To Cohere & to Last

“Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last. The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish.”

~Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow~

Late January on the farm—the sun low, the clouds heavy, the soil damp. I’ve got a jacket on and am hoping Emmett will waddle into our morning huddle, heave himself into my lap and warm me up. Yesterday I was roasting on the beach, but the beach is in Kihei, where I live, and the farm is at 3,300 feet of elevation, where it gets (to this Texas boy) legitimately cold. Overnight lows routinely dip into the 50s and sometimes 40s up at the farm in winter. It’s hard for the soil to dry out at these temps and with all this rainfall; roots get waterlogged, the microbes are lethargic, and due to all the clouds and shorter days, the photosynthesis with which our crops bless us in summertime is sorely reduced. Wintertime, everything slows down except two things: the oyster mushrooms and the humans. The former—being fungi and not plants—like the cool damp environment and so they can grow pretty explosively; the latter… well, I’ll grant that Seasonal Affective Disorder is a real thing, but the farm is an old-school taskmaster; she beckons us regardless. Less work in the fields just means more time for projects that have been on the back burner (hellooo rear of the barn!).

Soon enough the calendar will march into spring, cucumbers will be getting seeded then planted, flowers will begin to bloom in earnest, I’ll switch from a hot espresso to cold brew, and we’re shifting into high gear again. It’s the nature of the place. Everywhere of course has this—rhythms, flow, natural flux as well as unexpected disruptions; every ecosystem is in a state of motion at all times. Nowhere and no thing ever stands truly in isolation or permanence.

Our planet works its way around the sun in its elliptical orbit, on its tilted axis, circled by our one moon, enveloped by our impossibly complex weather systems perpetually shifting across the globe like Matisse’s dancers. Four and a half billion years of very hard work forming itself, becoming itself through mere dust and gas and gravity, have given us an atmosphere, tectonic plates, oceans and mountains and seasons and life itself. Everywhere—every where, every place—is always and already experiencing the continued interplay of Earth’s movements, always continuing to become its singular self time and again, over and over, in perpetuity. This is part and parcel of being embodied and having form: people and plants and volcanoes inhaling and exhaling elements that have swirled around since time immemorial.

And the farm is a world unto itself, a universe in miniature. Just like the cosmos, it’s a site of endless change. And exchange: life for death, death into decomposition, decomposition in and through—towards and because of—life. The life of the farm holds itself together in part through death (what is compost, after all?). In and around the root systems and mycelial networks there are the tens of thousands of microorganisms in every teaspoon of healthy soil, the bigger tiny things that eat them, the bigger ones that eat those, and on and on up the food chain until you find: us! And then of course we die and return, in a way, to the carnal eternal conversation. Life for death, death into decomposition, decomposition reborn into life. What else is simultaneously so terrifying and so reassuring? We are …and then… we are not. Beyond that, it’s unknown. The angel of death keeps mum; she prefers her cards held close to the chest. Which is fine really. There’s always enough life bursting forth on the farm, even in winter, to pull me back from the existential brink. It’s difficult—blessedly difficult—to plunge too deeply into the philosophical quandaries of death and meaninglessness when a few hundred pounds of carrots and beets and cabbage have to come out of the ground today, and into boxes all nicely washed and neatly packed today, and arugula needs weeding and the mushroom substrate needs to be inoculated and the old substrate needs to be shredded onto the ready-to-be-prepped beds because the salanova from last week has got to get into the ground before it gets rootbound and gives up the ghost! How I love it so. The urgency of tasks, it turns out, is a great way to focus one’s mind.

…As is just looking around the place. If you pay enough attention (and attention is the currency of a farm) lifecycles merge and diverge continually: change and exchange. A farm is in constant conversation with itself, each partner—whether human, vegetable, insect, or water molecule—giving and receiving, often completely and absurdly unaware of its partnership - its membership. All the members of the farm have different timelines and are operating on their own scale. (How could we do otherwise?) We all have different orbits around that center which we call Life. Our mesclun salad mix takes twenty-one days from seeding to harvest in peak summer, tack on maybe another week in January; the rainbow carrots take about seventy-five days, the Song cauliflower forty-two, the ranunculus in the greenhouse need perhaps three months before they start popping off. The oyster mushrooms give us close to four months of vigorous production before we send their growing medium on into the next world. We’ll be planting some trees soon, which is very exciting; I suppose we’ll be measuring their lifespans, like our own, in decades.

