We Are Reading a Play!

On March 22, Cory delivered the first draft of the Of Farms and Fables script. It is a monstrous 97 pages long, involves about 25 different characters, 2 farms, lots of family, Puerto Rican fables, fantastic dreams of dancing cows, and a GAP certification game show. On Thursday, April 14, we will be reading this script at Space Gallery with an excellent ensemble of local actors. Presented as part of the annual sustainable food event, Food & Farm, the reading will be followed by a Q&A. An integral part of our script development process, this event will help us shape the play through subsequent drafts. Please come, enjoy the script, and share your feedback!

Food+Farm: Of Farms and Fables

Thursday 04.14.2011, Doors at 7:00 PM, Starts at 7:30 PM, Ends at 9:30 PM, FREE, All Ages

Space Gallery, 538 Congress St., Portland ME 04101 (207) 828-5600

http://www.space538.org

Growing Stories: Growing A Photo Show (Claire)

Earlier this year, I pitched an idea to the Maine Farmland Trust Gallery in Belfast. I had been looking over some of the photos I took last summer and began to notice that some of them were actually pretty good. What if I took some of those pictures and put them together with blog posts we have accumulated over the past months (yikes! almost a year now!)? Do you think we could make Farms and Fables into a gallery show?

Fortunately for me, they were just as excited as I was and their wonderful gallery director, Anna, helped me focus my ideas and booked us to open Growing Stories: Photos and Writing From The “Farms and Fables Project” on May 6th. (Mark your calendars!)

Ever since then, I’ve been looking back through the blog, through the thousand or so photos I took... Its been quite an

adventure. Let me tell you.

First of all- I’m not a trained photographer, nor have I ever organized a gallery show. So

when the deadline I had set for myself started looming large in my mind, I gathered my ruler, tape and cardboard and built a scale model of the gallery. Its cardboard walls are scarred from tearing off and re-taping little paper scale sized “photos”.

Most of the time, it sits under the coffee table and holds the 70 or so photo kiosk prints that comprise my “rough draft” edit of photos. When it’s in action helping me plan out just how many pieces can fit where, it often hosts gallery patrons collected from the shelves of the apartment. (see 'em? Its like the beginning of a bad joke: the little mermaid, a flying pig, The Buddah and his african finger puppet girlfriend go to an art gallery...)

When I’ve got an hour or two, I pull it out and start laying out the sets of photos I’ve already chosen and commence playing a complicated game of mixing and matching to help me figure out which piece of this puzzle comes next.

Fortunately, I’ve had the good luck to be able draw on the incredible eye and generous spirit of my friend and roommate Lizzie. Thank god she doesn't mind coming home to find me sitting in the middle of a flurry of photographs having minor breakdowns about which picture of a cow I should choose.

She’s also one of the smartest people I know. After mulling some images over with me yesterday, she said, “you know- you’ve got a pattern here. There’s the people who do the work, the work being done and the stuff you work with. Try thinking of it that way”. Clouds part. The sun shines down on me. All is clear. I think, “Its as simple as beginning, middle and end. Close up, middle distance, depth of frame. Worker, work, worked on”.

For a moment- I am enlightened. Then I get caught up in the cow picture conundrum again.

I’m getting down to the wire. I’ve given myself until April 1st to get all my ducks in a row- to get from 1000 photos to 18. To condense almost a year’s worth of journaling, blog posts and essays in 8 8x10 inch plaques.

On that day, I’ll pack all these things up in a big digital package and send it out to a printer. And when they come back I’m pretty sure it will be better than Christmas. I’ve had dreams in which I’m holding the large print (18x24) of Jennie chasing a cow and I can feel the weight of the gatorboard in my hands.

By then, I’m sure I will have gotten used to the idea that all my favorite photos can’t be in the show, but right now I’m haunted by them. Every image that is eliminated feels like such a betrayal. I don’t just betray my longtime favorites, but also the images I’ve grown to love as I go through the process of evaluating them. There are so many more favorites I didn’t know that I had- making it even harder to turn them face down on the carpet and move on to the next one.

