Oh, SNAP: Do food stamps make you fat?

I have a confession to make. For the last six months, I have been using food stamps. It’s easy, and I like it. I get $200 added to a little blue card every month, which I use like a debit card at any convenience store, supermarket, health food store, Asian market, or even farmer’s market within the state of Oregon that I please. Basically, I eat for free, so long as I don’t want to go to a restaurant or the hot food bar at the grocery store.  

This might not seem like much of a confession. After all, about 20% of Oregon residents receive food benefits, and along with unemployment checks and the occasional visit to the food bank, it’s how a lot of Americans are scraping by these days. I took an Americorps job in June, and under this government-funded program, participation in SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the title that has replaced the phrase “food stamps” in government-speak) is all but expected. With my initial paperwork, I was given a letter addressed to the local branch of the Department of Human Services, which administers food benefits. To paraphrase, it said “Tuula works for Americorps now. We don’t actually pay her a living wage. Sign her up for food stamps, stat.” Everyone I worked with got the same form, and one-by-one, we trudged down to the DHS office, answered a couple of basic questions about our living expenses, and were handed the magical blue cards.

I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot outside the building, trying to adjust my frame of mind enough to allow myself to go in. Like a lot of people in this country, especially those with immigrant families who lived out some version of the American Dream, I considered accepting any form of federal welfare to be right down there with begging on the street corner. As I sat watching the rain dripping down my windshield, contemplating the course of my life, I started feeling very sorry for myself. Don’t I have a college degree? I wondered. How did I get here? What have I done wrong? Then I remembered: I wanted this. I wanted to do the low-paying, environmental, non-profit, social-service work. It makes me feel good. Besides, the economy is falling apart. I’m lucky to have a job of any kind, and it’s not like I’ll be a welfare bum forever. I pulled my jacket hood over my head, grabbed my letter, and went out into the rain.

That was six months ago. My Americorps term of service up, but I’m still on SNAP as I job search and try to avoid moving in with my parents. As difficult as it was to take the dink to my pride, I’m glad I did it. Not only did having my food bill taken care of allow me to save money while earning less than minimum wage from Americorps (another valuable experience), it also gave me some insights into the economics and geography of how we eat.

Because the SNAP card works exactly like a debit card would, it took me a while to notice any changes in my food buying habits. In fact, using EBT is quite discrete – at the store, they ring up your groceries, you swipe your card, selecting “EBT” instead of “debit/credit”, enter your PIN, take your receipt (which gives you the balance left for that month) and you’re on your way. As someone with a lot of initial guilt and shame surrounding the use of food stamps, I was grateful for this hassle-free process. I didn’t stand out.

That was the grocery store. The farmers market was a different story. After I found out that I could use my EBT card at the Lane County Farmers Market (for some reason, they don’t really advertise this feature), I took the next beautiful Saturday afternoon to stroll downtown with my grocery bag and pick out some fresh, organic veggies. I met my friend Tara, a fellow Americorps member, there. First, we had to visit a little booth, crammed between tables overflowing with produce, where a woman ran $10 off the balance of our cards (they do it in $5 increments) and gave us each ten wooden tokens that she said could be exchanged dollar-for-dollar at any of the farmer’s stands. Unfortunately, she told us, we couldn’t receive change in cash, so if we bought something for 50 cents, we would have to hand over a whole token. We started elbowing our way through the market throngs, and I found some carrots and a basket of strawberries, handed over five tokens, and didn’t get hassled. Tara, on the other hand, just wanted strawberries, and went to a different farmer for them. When she tried to pay, though, the woman behind the table frowned.
“Can you pay with something else?” she asked. “We get charged a fee to exchange those.” In the busy scuffle of the market, Tara didn’t feel like putting up a fight and holding up the line, so we dug through our pockets to produce some change. The woman didn’t seem much happier about the pile of nickles, dimes and quarters she provided, but what did she expect? As Tara pointed out on the walk home, if we had the option to pay some other way, we wouldn’t be on food stamps.

The more I thought about it, the more it irritated me. The whole point of SNAP is to reduce some of the inequity in our food system and give low-income people such as ourselves the option to eat fresh and nutritious food. If farmer’s markets charge their vendors a fee to accept their version of EBT, and farmers are reluctant to sell to individuals using the system, the whole point of the program is lost. I stuck the other five tokens in my purse, where they are still, because the next time I went to the farmers market I forgot to bring them. Clearly, this system needs some work.

