"Plants Have a Rhythm" - a character study from Ryder Farm (Cory)

Where to begin?

This is the end of my first week as an intern on Ryder Farm Organic in Brewster, NY. I'll be here until October 1. Then I'll head back up to Maine for the month to experience rehearsals, do any odd jobs the OFAF team asks of me, and hopefully carve a pumpkin or two! (Halloween in Germany just isn't the same.)

And...where to begin?

Living on a farm has turned my brain into a veritable hothouse of thoughts and ideas about farming. Observations we'd made last summer that had slipped my mind until now resurface like perennials: for example, how each farmer and farm worker develops his or her own "work costume" - like Tali and his hoodies, Penny and her boots, the Ryder interns and their daily long-sleeved plaid-patterned dirty button-downs. New experiences spark new thoughts and connections: I worked my first-ever farmer's market yesterday, in Union Square, and interacting with customers, setting up displays (and seeing what sells and what doesn't!), answering questions, inventorying - it all really drives home why it's important to plant, harvest and prep the way that we do. On a farm that manages to stay afloat, there may be madness, but there is a whole lot of method to it.

ABOVE: What the Ryder Farm stand at Union Square Greenmarket looks like

There are many things I could post about. An endless number of things. But another important thing I've (re)learned through the process of writing, sharing, and revising our play is this big thing that a successful small farm and a good play have in common: They are about people. Just as audiences are far more likely to invest and engage in a piece of theater if they care and understand and connect to its characters, customers are far more likely to support a small farm if they know and trust and care about the people who work on it.

So I wanted to write about a person on Ryder: Fuad, the field manager.

In some ways, Fuad reminds me of Jordan Farm's PeeWee. Fuad hails originally from another country (Bangladesh). He has worked on Ryder Farm for 15 years. Like PeeWee, he has developed over his time here an important relationship with a strong woman whose family owns the farm (Betsey Ryder), a relationship based on trust and communication. On a farm where most of the workers change from season to season, Fuad provides a strong and capable through-line, training and managing each year's new team.

Of course, Fuad is also not like PeeWee at all. I think the point of divergence starts with that crucial question to which we're always returning: What is a farmer? We've asked PeeWee before if he considers himself a farmer, and he's said "No." Though Fuad does not own Ryder Farm, though he is an employee, there is no question that he considers himself a farmer. He was trained in organic farming at UCA Santa Cruz, has worked on many different farms in many different states of this country, and lives, breathes and dreams farming.

Farmers are chock-full of knowledge and information about what they do - but it can be pretty rare to find a natural sharer who'll try to let you in on some of that information without being asked first. Fuad, however, is just that. He's a born teacher. He will never stop at telling you how to do something; he always tells you why to do it that way, too. A day working with/for Fuad is a day packed with knowledge nuggets and impromptu mini-lectures on sowing, harvesting, prep, food, plants, pests, tools, climate, sustainability and just about anything else you can imagine. There's a guest blog of his on Katonah Green about growing garlic from the 2009 season where you can get a taste of how much he loves to share his craft.

On Thursday, as we were sowing tiny sand-thinned radish seeds by hand in the hot midday sun, Fuad was inspired, waxing poetic in an unstoppable monologuic stream. "Plants are not active. They are passive. If there is not much of water in the soil, the plant will grow deeper roots to find the water. If the plant is growing in the shade, it will develop broader leaves to try to catch the sunlight. That is passive, that is not active. A plant cannot act. That is why I say it depends on environment. This is all environment. Water, light, sunshine. I do not believe people have green thumbs.

"Plants have a rhythm," he added. "You feel it when you touch the plant. In order to work with the plant you have to feel the rhythm."

