The Small Farm Future Blog

Vallis Veg Version 2.0: or, the Broccolator Resolves

Posted on November 9, 2013 | No Comments

Those of you who’ve followed this blog will know that Spudman, my crime-busting alter ego, fought a lengthy battle with Mendip District Council to win the right to live on our holding and thereby make it possible to continue with our veg box business Vallis Veg. But Spudman didn’t act alone. Not only did he receive unstinting support from the long-suffering Mrs Spudman, not to mention the Spudkids, but also from a great number of other people in our local community and beyond. This weekend we’re having a little party on the site just to thank some of the local folks who pitched in (dress warm, the house ain’t up yet) – and let me here record my thanks to the many others from near and far who’ve also helped us.

Although we’ve kept on trading through the planning appeal process, the truth is that over the past couple of years Vallis Veg has been a little in the doldrums while the gods at Mendip District Council played knucklebones with our future. But now that it’s been decided in our favour, at least for the next 3 years, the time seems right to launch Vallis Veg Version 2.0.

There will be some differences from a customer perspective between Vallis Veg 1.0 and 2.0 which will be explained on our yet to be revamped website in due course. But more importantly there will be some differences in my mental approach to it, which I shall here outline briefly by way of a kind of manifesto…or perhaps an early and rather public statement of my new year’s resolutions.

Having quit a securely-salaried university job to grow vegetables out of the naively idealistic conviction that the food economy needed reforming from the ground up, I’ve gotta say it’s been a steep learning curve. Would I have made the same choice if I’d known then what I know now…? Well yes but, sheesh, a lot of the time I’ve been way out of my comfort zone in switching from a salaried job to self-employment in a small business, setting up a market garden from scratch with virtually no prior experience, and in a low-paid sector littered with the corpses of market gardens past. I don’t know how good a job I’ve done, but the world has more need for second-rate farmers than for second-rate sociologists and so I’ll resolve to continue doing my best.

Did you see what I just did there? You got my first resolution, right? Resolution 1: I will do my best.

And now here are four more.

Resolution 2: I will embrace my agricultural mind. My background, and perhaps the background of most people in contemporary Britain, is relentlessly contemptuous of farmers and tillers of the earth. A proper job involves a big salary and office-based brainwork. The discomfort, the ‘backbreaking labour’ of agricultural work (note how often you see that phrase accompanying discussions of small-scale farming) must be avoided at all costs. I find it curious that we admire professional seekers after major discomfort (mountaineers, explorers) but generally not professional endurers of minor discomfort like farmers, and curious too how readily we assume that mindbreaking and mostly quite pointless office work (the kind that makes us ill, depressed, fat and eager for physical exercise) is intrinsically superior. But, hey, I’m not pretending that I’ve kicked these middle-class hang-ups – I’m always going to be wrestling with the uncomfortable thought that I ought to be doing something more ennobling than this. Deep down, though, I think there’s nothing more worthwhile, and no more privileged place to be, than producing food out of nature’s guts. On that point, I want to paraphrase a few sentences from Wendell Berry’s beautiful essay on the ‘agricultural mind’:

“The agricultural mind is not at all impressed by the industrial legendary of gross national products, or of the numbers sold and dollars earned. It is interested – and forever fascinated – by questions leading toward the accomplishment of good work: What is the best location for a particular building or fence? What is the best way to plow this field? Should this tree be cut or spared? Questions which cannot be answered in the abstract and which yearn not towards quantity but towards elegance. And though this mind is local, it is not provincial; it is too taken up by its work to feel inferior to any other mind in any other place.^1″

So that is my second resolution – to embrace, as best I can, my own agricultural mind.

Resolution 3: I will try to avoid both self-righteousness and self-pity. Having, as I said, given up a well-paid job in order to farm out of idealistic conviction, it’s easy to feel let down by the great big indifferent ‘YEAH, WHATEVER’ that is a common response of people in particular and society in general to my humble second career. And when I’m toiling away at a succession of backbreaking tasks (oops…) on the farm for minimal financial return, it’s also easy to get riled by the incomprehension of others who may be inclined to think it’s their right to enjoy the fruits of the earth without doing any of the pruning and grafting. But as Wes Jackson, another great American agricultural writer, notes “Teachers of sustainable agriculture…may feel inclined towards both self-righteousness (‘We are farming without chemicals’ and ‘We are farming nature’s way’) and self-pity (‘We do all this extra work so that we won’t have to use the chemicals, yet we are not properly compensated for our labour’). Both attitudes will have to be avoided at all costs”². Right on, and so I resolve to try to avoid them, and instead to channel the energies of potential self-righteousness or self-pity to more positive ends – to good connections with our customers and the wider community, and to political and educative work with organisations like the excellent Land Workers’ Alliance and blogs like the superb Small Farm Future.

Resolution 4: I will avoid arrogant self-regard and self-promotion.

And finally, Resolution 5: I will work hard and have fun. There are some in the alternative farming movement who think that if you design your system well enough, then you can produce a lot without having to work much. I don’t agree with them (but then again, as I mentioned above, I’m only a second-rate farmer…maybe there really is that holy grail out there somewhere of the low input-high output system; not convinced though, I ain’t seen it yet). So in order to provide for the good people of Frome who wish to buy our produce, I resolve to work hard in order to furnish it. But I will not work myself into the ground in order to convince myself or anybody else (like Mendip District Council, for example) that I am a good person and I’m doing the right thing, a mistake that I’m rather prone to make. Therefore, I also resolve to have fun, to spend good time with my friends and family, to enjoy the setting sun, the warm breezes, the buzzards wheeling overhead, the tree-crunching deer, and the miracle of life. Hey, perhaps I’ll even put that sentence into my ‘essential need grounds’ the next time I submit a planning application to Mendip District Council.

As I mentioned in a previous post Spudman has now retired after his exertions fighting the Council, so it is the solemn responsibility of the Broccolator, my new alter ego, to execute the heretofore mentioned resolutions of my new best farming self. Perhaps I’ll ask him to report in a year’s time on how well we’ve both done. In the mean time, please raise a glass to Vallis Veg Version 2.0!

References

1. Berry, W. (2002) ‘The whole horse: the preservation of the agrarian mind’ in Kimbrell, A. (ed) The Fatal Harvest Reader, Washington: Island Press.

2. Jackson, W. (2011) ‘Making sustainable agriculture work’ in Jackson, W. Nature As Measure, Berkeley: Counterpoint.