Food Webs

It is that early morning time, when the dew still hide on the west side of grass blades and the birds are still the dominant sound in the air. This is the time of cutting flowers and picking spinach and checking irrigation lines. This is the time for a cup of tea and a deep brearth of air. This is the time that makes farming the best job on earth.

That time before most people are working is the peak of your day, your rush hour. Before the heat begins to rise and sun to beat down you have to move all the cut flowers into buckets of cold water and coolers. The leafy greens must be picked and plunged into cold water and the peas hidden in buckets placed in the shade. The quality and keeping power of your wares relies on your ability to beat the sun and work with water shade and breeze to preserve freshness and moisture. At the same time you are filled with business and eagerness, the rest of the world is only barely stirring, thinking not of heat and crisp heads of lettuce, but of coffee and starting car engines.

This fails to capture the reason that I love the morning, and also my job though. Perhaps it is that the morning is new and filled with energy. I will never feel so good for the rest of the day as I do the moments after finishing morning stretches and shaking the sleep from my limbs. Maybe it is the anticipation of what is to come, the Farmers Market oohs and aahs at the bouquets, or the crisp salads yet to be cooked. There certainly is much satisfaction in the mother who buys your spinach to make baby food. For the restuaranters, co-op and families that I well to, there is certainly an element of trust, in purity, nutrition and quality, that fills my work with a certain meaningfulness and purpose.

But what is sometimes perhaps even more satisfying is seeing the land that I work, rather that what most people think of as a farmer's “finished product”. Undoubtedly part of the reason that I so love the morning is that I am not the only part of the farm that is feeling most lively first thing in the morning. Beetles scuttle from bark chip to fallen leaf. Pill bugs look for a place to stay wet through the day. Bees buzz happily about my fingers as I cut the flooms that they are hurriedly harvesting from. Robins, starlings, storks and numerous other birds flit in the air, and quails running out of the brush pile as I walk by.

Being able to be a part of this piece of land, finding my livelihood among so many other livelihoods is really what makes the whole endeavor worth while. As farmer perhaps it is best to say that I am the bridge, between a human food web of restuarants grocery stores farmers markets and dinner plates and a wilder food web; of bird eat bug eat bug eat leaf.