A few weeks back, I posed this question in your CSA newsletter: “How does it feel for me, as a 25 year veteran farmer, to see Featherstone Farm in such a solid, happy place, even as the world around us seems to be coming apart at the seams?”
In that writing I offered a bit of context for this question. Specifically, how decades of struggle at the farm- coupled with overzealous off-farm advocacy- had brought me to a place of personal and political burnout ca 2015. And how the past 5+ years of narrow focus on running Featherstone Farm efficiently and profitably, have begun to bear real fruit.
At this point in my work at the farm (and in FF’s history), it feels like the easiest path forward would be to double down on success, to say “we’re survivors here at Featherstone Farm, we’ve sacrificed so much to get where we are today, we can just ‘stay the course’ and run the farm as it is” for the foreseeable future. For myself and my family, there is a real temptation to focus primarily on paying down accumulated debt, and on ensuring we have something to live on in retirement (not that far off!) after dedicating our life’s work to building a small farm business from scratch. This would be easy, and easily justifiable at some way.
But on a gut level, this simply does not seem responsible in an era when pandemic, political turmoil and social upheaval are exposing glaring injustices in our society. And this is not to mention global climate change, the challenge of the modern world. I feel called on to (re)engage in these issues now, not in spite of Featherstone Farm’s newfound success- and certainly not at risk of reversing our progress toward personal and financial sustainability. But because of that success. Because I hope to use the perspective I’ve gained over the past 30 years to give back at some level, to call out and to address some of the hard realities that I see every day. I am no credentialed social scientist, but as a farmer I pay attention to weather a lot. And as a wise Minnesotan once said “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!”
So with this introduction, here is my assessment of where my perspective and work- and to some degree Featherstone Farm’s work- stand in the summer of 2020. As noted a few weeks ago, I’ll use the Vince Hatt engagement model as a guide for this assessment. And as a reminder, Vince’s (4) guiding principles are:
1. Show up 2. Pay attention 3. Speak your truth 4. Don’t be too attached to the outcome
Each of these topics deserves a separate writing, if I am to do justice to the breadth of ideas rumbling around in my head this summer. I’ll try and write you with one every few weeks, so as to be done before the big fall storage crop harvests begin. My, how time flies during the growing season!
Showing Up
Relevant question for me: Am I- is Featherstone Farm- really present in the lives of our employees, our community (rural Rushford), our markets (including South Minneapolis) and our country and world as a whole? How engaged am I, honestly?
Answer: Honestly, deep ambivalence. I think it’s fairly clear that, even as the farm business has matured and stabilized in recent years, that I have personally retreated in my engagement in community issues large and small. This feels particularly unjustifiable just now. I’ll offer this brief mea culpa, not in the belief that cataloguing my levels of absence will exonerate me from responsibility. On the contrary, I hope that this will help clarify when and where I could show up more in the future.
Here are a few examples. I go to very few meetings nowadays. I’m a very inconsistent contributor to our local chapter of MN 350 (climate change advocacy), to the Rushford Community Foundation, to the Sister City program that connects Winona with Misato Japan. At an earlier time, I was quite engaged in these service activities and more. There are so many truly useful opportunities to contribute to the meaningful work of social justice locally, from the Winona-Dakota Unity Alliance, to local meetings about implicit bias and community policing. I can’t say I’ve shown up at all for any of these, most often citing farm demands or simple exhaustion. Perhaps as our small farm business stabilizes even more in future years, I will have more time and energy to re-engage in some of this. I really hope I will.
Featherstone Farm markets a very significant percentage of its crop in the Twin Cities, and two of our best customers are food Co-ops in South Minneapolis. Jenni and I have many friends and family in the Cities… all of them live within 2-3 miles of 38th and Chicago, it seems. I feel like I “know the area” well at some level, after so many years of visiting Lake St cafes and businesses. And yet… I have clearly not really shown up in the life of that community at all, as I like to tell myself I have. This tension is very uncomfortable, I’ll admit.
Even worse, it’s been several years since I’ve been truly present in the lives of the 25 or so men and women who leave families behind in Mexico every year, to spend 6 months in Rushford planting and harvesting vegetables. For sure I am as cognizant as ever about the critical role they play at Featherstone Farm, and as grateful as ever when I see them heading back out in the midday heat for another round of harvesting. I remain involved in facilitating the nuts-and-bolts of housing, work conditions, sick pay and the myriad other details of work life at the farm. But this is the easy part of employing people who are separated from family and community for half of their adult lives.
Consciously or otherwise, I have to admit that I have pulled back from the personal relationships that I invested in so richly with the first group of guys that were here 2000-2013. Even the Go- Fund-Me campaign for Mote’s family last year (so successful at raising $$ for his medical bills) engaged me on a surface level at best. I’m just not showing up like I once did. This absence has been easier to justify in my mind, because others at Featherstone Farm have stepped up to fill the void more energetically and compassionately than I ever did. But it’s a subtle but real absence nevertheless, for the patron to be disengaged.
There are many reasons for all of this, of course, some of which I understand (in part?) and others I haven’t yet imagined much less come to terms with. Terms like “compassion fatigue” come to mind. Burnout. Utter frustration with the language barrier (seems even more insurmountable for me every year). The creeping conservatism that comes with age(?). So easy it would be for me, to throw these explanations out and retreat to a world of building a sauna on the ridge, walking in the woods, and reading The New Yorker cover to cover every week. But as I wrote last week, this just does not feel right, “in a world of George Floyd and Donald Trump.”
I’m going to start showing again. When, where and with what particular goals… this remains to be seen. I will write about this more as I begin. But as Vince Hatt suggests, you simply have to show up before you can get anything else done.
To be continued in the weeks ahead....
Gratefully,
Jack