The membership of the farm includes each worker and each crop but it is never only that; it is far more than the sum of its consitituent parts. We strive to make our work at Lapa’au consistent: we have our own patterns and rhythms that we have created, our ways of working that have come to define our days. And we do this, our labor, at a human scale, knowing that there are greater patterns at work operating on their own larger scales. A healthy ecosystem or biome, whether or not it’s a farm, is the type of place that seems like it’s always been what it is—it looks right—even as you know it is always somehow becoming new. It is both everchanging and everlasting. And so we see, as I quoted at the top, that a farm wishes “to cohere and to last” and for “all of its lives to flourish,” but also that “Change is constant, random, and irrepressible, and it happens to be the dominant force driving species evolution” (Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters—yes, go read it). So there is change and coherence, in some kind of union. It is to the benefit of the farmer to keep that union; more than that, it is an imperative. A farm is always inviting its farmers into its union, for we the farmers are part of the life of the farm. It asks us, and insists we answer: How do transformation and constancy meet? What does it mean for metamorphosis and stability to dance together? (In more practical terms: how do we keep growing food?)

A significant aspect of this metamorphosis is that while our work is contained within the boundaries of the property, so much of what makes life happen here is just kind of passing through. The varied amounts of daylight and precipitation throughout the year are two of the most obvious or discernable paths that cross the farm, but there’s also the patterns in the winds, the seasonality of the birds’ pillaging, the presence of the pollinators during our cut flowers months. Then there’s the cycles of the weeds who apparently like tag-teaming us (you take those months, I’ll handle these, we’ll really wear em ragged). The cress shows up in winter, purslane takes off in summer—and the amaranth is their year-round ringleader. Pests too: the cabbage moth and the cutworm have different life cycles and show up at different times and in different numbers. It may take them longer to move across the property than it takes a ray of sunshine, but they are certainly not stagnant and in fact quite impressively mobile. 

The great mystery of farming—or at least one mystery of many to me—is how a farm is both a complete entity and fully in time. We can look at Lapa’au as a place formally named and delineated, we can drive onto the property and see it layed out before us in its contained and working splendor, we can look at the order board and see all our accounts and their wish lists and our checkmarks next to their orders (2 cs oyster ✓, 3 cs salanova ✓, 10# celery ✓, 20# mix beets ✓, 15# daikon ✓, 7# chard ✓), we can see the business and a bank account and my direct deposit and W2. We can see that it is, simply and directly, full stop. There is a felt wholeness. But also… it is nothing but an accumulation of complex processes. The soil is living, the plants are living, the damn pests and weeds are living, the humans (and cats and dog) are living, and after a variable amount of time each of these lives will end, making room for something else. That is what I mean by “in time.” We are inescapably in the flow of time; we are mortal creatures, fully of flesh, knit together in and through—towards and because of—life. And life ends in death, or else it would not be life. And life also cannot be contained. It cannot be made into exactly as we want. Lapa’au has being, but it is a tenuous being. It is conditional, and provisional, and depends in large part upon our willingness to do the necessary work of its stewardship.

At some level, the land is always yearning to be set free from the rigors of the farming life - a farm is not, to be honest, a natural thing. We do our best to mimic the vibrancy of the natural world, but nowhere in nature are heads of lettuce set at exactly sixteen inches apart in four rows for one hundred feet. It is artful work, but it is also artificial. (This is why you have to be relentlessly attentive, because the forces of entropic decay are always pushing you around; the whole universe is flying off into chaos and nothingness at 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec and we’re trying to keep a dang vegetable farm in order.)

It is a great privilege to care for the life of the farm and an immeasurable gift to recognize the reciprocity - that the farm cares for my life. It offers in abundance the good things growing out of the soil. It makes room for me to lie down and be supported. It moves in recognizable patterns, it experiences the give and take and ebb and flow of material existence …just like me. It has good days and bad days, just like me. We offer and participate in the farm’s coherence, even as we ourselves are changing day to day. “In the end,” Zoë Schlanger writes, “the thing that survives is the biome, the whole community of life, just in varying states of composition.” That, perhaps more than anything, is where my faith lies. Life and death, sunshine and darkness, the giving and receiving of nutrients—none of this happens without movement, without adaptation, without a staggering degree of complexity interlaced across time and space. And somehow, through some alchemy of generativity and responsibility, a farm exists. Lapa’au was here yesterday, it’s here today, and dammit it’ll be here tomorrow. 

