[Excerpt, the complete chapter, from "Deep Gardening: Soul Lessons from 17 Gardens"
Woody Wodraska’s 40 year gardening odyssey has taken him to 18 gardens and another dozen agricultural endeavors in almost as many states and provinces. Always the question arose how to grow food, live in beauty and abundance with grace and in harmony in co-creation with Devas and Nature Spirits. From backyard family gardens to gardens feeding 100 families, Woody started from scratch or built on other gardeners’ vision. More free chapters here.
by Woody Wodraska
Again, exigencies of family life determined the timing and destination of a move and southern New Hampshire was the place. This was a hilly, lightly populated, town-hall-meeting kind of area, “real New England” where people from the populous areas to the south and east come to peep at the gorgeous autumn leaves. That’s what the locals call the tourists who flock there in October, “Leafpeepers.” An area of many played-out farms and a few functioning ones, but always vest-pocket places compared to the spacious Illinois farmscape. Pine Hill Waldorf School was located there and so was the Temple-Wilton Community Farm, beginning its fourth year in 1989. While we were able to join T-WCF as members, it was clear than no one was going to pay Woody to farm in New Hampshire, and that the cost of living was roughly double that in Illinois. It was time again for me to take my fall back position, a job in the social service sector working with mental hospital patients who had been returned to the community.
On occasion I was able to make myself useful in Trauger’s fields hoeing in the row crops, or rototilling the raspberry rows at Temple Gardens but my connection with the initiative begun by Trauger Groh, Anthony Graham, Lincoln Geiger and the other members really took form at the March budget meeting for the farm.
To me, these men are heroes, and so are the families who joined with them to initiate a never-before-seen cooperative effort like this.
There were about 75 of us sitting there in March, 1989, to pledge our support in dollars to the year’s budget for the community farm, sitting in a newly constructed meeting room attached to Trauger Groh’s home, where he lived with his wife Alice Bennett Groh and their new baby. We were representing the 80 families who would receive their shares of vegetables, fruit, milk and other dairy products every week during the season. During the winter the fresh produce would be minimal, and maybe or not worth the trip to the farm to collect, but if you were a raw-milk customer, as we would be, you’d pick up your gallon or two for sure and perhaps a handful of beets or carrots.
That prepositional phrase “the trip to the farm” distinguishes what I consider a crucial difference between CSAs: 1) Many, if not most, of the larger CSAs deliver their produce in boxes or bags to one or more distribution points in their geographic area. Subscribers pick up their portion and take it home. Many will never see the farm, although the farmer or core group may sponsor festival activities there; 2) Smaller CSAs often have the shareholders come to the farm to pick up their shares. Self-evidently, the traffic can be a problem, as is the demand on the farmers’ time to schmooze with customers, but the public relations are good. Shareholders may take the time to at least look at the cows or feed the chickens, ask a question or stay and gossip a bit with other shareholders. Certainly they will feel more involved.
There is a difference between what the CSA ideal represented 25 or 30 years ago and how the business of CSA is run today. Most of the websites for the larger, most successful CSAs simply offer vegetables in exchange for a set number of dollars. One such, serving 950 New York City families and some from other towns, offers up 25 weeks of vegetables, roughly 20 pounds per week, for $495. It’s pretty straightforward, much like buying a magazine subscription, with some flexibility built into the system for lower income folks. And not that there are not opportunities for shareholders to visit the farm individually or at a festive event.
This is the “vegetable box” scheme mentioned and found wanting by Wolfgang Stränz in a 2007 posting to the BDNOW! email discussion list, which I’ll quote extensively later in this chapter. Wolfgang is involved with the Buschberghof Farm in Germany, the farm where Trauger lived and worked before romance brought him to New Hampshire.
Many of the most successful CSAs have flourished with an additional twist, based on inspired thinking about the ultimate relationship between land, farmers and eaters, a relationship that faces up to risk and responsibility. The T-WCF blurs the distinctions by calling all members “Farmers.” and has remained quite small, 120 families. The following is from their current website [their 21st year if I calculate correctly.]
The
Temple-Wilton Community Farm is a free association of individuals which
aims to make possible a farm that provides life-giving food for the
local community and respects the natural environment. The members are
economically organized in households. Out of their household income
they cover, individually and together, the operational costs of the
farm. They are not legally connected and have, therefore, no legal
claims on each other.
