Atina Diffley's Blog: What Is A Farm? A Synthesis of the Land, People, and Business., page 4

Turn Here Sweet Corn Book Trailer

Blog readers have told me know that the book trailer I posted last week doesn’t work. Here’s the direct link.

Turn Here Sweet Corn Book Trailer

Enjoy and Share with your friends. Happy reading!
 

Goodreads Quiz

Time for a little reader fun!

Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works Quiz

10 FUN questions


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MPR Interview || Ford System Criteria

Here’s a fun – quick and snappy – MPR radio interview to stimulate discussion with your friends.

What criteria do we need to consider when we design food and farming systems?

Let’s make sure we’re asking the right questions!

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein

Realistic Optimism and Climate Change

Roger Blobaum once told me there would only be twenty-nine questions that book talk audiences would ask and once I’d been asked them all book promotion would be a cinch.

Apparently I haven’t reached the magic number yet, as each time there is one question that surprises me and catches me without a thought out reply. At a recent Turn Here Sweet Corn book talk an audience member asked, “How do you keep from getting discouraged about climate change?”

I talked about not having expectations and then tacked on a short bit about organic systems sequestering 15-28% more carbon. But I wasn’t satisfied; it felt like an incomplete answer, and it has been turning in my mind ever since.

Taking Care Of Our Emotional Selves

It is important that we take care of our emotional selves as we work to care for and protect life. Sometimes we become narrowly focused on the magnitude of the problems and the force of the opposition, or we expect quick change. We forget to look for and notice the good and the progress, we become discouraged, or even worse apathy threatens.

Sometimes moving forward looks and feels like moving backward, and sometimes success takes a very long time. It took 70 years for women to gain the right to vote. The original organizers were no longer alive to celebrate the day of signing. Progress has been made on segregation, but the work on civil rights, equality, and racism is huge, and will  continue for a long time.

When fertile prairie soils are bare, nature provides weeds for quick protection.

A basic law of nature is to protect and renew. We see this every day on an organic farm. Nature’s goal is to keep the land covered and protected from the ravages of weather. Ecosystems are protected through the system of species balance. The very life process itself is based on the fundamental law of renewal and that includes the recycling of nutrients and energy.

It is these basic systems of protection and renewal that create the amazing resiliency of life. When life is beaten down by hail or wind, by suburban development or toxic inputs, it rises up with immense power and begins the healing and re-growth process again. Again and again and again.

We are part of nature also and the laws apply directly to us as well.

In regions that are dry or with little topsoil, protection is provided with a CRYPTOBIOTIC CRUST or BIOLOGICAL SOIL CRUST. These are communities of microorganisms that colonize the surface of bare soil. "Cryptobiotic" means "hidden life." They are vital to the health of soils and ecosystems, are fragile, and take decades to develop.

Reality

I find every question has a helpful analogy from nature or the farm. When we’d plant a field I’d always say to the crew, “It will be a beautiful crop—if it makes it.”

There might be hail or drought, frost, pestilence, or a hoard of persistent flea beetles. A family of raccoons might host a family reunion with fresh sweet corn as the main course. There are erosive monsoons and blaring sun and fungal organisms.

The truth is . . . it isn’t real until the food is on the table. We know this, we do our best with what we have in the moment, and we have no choice but to accept the end results.

We do the work out of love. We know the gamble and the risks—there are no guarantees of success. We take the good with the bad, learn and improve, and go out and do it again.

Optimism

Martin loves to say, “In gardening you see all sides of life, and that includes death. Focus on what you want to see. It’s the farmer’s prerogative.”

To foster the life force deep within each of us and continue at whatever pace and direction is the present moment we must notice the good. This is part of our own renewal and protection process and it’s even more healing when we share it with others. Martin and I start and end each day (well, most days—we are human) with telling each other something good in our lives or relationship and expressing gratitude. It takes only a few minutes and the rewards of noticing include re-energized enthusiasm, peace with our place in the work, motivation, and support.

Blending Reality with Optimism creates Realistic Optimism and Personal Resilience

When we talk about the future, it is important to include a healthy balance of optimism and realism. If we want to change our food and farming systems we must follow the laws of nature and think like an eco-system. One of the most positive actions we can take is to support organic farming.