In their honor, I’m dedicating this blog post and maybe a few more to come to show off the really great images that just don’t fit into the big show in Belfast. Maybe this can be their moment in the sun they so highly deserve.

Real plow, pencil plow (Cory)

My connection to the farming world is very different than it was five months ago at the end of our work exchange. During the work exchange it was physical, it was experiential, visceral; it was personal and interpersonal, it was tangible, it was about particular stories and memories and opinions. It was this farmer and that intern and this potato beetle and that cow and this CSA member and that hot sweaty day of tossing hay or misty morning weeding.

Maybe it is a strange order of things, but I started -- through the work exchange -- with the effort to understand the smaller elements of the picture; and it's now that the work exchange is over, in stepping back from that tangible experience and from Maine and from the United States, that I am for the first time really trying to get a sense of the picture as a whole. Reading articles. Listening to radio programs. Checking out documentation on every website from MOFGA's to the FDA's.

It is overwhelming.

It is a big picture. BIG. It's over a year ago that I first started talking with Jennie about working on this project and it has been a year of being constantly surprised by how much I didn't know about the issues of food production and processing and consumption, and land use and preservation, in the United States; and how much there always is, still, to learn. It is a puzzle. It is a very complicated puzzle. And it's possible we bought it from Goodwill and don't even know whether all of the pieces are there at all, or maybe some pieces of another puzzle are mixed in. Seems like every time I turn around, there is a new can of worms to open.

A Partial Listing of Opened Worm Cans

1. The Big Guys vs. the Little Guys (GAP certification, farm subsidies, federal price of milk) -- how government ends up getting skewed towards making things easier for big industrial farmers, exactly the guys who don't need the help of, say, subsidies
2. Environmental issues: carbon footprint of food transported from one side of the country to the other, animals bred for their meat consuming massive amounts of grain
3. Is the "slow food movement" or the "local food movement" classist? Affordability vs. health vs. capacity to feed everybody vs. people just wanting to eat what they want to eat, damn it...
4. Health issues: is it healthier to eat organic? How can we avoid major food-related health scares related to food production/processing (that GAP certification thing is tied up in this)? Does the subtherapeutic use of antibiotics do more harm than good?
5. Community: is the American community deteriorating? What are the negative effects of globalism (I know, getting SUPER big picture here) and how can community-building, buying locally, and creating locally fight those negative effects?
6. Land use: small farmers often can't compete with certain buyers who are able to pay much higher prices for land; how do we even things out? What are the benefits and drawbacks of land easements?
   

There are more. There will always be more. Point is, this stuff wasn't even close to being on my radar a year ago. And what put it on? This farm. That farmer.

It's hard to be away from those individual farms and farmers, far away, quite far, working on a play for them. Distance lends perspective, but drama is in the details. The big picture isn't theater. Theater is pink crocs, memories of an old barn, a cow dodging a rope halter, hustling to get CSA shares ready, chatting with an old blind woman in floral print on the farmstand bus.

I don't know what the context of this quote is, but I'm sure you can see why it speaks to me: "Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field."

Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn't writing a play, but I can read a wealth of encouragements and cautions in what he says. At the heart of it is an exhortation not to simplify, not to forget what it's like to be much closer -- to be there.

One way that theater can be a vital part of the conversation about the future of farming: It can help people be there. Remove that distance. Help us remember there's a woman behind that head of lettuce, a man behind that gallon of milk. That a farm is more than the tangible consumables it produces -- it is a part of the delicate and endangered ecosystem of the American community.

The Ag Trade Show: Part 1 (Jennie)

On January 12th, I drove to the 70^th Maine Agricultural Trades Show in a blizzard. When I arrived at 10:30, the parking lot of the Augusta Civic Center looked like this:

And when I returned to my car at four o’clock in the afternoon, it looked like this:

And what happened in the intervening hours of relative warmth amid the fluorescent glow of stadium lights? Well, the show was sparsely attended, to say the least. This is in sharp contrast to Tuesday, which as I heard from one exhibitor was “mobbed”. Organizers were expecting roughly 5,000 attendees at this year’s show, and I’ll bet a good number of them made the trip on Tuesday. One highlight of my trip was a chat with Bib and Jodie Jordan. Bib said he thought most people were attending on Tuesday or Thursday, due to the weather. He implied that I probably should have made the same choice, and I can’t really argue. “Whatcha doin’ here?” he says. “Just crazy enough to come out in a storm?”