So:
- if a
member does not do the farm work that they promised to do
- if a member does not pay the share of
the farm cost they declared they would pay
- if a member harvests more produce for
their household than is socially
responsible
- if a member does not come
to meetings to discuss their needs, and the needs of others in the
community
- if a member works on the
farm without first coming to an understanding with the other farmers;
in short, if any of us goes against their own expressed will and
intentions: the others can have no claim against them. The only thing
that the others can do in these cases is to jump in, in order to
prevent an eventual loss. Everything concerning the farm originates
from the constantly renewed free will of the participants.
But I was telling the story of the pledge meeting that cold March evening in Temple New Hampshire. The farmers passed out copies of the proposed budget and discussed it briefly. I remember that it was in the neighborhood of $85,000 that year. There was general consensus that it was a reasonable budget. Trauger gave a high-minded little talk reminding people of the significance of the occasion—that they were engaging in a very unusual activity here, the application of principles of brotherhood in the sphere of economics, a radical departure from the ideology of the Wal-Mart store—cheap goods at the lowest possible price. There was a peroration, I’m sure, to help strengthen resolve and lighten the mood, which was actually a little heavy, I thought.
This was the one mandatory meeting of the year: you came to make your pledge, or sent a proxy, or lost your share. It was a thrill to be part of this, to put the “I” in Idealism and vote with our pocketbooks for food of the highest quality, grown by farmers who were first of all stewards of their land. Everyone, I think, was stoked, but most had been through the process before; this was my first time. For me, to speak aloud before this circle of strangers to tell what I could afford, to undergo such an exposure of private matters…this was exhilarating, humiliating and mighty disconcerting, all at the same time.
It was clear that the average pledge was going to have to be a little more than $1,000 and it was understood that some could afford to offer more to cover the shortfall that was generated by some who could only give less, like me. I was prepared to pledge $750 for the year’s share, all we could afford. Most of the others in the room had kids in Waldorf school too and were sorely burdened by the tuition as well as the high cost of living in the region, but many of them were employed by high tech firms in the western Boston suburbs and making three times what I did in my social service work, or they were professionals of one kind or another. Then there were the farmers, total masters of their craft, who were taking only a pittance for themselves.
[I have not analyzed budgets of the most robust CSAs in this era, to see what wages the farmers are earning—probably pretty good, considering—but this brings up another point which doesn’t seem to fit elsewhere: That all CSAs I know about or have been involved with have been subsidized in some fashion
often enough, as with T-WCF, by the more or less donated capital investment represented by the farmers’ land and equipment. I’m sure that by 1989 the budget covered normal operating costs for the tractors, mowers, swathers, balers; the fixing of fences and purchase of supplies. Farmer Groh had all this equipment and more besides, along with a few cows and fields for crops. Blueberries and an ancient apple orchard as well. Farmer Graham worked the land belonging to the Lukas Foundation, a Camphill-inspired lifesharing community occupying three houses at Temple, and Farmer Geiger, on land next door to Lukas, was continuing the dairy operation he’d run for some years. My point is that none of the eaters, in their share price at this time, was paying for the capital assets: Land, Equipment, Animals or housing for farmers.] This, too, along with the living wage issue, may well have been addressed in more recent years, and, as Steven McFadden [he wrote Farms of Tomorrow and Farms of Tomorrow Revisited with Trauger] points out in a New Farm article http://www.newfarm.org/features/0104/csa-history/part1.shtml that the town of Wilton assessed itself $40,000 for the farm’s support, this, as Steven reports, in “skinflint New Hampshire”.
And so the protocol went: Each of us around the room, one by one, spoke out our pledge, without too much editorializing or justifying, to keep the process moving along. As each firm pledge figure escaped a shareholder’s lips, a dozen poised fingers homed in on calculator keys, and a running total was kept. First round, $29,000 short; second round, $12,000 short; third round, DONE DEAL! We applauded lightly, many grinning faces and nodding heads. It was late. We congratulated ourselves and headed home.
