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Home Resource Center In the News Home Greenbelt Alliance in the News |
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Greenbelt Alliance In the News
February 25, 2004 Andy Griffin: Down on the Farm
When tractors meet tract houses BylineWhen a neighbor is standing in the gray, misty dawn, dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, shaking his fist and screaming "Why are you running the *!O#ing tractor at 6:30 in the morning?" it's a safe bet he actually doesn't want a detailed answer. He just wants you to go away. And as our cities balloon at the waist, more farmers are finding themselves in conflicts with their new suburban neighbors. I've heard pedigreed consultants speaking at important conferences call this zone where housing tracts and cultivated lands meet in "urban/rural interface." But "Urban/rural in your face!" is more like it. I should know; this awkward realm where expectations clash has been my habitat for years. I remember one encounter 20 years ago when my employer told me to take a backhoe out to a field he was leasing and dig a new sump in the creek. We pumped water from the creek to irrigate the field and the sump had gradually filled in with gravel so the pump would not suck. A crop of squash was wilting. There was no time to spare. Now, Saturday morning, early, I was to clean out the sump. Irrigators would arrive at noon to fire up the pump and water the plants. We were thinking about our own needs, our own pressures, our own business, our own calendar. It did not occur to me to worry overmuch about the people renting a house next to the field. It certainly never crossed my mind that the renter, a Sikh devotee, would be hosting a meditation retreat in his home that morning for co-religionists. I rumbled onto the scene around 8 a.m. driving a diesel-powered backhoe and plunged immediately into the creek. Scoop, scoop, scoop. I was reaching out with the long crane-like shovel, digging up wet gravel, swiveling, and dumping it on the creek bank. Scoop, swivel. Scoop, swivel. Scoop - uh oh - I swiveled around and almost knocked over a fellow who had planted himself on my pile of wet gravel. He was angry. He and his friends were trying to meditate in the house nearby and I was disturbing their peace. I listened to him, (for awhile) told him what I was doing and why I was doing it and then got back to work. He left, red-faced, fists clenched. In a bit, I heard a whoop over the roar of diesel motor. I looked up and beheld a whole knot of people were yelling at me, all holding daggers and, at least one of them waving a sword. "Holy cow," I thought. "These folks are worked up." I could just see the headlines in the local paper. "Farmworker killed by Indians." But then you read further and discover that these were not Apaches or Pawnees, or even Punjabis, but white, middle class, Central Californian spiritual seekers in turbans. The whole scene glowed with the manic violent energy I associate with road rage. Call this encounter an example of meditation rage. I answered them by pushing hard on the throttle to produce a puff of black cloud of smoke out of my exhaust stack. "Meditate on this!" I'm a more patient individual today. Five years ago, when a neighbor complained that the white-shouldered strawberries she was stealing from my field were tasteless and small, I merely smiled sweetly instead of expressing myself articulately. I also resolved to move the farm to a more remote location. Now all my farming is concentrated on a piece of ground I lease some 30 miles from our home where land rents are reasonable, water is available and I'm distanced from too many neighbors. So imagine my sigh of sadness when on my way to the field one day I saw bulldozers blowing in a new road through the hay fields near the ranch getting ready for the construction of a new sub-division. The new houses will be five miles from the farm, but the way progress progresses, I'm afraid I'll soon have neighbors again with their noises and their urgencies disturbing my peaceful meditations among my vegetables. So what's a farmer to do? My approach now has to be to reach out to the public. There is no fleeing any longer. The Pacific is at our backs and the farmlands are crowded on from all sides. We live in a democracy (sort of) where each person gets a vote. Small-scale farmers only have a small-scale voice. The spokesmen for the nation's agricultural interests are mouthpieces for the huge, corporate, commodity producers only. They certainly don't speak for me. If the seekers waving knives could have voted me away they would have. If I want to vote my new subdivision neighbors away I can't. I'm outnumbered. The public, by and large, is complacent with its ignorance about where its food comes from. There will always be friction along the "urban/rural in your face," but without some prompt action on the part of the farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by urban sprawl, someday almost all our food could come from some foreign land, just like our oil. That's no good for me - I'd have to get a real job. So this, then, is the agenda for our small farm.
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