Ode to Farm Kitties

[Note: This post is inspired by the best book I’ve read this year, Get Me Through the Next 5 Minutes: Odes to Being Alive, by James Parker. He used to write these odes for The Atlantic, on the last page of the magazine, which is where I fell in love with them. And miracle of miracles, he compiled them—and many more—into a full-on book! There’s almost seventy of them, weird and beautiful little things on topics ranging all over the place. His odes tackle “BBQ Chips” and “Crying Babies” but also “Meditation,” “Not Meditating,” and “the Psychedelic Locusts That Run the Universe.” (My personal favorite is his “Ode to My Dog’s Balls.”) Go buy you a copy.]

These cats, I promise you, are trouble. Oh they may not look like it, lying there fat and happy together in the morning sunlight, but the moment you let down your guard... well my friend you’re in for it. You may not think you’re a cat person, in fact you may insist upon it (“Cats are boring!” “Cats are psychopaths!” “I’m allergic!”) but purr by purr Emmett and Eugene will wear you down and fashion themselves a warm and snug little bed inside your heart. And it’s all downhill from there.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) for me, I was already a cat person when they arrived on the farm—two little orange tabbies that hid under the barn in sheer terror for at least the first ten days. At some point they realized they’d been granted the best life ever, one consisting of generous helpings of food and even more generous helpings of affection, plus plenty space to explore and the occasional bird or mouse to catch and subsequently disembowel if they’re so inclined. Cat heaven on earth, I’d guess. They got comfy here real quick.

They’re brothers, by the way, about five years old. I like to say Emmett is cuter while Eugene is more handsome; the easiest way to tell them apart is Emmett’s white chin - and his extroversion. Eugene keeps pretty close to their home base (the barn); rarely do we see him more than twenty or thirty feet from its entrance. He is happy of course to receive head scratches and some cuddles, especially at the end of the day when most activity has ceased, but what he really lives for—is always on the lookout for—is food. No matter what time of day, no matter if he has literally just been fed, if you walk into the barn he will appear as if magically summoned by the pure potential of extra caloric intake. Dry food is good, wet canned food is better, but the best? Handouts from human lunches. No cat has ever looked at you with more desire than when Eugene wants whatever edible thing is in your hand. And he squeaks! His meow is truly a squeak; nearly inaudible, just this tiny little high-pitched quasi-noise that emerges almost as if his vocal chords are being strangled by his appetite. It’s hilarious and a little sad, which I think is his sweet spot.

Emmett, on the other hand, is the more free-ranging of the two, and his sole motivation in life is getting petted. He will track you from the barn to the nursery to the fields, insisting you pet him, insisting you let him in your lap at once. His meow sounds needy, disgruntled, haughty but also desperate. And he’s adorable. If you give him even a hint of an opening, he’ll squeeze all seventeen-and-a-half pounds of himself into your lap, motor humming before you even begin petting him. The worst part: I cannot help myself—I HAVE to pet him. I succumb every dang time. We might be in the middle of a super busy workday, more on the to-do list than we could ever achieve in one day, not a moment to spare, but like a sucker I stop, put down whatever I happen to be carrying, and I pet the little bastard.

My only justification is that we all do it. We’re all suckers. These cats run the place (even the dog accepts their rule.) We would surely work much more efficiently if they weren’t around; let’s hope Michael and Lauren never run the numbers to find out how much labor costs these cats are incurring.

In the end, though, that’s kind of the point. That’s the kind of farm we’re aspiring to be. We’re going to work hard—really hard—to grow and harvest and pack for you the best produce we possibly can. But also... we’re gonna stop and pet a kitty.

Everyone at Lapa’au gives their best. I’m surrounded by people who roll in ready every day to do good work, hard work - important work. And the blunt reality is we need to do our best in order for people to keep buying our produce so, you know, we can pay our bills. (Economics is never far away on the farm.) There is always so much to be done and our to-do list never ends. It is daunting, honestly. Farming is about diligence as much as anything: always keeping that attention up, the mind focused on what’s around, what’s coming down the pike, thinking every dang day about the short term and the long term, what needs to be done tomorrow and next month and what should’ve been done yesterday and then trying to squeeze that into and around all the things we have to knock out today. We bust our collective ass here—and it shows. If you’ve ever bought or eaten our produce, you know. If you’ve ever had the good fortune of walking around the farm itself, you know. But the secret sauce? Our proprietary blend of farm magic? It’s those cats.