But I didn’t shop much at the farmers market this summer anyway. I tried to keep from using my own cash for food and keep my monthly grocery bill within the allotted $200, which was easy as long as I didn’t spring for such items as $3.50 baskets of local strawberries (or meat, which I don’t normally eat anyway). I still bought mostly organic, but local foods were out of my price range. I also found myself cooking a lot more. I couldn’t justify the expense of eating out when I had free food at home, and I also knew that if I spent my food benefits on frozen pizzas and prepared deli items, my account would be empty a lot sooner than if I bought the raw ingredients. Without kids to take care of and clean up after, or a second job to pay a mortgage or whatever, I had the time for this (although, living alone, I got pretty tired spending every evening at home in front of the stove). Of course, if I did have other responsibilities in my life, the quality of what I was eating wouldn’t be nearly as good as it was. Also, I would need more than $200 per person, especially if there were meat-eaters in the family.

So if you’re busy, and you don’t earn much money, participating in the SNAP program makes a lot of sense. Only problem is, most people are much more likely to use food stamps to buy fattening, unhealthy foods that are cheap and easy to prepare. The result? People on SNAP are much more likely to be overweight or obese than those who aren’t, according to some scientists.

Thinking more about grocery transactions recently has also helped me notice where various food outlets are placed. I usually shop at small natural-foods stores, which are concentrated around the center of town where housing and businesses cater to those in the upper income levels. Head toward the outskirts of the city, and you won’t find those cozy shops stuffed with bulk foods, fresh veggies and organic cheese. In fact, even the large grocery chains start dropping off, and for every Albertson’s or Safeway you’ll find three or four Dari-Marts, 7-11s, or Circle-Ks, all variations on the convenience store theme. I notice them because the changeable-letter signs often advertise “We take EBT”. For what, though? Doritos, candy, soft drinks, maybe some milk, eggs or boxed mac-and-cheese. So if you live in one of those neighborhoods, and maybe you don’t have a car, or the ability to bus into town to visit another store, what are your options?

I’m not the first person to notice this phenomenon, and much has been said about the problem of “food deserts” in both rural and urban areas. One proposal that keeps coming up is to not allow the purchase of high-calorie, low-nutrition foods under SNAP. As it currently stands, you can buy pretty much any food item in the grocery or convenience store using your food benefits. The federal SNAP website details what does and does not apply as “food” under the program. Among the things that don’t count: Alcohol, personal care items, vitamins, and live animals (No buying a catfish to fatten up in your living room, sorry). Twinkies, Velveeta and Kool-Aid do count, although most people would probably agree that they have few nutritional differences from toothpaste. The problem is, as SNAP argues in a report, that there would simply be too much administration involved in fine-tuning the definition of “food” to exclude “junk food”. And you know that food processors would find ways around the law if they did, fortifying their products until they met the minimum nutritional requirements.

In the interest of balancing out the junk food eligible for purchase under SNAP, the USDA implemented a program in 2007 that allows farmers markets to accept food stamps. Of course, this doesn’t address the underlying issue of the cost of fresh, locally produced food, so, in some states, other organizations have stepped in to offer subsidies to low-income farmers market shoppers. Still, less than 0.01% of all federal SNAP dollars were spent at farmers markets last year.

Another little-known fact about SNAP is you can also use food benefits to buy seeds for your garden. It’s another nice thought, but one that probably hasn’t been very popular. A lot of the low-income kids I met through the Americorps job this summer hadn’t ever eaten a fresh tomato before. If their parents aren’t buying this kind of stuff, the chances are even lower than they’ll want to grow it themselves.

So SNAP isn’t doing much to improve the health of low-income people in this country, but it probably isn’t the root of the problem, either. Regardless of how you pay for it, cheap, processed, and unhealthy food will always be an option, and more so if you live in a low-income neighborhood. It would be senseless to force stores in these areas to carry fresh produce that would probably just rot in the coolers. There’s an underlying issue here that needs to be addressed: the cycle of poverty and poor diet. If people didn’t grow up eating something, they aren’t usually going to start eating it as adults, and since poverty tends to persists through generations, it also defines the dietary habits of a large segment of the population. So you can make good food affordable, but that doesn’t mean it will replace bad food pound for pound. There’s also the issue of convenience. After working a double shift, your average single mother will probably be more willing to microwave a hot pocket than chop a salad.

