Growing a local food system is really about building community.  It is a process of personalizing our relationship to food and those who grow our food.  In order for our communities to be healthy and successful we need to deepen our relationships not just between producers and consumers, but also within the community of producers.  To that end, a few weeks ago a bunch of the young, landless, and wannabe farmers associated with the Triangle Food Commons got together to talk about the challenges and opportunities presented to us as we try to make a life of growing food.  There was talk and debate about wages, healthcare, land, and retirement.  At some point the discussion shifted to community, overwhelmingly these people who represent the future of the food system are interested in working and growing collectively as part of a community of growers rather than as individual farmers. 

I think this desire for community is about us reaching for something that is conspicuously absent from the dominant culture.  We get it in bits and pieces, little snapshots of community, at summer camp, on vacation, or during a disaster.  These are times when we are removed from our “real lives” and the habits and pressures that go along with them.  Ultimately we are lured/forced back to “reality” by our schools, televisions, jobs, and mortgages, but some piece of the experience persists. 

Many if not most people have a nagging sense that something is not right, that something is missing in their lives.  This dissatisfaction manifests itself in addiction to substances, television, and general consumption.  We are constantly looking for something to fill the hole left by a lack of community, a sense of belonging or purpose. 

Before the development of industrial agriculture, growing food was a community affair.  Your community might be a large extended family on a family farm or a collection of families on nearby farms.  Everyone played a role and contributed in one form or another.  Community was essential for agriculture and agriculture for community.  As agriculture became industrialized and mechanized, there were fewer and fewer meaningful roles for people to fill on the farm.  Neighbors needed each other less, fewer family members were needed on the farm so more left, fewer farms were needed so many were sold. 

Now we need to repopulate small farms and rebuild that sense of community as we transition from fossil fuel based industrial agriculture toward a more intensive hands-on system.  We need to grow food not only on farms, but in our backyards, front yards, porches and alleys.  Urban, suburban, and rural communities will all have to come together to plant, harvest, and put up the fruits of their edible landscape.

The group of young farmers decided to do just that.  Instead of coming together to sit around a table and talk, we would come together and harvest, plant, or weed.  This “Crop Mob” as it came to be called is about working together, co-creating the world we want to live in.  We build much deeper relationships working side by side rather than sitting stiffly around a table.  We can address the challenges and embrace the opportunities presented to us, we can feel a sense of purpose, and we can build the community that we yearn for so deeply, all while we grow food.

Click here to read Trace Ramsey’s blog about our first Crop Mob.