Climate Change and Organic Systems

We know that agriculture and the food that we eat is a significant contributor to the climate change problem.

Conventional agricultural systems reliant on off-farm inputs require enormous amounts of fossil fuels to mine, manufacture, transport, and apply fertilizers and pesticides. These processes release greenhouse gasses.

Organic systems do not use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides; they build fertility on-farm through soil-building practices (soil incorporation of nitrogen-fixing legumes and high-carbon biomass grasses), reduced tillage, and the use of composted animal manures. Off-farm pest control inputs are minimized by relying on practices such as crop rotations to break up pest cycles and habitat to attract beneficial insects.

Organic systems use less energy and emit less greenhouse gases, sequester more carbon in the soil, and are more adaptable to climate change symptoms: drought and extreme weather.

 Live the change! Bring the power of life into your daily practices. Think like an ecosystem. Eat, relate, and advocate for organic agriculture.

© Atina Diffley 2012

 

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Read Turn Here Sweet Corn| Amazon | Barnes & Noble |  IndieBound | University of MN Press

Atina Diffley is an organic consultant (Organic Farming Works LLC), educator, public speaker, and author of the 2012 memoir, Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Until 2008, she and her husband Martin ran the Gardens of Eagan, one of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest. For reflections, tips and decision-making tools subscribe to her on-line blog, What Is A Farm.

 

 

 

A Right or A Duty? A Privilege?

Imagine. If you had a relationship with a something that was absolutely ancient, and so precious that life—including yours—couldn’t survive without it, what would you do to care for and protect it? If it needed food and water and air, would you ensure that it had plenty and the best possible? If it were vulnerable to the ravages of weather—the wind, sun, and rain—would you make certain that it was shielded from harm?

This soil is ancient. The mineral parent rock once sat naked. Time and water, sun and cold broke the rock into stones, the stones into dust. For a very long time the earth sat aging, then the life process started, and living soil was created. Thousands of years of plants have left their condensed energy and captured time stored in the organic matter. Farming it in present time is a relationship with the past.

Imagine the soil has a heart and we’re walking all over it and talking about it. What is this like for the soil? It doesn’t get a say. People walk on it, talking, making human plans, like it is ours to open up and do as we want. Think how long this has been going on here. Since they broke the prairie off of this land, one hundred forty years of doing this to soil.

What was it like for Ole Olsen the first time to pick up handfuls of virgin prairie loam? What did it smell like? What happiness did he feel? If we knew what we know now, what would we do different?

If soil was virgin, what is farming? Do we choose a love affair, or is it a coarse taking? — Excerpt Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works

As organic farmers we grew Sudan grass and clovers, oats, hairy vetch, and rye to add organic matter to the soil, absorb rain, hold soil in place, and feed the microbial life. In working the land we avoided cutting grooves that rain could rip open and start erosion. Winter cover provided shelter from wind and water erosion.

Farm soil is a wild animal held in captivity. Living in the soil are more undomesticated species than can be found aboveground on the entire planet. This soil life has simple needs: food, air, water, and shelter. Just like every other species. Prevented from caring for itself, it lies at our mercy, dependent on our long-term vision and integrity. Its future capacity is determined by our judgment. Anytime we open up the land—when we remove its protective cover of grass and forb, brush and tree, when we lay the soil bare, exposed to the elements— we embezzle its ability to command its own wellness.

Opening land is a covenant. — Excerpt Turn Here Sweet Corn

A covenant—in law is defined as an agreement. Do we have a contract with land, and what does it say? Who is responsible for what? If the land feeds us, must we in turn feed it? In Theology a covenant is an agreement that brings about a relationship of commitment between God and his people. Is spirit part of this? What commitments do we have to land and nature? What does it mean to “own” land? Is it a right or a duty? A privilege?

When we began a five-year search to purchase land after suburban development removed all life from our living-breathing farm I reached a deeper understanding of soil-land and our human relationship.

“There is no such thing as a new farm,” Martin says. “All Minnesota farms are used. That’s the dilemma.”

