Cottage Industries

I learned that the average age of that great American myth, the American family farmer, has bumped up to 63 this year. Still pretty white, still pretty right. Personally, I’d rather be tethered to the younger and women-ier variety of farmer who is synonymous with biodiversity and culture for my food supply. But, still for too many things I purchase, I don’t get to decide. I like the farmers who don’t fake the family, especially when they have to do it all, especially south of the equator. But, north of that variety, up here in these here hotzones of big ag, the fury of the weather is lashed to landowners who are mostly men who answer mostly to spreadsheets of one kind or another. Where these guys see stock tickers, I see animations of agitated agrarians, all itchy and scratchy because they still can't control the weather and there is no greater sin than causing an out of stock on an invoice. The disappearing family farm is only a gleaning or two away from becoming next year’s sad Pikachu gify. There is harbinger of the next silent spring, on those ESG spreadsheets in big agriculture but nobody can translate it yet. I'm no expert, nor do I play one on tv, I just want my daughter to care enough to think twice or a thousand times, about what the weather is hinting at besides hurricanes and fires and how we need to hold hands in the rain. I can't stand all this indecision, married with a lack of vision. I don't want to rule the world, but I would like a kinder, gentler armageddon please Ms. Zamin.

Sadness is an ample harvest in the irreversible supply curve community. Hard feelings and complex math are short rooted annuals in America’s heartland, but for the sake of deflecting blame on globalisation, and the weather, I'll pick on the 2006 five year Syrian drought as cause for feeling sad about what farm-er-ing loss looks like. To hide from the recent, relevant, history of that middle eastern cautionary farm tale, would be feudal and foolish for any country or citizen of the world who are pretending not to be led by benevolent righteousness, faith or greed. The Syrian sad and terrible, awfully bad, pandemonium playbook plainly explains exploitation of a citizenry. That their warzone was a response to the changing climate that drove a farmer exodus out of the rural countryside is lesser known. Drought is a force majure on the balance sheet of autocrats and dictators looking to translate all sorts of populist messages in all manner of political dialects. The sad plight of the Syrian people and the blooming Arab spring that directly followed the Syrian drought directly followed the famine in Darfur, Sudan. The climate wars are here. What was on the menu for both Sudan and Syria? The leading cause? You guessed it. Drought. Drought defined by years of unsustainable farming practice. Weak, inert, overworked soil + a lazy, stalled out high pressure system that married and punished each other in a merciless feedback loop of arid incompatibility. When those two, land and sky, finally got a divorce, it was too late. Everyone suffered. Just ask a farmer, I mean a soldier, the two sided coin of the future.

Farming without water is like shooting without bullets. Water is life or so the story goes. Women farmers in the Thar desert of India where drought has always taken turns with monsoons are proof of that. I am partial to the stories about Indian women because they manage to be so pretty while being so resilient while being given so much nothing. Indian Mothers in the country side do most of the farming in fact, but that is lesser known story because the men keep it well hidden behind plain sight. In Rajasthan, the point being that the women work the land, the men sit and talk and the boys run the show while the girls walk miles and miles for water. Here in my corner of California, our Mothers go to work while the girls go to school, the farmers are grandparents and none of the neighbors care. We just don't really worry about the rain or how the water comes or where it goes once it's nice and full of pesticide/herbicide/plasticide. It's free! It comes out of the tap. The California story is not about our young farmers creating all this abundance and tending to all these happy cows. Our wells are invisible and we’re mainlining the great snowy hope of the Sierras through the Folsom dam. It's as if the American river flows by the grace of God herself and will do forever and ever, Amen. From that celestial bosom, the freedom water passes through pumps and plants to irrigate the Central Valley that grows more than fifty billion dollars worth of edible plants every year. Farmers are not the only ones who would be well served to mute the siren call from consumer/eaters carefully lest that water start to cost money. We the people who vote for things at the store are going to learn a lot about the water in our food sooner than we think. We are not going to drink almonds and eat cottage cheese forever no matter how magical the California aqueduct system might seem, it just aging infrastructure leftovers from the gold rush. I'm sure all that water is on someone's blockchain. It's gotta be getting ripe for a tax. I can almost hear the revolution chanting. I see you Syria.

The stories we ask for are the stories we get. We are currently in a drought but, the drought is not the story...yet. Our farms are unrecognizable as natural systems… yet, we gravitate towards O.P.P. (other people’s pain) stories. For fun or to escape, maybe a bit of both. I guess it's so we can feel something without having to own it. The internet has messed with our feelings just a little bit. Move over bold and beautiful. Fear, weird and "is that real?" is what gets the clicks. "No way!"-stories, "OMG!"-stories are the ones heard round the water cooler (Mom what's a water cooler?) making us just a little bit dumber. Since when would you ever see a story about a reservoir algae bloom or riparian buffer that wasn't on NPR or in the newspaper (Mom, what's a newspaper)? Like and subscribe, uh, nah, thanks. If Californians don’t seem prepared for the decades of impending fight and flight that is coming, what does that say for the rest of the world? Climate wars aren’t just for coastal communities or the third world islands anymore. The great global climate war is for everybody and it starts with food. But, war is not the story. Farming, there's a story there. Talk is cheap and food is expensive but slogans are for free. Slogans are for suckers. #FeedtheWorld

