Regenerative
On Tuesday mornings, I leave the house while Michael is still asleep to drive north on the two-lane highway that traces the base of the foothill the way a delicate anklet traces the base of a woman’s leg. After a number of miles, I turn right onto another two-lane road that weaves past soft hills down to fields and pasture. Falcons perch atop fence posts and in the leafy branches of cottonwood trees, which suggest water. Cows and their calves graze within white fences; I sometimes see a lone pickup parked inside the gate at the man-made lake for the rod-and-gun club. Eventually, after the four-way stop sign by the local fire department and the little stone church with the well-maintained graveyard, I pull into a gravel parking lot and walk thirty feet up the road to the packhouse, where I spend my morning weighing and bagging greens to go in CSA shares.
CSA stands for community supported agriculture, a business model favored by local, nonindustrial farms to guarantee consistent income over the growing season by selling shares of produce, delivered to CSA members in weekly or biweekly installments. These are farms typically without commercial contracts, farms that prioritize feeding their local community. Infinite expansion is not the goal. Many CSA farms take on work-share farmers, who work a set amount of hours in exchange for a share. Aspen Moon Farm, which I’ve already started calling “mine”, is a biodynamic organic farm. Their practices are meant to mimic and work in concert with the natural rhythms and processes of the earth to cultivate soil and crop health.
These past two Tuesdays, I’ve been bagging spinach with a woman named Olivia, who told me she researched several farms in Boulder County to find the one that best aligned with her personal values.
“How’d you find it?” she asked, repeating my question.
“I saw a sign at the Farmer’s Market that said they were looking for work-share folks,” I said. Olivia’s thoroughness contrasted with my happenstance provenance almost made me feel silly, but we both got where we needed to be.
Even after all these years, I still find myself treating farming with a kind of reverence and mysticism.
Olivia and I bagged and weighed spinach and talked about how being on the farm and eating locally and seasonally helps us attune ourselves to the land and to our place on it. All eating—and therefore all living—depends on death, so there is an inherent sacramentalism to food and its consumption. Each spinach leaf is a grown cathedral, shapely and sculpted.
I walked across the packhouse to grab another cooler of freshly washed spinach just as the head farmer pulled up in a tractor and started unloading the fennel harvest. Jonathan, the bespectacled, pun-loving packhouse manager, threw his arms in the air.
“It’s fennelly here!” he crowed.
“I haven’t heard that one before,” I said.
“Really? Three different farms and you haven’t heard ‘fennelly’?” Jonathan asked, in complete sincerity.
I got my first work-share position in 2014 at a vegetable farm in Beverly, Massachusetts. I started in the fall of my senior year of college, driven off campus both by my need for non-dining-hall-food and my growing disenchantment with the harsh, judgmental environment of Christian college. On my appointed mornings I biked to the farm and worked alongside Hadley, one of the full-time apprentices. We knelt in the dew-soaked rows and used knives to slice heads of cabbage and escarole from their stems and she told me that she loved farming because it was all about death turning into life, regeneration and resurrection.
For me, working on a farm has always coincided with or closely followed a period of great upheaval and instability, and working with the land has been a vital way to root myself in a place and in an embodied practice. It’s taken me months to establish my rhythms in Colorado, but they’re coming together now: driving out to the farm in the shadow of the mountains, bagging greens, cooking with the produce, writing in my craft lab, drinking tea on my back porch. My weekends have been crammed with games and pie and good people.
Regenerative agriculture is about farming in harmony with nature, working to support and learn from how the earth knows to nurture itself. I’m slowing learning, too, that my body knows how to nurture itself.
