Shelter In Place Report

Those of us who have jobs and safe homes and who are sheltering in place are having many similar experiences -- the news shares so many stories that we all understand. There is talk about fear and loss and grieving and increased communication between friends and family. Cabin fever, home schooling, recipes, exercise routines, zoom meetings, loneliness plus all the health workers who are working in unsafe conditions, getting sick, struggling to keep us all safe.  We have never done this before. It is Groundhog Day and unlimited Snow Days and Pandemic all rolled together.

But (and you knew there would be a "but") very little is reported from the front lines of the farmers. So here is your update from Northern Virginia.

March started out unusually warm, after a winter that was actually a long lead-up to spring.  So we carefully went out in to the fields a few weeks early and started to get some ground ready for seeds and plants.  It was way too early to put real plants in the ground, but the soil was warmer than it has ever been during those first weeks of March.  The new tractor got here (as you know) the first week of March and five days later we took her out for her first job (as you also know).  What you don't know yet is that the radish and turnip seeds came up within a week, with excellent germination, in straight and satisfyingly parallel rows. Before #42 came, the rows were relatively straight and mostly parallel -- as good as Carrie could get them with a push seeder, walking back and forth.  It took a few more weeks for the carrots to come up, but carrots are famously finicky and sometimes they never come up at all.  In a normal year, we would be starting to think about putting some carrots in the ground around the first week of April, if we decided to plant them at all in the spring. 

Which is to say that climate change is affecting the start dates of our planting, and in some ways it is exciting to be able to begin the season, slowly, calmly, gently and well before the hot weather is breathing on our heads.

And because it was not a real winter, but actually a long and early spring, we have unusual quantities of not-dead food in the fields.  Before the coronavirus became a motivating factor, we had already decided we would be able to continue our Winter CSA into the spring -- for the first time ever.  We have been feeding 100 families all winter and we offered to keep feeding them for a few more weeks. Little did we know that the benefit of having a safe and uncrowded place to "shop" would be just as important as having bok choy and kale and spinach. The other day many customers came to the CSA room, scurrying almost, looking like moles who had just come up for the first time. So many said "you are the first people we have seen since the last time we came to the farm!" Oh, that is sad.

The market situation is ever-changing and much depends on which organization is in charge of the market. Virginia in particular has been wrestling with the appropriate response. First they just closed the markets, and then they decided that we were like restaurants (not completely wrong as many people come to markets to snack and socialize) so they would limit the number of people allowed in the market to 10.  Everyone is encouraged to set up a system for ordering ahead of time so we can just do take-out.  We are sending letters to the Governor and other officials, trying to explain that Maryland and DC have made a much more logical choice in declaring farmers markets to be like grocery stores.

Meanwhile, we have continued our March schedule of going to market at Dupont Circle every other week, with some trepidation. We do all we can to protect our workers and the customers but there is a feeling of tension and anxiety at the market. It is completely warranted but if people are still going grocery shopping at regular stores, they certainly should be able to keep their distance at an outdoor market and get good food from farmers.

Yesterday I had to send a letter to a worker who is trying to cross state lines to get here  -- a letter for her to carry that declares her to be an essential worker in the world of food production. We will all be carrying these letters as we travel between the farms, or between home and farm for those who don't live here. So it is Groundhog Day and Snow Day and Pandemic plus something I don't even recognize -- living in a locked down state, needing to carry papers.

Every new worker who joins our crew needs to be quarantined, basically. They will work with us, but at an unprecedented distance.  Teaching someone to do a task but not being able to help them with our hands is a new kind of distance learning. Wiping down surfaces on a farm feels crazy, somehow.  We used to focus on food safety, and now that seems so easy.  Now we are focusing on avoiding an invisible virus that could kill someone. If you think about it too much, it can really make you anxious and grumpy.

