Back Forty: The farm takes all
Back Forty will bring you periodic reviews, interviews and reporter insights about the stories they wrote. We hope you enjoy it as a companion to our main content on TheFERN.org and our Ag Insider policy news site. You can subscribe to the newsletter below.
Mary-Howell Martens and her family farm 2,000 acres of certified organic grain crops in Upstate New York. She also owns and manages Lakeview Organic Grain, an organic feed and seed operation serving farmers throughout the Northeast and writes regularly for agricultural publications. In mid-May, the region experienced a severe late-spring cold snap, inspiring her to write this piece that she shared with friends. She gave FERN permission to reprint it.
By Mary-Howell Martens
Early in the week we started hearing warnings for frost Wednesday night.
It was, after all, only the middle of May in Upstate New York. This was not the first time that had happened. We figured we’d be okay, our farm is at the widest point of Seneca Lake, yet still we breathed relief Thursday morning when the frost on the grass was light and the thermometer read 33 degrees. We dodged that one!
By Thursday noon we started hearing from nearby vineyardists of serious frost damage just a few miles from here. The young grape shoots were several inches long, tiny clusters just visible, tender. They were vulnerable and hit hard. Some vineyards are estimating up to 50 percent crop loss, for even if the secondary buds grow, the fruit set will be light and will ripen late.
One feed customer near the Catskills said he’d just planted his tomato transplants out in the field. He had covered them carefully in the afternoon, but row covers are no match for 20 degrees. The shoots that looked so hopeful now hung limp and flaccid on the ground. He also lost a bunch of young chickens. He put heat lamps in the pens, but still the birds piled up in the corners trying to keep warm, smothering one another.
These are such random events. Some farmers and vineyardists are fine, while just down the road their neighbors were hit hard. The risk of real or assumed schadenfreude is great. We are not really all in this together. We may be in the same storm, but we are not in the same boat. While there is sympathy and hopefully a bit of empathy, there is also always a sense of, well, you know. There’s no one to blame, but that doesn’t mean there is an equality of hurt.
Farmers will be told, “At least you have crop insurance.” And yes, at least with crop insurance most of the bills get paid. But no farmer gets ahead on crop insurance, and it does nothing to reduce the desolation, the intense futility and anger, and all the thankless work to salvage what is left.
Once, we stood in a 100-acre field of nearly ripe organic food-grade soybeans just hit by a hailstorm. Soybeans lay everywhere on the ground, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of our much-needed bumper crop, shattered at our feet. We have slogged through fields of soggy bean plants struggling in rows of standing water; walked in wheat fields flattened by a brief microburst of wind; and stood beneath cherry trees that had been in glorious bloom just days earlier, the tiny fruit now brown and withered from a single hour of frost.
At least there is crop insurance. That is mighty thin consolation.
Please hold those who farm in your thoughts. Hard work, long hours, good planning, skill and experience, vision and commitment, expensive equipment, gambled loans. Sometimes none of it matters. One brief moment of bad luck, and none of it matters.
Please hold farm spouses and children in your thoughts, also, for we know that now nothing we say will be right. There will be no emotional space and attention for our needs or wants any time soon.
Once again, the farm takes all.
Only 2 percent of Americans choose to farm; it is not a popular career choice. Every year young people intern on farms hopefully, eyes aglow with the idealism of producing food, of oneness with the Earth, and of independence. And every year young people leave, having learned of the social isolation, weather disasters, long hours, strained relationships, and financial uncertainty. There are much easier careers.
There is a reason the poorest and least visible among us do most of the farming.
Farm disasters are nothing new. History and human migration are defined by them. Yes, we can blame climate change, and of course this time we will. We have to blame something to keep doing this. We can’t for a minute risk wondering if we are somehow at fault.
But the truth is that this has always happened — partly nature, partly human, always random, never deserved, always painful. Real people, real families.
This is farming.
Now, go eat lunch and please be grateful for the sacrifices made, the risks taken. Be grateful for the hearts that are aching and the many who are tired so you can eat.