I would love to see farmers in more of the zeitgeist than just the distressed denim pastiche from 40 years ago and give people a story they need instead of more of what they want. I know. But, yah let’s be honest about what it looks like to give of your time to the land. Cottage core makes me happy and surprised, in a bad way, but it’s got very little actual farming utility, that’s why we moved on kids. Founding farmer fashion might have been fabulously feminine but wearable tech can predict how sweet my tomato will be so it beats overalls for the modern farmer’s must haves list. Technology and fashionable tyranny aside (I see you Ted Cruz), managing risk is not all that is required to do farming. You need a suit, some big fat subsidies and a quiet place to store all those truckloads of fermenting corn. JK. A farmer needs to be a good listener first and foremost. Who does that sound like ladies? The land petitions us for more than managed risk and water. Land wants love and art mixed in alchemy so that she can nurture her lady parts to stay fertile. Nature always seeks a balance. Land and Sea, Mountain and Desert, she is always giving us regional requests for detail and attention here and there, not necessarily anything ‘big’ is required to make her tick, usually just a request for some me-time. Covid was like a spa day for the earth. Back here in industrial information time, however, Big Food pressures big Ag to go big or go home. Someone please tell the Bigs that we are already home. We can only expand so much on One planet.

There are 39,128 McDonald's serving 50 million burgers a day. That is some fancy industry expansion. Some McDonald’s are in food deserts, one is in the Negev desert but this is not a commercial. Did you know, just one Shamrock shake will put a human body on the the right hand logic side of feelin’ lucky, or so I've heard. I feel bad now though because I did make a few McDonald's commercials back when big macs still seemed aspirational (excuse) because Michael Jordan said so (defense) and Supersize Me wasn't a thing yet (justification). Ah, the olden days pre- Y2K... nothin' but net! I do try to limit my intake of fake these days so I’m not quite vegan. Sorry, not sorry. I would, however, like to make amends by making a commercial now that explains why we are content to obsessively separate nature from our daily food choice architecture. Who would sponsor that? Hmm? I see you Nestlé. Can you say partially hydrogenated vegetable oil? Can you say Mother? Baby formula and vegan marshmallows aside, I don't want food 2.0 the way it’s being peddled by big modern farmers on Wall Street. I don’t want fake food in my commercials or on my plate. I don’t want to fake it to make it. Commercials are for suckers. Plus, I already put 14 of my years inside the food supply chain and I'm here to say, fake doesn't feel logical, it feels greedy.

Those balance sheets that already own everything land based may ring the bell for yield speculation in service of the numbers but they can’t measure the song of a bird or control where it flies. We're in a real fight to the birth for the soul of the land. Enter the matriarchy. See? Women! (There are two on the McDonald’s Board of Directors now- two!) Poised to infiltrate the male dominated career path of feeding the world one acre, one prairie, one rooftop, one marshmallow at a time. Regeneration and restoration training camps are full of women and girls. Alert the media! Female farmers today are listening to and learning from the land. It's a movement that is outdoorsy, healthy and cool. One caveat, for the street, we are not immunized against digital depreciation. We that are pronouned she, especially the Moms and middle agers, the passionately driven, dirty fingernailed lady farmers, we may suffer the most in the iron maiden of social media. There might be losses because there are no luxuries of hope or products that belie the fact that those algorithms in social media, they are not on our side and time evaporates quickly when the air is dry, and the wifi is strong. Poof. Hours gone in an Insta. Farming takes hours. Seasons even. Lots and lots of time. Heck, farming takes years. There’s just no way around that. It is an obvious matter of attention to me that the story I need to read is not the one that I want. The time I need to give to a story is the one that teaches me to spend less time in the anesthetizing comfort of my high school boyfriend's bunion surgery and more time shoring up the legion of nationalized young women farmers to modernize the grange. No wifi allowed. Or else! (insert finger wagging), too soon from now we may find ourselves walking somewhere to pick up water unless we walk away from our social media obsession 2.0.

The true story is that I am complicit in the great enabling of timewasting. This is now a 12 minute read. The digital demon who has entrapped our best code breakers inside the Matrix has been fed by my own hands. It is my fault2. I am the cause. I alone can fix it. I spent 15 years making 30 second stories, laying those tracks with sugary snacks. I fed the beast with advertising. Micro thoughts that sell things is the devil's thumbprint on the web and I helped him get shorter, quicker, slogan-ier and ever dumber over the years. So much so that there are no reasonably fortified front lines capable of winning this war of attrition, the war for our attention that I can find. The digital eye of Sauron is already too big to fail. Only a menopausal militia has the right combination of maturity and angst to take on the invisible genie inside the phone or the rest of the man made world. We will sell no wine before its time. All that good analog industry making stuff requires time for it to age properly. Wine, cheese, vegetables, relationships, children, orgasms.. quality is only found inside of time. Remember... we ladies of the menopause, we've been properly aged and we know alchemy, so let's practice it militia style. Break the internet! That bossy digital dictator has been hitching a ride on my back long enough. I'm gonna put that algorhythm on airplane mode, tuck 'er in my upcycled overalls and get to work on pulling those weeds. Facebook did not lead me to water. Tiktok has driven me to drink. I’m putting down my mouse and picking up a shovel RN. Meet me outside.