I had never thought about it this way before; it is an entirely different perspective. I was focused on getting away from the bulldozers, on putting together a home and outbuildings, fields and greenhouses, creating a new family farm, and this time we will be the owners. “This is a little like buying a used car,” Martin says. “We need to look for all the things the seller doesn’t point out. But unlike a used car, we can’t take it for a test drive. We have to know clearly what we want and need before buying.”

He adds, “We need to look at how the water moves and how the neighbor’s runoff comes on and affects it. It won’t be looking to see if there has been erosion, but how badly. We have to look for old dumps—every farm had one. If we are lucky, it will just be a pile of broken glass bottles and tin cans. Usually it’s near the rock pile, at the edge of the woods or the mouth of a gully. They can have old chemical containers that are empty now but weren’t when they were discarded; there might be appliances or engines leaking fluids. In land ownership, it’s not the person who polluted who bears responsibility and liability for cleanup, but the present property owner.” — Excerpt Turn Here Sweet Corn

All life on the planet needs food and water to exist. All species eat and every species is eaten in turn. Even more profound is the basic truth that we all come from the same earth; our bodies consist of the same minerals and elements as the plants and insects and birds.

Whether soil is an inch thick or as deep as I am tall, we are utterly dependent on it. We are also utterly dependent on complex ecosystems and biological diversity. This is as true for the gardener and farmer as it is for those who live in a world of man-made structures and concrete streets. Every one of us has a relationship to land and soil and nature through our food—every time we eat. What a gift! And what a responsibility!

We all eat and the Laws of Nature apply to all of us. We feed the soil and the soil feeds us. We preserve nature and nature preserves us. Our well being is intimately connected to that of all other life on the planet. What we do in nature we do to ourselves.

© Atina Diffley 2012

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Read Turn Here Sweet Corn| Amazon | Barnes & Noble |  IndieBound | University of Minnesota Press

The Impermanence of Eden – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Scott Carlson, senior reporter of the Chronicle of Higher Education, has written a very personal and powerful book review of Turn Here Sweet Corn that frames the way each of us is connected to the story. Scott grew up living adjacent to the original Diffley farm He roamed and played on the land and worked for Martin as a teenager. As a child he was part of the first wave of housing as the market-garden township was developed into the city of Eagan.

He gets Turn Here Sweet Corn at the deepest level. The searching for permanence, and the relationships between events and groups and species.

The Impermanence of Eden, by Scott Carlson

Many journalists go into their line of work wanting to tell stories that will help fix the world, make something broken whole again. I have been writing about the environment, agriculture, city planning, and sprawl for much of my career—and I know that I, too, am trying to restore a lost world.

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in Eagan, Minn., near an unusual farmer who worked a remarkable piece of land. The young Martin Diffley grew an array of vegetables on fields tucked amid grassy, protective hills and dense woods, a landscape much different from the deforested, monoculture farms so common in the region. Diffley established his Gardens of Eagan, one of the first organic farms in the Midwest, on land that had been owned by the Diffley family since 1855; pesticides and other common agricultural chemicals had never been used on it. But its edenic traits could not save it. In the late 1980s, as the Twin Cities oozed into the countryside around it, the forests were bulldozed and the hills flattened to make way for unimaginative houses in various shades of beige.

The story behind the loss of that place forms the broken heart of Turn Here Sweet Corn (University of Minnesota Press), a new memoir by Atina Diffley, Martin’s wife. The book is billed as a gardening guide, love story, business handbook, and legal thriller, but it is really a wrenching tale of a common yet private tragedy: the way development pressures push farming families off the land, and what happens to those families during and afterward.

Atina Diffley comes from Midwestern farming stock I recognize—a family in which strong women and children hold the farm together and get the work done, while the men escape. After a few years of idealism, a failed marriage, and some missteps, she settles down with Martin in Eagan as a single mom, falling in love with not only the man but also the land. Its places, named by the family, give it almost a mythical quality: the Plains of Abraham, the Big Oak Woods, Treasure Hill, the Crown Jewel, and the Bridge Ravine, where 10-year-old Martin once chopped down a tree to span the ravine. Martin and Atina lie in the grass while he talks about Eagan’s old-timers and their history there.