Can we ever take fresh, local fruit and vegetables out of the domain of the well-off and align American food values along the lines of apples, not apple pie? Sure. I forgot to mention the steady, free source of local and organic vegetables that I relied on through my summer and fall of being on SNAP: the farm where I worked. When growing food is part of what you do for a living, you’re guaranteed nothing but to eat fairly decently. In fact, for most of human history, people made their living as farmers, and poor folks like me lived off potatoes, greens, fresh eggs, and fruit from the trees. We grew it ourselves. The rich gorged on lard, sugar and beef, got fat, and died of heart disease. Now the tables have turned. Over 70% of Americans are overweight or obese, and I would bet that most of them are currently on or have been on food stamps.

What we need is re-education, and the beginnings of it already exist. The best example I can think of is Farm to School, which takes kids on field trips out of the classroom to farms and also brings fresh food to them in the cafeteria. There’s also the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, similar to SNAP except with much stricter rules about what can be purchased, and it’s only available to mothers with children under five. It also has a fairly decent website with nutrition information and cooking tips, although it gets a bit patronizing (“Did you know that fruits and vegetables are naturally low in calories?” No waaay...)

As for me, I look forward to one day having the financial freedom to put my toothpaste, beer and bananas on the same piece of plastic. Maybe the fact that I have successfully used food stamps without packing on a layer of winter fat says something, but I think the average person on SNAP has a lot more hurdles to jump than I on the way to healthy living. Let’s fix our food system first, the one that pushed high-calorie diets on low-income people, and maybe we can all eat a bit fresher.

Find a farmer's market that accepts SNAP or WIC here.

Bring on the Tulips

Greetings,

You may have noticed the lack of blog postings here lately. Put another way, it seems that over the last few months, I reduced the volume of original content on this blog to match that of the rest of the blog-o-sphere (Huffington Post, anyone?) While they rehash the daily news, mining it for valuable gossip and tossing out the uninteresting facts, this blog seems to prefer presenting nothingness as what it is.

Still, the total lack of content here has given my blog the abandoned appearance of your neighborhood GM dealership, and I am not okay with that. I had a job to do, and that was to report on my wanderings and share what I've learned from them, for better or for worse. As a blogger, I try to step outside of my life from time to time and peer back in to see what larger connections can be drawn between my own experiences and what's going on in the world at large. Since February, it seems I've lost the ability to be the outsider in my own life, casually observing events as they transpire and reporting on them for your reading pleasure. Instead, somewhere in between wrestling crab pots and getting in touch with my fisherwoman self, I lost my cool and my ability to step into the third person. I didn't fall down as a writer, luckily, only as a blogger, and I managed to record - in a small heap of nearly illegible legal pads - most of my whirlwind journey as a rookie deckhand in one of the world's most dangerous fisheries. (During this time, I also found myself out of not one but two separate laptops). One day, these notes may even manifest themselves in a more readable format, but don't hold your breath.
So that's as far as I'll go for formal excuses. In the meantime, however, another strange thing has happened, something that's made me question the whole idea that launched this blog (in its eventual form as a food-and-farm advocacy tool) in the first place. This personal revelation may not seem as momentous as the catastrophic earthquakes that weakened bits of our society's foundations in the past couple of months, or the fact that at this moment, all the oil trapped in the rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico seems to be gushing out and headed for the Everglades, but it's significant nonetheless. My confession - and it is a little embarrassing to admit in this context - is this: I have been admiring tulips.