Fuad is quite a character and it doesn't take long to pick up on his quirks. Like his own personal turns of phrase: "much of" (as in "There is too much of bugs") and "pick up" (as in "How much of basil did you pick up?"), and beginning sentences with "So what I have in mind is...". And his habit of always having a coffee mug in his hand until lunch - you'll often find rogue coffee mugs scattered forlorn and forgotten about the fields - and taking a nap during the midday break. He is curious about everything - he's already asked me scores of questions about the plot and characters in our play - and clearly beloved by the long-term members of the Ryder Farm CSA, who often show up to visit, bringing him hugs and chicken dinners.

"I know how to cook everything I grow. I eat everything I grow," Fuad said a few days ago. I think that's the heart of what makes him a successful and passionate grower.

From the Inside Out (Cory)

First of all, if you're reading this then I know you care about our project so you should take a second to check out our Kickstarter page and consider donating a couple of dollars or passing it on to your friends. There's a video about our project on the page where Jennie and Claire will charm your pants off, so at the least, give that a gander!

Now back to your regularly scheduled blog post.

Since coming back to America on July 12, I've been in six different cities. I've ridden two airplanes, Megabus and Concord Trailways, two different commuter trains to and from New York City, and Jennie's bike, and I've driven for a total of about 14 hours. I've seen and hugged seven family members and about two dozen good friends. And I've done it all without a cell phone.

Somehow during the past three crazy weeks, I also found the time to make a decision: I want to spend six weeks on a farm. I'm not sure what brought it on. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was my all-too-brief return to Portland and our three farms in July. Maybe it was swinging by the Chicago Green City Market and buying some sweet-as-candy beets. Or maybe it was the hectic pace itself: experiencing different towns and cities and states, one on top of another, with no time to reflect or sit back and take things in.

There were benefits and drawbacks to the way our work exchange was structured last summer. Benefits: Experiencing three very different farms and getting to see the way the farms changed over the course of the season in a broader sense - because a month would go by between our first and second shifts on each of the three farms, we could see the shape of the growing season, the dramatic changes it brought each farm. Drawbacks: Because of the part-time and time-staggered nature of our schedule, I saw and heard about but never experienced what it's like to work on a farm. To do the kind of work we did Tuesdays and Thursdays for 40, 50 hours a week as an intern or farmhand, or more than that as the farmer. To see something you've planted or an animal you're raising grow day by day, not month by month. To feel the way the season unfolds from the inside, not as a bystander. Kind of like visiting a city for a few days every couple of months, but never living there.

So I started contacting farmers about coming on as an end-of-season intern and was even able to visit a few of the farms. I ducked under electrified fences, ate chocolate-avocado pudding, saw refrigerators full of processed chickens and met eclectic intern crews. Some observations from the experience so far:

1. Fastest hiring process ever. Never experienced anything like it. I got an incredibly high and fast rate of response to my inquiries, which were all (initially) by email. Some of these farms had no website, or only the most rudimentary sort, but they are on top of their game with communication. And you really get the feeling that your work on the farm will be absolutely integral and necessary if you do decide you're the right fit for one another.
2. I've already learned quite a bit about the farm intern/apprentice community. For instance, one of the reasons I found so many opportunities so quickly is that many farm interns are college (or even high school) students who will be heading back to school soon. I ran across other programs I didn't know about, like an international apprenticeship program for young farmers and intern networks that help connect interns with one another across a state or region.
3. Our project isn't as "out there" as you might think. One farm responded saying, "We unfortunately don't have any openings right now, but we think your project is fascinating - and we (the wife and husband team who run the farm) are a poet and a playwright!" Another farm has an outdoor stage and a non-profit housed on the farm that provides artist retreats and workshops throughout the summer. A third told me that one of their current interns, a college student, is studying theater. And on and on. We've been right all along: artists and farmers go together.
4. Our script is on the right track. This is just a side effect, but it's been very encouraging to talk to the farmers who have been interviewing me a little bit about our script and the themes we're exploring. They're invariably interested in the project and they've all responded with excitement when I say that our script deals with farm transfer, the dynamic between generations, and the dynamic between multigenerational and new farmers. It's clear that we're touching on issues that are really important to the farming community and that is so exciting to hear.

