A workshop on "Starting from Square One: Creating a Farm to Match Your Goals, Skills, Values, and Resources" today opened a whole new understanding of sustainability for me. The workshop was part of the annual Northeast Organic Farmers Association of New York's annual conference taking place in Saratoga Springs this weekend. Because of my participation in the NOFA-NY's "Locavore" challenge in September, I ended up on the organization's mailing, and learned in November that one could apply for scholarships to attend the conference. I applied, and was thrilled to be awarded one of the scholarships. Determined to make the most of the opportunity, I pulled myself out of bed before 6 a.m. and made it to the conference by 8, with plenty of time for a leisurely breakfast and browse through the exhibition hall books before things began.
What impressed me about this particular workshop was its emphasis on integrating personal values, lifestyle choices, and other professional work into the farming life.
"Farming is not for the faint of heart," stated presenter Erica Frenay, who owns the Shelterbelt Farm with her husband and works with a Small Farms Program operated by the Cornell Extension Office.
Because of the challenges of farming, she noted, "It's important to know that nobody farms alone."
About seventy people attended the workshop, which seemed like an unsustainably large number for a "workshop". Frenay and her co-presenter Kylie Spooner, however, made the three-hour session work with grace and skill. What worked especially well was their blend of personal stories with their emphasis to us on not getting fixated on their stories but rather to focus on the processes they were going through. They also put us to work on a series of individual writing exercises, a strategy that always works well for me. And they encouraged our stories, which turned out to encompass processes that all of us were able to learn from. (Well, I suppose I can't speak for everyone, but I learned a lot.)
Frenay and Spooner built the workshop on the principles of a concept known as "holistic management", which they defined for the uninitiated as "turning sunshine into money." I was unfamiliar with the term, but as the workshop progressed, I realized that the principles mirrored several other practices I've used throughout my life to set intentions and reflect on what's important in my life. They broke it down to three categories: Assessing your resources and skills; envisioning a holistic goal; and then setting some SMART goals for your farm that might be achievable within a one to five year time-frame. SMART refers to goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, results-defined, and tied to a particular timeline. The product, as I understood it, was not a fixed, concrete path to success but more one of establishing a potential destination that might require multiple -- and sometimes diverging -- paths to get there. As Spooner put it, "Think of it [the destination] as the North Star. The North Star doesn't care how you get there."
Holistic management parallels a "goal search" exercise that is part of Julia Cameron's best-selling book The Artist's Way. I have used the goal search for more than a decade to establish an annual goal and action plan for myself, and I have asked hundreds of students whom I teach to complete their own goal searches in some form or fashion. One of the struggles in doing the goal search centers on delineating the difference between "a dream" and what Cameron calls "your true North." She explains that many of us might have the same dream -- for instance, to be a famous writer. What fames means will vary with each person. Defining it for yourself gets at the "true North." I felt that Spooner took the true North concept even a step further when she observed that it doesn't matter how you reach -- or travel toward -- your ultimate goal.
With the work of holistic management came a lot of snippets of hands-on common sense. The farming activities that my husband and I engage in began fairly modestly, with a small backyard garden in Seattle that I described in a talk recently as being the size of a walk-in closet. From that point in about 2007, we began increasing our emotional, physical, and financial investments in this activity that we first called gardening and now are calling farming year-by-year. Last year, the year 2013, marked a watershed year in that we raised enough vegetables to feed ourselves for an entire year. That watershed moment made us realize that we ourselves were no longer just in it as a hobby. It was a commitment to living in a particular way, a commitment to sustaining ourselves, our creative and professional lives, our politics, our health, our communities.
This might be the pre-conditioning for the holistic management process to begin. But turning to common sense, there were a lot of things we had not done that Frenay suggested beginning farmers should do to understand themselves as farmers: register their farm as a business, open a bank account that is independent of the personal account just for the farm, and start researching the federal laws pertaining to what counts as income generated on a farm. I think that a year ago such details would have felt mind-numbing. Today, they felt clear and logical. They seemed to open a new path toward sustainable growth.
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