How can you really tell all there is to know abour being a farmer? How can you tell others how ‘to see’, with knowing what is important in the non-verbal world of plants telling you they are hungry, thirsty, diseased, virused? How much time is there to respond to the plant’s needs, immediately, soon…..too late?
Dan is one of the those special people that know plant language. He can spot a critter on a plant from a mile away…….like microscope vision! Of coarse it helps when you are a young farmer with good eyes and a keen sense of affinity with plants that produce food. I think he is a wizard with plant /seed selection, always on the lookout for the strongest , the most deliscious, the most plentiful varieties to grow. And grow he does….organic ginger, organic tumeric, tomatoes, peppers, squash.
Between watering cycles one day, I had the opportunity to sit down with Dan and ask him a few questions, starting with what motivated him to become a farmer (he’s a young farmer in his 30’s who is a full time farmer)). “Lazines…hahaha”, was his off hand reply. His background in agriculture stemmed from growing up next to an agricultural community in southern California, where citrus and pomegranit grew. His neighborhood friends families had farms. Now those areas are all concrete and buildings he said. Dan paused and then refected, ” Eventually I gravitated to farming because I felt it fit into my attitude towards life…I enjoy plants, they don’t talk back, I can pick my favorites and cull the rest.” There was a lot of humour during this interview which I took as a balancing mechanism to the seriousness of farming because as Dan put it, ” Get ready to fail, there better be more reasons to want to be a farmer than money because there’s a million things that can go wrong in growing plants.” I asked him if he introduced himself as a farmer in social situations. He said, “It depends who I’m talking to. There is a connotation of ‘hippiness’ if you say you are a farmer, sometimes I say I’m an Agricultural Technician.” ………….to be continued