But -- and you KNEW I was going to say this -- the spinach is so unbelievably vibrant and gorgeous that it is impossible to stay anxious and grumpy. You just have to remember to wallow in the beauty and appreciate the incredible level of privilege that comes with farming.  The privilege of continuing to work, of seeing people every day, of being part of so much unfolding green-ness (the cover crop is busting out all over, just exploding with deep color. It's not just green, it's some color that might be called Luscious Living Green.). The privilege of having a business that is essential. So many hard-working people don't have that.

And that is what is happening here. Plenty of worry balanced with plenty of joy. And plenty of food.

Thinking of all of you who are having to find joy in other ways, and hoping with all our hearts that you stay healthy.  Keep your distance and wash your hands and get outside.

Working From Home

If I never turned on the radio or opened a newspaper, I might not know that the whole world is different from what it was a month ago, or a week ago, or yesterday.  The outside world is behaving pretty normally, although spring is in second gear already and not looking back. This morning we all got out earlier than usual because Carrie is on a new schedule, splitting her work day with her wife, coordinating the child care. Her first priority was to spread compost so we can get the field ready for onions next week. My job was to get the compost turned in so the microbes can start jazzing up the soil and get going on chewing up the cover crop.

When the coronavirus news began to affect everyone's daily life, I could see right away that the economy was going to get trashed. There is no way to avoid it.  Our own personal first fear was that the farmers markets would close.  And the second fear is that people won't have any money to spend, so the CSA will wither. These were our personal concerns, but the fear goes much wider than that when you think about all the people who won't have an income.

It is impossible to know what the next months will bring, but I have come to think that farmers may be in the best position of everyone in society.  First of all, we haven't had to relocate our workplace. We are still working from home, working at home.  Second, our workplace is outdoors. Third, social distancing is pretty normal while we are at work.  There are probably few places that are safer than sitting in a tractor seat or kneeling in a spinach patch.

But the biggest reason we are lucky is that we are producing something truly essential. Potatoes, carrots, beans, lettuce. People need this stuff. Our job, no matter what, is to keep going.  In some ways, this crisis comes at a good time, seasonally. We have time to think about how to get the food to the people.  It might not be easy and it might not be the same as usual but people really do want food. Look at those supermarket shelves! It's nuts.  Many local farmers have been bombarded by requests for loads of meat, gallons of milk, crates of cheese.  My sister is all out of live chickens, for goodness sakes. People are really worried about their food security.

Because some of us are actually pretty vulnerable (Mom is our biggest worry), we are following all the instructions, keeping far away from everyone and doing a lot of handwashing and surface cleaning. Alissa has been fierce about telling us to pay attention and not take risks.  We have declared the greenhouse as a safe zone for my mother, which means that very few people are even allowed to go in there and only a few are allowed to work. 

We weren't sure whether people would really come to the farmers market last weekend, but we created a protocol that kept everyone's hands and breath away from the vegetables, and made the credit card process hands-free.  It turned out to be a very busy market. If the government continues to see farmers markets as essential, we will be ready.  The older folks (including me) are not allowed to go to market but we can keep doing the tractor work and washing the vegetables.

I have started to limit my news intake as it was beginning to fill me with dread.  Things will keep getting worse but the peas will sprout and the spring broccoli plants are luscious and vibrant. We are almost ready to put plants in the field. We just need to keep our distance and keep working.  We are super lucky to be farmers.  Who would have ever guessed that a crisis of this magnitude would arise, and that farming would end up being one of the safest jobs, while still statistically the second most dangerous job?

I have to go back out and get on a tractor. While I was sitting here in the Green Barn, Jon was replacing a hydraulic hose. Got to get this field ready for beets and carrots. People need food!

A Shiny Distraction

While most of our brains (speaking broadly, universally) are occupied with worrying about the novel coronavirus, some of us have a shiny distraction parked in the shed. Our timing may have been risky, now that we see that this may be a year of diminished income -- again, speaking universally.  So the coronavirus is linked to everything, since the economy and public health is linked to everything. But it still makes me happy to have this new tractor.

