Sandbox Center

At some point, my ancestors were farmers. This is a versatile truth, like how you can say parents are farmers. Teachers are definitely farmers. Student athletes are farmers. When you talk about producing what is necessary, cultivating true nourishment -- while dealing with unknown elements, endless input, attitudes rejuvenated with each new year -- then certainly, many people can be considered farmers!

It's not accidental. For example, I say my family comes from Hong Kong because the people who literally brought me into the world grew up in Hong Kong, and the remnants of their journey are so ingrained in familial history that I feel obligated to carve a space for it in my own identity. That pride and tradition is easily, seamlessly handed down. The fact is, my father was raised by farmers. His grandparents lived on a piece of arable land in the New Territories, the remote perimeter of metropolitan Hong Kong, and a few years after his younger brother was born, he moved there to live with them. While jogging around the indoor track of the Shoreview Community Center, he used to tell me stories about eating tomatoes straight off the vine, of sleeping with the dogs in the barn, slaughtering chickens, using a lantern to guide his grandmother back from the center of town after watching a film, so they wouldn't get lost out on the old rural road. 

Ghost stories happened in the countryside of Hong Kong. It was eerie, disturbing, not to have your neighbor within shouting distance. Who would you go to for help? My cousins, who also grew up in Hong Kong, would buy comic books where horrible things would always occur in houses, never in apartments, never in the city.

I inherited this too, though it took time to realize it. I've always felt that parents like mine have lived a lifetime, and then some. Lots of movement, lots of big leaps. Eventually my father moved back to the city to start school, to graduate as valedictorian, to become the first in his family, in his generation, to attend university overseas, to earn a Ph.D. Am I supposed to mourn the loss of his agrarian experience? It shaped who he became, but it has little presence, now.

Lives are not always rooted to the land, and that's ok. I've made my own way back to the farm, which means these things are cyclical, and have a habit of circling back.

It is an era where the phone call becomes excessive to sending a text and television news reports are drowned by ticker-tape news feeds at the top and bottom of the screen.  No doubt sharing meaningful information and maintaining relationships rooted in face-to-face interactions sometimes falls by the wayside.  It’s hard not to get caught up in it all.  It’s exciting!  Sharing information like that and moving that fast is supposed to be exciting!  We all do it.  So where is the balance?

Part of the beauty of the local food movement is that it calls to mindfulness the pace at which we are living our lives.  Slow food?  Let’s look to slow everything.  Running so fast most of the time, we hardly get a glimpse of everything happening in our peripherals.  The local food movement chooses a path that can’t necessarily be the lightspeed provision of what we eat, but takes a route that draws to focus what is important.  It is a value-based system that, among other things, when done right centers around community.

For one, this could not be more right.  The major issues we face today all hit on the same issue of community, be it the weakening of the community as a whole via lack of human rights, industrialization, etc.  Food that roots itself in not just the land but in the community is food that grows more than itself.  As Sandbox grows, we’re choosing a community and a path that grows more than just the food on our land.

Farming is a human relationship with nature bounded together by roots. Sometimes the relationship is like a newly infatuated couple, puppy love, when the plants are growing 2 inches a day (perhaps why I love hops) and just the right amount of rain comes at just the right time. Other times, Nature plays the one roommate who doesn't do their dishes: late frost, early frost, hail. Through the thick and the thin, roots are the common bond that hold nature and humans together.

For plants, roots are a deep source of power. Roots provide direction, stability, and communication. Generally, the healthier the roots the better the plant. Their importance to the plant is obvious, there is no chicken and egg between roots and shoots. Roots come first. One shoot may die but the roots will grow another in its place. As we all very well know, if you want to rid yourself of weeds, you have to go to the root of the problem.

Human roots are less tactile, but are they any less important? How healthy can a human be without contact to their roots? Imagine what roots you have in your life. Many take the form of traditions; recipes, music, structures, or stories. Family, arts, and culture play an important role in human roots.

