Sparks in the Soil

Interview: Jeff Rarick, Young Man with a Vision

One of the first things Jeff Rarick told me when I approached him for an interview was, "I'm not looking to start a movement." 

A movement is just what he is part of, though - he's a prime example of a young Christian who is drawn to growing food for the purpose of helping the poor. 

He's not thinking small, either.  He's got the use of (and insurance for) 10 acres across the street from his church that he's set to turn over and start planting when his hometown near Syracuse, NY thaws out.  And he's got over 100 volunteers from his church and community raring to make his dream of growing food for the Salvation Army a reality.

Jeff is no clean-cut farm kid, which makes his transformation into the leader of this ambitious project all the more remarkable.  In his younger days, he was known more for repeated drunk driving incidents--including one that almost killed him--than for responsibly overseeing a $19 thousand farm budget and answering to a Board of Directors. His is an inspiring story, and I for one look forward to seeing how it unfolds as the weather turns warmer.

Meet Jeff in these highlights from our e-conversation about the Matthew 25 Farm:

How did you come up with the idea to grow food for the poor?

As the Bible says in Acts 2:17, "In the last days your young men will see visions." And I have had my share of them. One that happened often was of the future, with me feeding people with food I grew on a farm.  There were acres planted and many people stayed with me because they had no place to go.  Up until this new year, these were just dreams and visions.

With a hurting economy and a new church my parents had planted, I decided to try and start a garden for the poor.  It was sown on my heart by God, and I figured if He is for it, it will succeed.  If not, then that's life.  

I started by finding a source to give food away: the Salvation Army.  Then God put it on my heart to grow 10 acres, but I only had 2.  But my faith was increasing and I did not doubt.  So I called many, patiently.  Then, several weeks later God literally dropped a Christian in my lap that had land that he would loan me for free.  After I located the property I saw how big the miracle was-- it is hidden directly across the street from the church,  on a lovely hillside.  If it got any closer it would have bitten me in the backside!  Many more blessing have come in such as tractor loans and the such. 

Why do the farming through the church?  Why not do it as a secular agricultural project?

I am a Christian, a citizen of The Kingdom of Heaven, a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.  My mind and soul are already in Heaven.  So to do anything secular is a waste of time, but to do something here on Earth that glorifies Jesus and can show people that God is alive and tangible is certainly worthwhile.

What has been the biggest challenge in getting your project off the ground?

My biggest problem is a small lack of faith at times.  Even though I can see so much, the devil is always trying to get me (us) to doubt.  And I am faced with some opposition from fellow Christians who are...jealous?  Others try to give Godly advice, but are really only giving me their own personal opinion vs. a word the the Lord has given through them.  That is tough, especially when you love them a lot.

What do you think is the biggest misconception most people have about Christians farming and growing food?

Some think I am a socialist, others a hippie.  But I am just a Christian who is following my orders from God.  Nothing more.  I have no interest in personal fame or glory.  I am not trying to start a movement.  I'm just working with one that has been rolling for 2000+ years. 

Are you an experienced farmer/gardener?  Where does this passion come from for you?

I am not an experienced gardener.  Well, I do have a garden the size of a house that feed the family.  And I grow wine grapes too. I used to grow things that that Big Brother really frowns over, and was really good at it.  So, I suppose I do have some experience. 

And this passion is from God.  In Revelation 20:11-15, among other places, the Bible makes it clear that every human being will have to stand before God, as Judge.  Every thought, action, and word said will be looked over.  So, since I know I will be there I better do a decent job while here on Earth so I won't be ashamed then.  My past is forgiven, that's the purpose of Jesus.  So, I only need to try and do my best forever.

Matthew 25: 'The Least of These'

Here's the passage from the Gospels that inspired Jeff Rarick to name his farm the Matthew 25 Farm:

"Then the king will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.'

Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' 

And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.'"
--Matthew 25:34-40

Michelle Obama's Foodie Sensibility

The First Lady continues to keep a local, sustainable food sensibility front and center.  This week, before the first official White House dinner, she invited a local culinary arts class to visit the kitchen (and the wonderful Sam Kass) to see how such an event comes together.

From the New York Times: "When food is grown locally, she said, “oftentimes it tastes really good, and when you’re dealing with kids, you want to get them to try that carrot.”

“If it tastes like a real carrot, and it’s really sweet, they’re going to think that it’s a piece of candy,” she continued. “So my kids are more inclined to try different vegetables if they are fresh and local and delicious.”

Brava!

Secret Food Spots, and the Perfect Pot Roast

Every few weeks, we drive out to Concord, Mass., stop in at Verrill Farm for some produce (um, and 2 or 6 of their mocha chocolate-chip cookies), and then drive just down the road.  We park in a small, muddy lot next to a horse stable, and walk down to an almost-hidden little door with a wooden chicken hanging on it.  Inside the door is a tiny room containing a refrigerator (which contains pastured chicken eggs by the dozen) and  a large freezer filled with fresh, local meat.