Last fall, while performing its normal duties, our 70-something year old Allis Chalmers G imploded. A rod came through the engine wall and poked a hole in the radiator.  This little tractor is a classic -- it weighs a little more than 1000 pounds, and it looks like an orange spider. We used it to drive over the beds and mark the rows so they would be the right distance apart for cultivating with the same tractor, and Carrie would then use a walk behind push seeder to put the radish seeds in the ground, following the markings. When we bought this tractor ten years ago, it was a big upgrade from just doing everything by hand. Ten years ago we got all the way up to the middle of the 20th century.

It didn't seem worth it to try to keep this old tractor going.  When she wanted to put the cultivators down to touch the ground, Carrie had to stand up from her seat and grasp the handle on the lever, clamp the handle tightly and push with all her strength, physically lowering the cultivators. To lift it again, she had to use the same arm to pull the weight of all that metal (with a lever, of course). No hydraulics, quite a lot of effort.

Of course we knew there must be something better out there in the world. I knew of one farmer friend who is all about the tools and the toys, so Jon and I took our one intentional day off last September and went to see Dave and his assortment of tractors.

We walked around his super tidy farm and talked about the mechanical projects he was working on. Dave is a former Navy guy, an airplane mechanic who retired and loved having a big garden so he decided to become an organic farmer. His good habits of finishing projects and cleaning up make his farm about the neatest and most intentional place we have ever seen. He doesn't seem to have clutter. He barely has weeds. But in his collection he didn't have any tractor capabilities that we don't already have.

"So, Dave, if you were going to buy a new cultivating tractor, what would you buy?"
"Well, there's this business I have been following for a few years. They are trying to design and produce a tractor for less than $20,000 so it can be accessible to farmers in developing countries. I think this company is worth knowing about.  Tilmor.  Look them up."

So we looked them up and learned that the tractor wasn't quite ready for sale. They were still fidgeting and redesigning. Hoped to have it on the market by November.  We brought our other G in from Loudoun and limped through the rest of the season.

Then this winter when we were in Little Rock at the annual sustainable ag conference (Jon just went to keep me company since we were on our way back from New Zealand), I bought Jon a special ticket to go to the trade show and told him he should go look around. He is the Procurement Specialist at the farm, whether he likes it or not.  I thought he should look around at the hand tools since that's where we usually find good stuff.

But he found the Tilmor tractor on display and he talked to the engineers who had worked on it. They talked for a long time. Then I got to go see it and talk to them too. Then we did something really uncharacteristic for Jon (REALLY) but quite normal for me and we decided to buy that tractor. And then we bought a lot of implements to go with it.  Then I sent pictures to Carrie and Ciara and everyone else. By the time we got up to our hotel room, my heart was pounding with totally unusual anxiety. It's the first new tractor I have ever bought in my life. The last person to buy a new tractor was my father, 40 years ago. Yikes.

A happy, if anxious, customer.

Skip ahead to early March. We had decided to go get the Tilmor ourselves since we had spent all this time and money on acquiring a big trailer.  Road trip! The guys in Little Rock had told us their business was near Pittsburgh so that seemed like it could be a one day trip. But when I checked the map, it was really much further away than he had said.

I wrote an email: "You said you were near Pittsburgh, but you are actually closer to Oberlin!"
Him: "I hope that's good?"
Me: "Well, it makes it into a two day trip instead of just one day."
Him: "Well, you can stay overnight with the family if you want. Or we can get you a hotel."

So we went to stay with the family. Why not? The salesperson/engineer had told us that we were going to be like family to the Tilmor folks since they would want to stay in touch and learn from our feedback. We had bought #42! There are only 41 other farms out there with this tractor right now.

We arrived after dark -- after missing the driveway the first time and having to make a U-Turn with that 18 foot trailer. Luckily the neighbors had a wonderfully wide driveway.

We drove down a long driveway -- the family has an organic farm and they grow lots of spelt and other organic grains.  Got out of the truck and walked up to the door with some small amount of trepidation since no one had come out to say "yes, you are at the right place! Welcome!"

