Real Farm Road Trip Across the Southeast

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            I recently went on road trip to visit small to medium sized, chemical-free farms around the Southeast for research on of my company’s upcoming projects.  Before I embarked on this two week, mind-warping journey,  I would have told you I was a permaculture designer.  My definition of permaculture is analyzing a landscape’s inherent features and using them, with the aid of appropriate technology, to create a biologically synchronous system that meets the needs of the land, and the needs of the client; be it crop production, wildlife habitat, livestock management, fruit orchards, etc…. If we put the needs of the land first before the simple needs of a human, we find that the end result will yield more food, less work, and decreasing annual costs.  However, after meeting with many small chemical-free farmers, beekeepers, livestock managers and meat producers, as well as heads of institutes and restaurant professionals, I very soon realized permaculture alone would never cut it in regards to growing food sustainably or regeneratively, anywhere.  In fact almost ALL the indigenous & ancient cultural practices, as well as the relatively modern systems like the various organic movements, biodynamics, holistic systems, permaculture, etc… won’t cut it alone.  Every farmer I visited, from temperate jungles to sandy coasts, used drastically different methods with sound reasoning behind the decisions they had made on their farm.  In fact, every chemical-free/sustainable/regenerative farmer and small producer I met with was farming or producing the ‘right way’, even though the ways they managed their farms were drastically different. 

              In order to avoid debate of infinite length, we shall assume the ‘right way’ of farming is that which tries to best mimic the inputs, interactions and behaviors of a self-sustaining, natural ecosystem.  All of the nutrients taken from the soil in every head of lettuce or pumpkin harvested must be replaced, and all of the conditions changed (like compacting the soil with a tractor, introducing different microbes by growing different vegetable species, etc…) must be accounted for or remediated.  At a minimum, the methods utilized to consider these many elements are environmentally sustainable, and ideally in some cases, are regenerative.  It’s nothing new; it’s a lot like the kind of farming the poorer parts of this country practiced successfully for hundreds of years.

              If you think the farmers I visited are a bunch of hippies living off the land (and government), you would be dead wrong.  The people I interviewed ranged from soft-spoken fathers to doctorate-holding grandmothers, from radical & educated hillbillies to computer engineers with young families.  The political spectrum ranged from Trump-forever’s to Biden-Amen’s and even one former Obama campaigner who currently converted to a Trump supporter.  Personally I am not a loyal Republican or Democrat, and I harbor no guilt in switching sides if a candidate provides support to real farmers.  ‘Real farmers’ are the individuals who run small to medium sized farms and livestock operations, as well as beekeepers. They practice agriculture in a way that best harmonizes with nature and produce ‘real’ food that actually nourishes are bodies with the nutrients they are ‘supposed’ to.  Besides producing proper food that God & evolution designed for us, they do so while increasing biodiversity and building rural communities by utilizing specialized skills requiring broad knowledge domains. 

          I showed up on Ernie’s farm without notice.  NEVER just ‘show up’ on a farm without giving a farmer a head’s up - there are many reasons for this (including your own safety) but mostly it has to do with the farmer being extremely busy during daylight hours.  I waited on Ernie’s beautiful TN mountain hilltop orchard, surveying the vallies of peach and apple trees below.  A large mess of dogs approached me and started growling.  The rumbling of an UTV began to grow louder as Ernie came over the apex of the hill.  I could see Ernie looked to be in his 80’s, but I could really see Ernie was not at all happy a stranger had just showed up on his property.  Before I could introduce myself and explain why I was there, he grabbed a peach from the back of his UTV and said ‘Do you see that?  Look at that!’  The peach had crescent moon shaped imprints all over it, like someone had dug their fingernails in all over the peach.  Before I could ask why the peaches were in such a state he yelled ‘What do you want?’  I quickly yelled, over the loud UTV engine, that I was interviewing small, chemical-free farmers from around the South.  He looked at me and started laughing and said ‘Honey, you ain’t gonna grow no peaches  or apples worth a damn in the South without chemicals’.  

            I cringed because I had read the description of the orchards in a local newsletter of being a ‘sustainable orchard’.  I didn’t want to get into a heated, philosophical debate about the use of chemicals in agriculture and suddenly I noticed a Conservative flag waiving in the wind on his home from the corner of my eye.  He then abruptly asked me, ‘Child, you know what is going on right now in California?’  Intrigued, I gambled with ‘You mean, the fires?’  He responded, ‘60% of all the produce in this great country of ours comes from San Joaquin Valley.  That fire ain’t gonna stop.  It’s coming here.  I give it 10-15 years before all hell breaks loose.’  

             Obviously, I had to press on.  ‘What do you think the solution is?’  He paused, looked me dead in the eye, and said ‘We have got to vote out every single Republican in the Senate.  And take ‘em out of the Congress too!  They refuse to do anything to deal with climate and it is gonna be the end of us’.

             My mind literally exploded.  Here I was assuming a whole bunch of characteristics about this man that fit the hateful stereotype the media associates with the Conservative flag, and trying to fit him into a certain category.  Turns out he was a highly educated man, whom had a college degree in landscape architecture, and was only using chemicals in the smallest quantities possible in order to even churn out a meager living.  But chemicals are not what ruined his peach crop.  That was climate.

           I met with another TN farmer, John, in North Florida.  He watched his father introduce chemicals onto parts of their family farm.  When he was a young man he developed a successful nursery business selling plants he grew in a potting mix he was able to make using farm by-products and compost.  After lots of hard work, he was finally making a bit of money selling his beautiful and vibrant plants.  But then TN passed a law requiring him to spend money on potting soil chemicals that he did not need.  It changed the entire system he had developed and that is when he ‘woke up’ to the damage the government, in conjunction with Big Money interests, can wreak on the small business owner.  He began to explore the organic movement more and came to realize the methods conventional, Big Ag farms were using were unethical.  He then met his wife, Sheila, a garden designer from Oregon, and they pooled their retirement money together to create a ‘real farm experience’ by managing a U-pick blueberry farm in Florida.