Readers of this blog may or may not have recognized my longstanding commitment to tulip eradication. Really, any flower (except those that precede fruit, of course) may be considered frivolous and unnecessary to daily existence, but tulips, for me, have always been a worst offender. I felt this way even before I read Michael Pollan's (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma) opinion on tulips in his book The Botany of Desire. He puts it this way: "Among flowers, the tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless." Unlike most of the flowers that humans have domesticated and bred selectively to serve our purposes, the tulip has no scent, no edible parts, and no medicinal qualities. On the basis of its beauty alone, it still wielded considerable flower power at one time. As Pollan describes in the book (which I highly recommend), no other flower has been as amenable to the corruption of the free market. In 16th-century Holland, it launched a lucrative futures market in tulip notes - slips of paper that promised future deliveries of high-value tulip bulbs. At one point, a prized tulip (like the Semper Augustus in the image here) could go for more than the cost of a big house on the canal. Speculation escalated out of control, and when the bubble burst, individuals who had invested their life's savings in these promissory notes found themselves holding useless slips of paper, without so much as a bulb to put in their gardens.
Tulips bothered me for other reasons than their historical role in setting a precedent for irresponsible trade. On a personal, aesthetic level, for instance, they have always seemed far over the top. With their primary colors, unnaturally straight stalks, and uniform appearance, they seem to go against what is natural, with no charming qualities to redeem them. Daffodils are frumpy and frilly but still cute, in a way. Roses - well, at least they have their dignity. Even dandelions are edible. Honestly, I didn't see the point of tulips, and every time I saw one, I wondered why people couldn't obsess over something a little bit more substantial and, to get right to the point, edible. Also, I didn't like the fact that my name (Tuula) is often misread as ending in "lip", as if I might be the type of person who goes around identifying herself as the sex organ of a plant.
Given my zero-tolerance policy toward the tulip - both the word and the flower itself - the name of this blog came up rather naturally. Everything worked fine until this spring, when my hard-nosed stance against tulips began to gradually erode. Maybe it was the brutally cold December we had here in Oregon and the generally hopeless post-holiday feeling I was experiencing, but when flower stalks began poking themselves out of the ground in late January, I didn't experience the usual sense of nausea over the anticipated floral show. On the Oregon coast, winter is short-lived, but the rainy and wet spring, with its endless assault of Pacific storm fronts, seems to take six months. It's not that I looked forward to the day when I would have to nod to the charming faces of a crowd of gaudy, candy-colored blooms ecstatically announcing the arrival of spring. But when those flowers arrived, suddenly the ceaseless grey of the sky, the ocean, and the windy highway I drove every day was enlivened with pink, yellow, purple, orange and red flowers. I tried to ignore them, at first, but they mocked me from parking lot dividers and window boxes in town, from every single front yard in my neighborhood, from behind the crumbling brick along my grandma's front walk. Resistance was futile.

The tipping point came on a walk I took one evening through my neighborhood. I noticed about ten huge tulips growing in a neighbor's garden, looking like half-inflated. bubble-gum pink birthday baloons upon thick green stalks. Their enormous size startled me, and I had to have a closer look. I approached cautiously and peered inside one, noting how the petals just barely overlapped one another as they curved gracefully inward. I never imagined something  so orderly, so tame and pleasing, occurring in nature. I stared into the flower for a while, probably long enough for whoever was watching inside the house to consider phoning the poilce, but didn't touch it. It seemed like it would be a thing easily distuurbed. The next time I came across a smaller version of this marvel in my grandmother's front garden, I gently felt its petal. Just as I suspected. Smoother than skin.
The tulips, I had to admit, had defeated me. In all their uselessness, and despite their inane obedience to human selection and cultivation, they were beautiful and put joy into my day from that point forward. Now that I am back in Eugene, where spring is a bit behind the more temperate coast, I am experiencing a tulip re-run, and it's just as chidishly pleasurable as it was the first time around.
My war on tulips is officially over. I have called off the troops; they are frolicking homeward with ridiculous garlands on their heads. What does this mean for the future of the blog? I haven't worked that out yet. Like my attitude toward flowers, my approach to the craft of writing has changed. There are other projects that have eclipsed blogging in this venue, which I will hopefully share at a later date. Employment-wise, my next gig is with Northwest Youth Corps in Eugene, where I will be leading summer day camps for kids that allow them to experience food production first hand. (In other words, I will be happily demonstrating the finer points of playing in the dirt and greenhouse-grazing at the NWYC Farm.) I would love to start up a complimentary project involving some sort of educational blog that is kid-friendly. Right now, I'm still working on removing the crab-bait smell from my clothing and finding myself (another &%$!@) laptop.
So thank you for reading NoTulips, and stay tuned for its reincarnation. Many of you have shared with me that this blogging effort has been entertaining or inspring in some way (I even apparently recruited my replacement at Collins Farm!) and your encouragement has been incredibly helpful in keeping the words flowing. As soon as my next project is up and running, you'll be sure to hear about it. In the meantime, keep eating well.

