I'm trying to take a couple of days off, and largely failing if you describe success as not thinking about farming. I've spent a fair amount of time today wrestling with where the farm is right now and how I can get to where we need to be.
For the past year, I've looked up to Chris Newman at Sylvanaqua Farms as articulating something that I hadn't been able to pin down myself - that for all our talk of local food taking on industrial agriculture, we produce a tiny fraction of what gets eaten. How are we, as individual farmers, going to grow enough to become a significant force when our current production can be consumed by on good day at a salad joint or a BBQ restaurant? Chris suggested a vision in which farmers worked together to increase production and control the means of processing and distribution. It took ideas I'd been playing with and made them real. I followed along with thousands of others as he attracted a talented group of people and appeared to be making it happen.
Today it came crashing down. Most of Sylvanaqua's employees and contractors resigned, accusations of incompetence and toxicity are flying from both sides. I'm watching this play out and wondering what lessons I should take from this.
Part of what I'm wondering is bigger picture, essentially the question of the benevolent dictator. My idea for giving farmers control over the food system is to create a corporate structure that both supports farmers and provides marketing and distribution outlets created to favor the farmer instead of the middle man. Watching Chris, I'd debated whether I needed a more democratic structure. I think now I'm leaning back towards deliberate, informed central control.
And the other part is granular, short term... I need to get vegetable production going. I need more people on my team than I have now, I need to get them officially on to payroll and make sure there's a solid production structure to support paying them fairly. Because no one will care about this as much as I do... And therein, I think, may be the trap Chris fell in to. When you want to be fair, to not work your people as hard as you work yourself, it's too easy to step in and take things over. Take the burden away. And you know that's not sustainable, so you tell yourself to let go of the way you would have done it, and the result is things not done well because you've neither done it yourself nor given your team the tools to do it well.
I don't have an answer, but if I want this farm to become the foundation of something larger that can shift our local foodshed towards environmental and human sustainability, I need to figure it out. I need to restart our production, I need to make sure our expansion is sustainable and I need to figure out how to approach the larger systemic challenges in ways that won't result in a public disintegration of The Community Ecosystem in ten years time.
(Not sure if this makes sense at all, but welcome to my brain...