“I had always thought the expression ‘good connections’ meant knowing people in high places,” Atina writes, “but it’s the clerk in the grocery store, the farmer down the road with manure, the teller at the bank. This is what creates a secure community.” . . . Read the Article.

Turn Here Sweet Corn Dialog On Urban Planning

I am very happy to write that my recently published memoir, Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works, is stimulating dialogue —as I had hoped! I am receiving wonderful emails from readers with discussion and comments about land use planning. Please keep them coming. A Star Tribune article, Hey, soil sister: Atina Diffley, by reporter Kim Palmer, generated this letter to the editor from Mary Devine. Thank you to Mary.

LOADED LANGUAGE: Developers can’t build unless landowners sell

While I appreciate those who are passionate about organically grown food and enjoyed reading the profile of Atina Diffley (“Soil sister,” April 18), I think it does a disservice to those who build our homes when a reporter writes that “bulldozers are the villians” and that the Diffleys “lost” their farm to suburban development as bulldozers “strafed the land.”

Bulldozers don’t just come over the horizon and take people’s farms. Somebody has to willingly sell their land to a developer. Then that developer (provided the property is zoned for housing) builds the homes we live in.

I don’t know the particulars of this family’s decision, but I do know that no developer, no city, no bulldozer made them sell.

MARY ALICE DIVINE, WHITE BEAR LAKE

Here’s my reply to the editor. I’d love to hear your comments on urban planning or other Turn Here Sweet Corn thoughts.

GOALS FOR FUTURE URBAN PLANNING: LAND PRESERVATION AND LOCAL FOOD PRODUCTION

I appreciate Mary Divine’s April 25th letter to the editor, “LOADED LANGUAGE: Developers can’t build unless landowners sell.” I agree: the developers were not true “villains,” the people responsible for specified harm or damage. Nor were family members who made the difficult decision to sell. They did what society and city planners asked of them. Unfortunately, the benefits the land provided to the community—fresh local food and ecosystem services—were “lost,” and bulldozers most definitely “strafed the land.” They removed the life: the trees, bushes, flowers, and grass. They even removed and sold off the living topsoil—classic 1980s development.

The city of Eagan had left no land zoned for agriculture. Was the Diffley family land “willingly” sold? With the zoning and future of Eagan being what it was and with the system of sewer and water assessment liens, development was a force in motion. It would have required tremendous community effort to reverse it and an understanding of urban edge land use that was not yet widely accepted.

One goal of my memoir, Turn Here Sweet Corn, is to learn from this experience and create a healthier future. For food security and stability, it is crucial that future planning includes land preservation and local food production.  Now, during this development downturn, is our perfect opportunity to rethink urban design.

Atina Diffley, author Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works

Taking A Book From Concept To Class To Publication—Trusting The Process.

Writing my first book had many parallels to vegetable farming—especially growing onions; and legal battles—like with the Koch brothers.

Managing The Process

If I think about the entire process, from farm dream to food on the table—access to land, learning skills and developing markets, buying supplies, HOEING; or what it will take to win in a court of law against the largest privately owned company in the world—if I focus on the gazillion details; it’s overwhelming. I just want to quit.

If instead I hold the larger vision in my mind and heart—the reader’s needs and the higher good I aim to accomplish—than I can stay in the moment and present stage of writing.

Commitment

Early on someone told me that to finish a book it is necessary to believe that the world needs what I have to say. I fought this idea until I accepted it doesn’t have to be true—I just need to believe it.

So I made a commitment.

I stood before a mirror, put my hand on my heart, and promised. I, Atina Diffley, will write that which is burning inside me and the world is waiting to read.

Believing in ourselves is the most powerful thing we can do. When I sit down to write I thank my inner critic—her name is Sylvia—for all she’s done, and I assign her the role she has in my present work. During free writes she is sent on vacation. While line editing she is appointed the responsibility of “specific” and “constructive” feedback. If she’s having a bad day and insists on self-defeating criticism, or her ego is raging out of control offering talk shows with Oprah—I send her packing.

