One On One: A Year On The Land

Mindful Metropolis, October edition

Farmer, author and founder of the Land Connection foundation, Terra Brockman, talks about the seasons, local food systems and buying food based on values.

In Terra Brockman’s new book, The Seasons on Henry’s Farm (Surrey Books), the 50-year-old food and farm advocate tells the story of her family and their life on her brother Henry’s farm. In central Illinois, on some of the richest farming land in the world, five generations of Brockmans have resisted the shift to agribusiness and maintained sustainable practices that produce healthy and delicious foods without spoiling the land.

Brockman’s evocative memoir leads readers through 52 weekly “seasons” using the power of vignettes, photographs and family yarns. Author and activist Sandra Steingraber calls Henry’s Farm “a compelling argument for rebuilding our nation’s food security that is threaded within a lyrical, funny, suspenseful narrative of life on her brother’s Illinois farm.” Brockman, who has lived and worked in Japan and New York City and traveled to farFlung destinations including Nepal, Eritrea, Morocco and the Baltics, founded The Land Connection, a nonprofit working to save farmland, train new organic farmers, and connect consumers with fresh foods. She also contributes regularly to Mindful Metropolis. We interviewed her just as an Indian summer was turning into the harvest season.

Why did you write Henry’s Farm? And what was the most gratifying thing about doing so?

I never set out to write this book. It just evolved from the weekly Food & Farm Notes I’d been sending out to people each week over the past 10 years—letting them know what’s happening on Henry’s farm and what’s coming up to market. The feedback I got from market-goers and others convinced me that a book based on those notes would meet a certain need—a hunGer for connection to the people who farm the earth that sustains us.

The most gratifying thing has been hearing readers say they have a deeper appreciation for the physical labor and intellectual effort involved in bringing good food from the soil to the supper table.

We typically think of a season as lasting for three months, but you described 52 weekly seasons per year. Are we missing something?

We definitely miss a lot when we view the world through the coarse lens of four seasons. There is a world of difference between a “spring” day in early March and another “spring” day in late May. Different birds are singing, different plants are coming up, different fruits are blossoming, different seeds are being planted.

I was inspired to use the 52-season approach after I heard that an ancient Chinese calendar had every five days as a season, and so had 72 named seasons. I figured if they had 72 seasons, then I could easily describe 52—and that made sense given that I write the Food & Farm Notes weekly.

Do you have a favorite season?

Autumn has always been my favorite season— all 12 mini-seasons of it. I love it more and more as I get older, and as it edges inexorably toward winter. Autumn is full of serene melancholy and bittersweet feelings that are best described by the Japanese phrase “wabi-sabi.” I wrote about this at some length in the book, but it is basically the realization that nothing is perfect, nothing lasts and nothing is ever finished.

Tell us about the Land Connection, and the impetus for founding that organization.

In a classic “leap before you look” moment, I founded The Land Connection in 2001 as an educational nonprofit to preserve farmland, train new farmers, and link local producers and consumers. Although there are more and more organizations in the local foods movement, not many deal with the prime movers: farmland and farmers. The Land Connection has had many successes, but still has a long way to go to ensure that we will have farmland and farmers in the future, and not be dependent on foreign sources for food the way we are for oil.

What are the biggest barriers standing between farmers and consumers? How can we tear those down?

We need to work at various levels to recover a direct relationship with farmers and good food. There is a lot standing in the way—from federal policies to large multinational corporations with a vested interest in chemical intensive agriculture, to other large food and fast food companies who make a lot of money by manufacturing highly processed foods from tax-payer subsidized grains.

We need people working on Capitol Hill to counteract the money and misinformation put forth by highly paid lobbyists. A lot can be accomplished with the power of the pocketbook, but we cannot completely reform the food system by just voting with our forks. There are policy issues and structural issues, like corn subsidies, that keep our current system on life support when in a true free-market economy it would have died a natural death decades ago.

It’s true that individuals have a lot of power, but we also need public policy solutions, and many organizations are working to make that happen.

But one of the best things about the local food movement is that people are empowered by it. You decide every day what you will put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That’s politics at its most basic. I hope that The Seasons on Henry’s Farm, along with many other books out there, will be part of what Alice Waters calls “the delicious revolution.” Perhaps a reader will stop buying the “perfect” but tasteless peaches in the store, back away from the global food network, and begin going to a farmers market, or seek out farmers and grocers who sell local meat and produce.

How have your travels around the globe impacted the Land Connection’s mission?

My brother Henry and I spent many years living in different cultures, and I think that experience led us both to our current lives. Henry decided to spend each day working with the earth and with his extended family to produce good food for the community—in some ways this is a “third world” lifestyle, but it was the only thing that made sense to him.

My world travels made me see that we needed to make some big changes in the way we use our incredible farmland. We need “land reform” in this country as much as any other nation, and we need “food reform” too. I realized the latter when I had the best frittata in my life in war-torn Eritrea. Here was a country almost reduced to rubble, yet I could eat better food from a tiny roadside café than I could in most restaurants in the United States. Why?

Because the ingredients were fresh and local.

The Land Connection seeks to get farmers back on the land, growing real food for local families—“real food” meaning nutrient-rich fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, and eggs—not corn and soybeans to sell below their production cost to companies who pick them apart and then reassemble them into nutrient poor “junk” foods.

What’s the next big project for you? Do you have another book in mind?

The next big project is knocking out some walls in my house.

As for writing, I’ll keep trying to bring people to their senses—literally, to enjoy the sight, smells, feel and taste of great food—and figuratively to realize what is happening to the health of our bodies and our planet because of industrial foods.

I hope that The Seasons on Henry’s Farm gets people thinking and talking about how they can have an impact—on the environment and on their own health via the food choices they make every day. I know it could be considered naïve, but when consumers make buying decisions based on their values, it does bring about change. We’ve seen it happen. If people get to know a few local farmers and their practices, they can get delicious food grown in a way that enhances rather than harms the environment— and do good by eating well.

Jacob Wheeler is a journalist, editor, translator and teacher who also publishes the Glen Arbor Sun newspaper (GlenArborSun.com) in northwest- lower Michigan.