Tuula(lip)

The Deckhand's Tale: How Landless Farmers Spend Their Winters

Opening the door of the Newport, Oregon Starbucks, I spot Captain Dave immediately. In grease-stained jean overalls and a peaked fisherman’s cap, he stands out against the plush green velour of the sofa chair he’s parked himself in. As I approach and introduce myself, he sizes me up with his one good eye, feeling his grizzled white beard like he’s asking for its advice. I take the chair next to his. The coffee shop is loud, and I lean in to catch what he’s saying as he rattles off a rant about his previous deckhands (druggies, scumbags) and gives me a brief outline of his typically rural-white-Oregonian-male political views (do-gooders, you’ve been warned). Nonetheless, he's confident that hiring women deckhands, even completely inexperienced ones, is a smart business strategy. We're not interested in stealing his tools, he tells me, and we're easier to get along with. My eligibility for employment established from his end, he then he asks me why I want to work on a fishing boat.


Somehow, although I was aware that I was going to a job interview this morning for a position I had expressed an interest in, I didn’t really have an answer to that question. The job posting he’d placed on craigslist had simply filled my three main requirements for employment these days: it didn’t require any previous experience, it sounded interesting, and it was something I could quit after two or three months without feeling guilty. No, I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into. Fishing hasn’t been a lifelong dream of mine. It's just that I was swiftly discovering the limitations of farming as a career choice.

Although those farmers lucky enough to have land to live and work on have plenty to keep them occupied (not to mention fed) through the winter months, I found myself greeting 2010 with no work and no carrots or potatoes in cold storage. Telling prospective employers that you’ll likely be leaving them come springtime in order to participate in the planting season doesn't really give you a leg up on the competition. But what scared me more than unemployment was the potential boredom of clicking a mouse or shuffling files all day. More than that, even though I tried telling myself that whatever menial employment I found would only be to get me through the winter season, the thought struck me that I might wake up five years later and find myself going to the same dreary office, driven ever forward through a bleak but not completely miserable existence by the promise of a bigger paycheck. My goals and reality thus in conflict, I found the months of January through March were stretched before me like a giant white question mark on a giant white space (in the middle of a giant white cloud of obscurity, no less).

In fact, any close examination of large blank spaces present around the first of the year would have revealed me right in the middle, hunkered down at my Grandma’s place on the central Oregon coast, watching my bank account balance dwindle. Then, on a whim, I responded to Dave’s “Deckhand Wanted” ad, explaining in the message I left that I probably wasn’t what he was looking for but I did need a job. To my complete surprise, he called back, and we arranged to meet at Starbucks. After I explained to him that day that the temporary, erratic, somewhat dangerous and often uncomfortable nature of the work he was offering was precisely what attracted me to it, he hired me, probably more out of curiosity than real faith in my potential as a deckhand. It helped that at the time he put his ad out, he didn’t have a crew – which would normally consist of two to three trained individuals working from December through August, the length of the crabbing season. There were crabs out at sea waiting to be caught, and his desperation was such that he’d rather train “girls” than try his luck with the riff-raff that normally hung around the docks. If I stuck with it, he told me, and if the crab are good, there’s money to be made. So far, this year’s crab season looks like it will be a record-breaker for Oregon – fishermen brought in $60 million dollars’ worth in the first month alone (in a typical year, the fishery is said to be worth about $44 million.) A deckhand typically takes around a 10% cut of the catch; depending on the price of crab and how much was caught, this can mean $50 to $500 per fishing day. Suddenly, I didn’t hear Dave’s rantings about do-gooder environmentalists or worry about the impact only having one good eye might have on his navigational skills. I was in. From now ‘till spring, I decided then and there, I’ll be farming the high seas.

The day after the interview, I met up with Dave down at the Port of Newport, where all the commercial fishing vessels (around 100) make harbor. As we stepped onto the docks, the briny scent of the ocean entered my brain via my nostrils and stirred up a few memories. Although I've never so much as set foot on a commercial boat, I actually grew up in small fishing village on the southern Oregon coast about 150 miles from Newport. Port Orford is one of the few coastal settlements that attempts to keep fishing as the defining industry of its economy, pushing hard against the tourist chintz that seems to have transformed the rest of the coast into an endless series of glass-blowing studios and Moe’s seafood joints. As a kid there, vacationing Californians and refugees from the Valley never really crossed my radar; I dug my sandcastles and hung around on the commercial fishing docks in peace. Today, the sound of pylons creaking in the water brings me back to the many late nights I spent with my father and older brother, fighting sleep and throwing our crab pot off the old wooden dock at low tide in hopes of pulling up the next evening’s supper. We just did it for fun; the men and women who run boats out of the harbors of Port Orford, Newport and Oregon’s many other fishing towns do it for their livelihoods. It’s a dangerous profession – in 2008, a federal study declared Oregon’s Dungeness crab fishery to be the nation's deadliest (more dangerous than Alaska’s king crab fishery, which is the subject of the Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch”). In good seasons, like the one so far this year, the money seems to justify the risk for fishing families. But there could be something else about it, too. The men who own fishing boats that I’ve met in Newport so far give me the feeling that they would be out there on the ocean even if they didn’t rely on the paycheck.