The young man who came to the door, Lydell Steiner, reminded us both instantly of a combination of our nephew Jesse and our friend Paul Benton. He moved and talked like them -- when he sat on a kitchen stool, he folded his legs under himself and kneeled. Only people with a specific body type do that without even thinking.

He hadn't come to the door instantly because he was in charge of his two kids -- his wife had just left for a long visit with her sister in Brazil.  His kids stayed out of sight in another room while Lydell told us about how this tractor came to be, and about his family story.

It's a long story, but they are a Mennonite family with a history of creating equipment and manufacturing it and running multiple businesses. Lydell's father has 6 brothers and Lydell has many cousins. They recently sold off a big part of their business -- they created a heavy duty lawn tractor that mows steep hillsides and golf courses -- to Toro. It was just getting too big to feel like a family business anymore. They had 350 employees. But they negotiated as well as they could with Toro so that the employees would keep their jobs.  They moved the new Tilmor business to a new location.

The next morning we got a full tour of the new location, including meeting two uncles and the dad. People were welcoming and friendly and they totally knew we were coming.  Lydell showed Jon everything he would need to know to be able to assemble all the tools. Everything was labeled and packaged and ready to load. They are really experienced at getting all the details right.

While we were looking at all the dials and levers on the new tractor, there were people moving more equipment into the warehouse (they are still moving). One of the uncles backed a trailer through the door, with very little room on either side, at a speed that took our breath away.

Lydell drove the tractor onto our trailer and I had that feeling I remembered when they first handed me my new baby as we left the hospital. Wait, I have to take care of this now? You are just giving him to me?

On the road home.

On the long trip home, I gained a new appreciation for all the things that truckers have to think about as they go through towns or up and down mountains. We were studiously avoiding weigh stations (not that we were overweight but we just don't know anything about that system) so Jon had us on some small roads in Ohio. But the trip was uneventful and the trailer rolled along perfectly. I love it when the lights and the brakes work.

Many adjustments necessary for the initial use.

A few days ago Carrie planted the first seeds with the new tractor, sitting in the comfortable seat, moving a small lever to lift and lower the seeder. I told her she is going to get fat and soft now since she won't need those powerful biceps.

Doing the job, planting radishes.

No regrets yet, even though we have no clue whether there will be farmers markets open or whether people will continue to sign up for the CSA. This tractor will last for generations, way past the current crisis that is spreading through the world. There is nothing like having a shiny new machine
that will be ready to do the work. At some point, people will remember they want fresh vegetables and we will be equipped for the job.

An Unexpected Friendship

One hot day in the middle of June, I happened to notice this little empty house next to the hayfield. I was on a tractor raking some hay for baling. It was a two story farmhouse, tilted and tired looking, with a crooked enclosed front porch with plywood over the windows.  As soon as I saw it, my heart started to pound.  The lawn was overgrown, the fence row along the driveway was wild and bushy.  Jon would love it.

I drove the tractor straight through the field to the back yard of the owner, Paul Lowe.  I was 25 years old, tanned and sweaty in T shirt and shorts, but I didn’t stop to consider what I looked like. He was sitting on his back patio, watching me from under his straw hat, squinting into the sun.

He was a Humpty Dumpty – in his mid-50’s, a few inches over 5 feet tall, with a big tight round belly.  I knew that he worked for the water authority, drove a Chevy pick-up truck that was much too tall for him and in the afternoons he sat out on his back patio and drank beer and looked at his fields. 

He looked up at me from under his big bushy eyebrows, and he grinned, waiting. He knew who I was, but we had barely ever spoken to each other, maybe never.

"Hey, how you doing?"
"All right, how are you?"

“So, what’s that house over there?”

“It’s my house.”

“Does anybody live there?”

“No.  Plenty of people want to live there.  They ask me all the time.”

“I think I might want to live there.”

“Yeah?”

“Why does it look so crooked?”

“When they moved it, they got in too much of a hurry, and they dropped it.”

“Does it have any heat?”

“Wood stove.”

“I think I do want to live there.”

“I think that’ll work.”

