Hi everyone!
My name is Danielle and this summer I’m working as the garden manager at the Community Garden on campus. Come fall I’m going to be a senior somehow but I still have a few more months of denial first. As was mentioned in an earlier post, I’m an Economics major (no idea how that happened) and I’m also in the Sustainable Food concentration. My favorite food right now is cereal because I haven’t gone grocery shopping in forever and it’s the perfect way to settle in and cool down after an afternoon of weeding my beloved garden.
I ended up here, covered with an intricate web of tan lines, perpetually aware of the dirt wedged under my fingernails, and eating cold cereal out of a coffee mug at 8 pm, through a long series of fortunate, random circumstances. I proudly come from a family of farmers. Growing up, I thought that, like me, all of my classmates had farms outside of town, that they would visit their farms on the weekends and would be welcomed by the choking aroma of manure that seemed to cloud the atmosphere, followed by warm cookies and milk fresh from the cow. It wasn’t until I was much older, after the farm had shut down, that I realized how special this part of my life was.
Of course, given that I was only a kid at the time, my memories of jumping on hay bales (imagine the lava game but x1000) and kissing calves straight on the mouth (because germs are whatever) are overly romanticized. My grandparents, together with my mom and her five siblings, all worked extremely hard. The cows required milking twice a day every single day of the year. That meant every day before school, every Christmas morning before presents, in blizzards and sweltering New England humidity. And they were extremely poor. As with most families who depend on agriculture, survival of the family was closely tied to the survival of the farm. Yet despite everything that was put into it and despite everything that it produced (probably about 100 million pints of ice cream, and also severe arthritis for some), the farm as a business was not viable in the end.
The story of this farm, though not uncommon in the grand scheme of things, has been extraordinarily influential in many of my endeavors since its closure. Apart from the wonderful memories, the farm gave me a deep respect for one of the most unappreciated professions of all time: the production of the food we eat every day. I had always been a bit obsessed with food (and still am, and I strongly encourage everyone else to be), but it wasn’t until I made the connection that all of the food on my plate, in the pantry, and at the grocery story actually came from somewhere and, more importantly, someone that everything changed. I kid you not, sometimes I look at an ear of corn and see a human face.
Since then, I’ve used food as a sort of lens into a world that may otherwise have been inaccessible. At Smith, this has manifested in incredible discussions about the invisible forces that create our food systems, neoliberalism and international trade policies, the role of agriculture in sustainable development, the effects of climate change on the livelihood of farmers everywhere, slavery and foundations of exploitative agricultural labor practices in the US, systematic racism and issues of food distribution in our cities, the untold stories of women in agriculture, powerful corporations, scarcity, and abundance. The question of food, from sustainable production to equitable distribution, is one of the greatest conundrums of our time, so as far as obsessions go, I don’t think it’s such a bad one to have. Last summer, it brought me to the Dominican Republic, where I had the unspeakable privilege of visiting a number of sugar plantations and seeing for myself the many layers of the controversy that has recently been in the news. This summer, it has brought me to this on-campus position supported by CEEDS and an internship at Grow Food Northampton, where I’ve had the opportunity to learn firsthand about what it takes to grow food.
Anyway, that’s how I got here, and with that I’ll end my first (long-overdue) post as Community Garden Manager. Stick around to hear me talk about something other than me, like the exciting stuff that’s growing in the garden, the people I’ve met, and all the new words I’ve learned! In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak:
Early days- volunteers planting and staking tomato plants.
Tomatoes in July are starting to show some color!
Red currants ripening on the bushes.
In the area? We are in the garden behind Gillett House each Sunday between 3-6 p.m and would love your company!
Tags: farming, growing food, smith college, Smith Community Garden, sustainable food