Contemplating the Work - On Produce and Production
I recently had a series of conversations with a dear friend from graduate school who was staying with us for a few days. Of the many things we threw around, one issue that stuck with me was a line of thinking about produce and production, a series of considerations that went well beyond farming and into thoughts of public life as well.
I consider as the principal goal of the farm to produce things, namely produce. Vegetables, herbs, fruits, maybe, eggs, honey, meat for some, flowers, seeds, and so on. What else do farms produce? What is the production of a farm? Is there more we bring to market beyond simply the squash and cucumbers grown in our fields?
The obvious answer is a resounding ‘yes,’ which is what got me thinking about the concept of production as related to my wife’s work. She’s a Production Designer for television, and it is her job (apologies for the felonious over-simplification) to create the look and feel of the production of a show or film, largely in an effort to do one of two things: make viewers suspend disbelief and enter the reality of the program and also to establish guideposts for the viewer to understand how they’re to feel while interacting with program.
I began thinking about farming in the present-day, and wondering about the balance between the produce we produce, the vegetables and herbs, and the production we often see in social media or even in person at farmers’ markets or events. Websites, merchandise, partnerships with restaurants, all of these serve as identifiers for consumers of our products. They are guideposts to let consumers know how to approach our products, how to talk about them, and how much they choose to spend for our products or services. Without these ancillary guideposts, without the production behind it all, is it really enough these days as a small farmer to simply produce produce? I’m feeling like the answer is likely, ‘no.’
I am left therefore to question my bifurcated compulsions. On the one hand, all I want is to be on the farm, working hard, demonstrating my value by simply providing high-quality and delicious food. After all, I spent nearly 10 years operating an educational non-profit, doing my best to connect our work with tangible outcomes (in my opinion a fool’s errand, for that matter), and part what attracted me to farming was the physicality of the result of the work. Twenty pounds of summer squash, a bushel of okra, one dozen eggs, two pints of pickles.
On the other hand, I am compelled to share my journey, to invite friends and strangers alike to understand the beauty, the difficulty, the triumphs and the failures of this journey. I can’t help but think that knowledge of the work behind a box of produce alters the way we appreciate and care for those foods. (I know from experience, in fact, as a long-time CSA member, how differently I treated those products than the run-of-the-mill grocery store foods).
For the current moment, I have settled on the fact that the story is important (when told in honest terms, without being over-produced), but so too is the quality of the food. The balance is the key, and I presume that’s a lifelong dance for any small farmer in this stage of the work.
