I love this!  Instead of encouraging women to break the glass ceiling in the corporate world, here is an article about them breaking into farming–traditionally viewed as a man’s work.  (Although anybody who knows farmers know that the the entire family helps and that women had traditionally helped in the fields, along with taking care of the household.  You know the old tale that great grandma gave birth in the morning and plowed the back forty in the afternoon…)

Farming means independence in so many ways–owning your own land, growing not only your own food, but earning bucks selling to others, playing in the dirt is always fun :), and just being out in the fresh air uplifts the spirit.   During the last Depression, folks were very poor, but they could still feed themselves if they had enough land to grow food.  This time around, things have changed….making people more dependent on food stamps, IMO.

When I worked on the farm that summer a few years ago, it was such a great experience.  I could be planting, when a butterfly floats by…or a grasshopper hops past…we would see clouds rolling in and wait until the last possible moment to make a run for it.  If it wasn’t lightening out, we would just continue to work (as long as it wasn’t a downpour).  Just being out in the fresh air away from office cubicles (and office politics) is so freeing.

And if you needed to, you could bend the farm schedule around the family needs.  And then there is the sense of community that is a part of farming–farmers know one another and will help another out.  I’ve heard stories of a farmer being injured and unable to get the crop harvested, which would mean losing the crop, their income and their farm…and the other farmers would come to his aid and harvest the crop.

And the wonder of watching a seed planted grow and eventually produce food is nothing short of a miracle.  You never know when drought will occur, when torrential downpours will wash things out, or when overbearing heat will scorch the plants….and on…farming is not for the faint of heart.  It’s an art. A craft borne of experience.

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Here is a neat story on a man from Bangladesh whom now calls the U.S. home.  He started his own restaurant and began growing fresh food to supply the restaurant.  He wanted to expand that with emphasis on food justice and found it with the help of Julia Nerbonne of the HECUA (Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs).  This ambitious project seeks to have fresh food brought to restaurants from nearby farms…and I love the idea of rickshaws bringing it to market.  As the story states, though, winter is the hard part–not only the end of growing season, but difficulty in transporting food to the restaurant.  It’s an interesting idea that I hope grows and takes hold.

Here’s to good food! And the farms that do it sustainably!