The relationships men have with boats is one of those earthly mysteries, and suffice it to say that when I met Captain Dave’s “baby,” I felt like I should have kissed her hand. The Golden Sunrise, as we'll call her, is a 36-foot fiberglass boat rigged to pull crab pots from the deep or cast longlines for tuna and salmon. She has red, orange and yellow stripes running across her hull and a definite personality. When Dave and his crew aren’t out at sea, he told me, we’re either working on equipment (making buoys, coiling ropes, repairing and building crab pots) or fixing up the boat. She’s temperamental, he explained, patting the steering wheel inside the cabin and adding a few more words aside that I didn’t quite catch. They weren’t meant for me anyway.

As it turned out, the Golden Sunrise and I had the opportunity to get to know each other quite well before actually traveling to sea together. For the rest of January, the coast was hammered with weather system after weather system, keeping us shorebound. As Dave puts it, "It's called fishing, goddamn it, it's not called catching." It's always a gamble. To make up for the lack of fishing days, Dave offered me paid labor in his shop and I accepted gladly. Putting sealer on the emergency "survival suits" for the boat, wrapping buoy ropes and drilling holes in bait jars, I began to get a better idea of what going out on the boat would be like. The time ashore also gave me a chance to get to know my fellow deckhand, Hannah. a feisty Minnesotan in a position remarkably similar position to mine - 23, broke and  dreaming dreams of sandy silt loam and prizewinning tomatoes. She’s spent the past three years working at her friends’ organic farm back home and admits that she misses it. But she also saw the attraction in heading west and spending a bit of time on a fishing boat. I liked her attitude, and suddenly, Dave’s political rants and weirdly oozing right eye became a lot more bearable. That, or the crotchety old guy was starting to grow on me too.


Next time: My first bout with seasicknesses; then, we (finally) catch a few crabs.

Farming Apprenticeships (part two): The Verdict

Note: This post is a continuation of last month's, in which I gave an overview of farming apprenticeship programs and something of an explanation for their sudden popularity. This segment attempts to summarize my own experience as an apprentice – for those considering doing it, parents of young people threatening to do it, and those otherwise interested.

... Do I now aspire to possess my own ten acres, a cow and a pile of debt? Will the dirt ever come out from under my fingernails?

I’ve been trying, but I can’t seem to develop an objective analysis of the apprenticeship program that defined my life for six months. It would be like sending your parents a report card for their performance during your childhood. Looking back over the journals I kept while working with the Collins, I see rants, reflections, stories about the people I met and many, many attempts to describe the beauty and wonder of the place I found myself living. My formal goal in undertaking the apprenticeship was to learn about what it takes to sustain a small farm; the day-to-day tasks as well as the personal commitment involved. Informally, I was really trying to see if I was up for it, if all my romantic ideas around farming held up to the reality of the job itself.

I worked hard to keep maintain my lofty ideas about farming over the months I spent living and working with the Collins. As they will be the first to admit, Bob and Ann are a bit worn out by the whole job. Granted, things are better than when they were dairy farmers, waking up at 4 AM to milk cows that eventually started costing them more per year than they earned. Still, most visitors to the farm become overwhelmed simply by being told what goes on here. It’s a lot of work, and by the end of the apprenticeship, I understood why most long-time farmers don’t share the bright-eyed enthusiasm of young wannabes. It’s hard, often thankless work. But I also learned why they’re still there, doing it. The energetic, gung-ho attitude may not be immediately visible, but their passion for the lifestyle they chose is still there lying just beneath the surface. Just as some city kids wouldn’t touch a manure shovel with a ten-foot pole, Bob and Ann would last about three minutes in an office. The animals under their care, the river that skirts their property, the 69 acres that they call home are as much a part of them as their hair or skin.

