Life as it Could be: Farms for Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

A portion of this article will appear in the Conservation Council's December Newsletter. The Conservation Council is a giving society of the Trustees of Reservations. The farms of the Trustees of Reservations are organizational members of the FBEA and Wayne Castonguay, General manager of Appleton Farms (a Trustees farm) is a founding board member of the FBEA.

Two retrospectives, traveling exhibits, and a new book celebrate Norman Rockwell and shed light on his painstaking technique that involved photographing real people in action.

I always assumed that Norman Rockwell grew up in a rural utopia but he didn’t. He grew up at 103rd and Amsterdam in New York City and did not live the life he painted. He painted America as he imagined it could be. Where did he get this idea of a charmed, simple life? During the summers his family spent earning money living and working on upstate NY farms.

David Kamp’s article, Norman Rockwell’s American Dream, in November’s Vanity Fair describes the affect those summers had on Rockwell:

While the adult guests simply played croquet or sat on porches breathing in the country air, the children befriended their farm-boy and farm-girl counterparts and embarked on a whirlwind tour of bucolia’s greatest hits: helping out with the milking, riding and grooming the horses, splashing in swimming holes, fishing for bullheads, and trapping turtles and frogs. These summer escapes made a deep impression on Rockwell, blurring into “an image of sheer blissfulness” that never left his mind. He ascribed to the country a magical ability to rewire his brain and make him, temporarily at least, a better person: “In the city we kids delighted to go up on the roof of our apartment house and spit down on the passers-by in the street below. But we never did things like that in the country. The clean air, the green fields, the thousand and one things to do - got somehow into us and changed our personalities as much as the sun changed the color of our skins".

The Trustees of Reservations has made a powerful commitment to their farm properties: Appleton Farms, Powisset Farm, and Weir River Farm to mention only a few, all engage adults and children in the real work needs of their productive farms. The Trustees owns 14 "complete" farms, an additional 24 properties with active agricultural land on them, and dozens of community gardens in Boston totaling about 3,000 acres. The Trustees directly manages four of the farms and all of the community gardens and the remainder are leased to local farmers. In addition, several more farms are in the "pipeline" to come to the Trustees in the near future. If you’ve ever spent time at one of these properties, you know first hand of the transformative power of farm-based experiences. These opportunities are expanding to include adults and children of diverse backgrounds and capabilities (indeed, many programs are emerging to support the rehabilitative and therapeutic needs of returning veterans and young adults with autism).

The demand for educational programming on productive farms has grown significantly in the last five years. Many people, fueled by an unsteady economy, seek a simpler, more sustainable way of life and realize the value of their local farm as a food source, a way to connect to the land, and a way to sustain individual healthy lifestyles and vibrant healthy communities.

Farm-based educators perform the critical role of engaging the public with the real-work opportunities and activities of productive farm life. These professionals and their programs are important because they provide often life-changing experiences, inspiring people to cultivate and protect relationships with farms and farmers. Behavioral change amongst consumers in turn helps farmers to build a community of supporters who act as customers, volunteers, and activists. Over time, through enough exposure to education on farms, individual behavioral change could reach a tipping point and cascade into broader societal change characterized by a critical mass of citizens actively supporting working farms.

In Rockwell’s County Agent* (July 24, 1948) we see a 4H session with young children. The Land Institute followed up with the families of the subjects in the painting to see who if anyone was still farming and found none of the next generation working in agriculture. The next decade will see a shift back to agriculture with the Trustees help. Young or beginning farmers have been flooding Ag training programs at the Northeast Organic Farmers conferences and agricultural training centers and Trustees’ farms are among hundreds of farms providing practical farm training to a new crop of farmer apprentices every season. Add to this most farms’ open door practices that welcome anybody of any age to help and it stands to reason that the impact will be quite broad. The idea that we can engage the next generation in more practical skills with a conservation ethic on farms is quite amazing. It’s the life Rockwell imagined for the nation.

* Licensing rights prevent use here of the painting, but you can see a a copy on the Google search page: http://images.google.com/images?q=rockwell%20county%20agent&oe=...