investment

   This past Monday morning, we set to cultivating beds of garlic. I had never used a scuffle or hula hoe to weed. After some tentative scratching in the dirt, I took a deep, calming breath and then chopped a garlic plant off at the root. Across the row, our farmer looked me in the eye. "And you just killed a garlic plant." A long pause followed and he continued, in a lower tone, "but that's alright." After I began to hoe with more aplomb, he mentioned that four of these garlic plants brought about six dollars at market.  It didn't take an English degree to decipher his subtext. 

         Amid further newbie mistakes and a body adjusting to sun and sweat rather than cappuccinos and casinos (o Vegas, how I miss thee), my thoughts turned away from myself to the farmer to whom I'm leased.  Weather conditions, market conditions, the capabilities of the apprentices hired sight unseen, the fickle, changing properties of water, sun, soil, and seed, insects, disease, frost--many times this week I've questioned how our farmer sleeps at night. So many unknowns, so much just beyond one's control. But he rises and labors each morning before us. He remains in the fields after we've rinsed the soil off our skin. He mentioned once this week that our work helps him and his wife with their dream. "Pick a smaller dream, next time," I half-joked. 

        Jest aside, the big dream of organic farming, of land both profitable and sustaining, seems to me held in the long pause our farmer afforded before reassuring me. Farming on such a new, small scale means that every seed, every action, every moment of work or rest signifies a contract made with a dream. A contract that no matter how challenging or how impossible a farm problem seems, you will offer a pause and mutter an affirmation. The long pause between failure and hope means investment, a faith in the worth of the project you (and your new, achy apprentices) have undertaken. How hopeful that across this country our farmer and others like him have paused, and despite the risk, have invested in the land.