THE NEXT DRAFT.

Jesse and I have always tried to focus on the long-term goals we have for the future – our holistic goals. These are the goals that we have set not just for our farm, but also for our future finances, for the future quality of our land and for the future quality of our life. Determining holistic goals is a process that considers the financial, social, and environmental impacts of a decision before you implement it.This is something we learned from our mentors, Eric and Cher, while we were Bugtussle Farm interns. It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work, the projects that begin to stack up and the never ending cycle that is life, but it is important to stop often and revisit your holistic goals. Ideally, you would revisit them before every decision you make, to make sure that what you are doing now is moving you towards where you want to be later. You may find that you have veered off course, or that you are wasting energy on work that doesn’t align with your values, or perhaps even that your goals themselves have changed. This kind of periodic checking-in at home base, re-centering and making sure everybody is on the same page, has been immensely helpful to our business, our marriage, and our sanity!Last December, Jesse and I found ourselves on a date for the first time since Further had been born – our first time alone in one year! Sitting in a hotel bar while my parents blessedly watched the baby upstairs, we used that time to revisit our holistic goals. And we discovered some surprising things. We were both feeling like our current distribution model was unsustainable – the hour long drive to market twice a week was starting to take a toll. Not just hard in terms of gas mileage, but hard to be off the farm two ENTIRE days a week. We want to be a part of the community we are feeding, to be involved in a way that isn’t just driving in and dropping off our food. But we don’t have extra time to go back into town for activities, socializing, volunteering, local politics and social justice – we don’t have another full day to give. So, we end up feeling disconnected.Also, it turns out that the cliché is incredibly true: having a baby changes everything. We want so many things for Further – we want him to have that same sense of community connection that we are craving. We want him to have the option of school or sports or lessons or even simply playing with friends on a regular basis. Most of all perhaps, we want Further to be closer to his grandparents – to see them regularly, not occasionally. We selfishly want and need his grandparents’ help to allow us to work more on the farm, or perhaps even have another child some day.As we talked about all these things last December, we allowed ourselves to say something out loud for the first time: Maybe we can’t have all of these things here. Maybe Bugtussle isn’t our forever home.It was a difficult thing to say – a difficult idea to even entertain. We had finally gotten our farm to a really great place: The cabin we had worked so hard to build, the home where Further was born. The land Jesse had been slowly carving out by hand, clearing and tilling and mulching and nurturing. The neighbors we love and had worked alongside, their children we were watching grow up. Our little homestead was a paradise. But we had come to see that our paradise was just too isolated from the other parts of life we wanted for ourselves – we conceded that our holistic goals could not be fully achieved here. Bugtussle was maybe just not in the right place for our new family.Honestly, I could go on and on about all of our reasons, about how many times we went back and forth about what we should do, about all the thinking and rethinking and praying and agonizing that went into this, but we ultimately knew it was what we had to do. And so we began to talk with our families and to start looking.Well, to go ahead and jump right to the end of it, we found it. We found our new farm. It happened very quickly and unexpectedly. It is in Anderson County, still beautiful and surrounded by woods and creeks. Still very isolated while also being close to many major cities as well as our families. We are incredibly excited and terribly devastated at the same time. Bittersweet. Leaving is hard. Change is hard. We will miss our market – our Bowling Green family and friends that have been our support system and our customers for four years now. We will miss our Bugtussle family, the Smiths who are actual family to us, and our wonderful neighbors who are the definition of generous and kind.And so, this Rough Draft of ours continues to be just that. Right now, we are still trying to focus on the growing season. We won’t be transitioning to the new farm until the winter, until after our fall share ends. We are anxious to share more with you about the new place, but our energy is still entirely here right now. On saving the blighted tomatoes, on weeding the late sweet corn and keeping the deer out of the sweet potatoes. We just keep farming, keep moving forward and taking the changes as they come at us. Keep trying our hardest to do what is best for the garden, for the land, for our family.-Hannah. 

DRIFT.

I went to a neighbor's and filled the back of our truck with some old, dry compost. On the way back with the first load, I could see in the side view mirror how a little of the compost was drifting out onto the roadside, and sorta smiled thinking about how nice this drive would look if I did this enough times––a sort of residual fertilization program: Our style of natural farming, in a sense, improving the landscape beyond our farm.Because heavy on my mind was also all of the drift from herbicide we can see around our county. Roadside trees and plants show with bleached white leaves, and the fields look stained with black. If you were to stand above it, it would look like a bomb went off––not even and straight like rows of corn, but powerful and indiscriminate, like chemical warfare.I've said it before, but farms are not contained by the barbed wire and land surveys that define them. They are living, connected parts of a giant biological organism. They touch. They mingle. Birds travel between them. Deer, farmers, dogs, water, and wind, too. What I do here affects what my neighbors do. And vice versa. If we promote life, we spread life. Death, unfortunately, is spreadable, too.Not lost on me, of course, is that there is a fundamental difference in approach. We love our neighbor's dearly, but we believe in diversity, where conventional farming is about sterility. So they may not want my life any more than I want their death.Ultimately, farmers can choose to change, but consumers help influence that decision. The choices we make in what we eat, have their drift, too. We create the demand for the herbicide, pesticide, and exhaust from trucks between here and California, Mexico or Canada every day. The question then is not just "Are these tomatoes good for me," but "Are these tomatoes good for everything?"-Jesse.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT FOOD?