Somewhere I read that Thomas Edison would send a press release out when he had an “idea.” Before he even started to work on it! I decided I had to do the same and tell people about my “upcoming” book. It would firm my commitment. I even gave a projected launch date. (It was May 1, 2012—I  actually beat it by 26 days!)

So I told, which was terrifying, but it became easier and the book dream became more real each time I said it. I also “scheduled” writing time on my calendar in ink. Pencil is used for other entries. Writing time is not negotiable.

Writing Islands

The first six months I wrote unedited “Islands” as Loft instructor, Mary Carroll Moore, teaches in How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book. I used two rules.

Rule 1: When character, location, or emotion changes—it’s a new island, and a new document. Working without an outline allows my sub-conscious to free associate. Memory and emotion are not time linear. Writing islands surfaces others. I jot them down for future work and go back into the island deeper. Thus I always have material waiting.

Rule 2: Write 300 individual islands before creating structure.

I would meditate on a scene until I could feel it and then pour out the story focusing on imagery that included all of the senses. I also learned that this is a private stage. Few people have the skill to provide helpful feedback on unedited writing. It is important to just write, write, write, and get it out raw. Trust the process. Trust yourself.

Creating Structure

The next step was the hardest for me—putting the islands in order. Mary teaches storyboarding in her class, which worked for others, but I needed something more tangible. Finally I printed every island and sat in the middle of our living room with them circled around me and shuffled the order. This took five excruciatingly long days.

During this process my intuition would tell me certain islands belonged together.  I couldn’t always see it but learned to just do it anyway.

Inner Story

It was truly amazing and completely cathartic to discover the inner story and message of the book as I then knit the islands together. The questions I answered during this stage were: What happened? How did I feel then? How do I feel now? This is when the three-act structure began to make sense, and I learned how to manage narrative and emotional arc.

Editing and Revision

At this point I didn’t need much self-coaching anymore. I knew I would reach readers and that the world needed my book. Sylvia was living semi-permanently, but on-call, in the Bahamas. I took LOFT classes and learned the difference between revision and editing and the craft that I needed. The writing went semi-public as I asked carefully select reviewers for feedback.

Eighteen months from the start I had Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works and the University of Minnesota Press.

Please Join Us

On April 5, 2012, my journey from book dream to published will be finished. I invite you to join us as we launch Turn Here Sweet Corn into its public life and personal relationship with readers.

Turn Here Sweet Corn Book Launch Event

Target Performance Hall, Open Book literary arts center

1011 Washington Ave S, Mpls. MN.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

6:00 – 7:00 Reception with food and beverages

7:00 – 8:30 Book talk and Q & A followed by signing

If planning to attend, please RSVP to presspr@umn.edu

 

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© Atina Diffley 2012      Originally published in the Loft’s Writers’ Block

 

 

 

 

 

John Steinbeck’s Journal

For those of you who enjoyed my blog post, I “Wish” No More, about my childhood, self-inflicted intimation of the writing skills of Steinback.

Excerpt from John Steinbeck’s journals while he was working on Grapes of Wrath.

March 21

My many weaknesses are starting to show their heads. I simply must get this thing out of my system. I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were. This success will ruin me as sure as hell. It probably won’t last, and that will be all right. I’ll try to go on with work now. Just a stint every day does it. I keep forgetting.

Always I have been weak. Vacillating and miserable. I wish I wouldn’t. I wish I weren’t. I’m so lazy, so damned lazy. This year though I have made up for last year’s lay off. I really have batted out a lot of words. I would go through until winter if I could. But if I don’t lay off it will be done, and if I do lay off I’ll lose the thread. I am simply incapable of working any way but hard and fast. That is the only way I can make it. This is too bad. It is almost impossible in fact but I must get calm and quieted before I can go on. I mean that streak yesterday was curiously indecent. I don’t know why but it was. So many things. How impossible it is for me to think. Just writing words, but the thing is starting in my brain. I must get the tempo. — via Heron Dance Studio

He used the word “wish” three times! Steinbeck considered himself to be a failure as a writer, and lazy, so he forced himself to write. The results of that process, of trying to compensate for what he thought of as a lack of talent and discipline, were some truly great novels.

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© Atina Diffley 2012