I was commuting back and forth to Manchester, a city of 100,000, an hour and a half at least per day to the various places we lived in the Temple-Wilton settlements and their surroundings. We never could find quite the right place to live and garden there. Then, after two and a half years Waldorf school was over and there was no way we could afford to send young Sky to the Waldorf high school at High Mowing, which is a boarding situation. And so there was no real reason not to move to the city and give me back that seven or eight hours a week I was spending behind the wheel. He could go to public high school there.
Another year and a few months went by with me, the gardener …
bereft of land to take care of, away from the light, the smells, the colors of the garden. My work was with highly medicated schizophrenics, bipolar folks, all who had been through hospitalization, most many times. The support available to them in the community was scattered and sparse and ill-advised. I learned a lot about compassion working with my people, and a lot about anger working with conventional medical bureacrazy they were enmeshed it. My rope was getting mighty short and I went to a psychic for advice. The question was why I was stuck in this job and lifestyle so far from my natural home on a farm, and was there a way out? The psychic was a drooling old fraud [he’d had a stroke, but his wife was at his side to dab him off with Kleenex and interpret his very impaired speech] who came up with a delicious story for me to chew on, about the relationship I had with my son several lives back for both of us. When I asked “Am I ever going to have the opportunity to garden again…” he answered “Of course. What you have to do is want it badly enough.” And that old cliché, which I could have had for free in any number of self-help books, carried me in the next few months, and that was worth the price of admission, so I paid the guy and I left.
In this winter of 1993-4, in the meantime, I met up with the Landmark courses and I took the basic one, The Forum, in January, and the Advanced Forum soon after. I very quickly “got it” that I was creating my own misery and that there was a bold and terrifying thing to do about it: I could “really want it.”
Soon came a phone call from Dennis, my helper from the Quincy CSA times five years before. He’d read a classified ad in The High Country Times. The B-Bar Guest Ranch in Montana was advertising for a Biodynamic gardener. Decent salary, housing included, a captive market. On my. I took all I had learned from the Landmark courses and went for it. Applied for the position, had lengthy sessions on the phone with the ranch guest manager, she consulted with the owner [my big negotiating point was that I needed a winter job as well, since I would be supporting my son with half of my salary] and the deal was struck.
More about CSAs and their many ramifications now:
Now we hear from Wolfgang Stränz, from Germany:
at
Buschberghof we are an all-year CSA with a full range of food,
including bread, meat, cheese. There is no need to go shopping anymore
for us. And the other difference is that we (the members) decide
personally, how much money we want to give. There are no fixed prices.
Trying to let the social threefold thing to come alive.
Trauger Groh once lived and worked here on Buschberghof. Then he went to the U.S. and founded the Temple Wilton Community Farm, from which we adopted most of their principles. The exception is, that processed food, like e.g. bread, cheese, sausages are included and don't need to be bought by the members as at the TWCF.
Talking of sharing risk and responsibility in agriculture CSAwise means for me that it has to happen reciprocally. To run a CSA scheme only during the summer season and let the consumers go to the supermarket during the rest of the year and let them buy the crap from there, is not a mutual commitment. I do guarantee the economical stability for the farm and I do expect from the farmers that they don't let me starve.
Trauger Groh once lived and worked here on Buschberghof. Then he went to the U.S. and founded the Temple Wilton Community Farm, from which we adopted most of their principles. The exception is, that processed food, like e.g. bread, cheese, sausages are included and don't need to be bought by the members as at the TWCF.
Talking of sharing risk and responsibility in agriculture CSAwise means for me that it has to happen reciprocally. To run a CSA scheme only during the summer season and let the consumers go to the supermarket during the rest of the year and let them buy the crap from there, is not a mutual commitment. I do guarantee the economical stability for the farm and I do expect from the farmers that they don't let me starve.
Which is the clearest explanation I know why one would belong to a CSA and embrace the heart-centered commitment Wolfgang is proposing.
From the Temple-Wilton website, details of the financials:
The
following formula has allowed the farm to operate smoothly since its
inception: All unprocessed farm produce (vegetable and milk) is
available to members free of charge, if they meet the proposed budget
through contributions over the course of one year. This enables us to
sever the direct link between food and money. Pledges are made, based
on the ability to pay, rather than on the amount of food to be taken.
