It's the type of gorgeous Saturday morning that has been far too rare this summer and The FARM Institute is holding its weekly community chores. A steady trickle of arriving families is directed to the Friendship Garden for a preliminary dirtying of hands.
Children have McGee the goat eating out of their hands at The FARM Institute's community chores day. Photos by Mary Baker
While the counselors figure out who among them are going to tackle which chores, the community volunteers are set to work weeding. A host of adolescents descend upon an unintelligible green mass, and in a handful of minutes turn it into a neat patch of tomato plants. When a counselor asks if anyone wants to wheelbarrow the weeds to the compost, a child jumps to volunteer.
Parent-escorted children compose the bulk of the workforce. Even early in the morning they are full of questions. "Is this a weed? Which plants are the good plants? When will these grow tomatoes? Have you eaten them? Are they good?" After everyone's hands are covered with a good layer of dirt, the real chores begin.
FARM Institute volunteers line up behind Gilda the pig.
The FARM Institute is a fully functioning farm and as on any farm, there is always work to be done. Children tend to think of chores as some annoying contraption invented by parents in order to infringe upon the child's freedom, but to a farmer, this is just the routine of farm life.
One of The FARM's goals is to show the interconnection of food and work: food doesn't just appear on the kitchen table. To this end, counselors inform volunteers which chores they will be doing. Some will feed cows, others milk goats, others collect eggs. Children are free to choose what work they want to do, and they clamor with their decisions.
Counselor Wendy Biddle leads a group of children out to feed the cows. All of the children are given little pails filled with alfalfa cubes, which they hold out on their hands as the cows shuffle up.
"Their tongue feels like sandpaper," says one of the girls. One young boy is hesitant about the cows at first, but after seeing the other kids laugh as the cows eat from their hands, he too offers some alfalfa cubes.
"I love working here as a counselor," says Ms. Biddle. "Seeing kids get excited about animals is the most fun I've had as a teacher. The hope is that going to a grocery store becomes a different experience. It's great watching a kid pick out a fresh carrot and realize it's the tastiest carrot they've ever had."
The FARM's main crop is education. Sixty-five percent of its budget comes from donations, 35 percent is revenue, and less than 10 percent of its budget is covered by produce sales. This is in some ways a reflection of the current state of farming in America. It is cheaper to mass produce food and truck it all over the country than it is to raise food locally. The process of food distribution in this country uses an enormous amount of nonrenewable energies.
"Factory farming models mass-produce with the goal of making things cheaper," Ray Conner, The FARM's assistant education director says. "We're trying to teach future farmers a better way of doing things. Our model of farming aims at all of the best techniques, not on economic shortcuts."
"This is a working farm, and it's a way to give kids a chance to connect to their food source," development director Rob Goldfarb says. "The community chores are a way to connect kids with farms and to promote our programs. A parent came to me last week and told me how his kids got upset with him for not finishing his peas. 'Don't you know how much water, sunlight, and labor went into growing those peas? You're just going to waste them?' We're trying to flip the dynamic, bring the change up from the youth."
The FARM Institute also seeks to instill a dignity of labor, a realization that if you want to produce something lasting you have to actively care for your environment and the things around you.
"The people who work here year-round realize it's a privilege to run the farm the way we do," said Ms. Biddle. "If we have a hurt animal, we invest the time to nurse it back to health. On a commercial farm they can't afford to do that. This isn't a petting zoo, it's a working farm. We want to empower and educate so that the next generation is full of informed consumers."
At the end of the chores, a young boy, perhaps five years old, stands transfixed as a tractor rolls through a field of mown hay, pulling a tedder, a machine that shuffles the hay into neat rows. His dad calls to the boy that it's time to go, but as the boy stands unmoving, the dad stands and watches with him. After a long moment, the father says, "C'mon, we'll come back again soon."
Family/Community Chores 9 am, Saturday, July 25, The FARM Institute, Edgartown. Lend a hand, feed animals. $10/family; $5/person. 508-627-7007; farminstitute.org.