That day, in the quiet and the lull, leadership of convening organizations were filling in for missing presenters, “winging it” through lecture schedules missing half the key players. And yet talks were given, and productive conversations were had. I got to see some really, really shiny tractors. People nervously checked the front doors at regular intervals to see how the storm was coming, conferring about the safest plan – stay until it slows, or get out before it’s worse?

I attended one talk at the Maine Grass Farmer’s Network Annual Meeting. It was about a trial in “direct-cut silage” and was given by Rick Kersbergen of the Cooperative Extension. Apparently, “direct-cut” silage systems are not heavily used in the US, nor have they been generally recommended by the Extension in recent years. I have difficulty following the details (and there are many details), but it has to do with the water content of forage immediately after cutting, and subsequent moisture loss from seepage during storage. The wetter it is when you store it, the more likely it is to seep. Here’s what I find on the North Dakota State University website:

“The high moisture level in direct-cut silages can cause an abnormal low-temperature fermentation producing conditions favorable for undesirable clostridial organism growth. This produces silage that has an unpleasant sour, butyric-acid smell which severely reduces livestock consumption.”

What most Maine dairy farmers use is a “wilted silage” system – forage is left to dry a bit in the fields and then either wrapped in round bails or chopped and pressed in a bunker (the Bensons do both). The stated concern for small operations farmers (those with a small herd of sheep, for instance) are the costs involved with wilted silage systems. The machinery involved in cutting, gathering, baling and wrapping the feed is expensive. With the machine that was the object of this trial, a farmer can cut, gather and store the feed in a single pass through the field. The machinery looks like this:

A full description of the results of the trial would be lengthy, and coming from me - inaccurate. The primary goal was to compare the nutrient content of feed produced with this direct-cut system to that produced with a traditional wilted silage system. Though not completely sold on the system, Mr. Kersbergen seemed pleasantly surprised by the results. Though the direct-cut feed from one field of alfalfa was effectively butyric to the point of poison, a sample of direct-cut ryegrass (I think?) compared favorably to its wilted counterpart. There’s more information about the trial here.

I was fascinated to hear and to partially absorb the details of feed testing and optimum fermentation conditions. However, what was most exciting for me about this presentation, and the photos from the trial, and the comments from the farmers in the room was the sense of curiosity, experimentation, and problem solving that drove the conversation. While the fairs serve this purpose in a competitive environment, the trade show gives farmers and leaders and educators and advocates a chance to sit down and share what they’ve tried, what they’ve learned, and how they’ve failed. The farmers in this room were eager to compare practices and commiserate over frustrations. Observing the easy manner in which this community laughs and marvels together gave me a chance to see that famed farmer ingenuity in action.

There have been other examples for us. Eddie and his boys fashioned a travel milking parlor from a neighbor’s old compressor so that Dolly and the other show cows can be milked right in the stall when they compete at the fairs. I learned at the trade show that it’s fairly common practice to control weeds with a propane weed burner. Pictures showed one Maine farmer’s home-built propane-holding backpack. The farmer that ran the direct-cut silage trial designed and built his own trailer to collect the feed. John and Stacy haven’t got a lot of irrigation built into their fields, so in the drought last summer they loaded water-filled tanks onto a tractor and drove to the parched cabbage beds, distributing water to thirsty plants through a garden hose. Techniques among farmers may be similar, but individual approaches will depend on the farmer and what he/she has in front of them. Watch out, industrial designers, farmers have been solving their own problems for centuries. Farmers are industrial designers. Farmers are inventors.

Some related thoughts from my brother (a designer) in a slightly different context: mhahndesign.

That’s all for now. Look for a lively discussion of farmland preservation practices in the upcoming Ag Trade Show: Part 2.

