We all know about celebrity chefs and big-name attorneys and famous entertainers. People get famous, and their names become known to those of us who know nothing about real life in the courtroom or what it is like to star in a movie. We like knowing about these famous people. I might put politicians in a different category, but their lives also create a buzz. Not just because of what they do, but because of who they are.
Maybe about 20 years ago or so, there started to be a category of celebrity farmers, mostly only known to other farmers. When farming started to be part of a movement, and not just a way to earn a living and produce food, some farmers started to become spokespeople for the movement. Like all celebrities, they were mostly self-appointed, and they had a certain charisma. The more famous ones were connected to well-known chefs or they lived in California where fame is in the water.
There are many paths to celebrity farmerdom. You can write a book that gets noticed, you can be written about in a book that non-farmers read, you can be a big personality on the conference circuit, you can create and replicate a new and better way of doing something, or – in our case – you can just keep doing the same thing for so long that it starts to seem noteworthy.
My mom and I are a small scale, local version of celebrity farmers. My mom is more famous, and rightly so. She is 88 and has been a role model for more than half of that time. She has been speaking publicly and serving on boards for years and years. I have had a quieter level of exposure, which is just fine. But in the last 30 years or so, I have lost my anxiety over public speaking – it always helps to speak about topics that I know more about than the audience does.
A couple of months ago, I got an unusual phone call from Jacques Haeringer, the present owner and overlord of Chez Francois. Like me, he is a second-generation owner/operator of a local business. His parents started their restaurant in 1954. My parents started farming in 1962. Jacques is about ten years older than I am, so we are running sort of parallel lives. We have the same job, in different realms. We are linked by our connection to good vegetables.
He called because he had figured out that he wanted me to be the featured speaker at a farm-to-table dinner that he was hosting at Chez Francois, between his two gardens. He was all excited about it – the long table, the community feeling, eating outside – and he needed a farmer to give the whole experience some validity. His event planner had just seen our website and watched the video and she thought I would be the perfect representative of sustainable agriculture and local farming. They said they would give me dinner and I could bring a guest.
I said yes, thinking that there would be no conflicts on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of May. As it turned out, I was double booked on that day, but I had said I would do the Chez Francois thing, so I had to make that my priority. I did not fret about what I was going to say. I knew I had much more material than anyone really wanted to hear.
Jon and I arrived on time for the “run of show” conversation, and I watched Jacques splutter and complain about the way things were unfolding. He needed to watch over the main course as it was coming out of the kitchen and he thought the timing of the speeches was not going to work. But he also gave Jon and me a tour of his garden because that has been his personal project for the last decade or so.
Jacques is a confident, serious business owner and chef and he can choose everything about his life, pretty much. However, he can’t do anything about the placement of his septic field – which has to be huge because he runs a very busy restaurant with so much cooking and dishwashing – the septic field takes up the sunniest, most level and prime piece of his expensive Great Falls property. So the gardens are on either side of the grassy space that covers the septic field, and they are on slopes and in the shade. Still, they give him great satisfaction and he loves to show them off. (The long table was set up right on top of that septic field, in full sun.)
I was introduced before the salad course and I got up and talked about being in business for a long time, growing and changing over the years, and about how the people who support our farm the most are our CSA customers who pay for their vegetables many months in advance. I told them that I had picked the salad myself, because Jacques asked me for salad. Luckily, the salad was delicious, with an excellent dressing.
It was about five minutes of talking with a faulty microphone while people were eating, it was outdoors, and it was hard to be heard. It didn’t matter what I said, really. I was just being a farmer while everyone ate fancy French food in the sun. I had no illusions that anyone was listening particularly carefully, and it didn’t matter. It was a lovely event, the food was extremely nicely prepared, and the wine was excellent. Jon and I don’t know anything about wine, but this wine tasted so “smooth” (Jon’s word) and we both drank it happily. We had unexpectedly interesting conversations with rich foodies.
This is a small scale, local version of celebrity. We ate a meal that cost others $275/plate, we met nice people, and we did our part to educate the public just a tiny bit more about the value of maintaining local farms. Some people got out their phones and started to figure out how to order a CSA share on the spot. This is about as famous as I need to be as a farmer.
The flowers came from the farm. I was supposed to talk about them, but I forgot. There are kale blossoms and wheat grass and bachelor buttons and flowers from Anna's garden and roses from our yard.
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