So that's that. I'm excited about this last phase of writing and about the prospect of doing it while living on a farm. The two go hand-in-hand: the revisions to be done in large part have to do with making the day-to-day realities of running a farm believable, so though I'm not officially doing this as research, I know it will be helpful to the script. And I'm looking forward to getting really dirty and spending a lot of time outdoors and learning by doing and weeding, weeding, weeding. To not running from place to place, or farm to farm, but taking the time to get a little rooted, to try and see a farm from the inside out rather than outside in.

What Concerns Everyone (Cory)

Last time I saw Eddie, he told me to look out for Benson cows in Germany. They're here, though he says even he wouldn't know how to find them. I haven't run across one yet, but this summer's experience on the farms continues to resonate with me in many ways even all the way across the pond.

When I walk down the produce aisle in the German grocery stores I frequent, in Netto or Lidl or Aldi, I am very aware of the Ursprung of the potatoes and the tomatoes, the peaches, the onions. Germany? Italy? New Zealand? It doesn't mean that I stick with only German products, but when I do buy nectarines from Spain, that's a choice of which I am conscious. It's clear that the local/organic fad is here, too, and it's similarly complicated (people tell me, for instance, that you can't necessarily trust a food item marked "BioBio" or "Ökologische" to be organic, due to wide disparity in controlling and evaluating organic farming). I've had a surprising, to me, number of conversations in Berlin about eating locally and eating organically -- are people here more aware of some of the food-related issues the OFAF team started to consider this summer? Or is it just that I'm more aware? It's hard to tell. But I am definitely more aware. And I feel that my perspective on food, the way I think about it, purchase it, and prepare it, has changed. Permanently, if not massively. As someone who as of six months ago saw nothing but price tags in the grocery store, I feel excited about this change in myself because it seems to me an indication that just opening the dialogue is a big step. I mean, really all that did it was getting to know some farmers and hanging out on some farms for a while.

From two months' distance, these themes and surprises rise to the top for me:

• Farming is a job. A farm is a business. (Small farms have to find their niche to survive.)
• For a small farmer, farming must also be a lifestyle. (No vacation, or not REALLY.)
• Tradition is significant, as is the breaking of tradition. Farmers are not stuck in the past, but they are certainly in dialogue with it.
• Working extensively on or owning a farm gives you a close and unique relationship with the life cycle.
• There is no set definition of "farmer." (Pride.)
• Farming is a rollercoaster of emotion.
• Each generation on a farm has a tough decision to make.
• Farming is about family. Growing up on a farm is something special.
• There is no easy solution to the difficulties these farmers face. It's all complicated.

And these images: Bright vegetables and faded clothing. Early morning mist and dew so that everything looks old or like a dream. A July afternoon when everything sticks to you -- straw, your clothing, sawdust, cat fur, the smell of dung -- and small blisters pop out on the palm of your hand under the hoe. When it's too hot to talk. White shirts showing scrubbed-in dirt. Picking a lemon cucumber and eating it, in the field, with its prickles and its cool watery insides that quench thirst. (Cool as a cucumber. How is it that cucumbers really are still cool on a ninety-degree day?) A sick cow, the way her eyes turn glassy, the way the fight comes back into them after an IV. Or the deep sleep of cows -- a cow passed out with her tongue lolling from her mouth, Ryan pulling on it, the cow sleeping on. Tali in his hooded sweatshirt and thin plastic gloves. Huge sudden welts from afternoon mosquitos layered over a rash of tiny bites from early morning invisibugs. Stout geese running, wings spread. The absence of the barn as strong as its presence. Clothes that people wear every day or almost every day, like Penny's polka dot boots or John's feminine straw hat or Trey's orange rubber apron or the Crocs that abound in Broadturn in the morning -- like costumes or uniforms. Flora's porcelain-doll face smeared with homemade cheese spread, white and peppered with fresh herbs. A field full of weeds bigger than the fragile salad greens sprouting underneath.