I was googling around the other day––because we have Internet and I can just kinda do that now––and saw a strange trend: jobs in food are consistently among the lowest paying jobs. Not just stateside, but worldwide. In one study, I found that 30% of the 75 lowest paying jobs were food-based––cooking, serving, farm labor, etc.. All this, of course, led me to the obvious question of: What gives?What is it about food that makes it such a financially rough industry to be a part of? This fact seems counterintuitive to some extent. People have to eat several times a day, do they not? And if that food costs money, which it does, then A plus B should equal C-notes. But it doesn't. At least not for most people. Food is cheap, perhaps that explains part of it. However, food is also something you can sell lots of, so you'd think it would make up for itself somewhere. But, again, it doesn't.Naturally, this led me to wonder: if food is consistently on the low end, what are the highest paying jobs? So I looked into that. And kind of regret it.Over fifty percent of the top 25 highest paying jobs––that aren't just being Lebron James, Bill Gates or [insert relevant actor]; you know, normal people jobs––are medical. Dentists and assistants. Surgeons and anesthesiologists. Psychologists. The list goes on.Hm.Obviously, we need all of these jobs no matter what diets we follow. Eating good food will not stop you from a car wreck. It will not stop you from needing therapy (though the reason I included psychologists is the link studies have found between the gut and mental health). But it seems at least a little ironic, no? Because although I've heard it for years––"You can pay your farmer now or your doctor later"––that is actually what we've chosen to do. All that money we save buying cheap food, we are just reserving to give to our doctors in bulk.If humans share one common illness, it's chronic short-sightedness. It's not being able to look into the future and see how the decisions we make now, every day, will affect us later. This goes for our own health and it goes for the environment. And that food is at the bottom of the financial scale while medicine is at the top, illustrates with disturbing clarity how far we are willing to let it go. Then when our children get older we tell them to go be doctors because that's where the money is.I don't think this will ever change fully, but the beauty is that it's not law for doctors remain on top of the pay scale while the people who grow, cook and serve our food remain on the bottom. It's a choice we make as individuals. So I guess that's what we need to think of three times a day––we can pay our farmers now or our doctors later. And maybe I'm partial, but I'll take a good tomato sandwich over an antibiotic any day. That's not such an, ahem, hard pill to swallow.-Jesse.

FATHER-TASKING.

My son caught me talking to myself the other day. This isn't unusual. I've accepted talking to myself as a requisite part of being a writer. I talk to myself in order to work through ideas that sound reasonable in my head, though may not, and often don't, aloud. But bemused and a little curious, holding his large bouncy ball with both hands, Further just stared at me. Suddenly embarrassed, I stopped talking and stared back.You see, Hannah needed a chance to do some work around the house without Further undoing it, so he and I went on a little walk down the road. Further was throwing the ball, mostly at Wendell or Charlie, and I was taking the opportunity to work out ideas for an article, absently chasing the ball down when it got away. So out loud, pacing back and forth, I was conducting an interview with a professor I was planning to call the next day. In other words, though technically walking with my son, I was somewhere else entirely.Because the reality is, I can't just do one thing. I am a chronic, borderline obsessive multi-tasker, physically uncomfortable doing just one thing, even when it's taking a walk with my son. And though I used to think this was a positive trait, one that would get me ahead in the world, I now as a father wish I could turn it on and off, that I could be fully with my son when I'm with him, not just as a guardian, but a participant in his life.He's growing fast. He's developing his speech, constructing sentences, having opinions, running, jumping, dancing, singing. It's a lot of fun. Hannah pointed out the other day that I couldn't wait for him to be old enough to play with. Yet here we were, our chance to play together, and I couldn't see anything but my work.The phrase "to live in the moment" has always bothered me a little. I don't know why. Perhaps something about it felt evocative of new-agey privilege, that I can be so fulfilled in my needs as to be able to remove myself from the world and just bask in my riches. But I get it now. It isn't about being with yourself. Living in the moment is about finding the things that are important to you and those around you then being with them when they're there. It's a different kind of multi-tasking. It's the kind that instead of doing two different things at once, one part of you deletes your distractions while the other part bends down, holds out his arms in the shape of a basketball hoop, and says the words he should have been saying aloud since he started this walk with his son, "Further, you wanna dunk it?