The Song of One Thrush: Why We Need Each Other to Build a Healthier Food System
I faintly heard a single Russet-backed thrush in the ravine behind the farmhouse this week. Late at dusk and then again this morning. In June, her melodious spiraling melody is one more sign of hope and promise for the growing season before us.
This is my sixteenth year of farming. I have always seen my role as less of a ‘producer’ and more about removing barriers to ensure energy—life—could flow and nourish these 24 acres I’ve loved since I was four years old. Early in my journey, my perseverance was rooted in the belief that things would get easier. Over time, I thought as I developed processes, scraped together increasingly more robust infrastructure, fence post by fence post, seed by seed, experience by experience, “things”—i.e., farming—would get easier.
I believed my work as a farmer would eventually be to get out of the way. But I quickly learned, as Frank Edwin Egler so aptly wrote, “Nature is not more complicated than you think, it is more complicated than you can think.”
I look back now and feel grateful for all that heady naivety that fueled my days and made me dig deep and keep going. So much has transpired between those early days and now, things I could have never imagined…