Jon and I lived in the house for four happy years. Becoming friends with Paul Lowe was an unexpected bonus.  He was the son of a dairy farmer and a veteran of the Navy. He was a lifelong conservative and a Reagan supporter. Our political beliefs could not have been further apart, but we had both grown up on farms, we respected each other's capacity for work, and we enjoyed a good conversation.

Sitting in front of the TV after delivering the monthly rent in cash ($150), I learned lots about him. Years ago his wife had suddenly left him with three young children to raise alone and yet he did not speak of her with bitterness or anger.  His children were still on good terms with both their mother and their father. They visited Paul regularly.  He had worked hard all his life, as a dairy man, a butcher, and then for the county, never leaving the property except for his time in the Navy.  Paul Lowe had inherited thirty acres from his father and he was the master of his universe.  He looked forward to selling some day and retiring.

He knew he was sitting on a gold mine and he loved the feeling.   Finally an offer came in that he couldn’t refuse – $30,000 a month for the right to buy the property within a certain time. The developer’s ambition was to rezone it for “mixed use.”  If the rezoning failed and the developer gave up, Paul got to keep the money.  If the developer wanted to buy the farm, Paul would sell. 

The court denied the rezoning but the developer decided to buy the farm anyway and build houses instead. The developer expected that they would sell for a million dollars each.  Less than a mile from Tysons Corner, the location would sell itself.  Paul Lowe probably got about two million dollars and he was happy.

He bought a five acre mini-estate on the other end of the county, far away from the traffic and intensity of Tysons Corner and he hired a custom builder. The five acres came with a barn and a pond.  It was the barn that decided him.  He filled it with the tractors and equipment that he couldn’t leave behind.  It tickled him to have a little barn.

He built a mansion with a six-truck garage – complete with a full shower -- for his son-in-law’s collection of vehicles, and he put in a gigantic kitchen for his daughter.  For himself he designed in a small room for his recliner and his TV, right next to the kitchen. The house had a grand entryway with a cathedral ceiling and extra rooms upstairs and down, but Paul felt at home in his little cave. The rest of the house was his daughter's to manage.

One day while we sat in his dark little TV room, he took a long time telling a story about mowing his lawn because he kept stopping – his eyes crinkled shut and his belly jiggled as he wheezed and laughed, remembering getting the mower stuck at the edge of the pond.  He had been trying to push it out when a local workman stopped to help him.  They eventually managed to get unstuck, and the Good Samaritan said “You’d better hurry up and finish mowing this lawn before your boss gets home!”  Paul got a huge kick out of that story.

A friend of Paul’s suggested he invest the rest of his money in his building supplies business, and he did, but the business went bankrupt and the money was lost.

And here is where things began to unravel.  It just crushed Paul to have lost his children’s inheritance.  His kids continued to work and they did not fault him for the loss, but he got depressed.  He sat in his recliner in his dark cave, didn’t go anywhere, watched TV, and felt bad.  Then Paul got kidney disease and had to go on dialysis three times a week. 

When his grandson was away at summer camp for a week, Paul took his shotgun in the middle of the day and went behind the garage and killed himself.  He didn’t want to leave a mess indoors for his daughter and he didn’t want to frighten his grandson. 

He died of not knowing what to do with disappointment and despair.  He did not have a toolkit for that. He had some good luck and some bad luck, and he didn’t like being an ailing, uncomfortable, unhappy old man.  His candle burned brightly and then sputtered and he blew it out.

Dialysis was probably what really pushed him to take his life, and he isn't alone or even irrational in that decision. But it was hard on his daughter and his grandson, that choice he made.  Again, no one blamed him and no one was angry with him for very long. There are other ways his story could have ended (if he hadn't had a gun, if he hadn't been so lonely, if he hadn't felt so bad about the money). I sat in the little chapel, looking at his little body in the casket, more dressed up than I had ever seen him in life, and I told him I would not forget him. I will always remember that laugh that took over his entire body from his eyes down through his round belly, as he leaned forward in his chair and grabbed his knees, wheezing with joy.

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