In addition to being a great way to support a local food source, it's just plain fun to go to Pete & Jen's Backyard Birds.  Slipping through that door feels like a secret privilege.  And walking out again with farm fresh eggs (their laying hens live the good, grass-munching life in a mobile coop) feels like a special gift.  In the summer, one of our favorite dinners is a couple of super-fresh eggs, sunny side up, oozing bright yellow yolk over a hash of seasonal vegetables.  Ooh, summer:

But I digress.  Eating local in a New England winter means eating meat.  And I missed my chance to get orders in for Pete & Jen's meat chickens, plus I don't eat pork.  But lucky me, because they currently have in their freezer grass-fed beef that's pastured in Southborough, Massachusetts!

We bolted over there right after getting the email alerting us to this exciting development last Sunday, and we came home with a beautiful chuck round roast and a pound of ground beef.  And last night, we chowed on pot roast - brightened with the biggest honkin' carrots I've ever seen (which we picked up at Verrill's), and stewed slowly in a braising liquid that's half Barefoot Contessa and half of my Great-Aunt Dot:

Equal parts tomato juice and ginger ale. 

The ginger ale gives a little zing to the roast, and the tomato juice tenderizes and flavors the whole thing.  Four hours on low heat, a little brown rice to sop up the juice, and dinner was served.

Do you have any local food sources that feel like your own special secrets?  Come on, it's just between us chickens....and grass-fed cows.

 

Fun with Wordle

I wanted to see what my blog would look like as a Wordle cloud.  It turns out, yes, we have BANANAS!

The Jewish American Farmer

Check out this interesting article about the young eco-Jews who are starting farms and gardens across America, guided by the plentiful Jewish teachings on agriculture (found in the Mishna Zearim texts, which make up 1/6 of the Talmud). From the article:

"They leave a corner of their field unharvested for the poor, in accordance with the Mishnaic Tractate Pe’ah, or corner. They don’t plant wheat and barley together, a teaching from Tractate Kilayim, or holding back. They slaughter goats and chickens they raise themselves, practicing "tzar ba’alei hayim," the commandment to show kindness to domestic animals. They say a bracha, a blessing, before they eat. Some keep kosher, some do not, but all are committed to some kind of Jewish dietary practice."

What fascinates me about the trend of Jewish farming and "eco-kashrut" is that it's really a theological and political shift for American Jews.  Time was that Jewish farming meant kibbutz farming -- moving to Israel to turn the promised land into a teeming, beautiful oasis that could feed those who lived there.  Now, young Jews are as interested in farming, but not in a Zionist way.  They feel drawn to the land, not The Land.

"Plant where you're planted" is an idea I'm bouncing around my head, especially in light of the passage from Jeremiah I read last week.  Because they've grown up in a world where Israel is a sovereign nation, these young Jewish farmers take a biblical, not a Zionistic, view.  They see God in the act of nurturing food from the soil, in the process of living by the commandments for how to feed yourself.  That's a luxury the Zionist pioneers didn't necessarily have, and it is so telling of the desire for connection and spiritual groundedness that young American Jews feel today.

Oh, and finally, I was so encouraged to read this about those who lead Jewish farm education programs like The Jewish Farm School and Kayam Farm: "The leaders of these programs say they look forward to the day when every Jewish community center, synagogue and day school will have its own garden."

Amen and amen!

In Defense of Conventional Bananas (Sort Of)

John raised a great point in my "green shopping tips" post about why he buys organic bananas: the pesticides used in conventional methods don't necessarily hurt the fruit or the eater (because of its thick rind), but the chemicals can hurt the people who grow and pick the bananas.

He's very right--and it used to be even worse.  In 2007, banana growers sued American companies Dole, Dow Chemical, and others because they claimed that in the 1970s, the companies negligently allowed workers to be exposed to DBCP, a toxic worm-fumigant known to cause infertility and cancer.  DBCP was banned by the U.S. in 1977, but other chemical fertilizers and pesticides are used to keep bananas "clean" yellow and free of bruises. This article makes a good case for organic banana-buying.

The problem is that organic bananas are $1.19/proud at my local Whole Foods Market, as opposed to $0.79/pound for conventional ones.  And I'll confess: I've been spoiled by the idea that bananas are smooth and yellow, not brown and spotted.  Organic bananas that I've eaten in the past have tasted starchy to me, been small, and often had rotten spots.  That's my anecdotal experience, granted, but there it is.

The good news is, there is a middle way for those of us who don't want to pay $0.40 extra at the market for food whose pesticide residue is unlikely to find its way into our bodies, yet who care about worker safety and health and want to feel that we're not hurting whole communities so we can have bananas in our morning cereal.