For me, theatre, indeed art in general, is about asking questions -- not providing the answers to them. Artists alone don't have the solutions for the things farmers are facing. Neither do the farmers, alone. Neither do the scholars who study agriculture, alone. Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote 21 "points" to accompany his play The Physicists which I find to be absolutely lovely, and a few are very pertinent, I think, for us:

15. [A drama about physics] cannot have as its goal the content of physics, but its effect.

16. The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.

17. What concerns everyone can only be resolved by everyone.

18. Each attempt of an individual to resolve for himself what is the concern of everyone is doomed to fail.

Strongly worded for sure, but what I like about it/take from it is that it's our job to identify important questions, and to start helping to ask them. So, some questions that I've thought of:

• What role does farming play in our world? What role should it play?
• What role does it play in Maine?
• What is going to happen to farms like our three farms in the future? What should happen?
• What are the sacrifices and rewards that farmers make/receive? At what point do the sacrifices outweigh the rewards?
• Why should non-farmers care about farmers/farming?
• What is the role of tradition in farming?
• What is a farmer? (SURPRISE!)

The question for us, then, is not how to answer the questions we come up with, but how to dramatize them. And, also, how to craft a story out of farm life that will be dramatic and at the same time not seem to the farmers played up, overblown, unreal.

The Group Psychology of Summer Squash (Cory)

"How long until these tomatoes are ripe?"

Hands still occupied by the hose attachment she's using to feed the green tomatoes, Penny tosses her long-cut bangs back on her short-cut hair, surveys the greenhouse, and considers. I've been shadowing Penny since 7am. It's now nearly 4pm, and this half hour of tomato feeding, just the two of us (and the plants) in the greenhouse, is the first moment I've seen of anything that I might ordinarily call "calm" in her busy day.

We can see the farm stand just down the hill -- Trae in her bright orange smock slinging vegetables from sink to sink with her headphones clamped over her ears, probably blasting Vivaldi; Joy washing summer squash, testing for rotten ends and funny shapes; The Guys unloading a truck bed of green beans and flat beans fresh from the field. For once, though, Penny's focus is away from the havoc of her hundred farm stand, wholesale, farm bus, harvesting, planting, watering, weeding, labeling, and emailing duties. She even rejects a phone call on her constantly ringing cell. For once, Penny is doing just one thing: feeding the tomatoes.

Well, two things. Feeding tomatoes and talking to me.

"You know, I really can't say," she answers. "Tomatoes are funny plants. One can go red, and you think they're all about to get ripe, but then the rest can stay green for a week. It's like summer squash and zucchini. You'll see a bunch of them that are this big, not quite big enough to harvest but almost there, and then they'll just sit like that. For weeks. You'll keep seeing more and more of them at that same size but the ones that got there first don't get any bigger. As if they're waiting for their little brothers and sisters to catch up. You know, Bib and I have this theory? That they know when we want their fruit. They'll sit at the same size forever, and then we'll finally pick the first one and all of a sudden pop, pop, pop, they're all ready."

We are just passing the midpoint of this summer's work exchange and nearing the home stretch. The end of the summer is on the OFAF team members' minds, and we ask ourselves and each other different iterations of the same questions at our meetings: Are we getting all of the information we need to write a play? Are our relationships with the farmers and farm workers in the right place at the moment? On August 20, will those relationships be where they need to be for this thing to work?

Ben and Joy chat with Jennie, me, and Keith at
Jordan's -- pizza is great relationship fertilizer.

Writing a play is not chemistry, where two milliliters of X and a half liter of Y gives you Z every time; writing a play is not mathematics, where the square root of 9 doesn't change based on the weather. Writing a play is biology. Writing a play is growing things. Writing a play is a leap of faith. Writing a play is farming.