            But the dream of the U-pick blueberry patch quickly turned sour for completely unexpected reasons.  They were hesitant to discuss it at first but the pain just poured out of them after I pried a little.  ‘We asked on our website that parents please visit before bringing their children so that we could go over some of the ground rules…we began receiving nasty emails and phone calls from parents, whom had never visited our farm, about our supposed anti-child policy.  We aren’t anti-child!  We just don’t know how to ask them to please not destroy our farm…’.  I was a bit confused so I asked her to elaborate.  John had no problem discussing the past occurrences.  

            John felt as if parents dumped their kids onto their U-pick blueberry farm as some kind of outdoor daycare center.  Many children were wonderful and respectful, but many also damaged equipment, killed new crop seedlings and broke things in their office-home when they let them use their toilet.  A pair of 17 year old boys bashed in a row of productive, healthy blueberry bushes with their empty buckets as the parents watched, completely un-phased, their children destroying and disrespecting the means of someone’s living.  How can you ask children to behave well if their parents do not know even recognize when they are behaving poorly?  Many of their customers would visit multiple times throughout the year, so Shiela thought that much of the drama with first-time families could be avoided by educating the parents beforehand on the ground rules.  John seemed to lean more towards shotgun scare tactics.  She politely posted the request on her website for a couple weeks and for that they received ugly and hateful emails and phone calls for months.

         John and Ernie are at polar-opposite ends of the political spectrum.  But both the staunch Democrat and avid Republican agree that American agriculture is in a state of crisis.  They both have had the standards of government and Big Industry force them into situations where they are forced to use unnatural products or methods that end up resulting in a more poisoned, less nutrient-rich and overall, poorer, product.  The lack of financial and government support for real farmers is almost as shocking as some people’s lack of respect for their farms.

             Societal shifts and changes in technology introduced in 1920’s and amplified by the introduction of the tractor in  1940’s led to a severe decline in America’s farming population(3).  Hundreds of thousands of family farms, which had been using sustainable and self-sufficient methods and whose success was mainly regulated by Mother Nature, were forced to compete by using tractors, agricultural chemicals, and genetically modified crops or get out of the game.  These new technologies created substantially larger yields, which put American farmers into a type of arms race, with the remaining farmers becoming dependent on buying more agricultural chemicals and heavy machinery to manage their ever-expanding large tracts of farmland, pushing small and poor farmers out.  These technological ‘cheats’, used over the short span of the past 70-80 years, have resulted in 7.5% of all American farmers now controlling 80% of total American agricultural value(3).  These ‘cheats’ have led humans to expect large crop yields, and in response food prices have fallen so that now, it is economic suicide to return to the type of farming that supported human civilization for thousands of years.

            The South was still heavily rural up until WWII, and could not provide career options in industry or business for citizens(4).  Many pre-WWII Southerners were poor white and black farmers, renting land or sharecropping via wealthy, white landowners.  By the 1950’s, the majority of Southern farmers could not afford to keep up with the massive transition to large-scale agriculture that had been taking place for decades.  It was impossible for most to even purchase a tractor, let alone meet the new market conditions. Wealthy landowners welcomed the introduction of large-scale mechanization and chemical fertilizers, leaving thousands of farmers that had been making a living by renting land or sharecropping with no land to farm, or nothing at all.

Real farmers watched as the wealthy business men, backed by government programs and an army of early Big Ag’s research scientists, bought up their land and forced them out of the market.  And the valuable skill sets that a farmer develops, as well as specialized knowledge passed down for generations, were looked down upon by those in the cities and universities.  Excluding a small minority of wealthy, white landowners, as recently as sixty years ago, thousands of black and white Southern families were robbed of both their financial and cultural wealth-unable to pass down anything to future generations.  Accordingly, the USDA’s Economic Research Service, recently found non-metro counties with the highest incidences of poverty to be mainly concentrated in the South2.  It is easy to see how Sothern, rural Americans began to build a deep distrust of government due to these complex factors being played out over a relatively rapid time period.

            Mary actually prefers to live on the lower-income side of her community.  She is a master beekeeper, and sells honey and medicinal salves/tinctures she grows and produces herself.  She lit up when discussing her neighbors.  ‘Most of them are older, but everyone’s yard is FULL of different, native plants that my bees just LOVE!  Nobody around here wants to waste money on those boring, landscaping ‘stock’ plants you see in everywhere nowadays.  So people have taken care of and continued to propagate plants native to this region that are now considered unique but require the least amount of maintenance.’  

              She has been featured in magazines and taught classes due to her incredibly vast knowledge of beekeeping.  But beekeeping is very time intensive and can get expensive, so her costs and time spent beekeeping don’t allow her to produce enough items to sell to save up for more equipment or land.  She told me that if only she was able to get her hands on $5000 for some equipment last year, she would have been able to pursue a profitable opportunity that was offered to her, allowing her to make enough money to expand her backyard operation.  Her backyard operation didn’t generate enough profit for her to feel comfortable approaching a bank for a loan, so she tried to sell some things and made some calls to family and friends, but couldn’t raise enough in time.  

          Assuming that most people are aware of the dire decline of honeybees around the world, and how important honeybees are to produce food, it seems the government should be interested in creating a program to financially support honeybee keepers and real farmers who don’t use bee-killing chemicals on their fields.  But real farmers don’t have lobbyists from Big Ag industry because they aren’t reliant on corporate chemicals like conventional farmers are, so they don’t get a seat at the Big Boys table.