Why grandmother: what beautiful soil you have!

By Gail Taylor, Three Part Harmony Farm

"The better to feed you with, my child!"

Harvesting over 600 heads of lettuce this month, at some point I started to feel delirious. The 400 bunches of radishes we harvested from a single 100 foot long bed took an extra harvest trip on Saturday night after the farmer's market.

There are two things that I love about being a farmer:
1. Working harder produces measurable, tangible results.
2. The results of my hard work are cumulative, meaning each year it just gets better!

70,080 hours (or 4,204,800 minutes)

That's how long we have been growing soil at Three Part Harmony Farm. Getting to production level didn't happen overnight and we are still working on it. It took a lot of work to get to the point where we can pull 400 bunches of radishes from a single 3x100' bed.

Food for People

I started the farm with a naive but stubborn commitment that I would grow food for people. To me, that meant growing things like kale and collard greens. My ideal customer: people who want to eat high quality, nutrient dense food from a "socially responsible" and politically progressive local business.

3 years: we doubled our growth each year 

I wrote an ambitious growth plan to scale up and double our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program every year for 3 years in a row. In the 2019 season, we grossed over six figures. The multi-farm CSA offered agricultural products grown by over a dozen sustainable farms owned by BIPOC and/ or women or gender non-confirming folx.

7 minus 3 = 4

This season, we reduced the number of CSA pick ups by 3. We consolidated our CSA pick up days from 3 to 2. We reduced the number of CSA members by 80. We only staff 2 pick ups and that burden is shared equally with our sister farm, Deep Roots.

Photo by Anna Meyer

Slim margins

Running the farm on a wish and a prayer became untenable. No matter what plan I wrote on paper, the farm never increased its profits enough to pay me minimum wage much less a living wage. Why? The short answer is: not enough support. 

Welcome to the revolution

Even before the word "pivot" was on everyone's lips, our farm began to make a slow arc of a turn towards cooperation to solve our problems.

This year we will formalize our farmer co-op [and many thanks to Co-op Impact DC for awarding us a grant to get started!], "Cooperative Colibrí" and emerge stronger than ever. On a production level we scaled back. We right-sized ourselves and made smart, strategic choices about what would nurture us the most as growers of soil.

If you are one of the almost 1,000 new instagram followers or any number of the hundreds of new subscribers to this newsletter: welcome! If you donated: thank you. If you called me and I didn't answer, if you emailed and didn't get a response: I'm sorry. I'm completely overwhelmed right now by the number of inquiries. If I am able to answer I will.

In the meantime, maybe you want to learn more about Black farmers and how to support us?  The hard truth is, supporting Black farmers starts before you buy from us. You have to pay taxes twice: first you give money to the government. The USDA takes its share and favors big corporations instead of small, family-owned farms not to mention the legacy of racism and discrimination. Then you give again, a free-will offering in order to give to organizations that are trying to reverse the legacy of Black land loss and the effects of structural, institutionalized white supremacy that has made access to land, access to markets, access to capital so much harder for us than for white folks. It's not going to change overnight for us but your acknowledgement is a start.

For one of the best places to learn more about these issues, I highly recommend the SoulFire Farm website for a succinct, consolidated list of resources. If you spend more than 5 min enriching your mind and life from this gem of a resource, send them money :)

And if you don't already read Civil Eats I highly recommend it.

p.s. if you are confused about taking a strong stance against anti-Blackness and think that maybe it overshadows the importance of Black and Brown solidarity, please remember we are not the problem looking at each other, together we face the problem.