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Today’s excerpt is from The Politics of the Pantry author Michael Mikulak’s blog, where Michael shares his experience of moving from the city to set up the Common Ground Farm just outside Hamilton, Ontario.
I have been studying food systems for a decade now as an academic and even longer as an eater and gardener. In my small urban backyard in Hamilton, almost every square foot was intensively planted. The first thing I did when I moved into my house one bright May was to rip out nearly all the grass and replace it with about 250 square feet of raised beds and planters. This provided hundreds of pounds of food for me and my family every year and I was able to tend it with basic garden tools and a push mower. I was able to live a kind of post-oil fantasy of farming by hand that is easy to fetishize as being more authentic and natural.
In the spring of 2013, my urban homesteading dreams had outgrown our inner-city home. It was a hard decision— I love city life and enjoy the ease with which I can bike everywhere. I know that, counterintuitively, urban living is often greener and more sustainable than living in the country. As an avid cyclist, moving to the country was going to mean some serious changes.
Our family had one car, walked and biked everywhere, and enjoyed the amenities of urban life. I never thought I would be the kind of person who drives a truck and owns a chainsaw. Much of my identity was tied up in the city, and yet, I wanted to live the rural life, to see the possibilities unfold on a piece of land that could sustain my family and others. I wanted to see my signature on the land, to witness and enter into a partnership with a place that could nourish me and which I would nourish in return. I wanted to build a home, to settle down in the best sense of the word.
But I wasn’t ready to give up on the city just yet. I didn’t want to get trapped on the treadmill of debt and production that has forced farmers to get big or get out. This attitude has dominated agriculture in North America and much of the world for the last 100 years. It is a mantra spoken by policy makers, farmers, processors, and grocery stores. Driven by a Malthusian dread that our ability to breed will outpace our capacity to feed, the ideology of growth has profoundly shaped the rural landscape and consumer expectations about what a good meal ought to cost. For 100 years now, the tractor and other tools of industrial farming have slowly displaced human labour, and oil in its various forms has replaced the sun as a source of energy. As many have pointed out, we no longer eat sunshine, we eat oil!
This isn’t that story though. I’m not going to write about the good old days and lament about a more honest time when people laboured on the land and had a more authentic relationship to nature unmediated by technology. Not only is this a hopelessly naive and useless exercise of pastoral fantasy— it ignores a rich history of hard work, exploitation, and environmental degradation that goes untold when we project ourselves into this precarious retro-future that never was. No, I want to talk about how technology shapes expectations and transforms what is possible in both positive and negative ways. I want to talk about scale, and how we need to rethink what it means to farm in the North American context, where bigger is always better.
Farming in Southern Ontario is a tough prospect, and with land prices at all time highs, I wasn’t about to trap my family in a modern version of serfdom and become debt peons. I didn’t even want to farm full-time, which is good, since many farmers rely on off-farm income to support their career. As a writer, teacher, and researcher, I have a desire to share my knowledge with others. And as a university lecturer, most of my teaching occurs between September and April, leaving a perfect gap for the most seasonal of professions. The farm I wanted would give me just enough room to produce everything I could possibly consume, and then some. It would have space for animals and wild experiments in composting. There would be a place for me to build an off-the-grid, straw-bale writing shed/guesthouse. I could have chickens and rabbits, and build a clay oven big and hot enough to make a pizza in ninety seconds.
I wanted a place that was bigger than a city lot, but not so much more that its scale would seem alien. I wanted a place where someone with no farming background could come and see what was possible in their own backyard. It had to be close enough that I could bike into the city, and that people would be able to easily visit for farm tours, events, and workshops. And from this, Common Ground was born, a teaching farm for the city.
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