a season. I still feel so bound to that crew. In fact, the farmer who taught us so much at Stone Barns came out to marry us here in Dayton way back when. Without a doubt, I fell for two things pretty hard during those years: a new way of life I had discovered in farming and Rich.
Cornell's Ag School accepted me to their program and following my best judgment, I decided to enroll and deepen my academic understanding of this new field. Rich moved to Ithaca with me in January, rather than taking a ranching position out in outrageously gorgeous Montana...a true testament of his love. We moved into a very low budget apartment together in a country hamlet of sorts, north of campus. Rich and I ventured to start a small veggie operation on borrowed land nearby as I waited for the fall semester to begin. With hardly any money to speak of, we bootstrapped a germination set up together in our bedroom...yes our bedroom. We started trays upon trays of seeds for spring planting and made some cash on the side working market for the farmer who was to lend us land. As it turns out the transplants and seeds we sowed were trampled by the farmer's cattle whom he said were 'well fenced in'.
With that investment and dream sunk, I picked up work at a vegan deli and grocery and Rich sought out work on various small farm operations. It was meant to be. Rich and I both worked for a fantastic artist and shiitake mushroom guru who became a good friend of ours. Then Rich landed a full-time position at one of the first and truest organic vegetable farms nestled in the gorges of the Finger Lakes. We owe any green thumb success to the incredible couple who ran that farm and allowed us to move into the converted barn apartment there.
As much as school fed my bookworm appetite for studying soil microbes and writing, I yearned for field days with Rich. Increasingly, I felt that I was unfairly taking up space in the classroom. Every day, I couldn't wait to get back to the apartment to hear about his day on the farm. It became clear within that first semester that applied learning working with my hands was way more important to me, rather than three more years in the books. I was not interested in research or corporate agriculture, but rather in spending my time with Rich, figuring out how to make a life for ourselves farming. And so I weasled my way into a full-time position working side-by-side with him once again, learning from some of the best how to grow carrots in clay. We got married while working there, leaving during strawberry season (of all times...sorry Lou and Robin) to tie the knot in my parents' backyard. While living out there, we also adopted our farm dog Mel, who has followed us all the way to Foxhole.
After a few seasons on the farm, we heard a farm manager was wanted to start an operation right on the shores of Lake Huron in a tiny town hallowed in my family. Somehow we convinced this wild venture capitalist to hire two farm managers. So, we packed up that Ikea bed once again and I transplanted Rich to the midwest...where he was soon to fall for the culture of the heartland :). Growing an operation from scratch was incredibly fortuitous for us. Here was an opportunity to put our ideas to the test and to spread our wings...and all without burdening our own finances. I can't describe how much energy our brains and bodies put into this place...Day after day waking together with coffeed car rides to the farm. We first built, then managed acres of vegetables, hoop houses, pastured broiler chickens and pigs, and an eggmobile squawking with hundreds of layer hens. Like the synchronicity of the right and left hands, we learned to coordinate with each other until it became like muscle memory. But this didn't come without tense car rides home, having pushed ourselves to our limits with work and both stuck in our respective strong-willed ideas of how to steer the ship.
Proud of what we had spent years to create at that place, but also newly pregnant, we felt compelled to move closer to family and to a place where we could eventually realize our goal of finding land. And for maybe the last time, I followed an opportunity that led me away from daily life with Rich. I took a job managing a farm and which got us to Dayton, all the while with a growing baby May in utero, who was really testing the limits of my Levi's. Rich found work with one of the best construction companies in the city, where he would pick up priceless skills. We spent whole days apart from each other, a rather foreign experience for us and reconvened at my folks house, where we would be for a year.
Just as with my short-lived enrollment at Cornell, this new job was fated to end sooner than I could have guessed. Riddled with dysfunction and stress, too much computer work for my taste and eventually days spent apart from baby May, pumping in my office, I was exhausted by the time I got home to my little family of three in my parents' basement. Push came to shove and I put in my notice. Although we were down a paycheck and still looking for land, being home with May to welcome Rich after a day of work felt one step closer to the right way of life.
As the story goes, we eventually landed at our current home here in Brookville...this single-story farmhouse laced with oak trim, thirty acres under our care, our little girl, the dog and the two of us. And guess what bed we slept in that first year on the farm? It was that same old Ikea bed we went in on together, at a time when owning a farm of our own seemed lightyears out of our reach.
How do we do it? Rich and I learned more than methodology from the couple who gave us our green thumbs in the Fingerlakes. We learned vicariously through them that a two-man team survives a lifetime spent farming together by division of labor. They knew their respective domains of the business and found a way to put their pieces of the puzzle together, completing a beautiful picture. To see two visionaries play off of each other's creativity, respecting each other for their strong suits and knowing when to get out of the way...it was most remarkable and influential for us. I will say that even the best of the best don't always find their harmony. Recurrent comic relief on longer field days came from their disagreement of kale bunch size. You learned to bunch more generously when Lou was in the field...and lighter for Robin :).
Day and night, work and play, personal and professional...it is complex and rich and it breaks all the rules of business to do this together. But when your affection for each other is strong enough that you can find yourself seven years into happily falling asleep next to each other in that same old, four-times-broken-down-and-rebuilt Ikea bed, you know you've got a good case for breaking the rules.
Full disclosure: we DID get a new bed during our first year on the farm ;) (Thanks Mama Wickham)