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AgriCulture: The True Meaning of Deeply Rooted
AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes:
It’s been a rough few weeks on the farm. With snowstorms now a regular event, the clutch on the pickup truck we use to transport big bales of hay to the sheep and cows went kaput, the snow blower has had repeated parts failures, and our usual neighborhood snow plower took a powder. Mostly these mishaps have happened while Peter was alone here, without help. I felt awful for him, but secretly grateful that I could express my sympathy and support from the warmth of an apartment in the City, before getting back to the book he gave me for Christmas, Deeply Rooted, by Lisa M. Hamilton.
This book, a portrait of three rather unconventional farm families, delves in great detail into the lives of farmers whose methods are rooted in historical farming practices, even as they meet modern challenges. Perhaps more important, it shows how central the history from which they come is to these farmers. It’s as if awareness of—and allegiance to—that history is what impels them to farm in a way that reveres the land and builds on traditional farming methods that evolved over generations.
I was particularly struck by the story of Harry Lewis, an African-American dairy farmer in Sulphur Springs, Texas. Mr. Lewis is a long time and prominent member of the Organic Valley farm cooperative. But he’s not a Birkenstock-wearing urbanite who came to organic farming through reading articles on its merits in Mother Jones. His family has been farming in that area for generations. His guiding ethos includes an instinct for economy, a belief in the supreme value of self-determination, and reverence for the land as the source of his ability to make what he will of himself.
The association between the land and self-determination is no accident. Mr. Lewis’s community grew out of one of the hundreds of “Freedom Colonies” that sprang up in east Texas in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Sparsely populated and free of cotton plantations, the region offered recently freed slaves an opportunity to obtain their own land and establish self-governing communities. Those who came to east Texas were able to escape the serf-like fate of those who remained as sharecroppers on their former plantations and whose lot was barely distinguishable from that of slaves.
One reason the description of Harry Lewis resonated with me was that a few days before reading it, I had heard from a friend, Mondy Raibon, who lives in Putnam County, about what he and his partner, Scott Wilson, were doing, in a very part-time way, to bring back into production a small grove of 17 pecan trees on some land he had inherited in east Texas. Given the location, I wondered whether his farm, too, might descend from the Freedom Colonies of the 19th century.
Mondy had not heard about the Freedom Colonies, but he has done substantial and detailed historical research on his land and his family, and it certainly fits the paradigm. His pecan grove is located on what remains of his maternal grandparents’ farm in a community known as Galilee, Smith County, Texas. It was an entirely African-American rural community built around two institutions in what Mondy calls the “classic arrangement”—the Galilee Baptist Church and right next door the Galilee School, grades 1 through 6, which Mondy attended.
Mondy’s maternal grandfather, Mondy Adams, was born in 1884, the first generation after emancipation. His surname was probably the name of the family in Alabama that owned his mother. When Adams was 21, he married 15-year-old Annie Lovie Britton. They both almost certainly had been raised on farms in the region. After marrying, in 1911, they bought their own 107-acre farm and lived in the barn until they could afford to build a Sears mail-order kit house, which still stands today. For a time, they raised sugar cane and had a syrup mill, but they always worked their own land, for themselves. .
Annie Lovie Britton Adams is vivid in Mondy’s memory for being as strong as a pioneer woman. She was fair skinned, 5’6” or 5’7” tall, and she could work toe-to-toe with any man. She worked in the fields beside her husband. She drove the horse to plow the land. Though not formally educated, she loved to read and was an avid correspondent, keeping in touch with cousins all around the country by mail. She died in 1978, at age 88.
Mondy’s mother was raised on that farm, and she married a man of similar background from the northern part of the county. His family, too, were independent farmers, raising cattle. He took up residence with Mondy’s mother and her parents on their farm, bonding closely with his father-in-law.
Mondy’s father worked as a laborer on the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift at Ideal Sunbeam Baking Company. That allowed him to work more-or-less full time on the farm, as well. At planting time, he would come home from work and start planting by the headlights of their small International Harvester “Farm-All” tractor from midnight until breakfast, and thereafter through the morning, catching only 3 hours of sleep before returning to work at the bakery.
One of seven children, Mondy was born in 1950 in the Sears kit house. From the age of 7 or 8, when not in school, he was expected to do a full range of chores—getting the cows into their milking stalls in the morning, slopping the pigs, and helping to harvest the field corn, which they did by hand. Mondy describes his family as not prosperous or even middle class, but, because they grew their own food, they were never hungry, and his parents always made sure that their children were well dressed to attend school.
In addition to what they grew for themselves, the farm raised market crops (cotton, peaches, pecans, cattle, turkeys, geese, field corn used as feed, and purple hull peas which they sold to the local grocery store). They had milking cows and laying chickens, and the teachers at the Galilee School would buy eggs and butter from their farm for themselves and their friends in the local metropolis, Tyler, Texas.
Mondy loved the sense of space and freedom the farm afforded him. He could walk in the woods and sing as loud as he wanted without disturbing anyone. Yet he found it confining to be in Galilee, and could not wait to escape to the city.
When Mondy finished graduate school in 1980 and had not yet found a job, he moved back to the farm. His father invited him to tend the pecan trees and sell the crop, so he would have an income, and Mondy did that until he was able to find a job in his chosen field. When Mondy’s mother died, and the farm was divided among Mondy and his brother and sisters. He chose the section with the pecan trees for himself.
I asked Mondy what he thought the farm represented to his grandparents and parents, and he said “independence.” I suspect that the same is true for all family farmers, but must have been so ever more deeply for those with a history of slavery, who all-too-easily could have fallen back into servitude by sharecropping. Their overriding desire for independence gives his farm a special meaning. Mondy, after 30 years away, would now like nothing more than to resume tending his orchard. His impulse to return is a testament to what it means to be deeply rooted, not just to a place, but to the history and spirit that infuses that place. —Mark Scherzer
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Posted by Rural Intelligence on 01/25/11 at 10:01 PM • Permalink