A common cultural phrase describes my roots: “You can take the person out of the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the person.” Like many young farmers these days my parents left the farm and raised me in the suburbs. I didn’t garden, I didn’t cook, I didn’t like to get my hands dirty. My favorite meal was Pizza Hut’s monster 16” 4-cheese pizza with breadsticks and dipping sauce.

But you can’t take the farm out of the person; and my entire life, four generations of roots, were calling me home.

So here I am heading into my third season of farming. Great-grandpa is gone. Grandpa is 90. Dad is still in the burbs. Yet their roots are here with me everyday. Dad’s belt is around my waist. Grandpa’s name is on my ring. Great-grandpa’s photo is on my desk. Their hands are mine in the soil.

For now though I am just another young person struggling with my roots. I wonder: Is my heart healthy enough for all these rooting activities? Should I consult my doctor if I experience rooting for longer than 4 hours? Does this path lead me away from my peers to an isolated place in the country where I complain about "kids these days"? How do I maintain my urban relationships? And more importantly: Why am I so uncertain? Shouldn’t farming be like the spiritual, physical, emotional end all be all of my entire life?

Sometimes you have to leave home to know home.  After mulling over the pros and cons of taking a few days away from home, my dear friend/co-worker and I decided to attend the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Services (MOSES) organic farming conference.  With 2 gifted tickets to Organic University, we woke before the sunrise and sped out of town on perhaps the coldest and iceist day of our frigid winter to date with a rising temperature of -12.  With little time to prepare, I threw random “emergency items” into my car haphazardly; these items included 20 tea lights, a few Luna bars, the title to my car (just in case), and my friend added 3 jars of frozen curry “for the road,” and about 200 ounces of brewed coffee.    

As the sun rose, we laughingly belted out Michael Jackson tunes, munched on fresh donuts from Red Wing, and soon we were rolling through the white-capped bluffs of what could have been the breathtaking scapes of Colorado or Montana, but was in reality, just LaCross, Wisconsin. (It is also likely that only a midwesterner would make that comparison). With excited energy akin to childhood holidays, we refilled our canister of coffee, and settled into a day-long session with Mark Shepard on Farm Scale Restoration Agriculture.  With a renewed devotion to perennials, keylining, and microbusiness, I left the 8 hour workshop ready to turn Sandbox into acres of perennials and polycultures.

But unfortunately, outlawing annuals, would likely pose a problem to many of our incubating new farm businesses.

On a similar thread, I was heartened by a keynote speech given to thousands at MOSES, focused on the values and processes of Permaculture, because we, as young farmers, are entering a time of immense economic and environmental shifts, and we were reminded collectively that now is the time to “creatively use and respond to change.” This sentiment is the 12th Permaculture Principle by David Holmgren, and also sticks with me more than the others for some reason. To learn more about permaculture principles follow this link http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles/

For whatever reason, green energy sounds about as sexy as a bird feeder. I can’t speak for all millennials, but sometimes, going green seems like this unreachable star of semi-retired activism; if only I had a day or five to read up on the technicalities, then I’d totally be engaged! In the meantime, clean energy and carbon offsets makes me cringe with inner guilt, doesn’t prompt much else. I mean sure, I recycle, I compost, I turn off the tap with the wrist not curled around the toothbrush, but thinking about the merry-go-round of research and applications required to take green energy seriously inspires some significant lag time.

I should backtrack: there’s no question that Sandbox is committed to minimizing our environmental impact. This means that Sandbox carefully considers the downstream impacts of our operations, and is supportive of other organizations who are doing the same. Likewise, we look upstream at what we consume, use, inhale, etc. and make our choices as deliberately and as informed as possible. Most of our leadership team already commutes via public transportation, biking, or walking, while our communication methods and project management tools are entirely paperless. And with a floating office and four laptops as our only hardware, it's incredibly easy to maintain low energy consumption.