Having made a contribution, the member is free to take as much food as
is needed, dependent on availability. Processed goods (yogurt,
cheese, meat, bread, etc.) and eggs, are sold at a price that will
enable the processing costs to be covered.
And the nitty-gritty of co-operation, after the “new” wears off and the ideals have been tested time after time:
The farmers agree on certain principles to make cooperation in the agricultural community possible:
1) All farmers (members) are individually responsible for their actions and the consequences thereof. To enable others to help them in their initiatives, each farmer (member) must let the others know what they intend to do.
2) Each farmer generates expenses to serve their initiative. The expenditure made by each farmer increases the cost for all the others. Therefore, the individual, in cooperation with other individuals, has to declare what costs they project to fulfill their initiative. The projections of those that intend to spend money, combined together, make up the annual budget. This budget has to be approved by the assembly of farmers (all members). Once the budget is approved, the individual farmer is free to spend the amount of money they have in the approved annual budget.
Every farmer who spends money agrees to keep books and records of such expenditures. The farmers agree on a scheme of categories in which the expenses are accounted for. The books have to verify annually how far the economic aims have been achieved.
3) All farm members agree to share the cost of the annual budget. Any farmer (member) can leave the Community Farm at the end of the year, when they have paid their part of the annual cost. If the need arises to leave the farm before the end of the year they can either pay out the rest of their pledge, or find another member to replace them.
4) Every farmer gives all the other farmers the right to substitute for them in their work if they fail to do, or complete, something they have taken on.
5) It is understood that when the cooperation between the farmers is working, fewer goods and services will be brought into the farm organism by individuals at the expense of all others. It is our goal to be as self-sufficient as possible with our labor.
6) The motivation to do things on the farm should always be directed by our spiritual and nutritional aims rather then by our financial needs.
And Wolfgang contrasts this level of brotherhood with the more typical CSA “vegetable box schemes:1) All farmers (members) are individually responsible for their actions and the consequences thereof. To enable others to help them in their initiatives, each farmer (member) must let the others know what they intend to do.
2) Each farmer generates expenses to serve their initiative. The expenditure made by each farmer increases the cost for all the others. Therefore, the individual, in cooperation with other individuals, has to declare what costs they project to fulfill their initiative. The projections of those that intend to spend money, combined together, make up the annual budget. This budget has to be approved by the assembly of farmers (all members). Once the budget is approved, the individual farmer is free to spend the amount of money they have in the approved annual budget.
Every farmer who spends money agrees to keep books and records of such expenditures. The farmers agree on a scheme of categories in which the expenses are accounted for. The books have to verify annually how far the economic aims have been achieved.
3) All farm members agree to share the cost of the annual budget. Any farmer (member) can leave the Community Farm at the end of the year, when they have paid their part of the annual cost. If the need arises to leave the farm before the end of the year they can either pay out the rest of their pledge, or find another member to replace them.
4) Every farmer gives all the other farmers the right to substitute for them in their work if they fail to do, or complete, something they have taken on.
5) It is understood that when the cooperation between the farmers is working, fewer goods and services will be brought into the farm organism by individuals at the expense of all others. It is our goal to be as self-sufficient as possible with our labor.
6) The motivation to do things on the farm should always be directed by our spiritual and nutritional aims rather then by our financial needs.
What
we have here in Germany is many lots of vegetable box schemes, which is
less than CSA for my taste. Because it is so easy to stop your
subscription. To take over risk & responsibility in agriculture is
something different. But possibly these veg box schemes are similar to
many CSAs in the U.S. of which I know too little.
I say All blessings on the named and unnamed heroes at Temple-Wilton Farm, and on all of those in Germany—they provide the models for the almost 100,000 families involved in CSA projects around the country to strive for greater involvement and commitment...for the sake of the land and the children.
And so by grace I was offered a gem of a gardening job at the B Bar Guest Ranch [next chapter] and much sooner than I might have expected I was to be showing up for work there, two-thirds of the way across the country, in my beloved West. The obstacles fell away, fell away, until I was on the road in the last week of March, with everything I owned in a small pickup. Along the way, somewhere in South Dakota, the landscape became visibly, spiritually Western and I pulled over into a roadside rest, plucked a sprig of sage; I cried with the beauty of it.
End of Chapter 9
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