Last growing season was a season of rainfall, of struggling to keep up. This season -- so far -- our farmers all seem to be on schedule...even ahead of schedule. Eddie and Ryan on Kay-Ben reiterated at last week's story circle how bizarre it feels to be so on time with everything this year. At Jordan's today and yesterday, I heard talk of everything being early so far. The produce in the farm stand's unusually plentiful and varied. I don't know nearly enough about ordinary growing seasons to judge for myself, of course, but one thing is for sure: every season is a different game. No plan is foolproof on a farm. No tomato is immune to late blight, no hay is safe from a freak thunderstorm, no cow is healthy her whole life, no field stays weeded, no rain is guaranteed to fall. There are always fires, broken fences, late or early frosts, and family emergencies. You plan for what you can, and you deal with the rest when it happens. And it happens, and it is never the same ballgame.

When I get ready to write a play, I do my best to make sure all my ducks are in a row. I do research and I talk to people and I spend time thinking and I journal and I consider possible characters and possible plot lines and all sorts of crazy ideas go through my head. And one of those ideas is the seed from which the play will grow. But every play grows differently from the last. Some seeds need more care than others, some fall victim to doubt or indecision or self-censorship, some pop up too early and are forgotten by the time the time's ripe, some get all tangled up in weeds of too-much-complexity and overly-ambitious-concepts, and some are beautiful but fragile and can't take root.

Some grow faster than in your wildest dreams. But that is as rare as a perfect growing season.

Last week we all took some time together to take stock of where we are. It gave me the opportunity to look back over the preceding seven weeks and recognize that, yes, we already have a lot of material and there are countless potential plays beginning to germinate in that playwright greenhouse. But there is still a lot of work to do before we can even narrow things down to one potential play -- which is what the rest of this summer's about; and then even more to do to help that play grow. And I'm looking forward to that feeling I get when all the research and all the prep work is done and there is really nothing to do other than wait for our ideas to start to ripen into a play...and hope that everything we've done to prepare for the harvest will be enough this time.

The ideas ripen bit by little bit, waiting for one another, stalling, waiting for that first one to finally swell up big and ready, and then pop, pop, pop -- there they all are.

New Farm Term:

Seconds. Not what you fill your plate with after you've already had one helping at dinner. This is the word for fruits and veggies that are "not perfect, but still tasty" (in the words of a Jordan's Farm Stand sign). Slightly overripe or misshapen summer squash, bumpy cucumbers, funny-looking apples -- whatever the a-bit-the-worse-for-wear produce, farm stands will often sell it at a discounted price.

Planting peppers and soaking up stories (Cory)

Wednesday afternoon: Penny comes bursting out of Jordan's produce stand into the back area where Claire and I are washing, draining, and bagging spinach. "You have to put this in your play: Running a farm is like a startup business every season." Overflowing with the morning's tense energy of having to juggle customers, meetings, instructions to The Guys, and the millions of ideas bouncing around in her head, she tells us about the difficulty of working with a mostly new cohort of employees every season. "In a restaurant" (she uses this analogy because she knows both Claire and I have food industry experience) "or a business like that, that's all year round, there's this flow. You don't have that on a farm. For instance, Joy, who is great, is in this transition period, because she has to learn I can't always be there at the register. For the last month I've been there, because I've been training her, but now I can't always, and she's thinking, 'Why can't you be there?' So she has to get used to that."

Today at our workshop lunch: John's dad answers Jennie's startup question for our first story circle at Broadturn, "What would you want the world to know about this farm, or about farming in general?" with the introduction, "This would be a great topic for your play." He talks about Scarborough as a car-heavy community and the detriment he sees in that reliance on automobiles. He feels what the country needs is to move towards less sprawl, more geographically contained communities, and "Scarborough is a perfect example of something that is -- not that."