What's For Dinner? (Claire)

From my dining room table I have a lovely view through bay windows looking out over the city of Portland. As the sun shines down on our latest accumulation of snow, the largest per-capita collection of restaurants and bars in North America (or so I’ve been told) ready themselves for another busy night of service. Its getting to be dinner time and since I have the night off from my job waitressing at Silly’s restaurant, I have no food in the house. There are three different large supermarket chains in my view, two convenience stores, and a local grocery store chain just out of sight, but my pallet is just not convinced any one way or another. I know I have some pasta, and rice... I could try that thai place down the street? Through the drafty heating ducts that run between my downstairs neighbor’s apartment and mine, I hear the echoey instructions from their television, perpetually tuned to the Food Network. In a TV studio somewhere, someone is making pot roast.

From my spot on the hill, its easy to see Portland as the food- filled bonanza it sometimes seems to be. Thanks to press attention, (especially a lengthy New York Times Feature I’ve heard a lot of descriptions of our fair metropolis as a “foodie town”- and for good reason. With a relatively small population, we boast an impressive collection of chefs and a very active “slow foods” community devoted to the use of locally produced foods. Heck- we even have a winter farmer’s market these days. With this heady vision of abundance, the view from my snowy dining room table begins look like one of Carl Warner’s fantastical all-food landscapes. (www.carlwarner.com)

As I try to recover my senses, I think back to my summertime in the fields and remember listening to the Broadturn farm interns talk about what they would have for dinner. “Are there any pork chops left?” “Yeah- and we’ll grab some zucchini before we leave the field.” “And there should be some lettuce left out there too.” - in the dead of winter, that sort of decision making is appealing for a number of reasons, (Salad! With real tomatoes! That you can just go outside and pick!) but unfortunately, the crop from my apartment's little raised-bed garden was used up long ago, and -seasonally speaking- I am just about as far from fresh tomatoes as a person can get.

The thing I find I’m longing for the most is being able to look around and find out what’s for dinner in the land rather than on a grocery store shelf. Alice Waters, the owner of legendary “slow food” restaurant, Chez Panisse, wrote about this in her essay, “A Delicious Revolution”. In her mind, this connection between the land and our tables is imperative to living a full life.

“When you understand where your food comes from, you look at the world in an entirely different way. I think that if you really start caring about the world in this way, you see opportunities everywhere. Wherever I am, I'm always looking to see what's edible in the landscape. Now I see Nature not just as a source of spiritual inspiration — beautiful sunsets and purple mountains majesties — but as the source of my physical nourishment.”

(You should really read the rest of the essay here: www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/delicious-revolution its lovely.)

Eager to find opportunities for eating in my wintery food landscape here in Portland Maine, I took it upon myself to heed these words and really use what I've got right in front of me. A few weeks ago, I pulled on my boots and set out through the constant deluge of snow to make such a meal for my roommates and me. I wasn’t alone in my quest- Keith had proposed that each member of the artistic team make an attempt and share their successes and challenges with the rest of the group.

In the summertime we were in the practice of making dinner for each other so we could eat together during our Tuesday night meetings. Most of the time our food came from the farms were working on. There was always salad- and always desert. For me, a full-time waitress- it was my one meal a week I could count on eating while siting down and having time to fully finish. I always looked forward to our little Tuesday rituals. When I started planning this wintertime meal, I wanted to bring that kind of meal to my house- where all my busy roommates and I could come together and really share in eating a meal.

For me, the meal started with Kale. One of my roommates happens to be dating a farmer from Durham, and he had brought us the last of the sweetest, latest Kale still left in his cold-frames. She offered up the whole bag when I first proposed the idea, and I was very happy to have it. After Kale came some turnips and Rutabagas from our friend Leah's garden down the street. With my side dishes taken care of, I started thinking about what I could get for a main course that would be really fresh and from somewhere very close by... and then, on a walk on the near-by eastern promenade, I thought, of course! Fish!

At the Harbor Fish Market I found bags of shiny black Muscles harvested from Bangs Island- a little slip of land just off the just a mile or so off the eastern coast of Chebeague Island and the same hop skip and jump from cliff island, right on the edge of Broad Sound in Casco Bay. All in all, about 10 miles straight out to sea from my house on the hill. (Look for the tiny point A and point B on the map below. My house is point A. The muscles were living at point B)

After I had my muscles, I found onions, garlic, shallots and carrots (from Durham, Union and Freedom) to add to a broth of "Villager" white wine, grown and bottled in Warren Maine. Add to that a little thyme and rosemary we grew in our little window boxes this summer and some bread made with stoneground wheat flour fresh from Houlton, and we were well on our way to a full meal.

