What's your itch? What keeps you awake at night?


For this resolute intern at Thornbury Farm CSA, the itch is having Earth's sixth mass extinction on our hands. Collapsing ecosystems threaten our planet's biodiversity, politics act fickly and feebly to preserve habitat, and new "super-pests" wreak havoc on crops due to pesticide overuse. A freight train of seemingly insurmountable problems daunts us, taunts us, and makes hoping seem silly. 


Our current food production scheme has proven to exacerbate more environmental degradation worldwide in more ways than make sense to list here. The production and transportation of food, involves deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pesticides, runoff, erosion, greenhouse gas emissions, and inhumane treatment of animals, is a burden to all life on the planet. 


But there is reason to hope. Very delicious and nutritious reason to hope.


The solution to both the moral decline of food-production, and to our feelings of indignance and frustration, is fulfilling and delicious, achievable, and worth working in the soil for. We can possibly do the lion’s share required of us to save the world simply by eating, not only good food, but the right food. Isn't that simple!? Talk about giving people a more positive vision to work toward rather than scaring them to death… instead of our terrifying image of homeland security forever being attached to violent images, let us send out our “exploratory sprouts” and realize that “homeland security [also] derives from having enough potatoes” (Kingsolver 80).

That's not to say we don't face some mighty opponents.

“Thomas Jefferson…presumed on the basis of colonial experience that farming and democracy are intimately connected. Cultivation of land meets the needs of the farmer, the neighbors, and the community, and keeps people independent from domineering central powers. In Jefferson’s time, that was the king. In ours, it’s multinational corporations” (Barbara Kingsolver from page 150 of her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle)

I began interning at Thornbury to learn the ways of trellising, tilling, seeding, and fixing because if the zombie apocalypse happened today, I would have little practical skill in my survival toolkit, and one most likely cannot live on Ramen alone, despite what my roommate says.

As I craft this blog, I am exploring what it means to live and eat sustainably. I invite you to join me on my journey, read about my experience on the farm day-to-day, and learn, through my eyes and writing wits, about Truth in farming, environmental stewardship, and community engagement. 

Love,

Ben