Real Farmer

Three-year-old CJ is uniquely positioned to arbitrate certain disagreements on the farm. Accustomed to the process of city-fied apprentices showing up on the bus only to be churned out months later as farmers, and unsullied by many societal mores, she has an honest and pure perspective on whether someone has become a “real farmer” yet. One day after a morning of transplanting in the rain and mud, Alex comes inside to CJ who says, “now Alex is a real farmer.”    Amused, her mother prompts her to judge me as well. “Is Faith a real farmer yet?”

“No. Too clean.” I glance at my hands and knees ingrained with dirt and shirt coated in pollen, mud, and leaf mold, and touch my unwashed hair matted under a dirty baseball cap. “Clean?”

Reba interprets that even when dirty, I maintain an aura of cleanliness.

After three months on the farm, it seems I have established merely a “thin veneer” of farmer. Somehow despite the dirt, knowledge of vegetables and farming, and occupation working on a farm, I still don’t entirely pass for a farmer. What is it? My posture? My speech? A short life spent striving toward intelligentsia apparently runs deep.

       For the most part, I’m just amused by this (effortless schmoozing with the well-traveled, well-read, well-cooked suburbanites who constitute a good portion of CSA members). Sometimes, though, it takes on tricky overtones. We have a livestock farmer friend who comes to weekly farm dinners. Cheryl grew up in a farming family, and owns a livestock farm with cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys. Cheryl is tough, serious, and competent: she sees right through me. What did you study in college? What will you do after this season? My answers to these questions yield an incredulous “Why on earth are you farming anyway?”

       Very reasonably, a born-and-bred farmer would have doubts about the farming aspirations of an over-educated recent graduate fixing to head back to the city for a comfortable, health-insured, air-conditioned yuppie career. Sensing this, I have no adequate response to her questions. How do I explain the necessity for a spiritual farm-work cleanse following too many months of intellectual labor? How do I avoid the inevitable implications of luxury in time spent frivolously trying on a lifestyle? My responsibility as a privileged member of the upper-middle class to find happiness in work? Even my class angst itself feels offensive.

       Luckily, this issue has a quickly-approaching expiration date. In all likelihood, by the new year I’ll be setting up in a city somewhere beginning one of the aforementioned career paths, never to play at farmer again. In a smaller possibility, eventually I’ll come back to farming for good. I’m assured that over the course of years, any city person can be entirely transformed. For sure, there will always be a farm child around to tell me if I’ve made it yet.