After a few weeks at Collins Farm, I started to feel this way a bit, too – attached to the place in a way that made me wonder, when it came down to it, whether I would actually be able to leave. Maybe it’s the seductive beauty of Vancouver Island or the fact that every day was a chance to play outside. Sure, there were some long hours spent bent over pulling weeds and picking vegetables, but since most of those activities were new to me, they took a while to get dull and repetitive. In between, I gorged myself on blackberries and strawberries, climbed trees to pick apples, wandered the woods aimlessly to find mushrooms (or to walk the goats), and shoveled around piles of dirt and manure under the guise of creating compost. Honestly, sometimes I couldn’t believe I was being paid, however meagerly, for that level of enjoyment.

Second to finding out that work didn’t have to be a miserable activity, the most valuable aspect of being a farm apprentice turned out to be the mentoring relationships that I was able to develop with Bob, Ann and people like Andrea, Connie and Crystal who were a near-daily presence during the summer months. Without a lesson plan, a schedule or any sort of formal discussion, they managed to impart a ton of valuable information on how to grow food and turn it into a semblance of a livelihood: the economics of homemade pie and hungry tourists, the “joys of backyard cheese making," how to pick a perfectly ripe strawberry and catch a pig on the run.


Farming apprenticeships are criticized for being a product of privilege; an option only available to those who can afford to work for little or no pay for an entire summer. One commenter on the New York Times article mentioned in the previous post calls such positions “a time-honored tradition for children of the wealthy” to fill the summer months. It’s an interesting point. Although my mom quit supporting me as soon as I graduated, the fact that I had no student loans to pay off allowed me complete freedom in choosing the route I would take next. I assessed my personal and financial needs, looked at the state of the world and, deciding it needs more farmers, jumped into the apprenticeship program with both feet. Did I feel privileged? Absolutely. I lived in a place that people from all over the world pay through the nose to visit, ate almost exclusively organic, home-cooked, local food, and learned how to feed myself and come a few steps closer to self-sufficiency. Those non-monetary forms of payment added up to be more than any “real” job could have provided me with, especially just coming out of college in a major recession. Meanwhile, many of my fellow graduates languished in their parents’ basements, looking for nonexistent jobs and wondering if they should go back for a Master’s in business administration. I came away with skills that I’m finding a new job market for – in managing community gardens and CSA programs, helping restaurants and stores source food locally, or assisting small farms in going organic.

My last few days at the Collins’ place were difficult. It didn’t seem fair that I was leaving; the Christmas season was just upon us and there was so much to do. I went through the motions anyway, and Ann and Bob made sure I got to do everything one last time – go for a ride on Jesse the big Belgian mare, eat all my favorite foods, see all of our friends from around the community at a fantastic Thanksgiving Day potluck. The day before I left turned out to be the first sunny day we’d had in weeks (after record rainfall all November), and Mount Arrowsmith, the towering face of granite that greeted me nearly every morning for two seasons, appeared dusted with snow just as it’d been when I first arrived in June.

Before I left, Ann and Bob gave me a painting of that mountain, gorgeously rendered in watercolor by an artist friend of theirs. I put it carefully in the back window of my fully stuffed car. Then I got in the car with it and drove down the driveway, watching the two of them growing smaller in my rearview mirror. They were the ones I hated to leave the most. They weren’t simply friends to me or even surrogate parents. Our relationship was more similar to that of close accomplices. Although the Collins are the ones responsible for creating what is now a diverse farm that feeds the close-knit community around it, I felt like that season – the second one that they had grown for the local market – had been a milestone. The worldwide craze around eating locally and knowing where food comes from had started to hit our little valley, and real progress began to be made toward making the entire island more self-sufficient. I’d come to experience some of the joy of working on the land and with people who understood the value of that, for the guiltlessness of laboring for ideas that I believe in completely. At Collins Farm I think I glimpsed an outcome that was greater than the whole, something right in a world that usually seems wrong. 

As far as my own desire to become a farmer, well, as much as I hate making long-term plans about my future, it's definitely tempting. But first, I need a few more seasons' experience under my belt and a small mountain of cash - it's as difficult to get into farming as it is to get out, it seems. Now that winter's set in, I'm simply biding my time (and honing my couch surfing skills) until I can once again turn my efforts toward the worthwhile goal of feeding people.

That dirt under my nails? Long gone. My itch to put it back there? Stronger than ever.