While I was visiting my roommate at her workplace, the lovely Rosemont market, the day of our feast, I picked up some "micro" salad greens and hot house tomatoes grown in New Glouster to round everything out. I spent most of the day working at the restaurant and ended up telling my boss, Colleen, about the mission. She loved the idea and donated two bottles of a blended red wine from Falmouth, known as the "Scarborough Beach Series" on the spot! What a treat!

That evening, my roommates Liz and Seren gathered around the kitchen table for a meal consisting of the following:

Muscles from Bang island (10ish miles from where I live.)

Wine grown and brewed in Warren Maine (70 miles or so)

Shallots and carrots from Freedom Farm (84 miles)

Onions and kale from Durham (25 miles)

Garlic from Union (74 miles)

Flour from Houlton (247 miles)

Greens and tomatoes from Olivia’s (19 miles)

Turnips+rutabagas from Lea down the street (.25 miles)

Rosemary and Thyme from our gardens (no miles)

Wine grown and brewed in Falmouth (8 miles)

Sea salt (the ocean is .5 miles from my house, the store it was purchased at, 1 mile)

average distance of this feast traveled: 49 miles

Here's something that I read on the Maine Coast Vineyards website (makers of the Scarborough Beach Series wine we enjoyed that night): “That is what wine is all about anyway, creating a beverage from a product grown on the land that goes with the native foods of that land. And that is what we are doing.” That kind of holistic approach to eating- choosing food that is grown here and pairing it with other foods with a preexisting geographical relationship to each other seems like the way to honor the place you are in. As Alice Waters puts it, "How can you marvel at the world and then feed yourself in a completely un-marvelous way?"

Let me tell you- it is marvelous to sit a at table with friends with fragrant muscle broth steaming up the windows and feel like you've pulled the snow right off the city and discovered all the delicious secrets it was hiding all this time. The snow is flying down now- but knowing that the food I eat can connect me to the sunny fields I remember from the summertime feels like I'm loosening this winter's hold on me. Tonight I might have pasta with butter or whatever is hanging out in the freezer, but the memory of my Local dinner and the planning that went into it will stay with me long after I've eaten a million other dinners, and keep me planning more of them.

If It Be Now: Some Old and Even Older Words (Jennie)

I began writing this entry in July, shortly after the collapse of the Benson barn. I had difficulty completing it at the time; the event was overwhelming and raw and I struggled to write clearly. I have been meaning for some time to finish what I started. This was a momentous event, and I feel that it is important to include a description in our log:

“Well, Jen, what do you think?” Eddie Benson has disembarked from the house-sized front loader he was operating and is crossing the drive toward me. I am peering into a concrete and stone-filled hole in the ground; the last remaining evidence of the Bensons’ beautiful century-old hay barn.

“I don’t know, Eddie.” I say, sadly shaking my head.

“Just another day on the farm!” he replies.

It has been an ongoing manifesto of Eddie’s, and a personal project of his to impress this awareness upon us, that a farmer must be ready for anything. You can’t plan too far ahead, and there is no “control”. Every day is a new day, every hour a new hour. A farmer is someone who rolls with the punches, and is prepared to fix any problem, or to spend half the day trying.

When I drove to Kay-Ben on Thursday morning, two hours after learning of the barn’s collapse in Wednesday night’s freak windstorm, I could hear my pulse in my ears and I was afraid. I knew which barn had fallen and that two cows had died, but I didn’t know which two cows and I didn’t know how the family was holding up. From my brief conversation with Becky, I could only tell that things were very hectic.