That middle way is the "Fair Trade" seal that appears on the $0.79/pound conventional bananas at my market. The seal means, among other things, that workers are:

a) Paid a living wage
b) Protected from human rights abuses like child labor
c) Given healthcare benefits
d) Not exposed to banned toxic chemicals
e) Given protective clothing (gloves, masks) as needed to prevent respiratory and skin absorption of chemicals
f) Working under environmentally sound conditions

Click here to sign a petition to urge your grocery store to stock fair-trade bananas. 

But first, please leave comments - do you buy conventional bananas?  Are you comforted by "fair trade" seals?  Or do you avoid bananas because of the carbon footprint required to transport them to your neck of the woods?

(Image from this interesting Babble.com post about how bananas are marketed here in the U.S.)

A Heartbreaking Thaw-Day Discovery

The snow-pack has retreated over the past few days, revealing a heartbreaking mistake that I made last fall.  For some frustratingly mundane reason, I left my ceramic herb pots outside instead of schlepping them into the basement for the winter. 

And guess what happens when ceramic pots have tiny fissures in their enamel, and then water gets into those fissures and freezes, and then melts, and then freezes again?

I should have seen this coming.  But why this pot?  Why?!  Rob and I bought this beautiful, vibrant pot at the market in Siena, Italy when we were there on our honeymoon almost 10 years ago.  Now it looks like it was excavated from an archaeological site rather than lovingly packed, brought home, and filled with herbs and flowers.

Maybe I'll break it into pieces and make a mosaic garden tile out of it.  Ideas?  Must rescue this awful mistake....

Gardens in the Bible: Jeremiah's Roots

In my ongoing study of the gardens of the Bible (click here for some thoughts on Eden), I came across this passage in Jeremiah:

"Cursed is he who trusts in man, who makes mere flesh his strength, and turns his thoughts from the Lord. He shall be like a bush in the desert, which does not sense the coming of good: it is set in the scorched places of the wilderness, in a barren land without inhabitant.

Blessed is he who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord alone. He shall be like a tree planted by waters, sending forth its roots by a stream: It does not sense the coming of heat, its leaves are ever fresh; it has no care in a year of drought, it does not cease to yield fruit." --Jeremiah 7:5-8

This classic "cursed is/blessed is" prophetic construction hinges on the metaphor of a growing, fruit-bearing plant.  The curse is a barren land. The blessing is a fruitful one.  The curse is to be carelessly planted in the desert, to be scorched by the desert sun. The blessing is to set its roots "by a stream" so it does not have to "sense the coming of heat."

God in this passage is the metaphorical gardener; His people are the plants.  But given the whole "made in God's image" idea, so too are we gardeners, and the fruits of our lives (and our gardens) are the plants.  Our work, it would seem, is to choose wisely where we set our plants into the earth, hopefully landing someplace where our leaves can be "ever fresh."

I wonder how the early 20th century Jewish pioneers who first turned the arid, sandy soil of Israel would have read this passage.  They had no stream, and they had "cares" from drought to starvation to attack. But they were determined to till the un-tillable into a place that "does not cease to yield fruit."  And they did--they earned the "blessed is" side of Jeremiah's equation, and understood the two sides of the metaphor.  They both planted and were planted.

How does this passage speak to your gardening life?  In addition to the Israeli pioneers, I think of  container gardens on high-rise balconies, blighted brownfields turned into urban oases, and the myriad other ways in which people are planting wherever they've been planted.

No Hens Allowed...Yet

Inspired as I was after my visit to Terry's hen house, I decided to look into whether my town (Arlington, Mass.) allows residents to keep hens.  So I called Tom at Animal Control, and when I asked the question, he laughed out loud.  "Oh, I love this place," he said. 

Apparently I wasn't the first call he's received on the subject.

It turns out that the desire for organic, fresh eggs right from the backyard is quite the trend, especially among the funky, eclectic types who populate my town.  But Arlington is zoned only for plant agriculture, not animal.  A town-wide variance would be required if that zoning were ever to change. 

Turns out just such a variance i's on the agenda for the Town Meeting coming up in April.

The problem is that nearby towns (Belmont, Lexington, Winchester) that allow hen-keeping require either 1/2 or 1 acre of land to do it.  Average lot size in Arlington (and the precise size of my lot)?  One-tenth of an acre. 

People on these tiny lots here have kept hens before, but let's just say that Tom has received many an anonymous call from irate neighbors who are complaining about their cluckin' neighbors....

Town meetings in Arlington are closed, so if I want to voice my opinion I need to figure out who my precinct's representative is and talk to him or her.  Which I might just do, except now that I'm thinking about it more, I'm questioning the wisdom of squeezing a hen house onto such a tiny lot.  Where would I put my tomatoes? 

A girl can dream, though.  A girl can dream.