Everyone's read a quote from one of those writer-types about how all you have to do is let go and then one of your characters will just appear, like a vision, and start talking ("There I was, 37 sleepless nights into slaving over my first draft and making about as much painful progress as an ant on hot asphalt, when I looked up from my typewriter with bleeding eyes and there she was: Madame Bovary, in the flesh! And she dictated the entire thing for me start to finish. I can't take any credit"). But here's the thing: Our characters actually are talking to me. They're all talking to me. And the trick is not how to hear them, but how to actually listen. How to be true to all of the voices and ideas that are coming out, all of the images and impressions they give us -- as well as the ones that Jennie and Claire and Keith and I absorb; and how to sort all of that into something coherent. This job is part medium, part sculptor, part orienteer, part sponge. It's all a very exciting and scary place to start from; but just like an actor has to learn to use stage fright, a playwright has to learn to use the research free-fall. So here's to the coming three months of being a sponge.

These sponge months started off in earnest for me on May 18th, when we had our first OFAF team meeting. I was still in Chicago, and I got to meet the rest of the artists for the first time on Skype (pictured left). We shared some of our excitement, nerves, expectations, and hopes for the summer and the project as a whole, and just generally opened communication lines.

I've been in Maine since May 30th and the transition's going as smoothly as could possibly be expected. Our Tuesday tour of the three farms was whirlwind and eye-opening. They are really diverse choices that are going to bring us into contact with a pretty broad range of perspectives and experiences -- we're going to have a veritable cacophony of voices to sponge up.

This week and next are Jordan's for me. Primarily I have been planting and harvesting with The Guys, Penny's rockstar team of dudes: Pee-Wee (the boss), Neftali (or Tali, the outgoing ham of the group), Orlando, and Miguel. We planted rows and rows of peppers with evocative names like Lipstick, Red Knight, Mild Banana, and Vivaldi; we harvested spinach and other greens, which you do by pulling the leafy part up in a bunch and slicing across the stems with a sharp knife, a motion that reminded me a bit uncomfortably of slitting somebody's throat. The Guys talk and joke in Spanish, and sometimes switch to English for me, though Miguel and Orlando are either very shy about their English or don't speak much. Over our snack break yesterday around 10am, I asked them to teach me some Spanish (I know absolutely none):

Spanish words I learned yesterday

• la piedra (stone)
• el guineo (banana)
• el café (coffee)
• espinacas (spinach)

Piedra became an important one when we started clearing big rocks from a field that was soon to be seeded. The Guys were not pleased with this job. Otherwise they don't complain much, other than to tease Penny.

"All right, Pee-Wee, you guys ready to plant some cabbage?"

"No."

"Too bad."

Their dynamic seems to work; Penny is high on stress because she has so much on her plate, but she has a ton of trust in The Guys and they maintain a laid-back attitude (while still working hard as hell) that seems to help keep Penny calm.

Yesterday we'd planted rows of cabbage up to the top of a field; I'd emptied my tray of seedlings and headed back to the truck to get another. The Guys started waving to me from across the field to put the tray back into the truck bed -- so I did; but then they were gesturing for me to do something else. It took me a while to figure out they wanted me to drive the truck up to them along the side of the field, which I proceeded to do. Completing that task probably made me inordinately proud of myself, but I felt pretty cool anyway, and a little bit like one of the guys...Then I found out that Miguel thought I was 17, Tali thought I was 19, and Pee-Wee had guessed 21. "I'm 24, guys." Tengo venti quattro años. Some things never change.

Favorite new farm term

Bolting. Keith and Claire already knew this one, but it was new to me. It happens to spinach and lettuce and presumably other plants, and it has to do with the plant transitioning from the growing stage to the reproductive phase of its life. It begins to put up a stalk and produce flowers, and it happens when things start to heat up outside. The spinach at Jordan's was starting to bolt this week, which made for some smaller, curlier leaves and thicker stems. I like this term because it makes me think of the plant as a startled person or animal. Shocked by the heat, it reacts by going a little nuts. Penny often talks about her plants as if they're people. "I don't want to plant the peppers down there just yet, because it's pretty soggy down there and they're not going to like that."