When I pulled up to the Bensons’ yard, parking on the road because there were so many cars in the driveway, the energy was vibrant and hopeful. The yard was full of people, community members who put their own agendas on hold to pitch in and help the Benson family save their animals and clean up the colossal mess. In the center of the yard, folding tables were piled with donuts and sandwiches and water. Near the barn site, fifty or more people were picking up debris and waiting to move hay, once the loaders managed to gain access. Some of them had been at the farm well into the night and returned early in the morning to continue the family’s efforts. I grew up in a small Maine town myself, and recognized from my earliest consciousness this scene: women chatting and organizing food, men and women lifting and hauling, children scampering about through legs and under tables. Pitching in. I found Becky, ascertained that none of the most valuable cows had died, and hopped into a truck full of strangers to help bring additional picnic tables from a neighbor’s yard.

It was reaffirming to be on the Benson Farm that day, to see and to participate in the community support of this generous family. It was heartbreaking to see the barn caved in on herself, thrilling to hear the tales of heroics that brought seven buried calves to health and safety. It was dreadful to imagine Janice, a dry cow who was standing alone in the basement of the barn when it fell, and infectious to hear the stories, over and over again, a community cementing this event in the collective memory. Generations from now, the children will hear: “Remember when the Benson barn fell . . . I couldn’t even see my truck through the rain . . . I looked out the window across the yard and I just knew . . . they were standing in the sunshine, with the barn collapsed all around them . . .”

It was an overwhelming day full of myriad mixed emotions, but what most surprised and impressed me was that the predominant feeling on the farm was one of gratitude. Gratitude: that none of the family was hurt. Gratitude: that none of the most valuable cows, representing significant financial investment, had died. (Just two days before the collapse, I had helped to move all of the show cows, $60,000 worth of heifer, across the road from the basement of the hay barn to the heifer barn). Gratitude: that nothing worse had happened. “Eben had been planning to go over to the barn with his friends, before the rain.” said Eddie. “How lucky am I?”

Nevertheless, the event did represent substantial loss. Saying goodbye to a century-old icon and a space full of memories for generations of family members is not easy. Replacing the much-needed storage and housing facility is emotionally and economically stressful.

“It was a beautiful barn”, I say to Eddie.

“It sure was.” he agrees.

This cornerstone of farm life, that you must be adaptable and prepared to chuck your plans out the window whenever nature throws you a curve ball, must manifest in both large and small ways. Some days it’s an unanticipated rainfall or a tractor that won’t start. This summer, we observed a mammoth demonstration of farmer adaptability. “I can’t believe you’re writing a play about farming and a thunderstorm flattens a hay barn” said a Broadturn intern. “It’s your fairy tale ending for the play,” says Ryan.

“You know, Eddie,” I say. “We’ve all noticed that each week, you somehow manage to make our visits to the Benson Farm more unique and dramatic than the last.” I indicate the absent barn with a nod of my head. “There are four weeks left in our project!”

“There are, huh?” Eddie pulls at his chin and nods. “We’ll think of something.” He says.

Flexibility. Adaptability. Preparedness. Acceptance. I have only observed, but to me it seems that farming teaches a person how to live with wisdom and grace in a way that few other vocations can. On the other hand, perhaps this is one of those ways in which farming and theater aren’t so very different after all. I find myself mulling over Hamlet, and a few of my very favorite lines, ever:

“ . . .There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come - the readiness is all.”

Two very different albums that have to do with farming

1. Dirt Farmer (Levon Helm)



Dirt Farmer is good ol' folk music. It won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album in February 2008. The music video for "Poor Old Dirt Farmer" also has interviews with farmers interspersed with it -- definitely worth a watch:






2. Heartland (Owen Pallett)



Heartland is the third album by Canadian indie rock artist Owen Pallett, released January 12, 2010 on Domino Records. The songs on Heartland form a narrative concerning a "young, ultra-violent farmer" named Lewis, commanded by an all-powerful narrator—named Owen. It is set in the fictional world of Spectrum. According to Pallett, the songs are one-sided dialogues with Lewis speaking to his creator. Pallett commented that the idea behind Heartland is "preposterous. I wanted to have this contained narrative that has the breadth of a Paul Auster short story." The lyrics raise all sorts of theological questions about believers’ relationship with a deity and the nature of fate, but the construct is just a blank canvas. Pallett said, "Really, it's just all about me. All records are about their singer. I was trying to play with that." (Thanks, Wikipedia!)