Contemplating the Work - Isolation and Thinking on the Need for Community
When I was in the beginning stages of getting my educational non-profit off the ground back in 2013, I had a meeting with a higher-up from Austin Community College, the largest purveyor of adult education in Central Texas. I was a rebellious, driven, dogmatic, unapologetic advocate for both our learning community and also my style of running a program and a classroom. This higher-up assured me that - paraphrasing - without partners, our non-profit would surely die. The implication being that we - the little, radical startup - needed to feed off of the big boy as a strategy to simply go on living. I didn’t then - and I don’t now - love the idea of living a parasitic existence. That said, I wonder about the need for interaction, mutuality and collaboration with others in the farming space.
I spend the majority of my time working alone, and frankly, I like it that way. I am beholden to the soil first, the crops second, followed by concerns for customers and in dead last, my own considerations. That’s fine. In fact, it’s just the way I like it. I’m motivated by the changes in the weather, and their messages are often quite clear. Plant, harvest, cover, shred, seed, water. All these actions, compelled by the little world of the farm, are particular to my context, to this farm, to this land.
When I was in education, I had a similar desire to make decisions, though they were based more on the community of our program and guided by my strong convictions as an educator. I did, however, enjoy and even covet conversations about my practice with other educators, like-minded or otherwise. I liked to keep up on current research about pedagogy and curriculum studies, and I liked to push myself and others to consider their own practice reflectively so as to improve our methods.
Being as busy as I have been on the farm, however, I have yet to establish such a professional community, and I often wonder about the utility of doing so. I have attended a couple of events here and there, mostly focused on specific practices, but I’m not the type of person to force networking or even small talk. If I’m telling the truth, my conversations with the chickens is usually enough to scratch the itch that my family doesn’t take care of.
Just as in education, I think that there are some really wonderful people doing farming these days (along with ostensibly some real boobs), and I’m encouraged by the diversity represented in our space in Central Texas. We cis, white male farmers are perhaps the least interesting flavor of the farming rainbow, but I’m hopeful to learn about my positionally through interacting more closely with the various members of the farming space. Helping me contextualize my work through dialogue with diverse actors seems the very least I can do.