No farm—or any venture really—can be successful in the long-term if the ground it occupies is not continually being filled with joy and beauty and good things, and not theoretically or metaphorically but literally. You reap what you sow. What embodies or incarnates the qualities in life you most value? That’s the type of place Michael and Lauren have cultivated here over the years, a place where peace and happiness are never completely overtaken by the time and effort good agriculture requires. “Sustainability” as an agricultural concept begins and ends with the sustainability of the farmer. Running a business is hard, farming is psychically demanding and physically exhausting; we all need some way to insulate ourselves from the cold winds of life that can batter us about. Eugene and Emmett (speaking of insulation!!) do that for us at Lapa’au. Ostensibly they’re on the property to keep the rats and mice at bay—and they in all probability do a decent job of it, given their heft and the occasional small headless creature we find. But really... they’re here because we love them and our hearts need them.

Eugene and Emmett are fat, furry messengers from the deities sent to remind us that life must have balance, that worry and fear will never satisfy as much as contentedness and peace, that spending a few minutes giving and receiving love and affection are ultimately more beneficial than using all our spare moments to hustle even more. These cats bring to us in their adorable and blissfully-unaware creatureliness a reminder of the cosmic truth that life does not go on forever and our limited finite hours will be better served if a bit of that time is offered to unconditional love. I’m a better farmer because of those cats, I’m pretty sure. When I stop to pet one of them, it gives my tired muscles a little extra break; it makes me pause long enough to realize I should drink some water. When they’re extra needy in the morning because no one has petted or fed them in fourteen hours, I am reminded of our universal and interconnected desire for care. And when I have thirty-five pounds of feline in my lap—that’s 2 cats x 17-ish lbs each—there is no better time to look up and take in the blue sky or setting sun (and yes that’s in part because they’ve rendered me immobile).

So dig deep, put in excellent work, deliver an exceptional product—but never forget the singular joy that comes from a purring cat. Remember to stop, put down your stuff, and give a head scratch. Your own soul will thank you for it.

A Hui Hou, Zaggy!

Well, friends and readers, as itʼs said, the only constant in life is change. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, oftentimes—and in this case—a bit of both. That bittersweet taste is the occasion for this post: a major note of celebration paired with the minor note of a fare-thee-well. This month we bid adieu to Zach, a farmer at Lapaʼau for the past nearly three years. He was hired on a few months before I sweet-talked my own way onto the farm, and so for me, I donʼt exactly know what Lapaʼau is without him, or what it will become in his absence.

Itʼll be quieter though, thatʼs for sure. As a native Texan, I donʼt think Iʼve ever been friends with someone from New England—a place that felt as alien to my childhood as Mongolia—and then lo and behold, here at a farm on Maui I stumbled upon two of them! Zach and April, my Massachusetts homies, who Iʼm pretty sure have a true familial affection for each other but to this Texas boy seem to be vehemently arguing and/or trash-talking approximately 85% of the time. My heart rate is lowered considerably when they are not working together, but they assure me itʼs all just that New Englandy way of relating. Iʼll have to take them at their word.

Zach is not always so brash and argumentative though. He is also endlessly curious about the world and all the people in it, genuine in his reflections, and self-deprecating in his humor. In all sorts of environments he is comfortable in his own skin; it would not be the least bit surprising to find him rolling up in either (hypothetically) a beat up old Maui minivan—you know the kind—or a sleek Tesla (again, hypothetically). He is quietly generous, buying you a drink or giving a gift in the uncommon way of someone who is less interested in your gratitude than in your simple enjoyment of life.

And of course Zachʼs a good farmer. Happy to be outside, happy to be laboring, standing or stooping or kneeling between the sun and the earth, usually wearing a ratty t-shirt that once upon a time had a color other than “dirt.” He is attentive and a good teacher. I cannot recall a time I needed a hand that he did not provide one. Zach and I came to farming separately but both searching for ...something; meaning or purpose or simplicity or any of those words we all know, those beautiful but worn words that can never quite capture the ghosts that haunt them (and us). We both lived that West Coast city life for a while, and we both got out while the getting was good. My wife and I made our escape to the islands three years ago, Zach nearly four. He got to Maui, in fact, through a WWOOFing-type program at a neighbor farm, Pono Grown, and then through Pono was able to get connected to Lapaʼau.

And now, well now heʼs taking the next step, the big leap of faith: heʼs got his own farm! Or, at least, the man has secured the land and is beginning to start the endeavor. Zach and Bree (another former Lapaʼau farmer in fact!) are in the beginning stages of an agroforestry effort, and I cannot wait to see the shape it will take. Everywhere and always there is the need for more small farms and the dedicated men and women to steward them, and so I am glad that another farm is popping up out of the ground, as it were, making ready to feed the people. It will be a transition for us here though; there is so much to learn when working on a small, intensive farm like Lapaʼau. And since we are still such a young farm, Zach not only has learned but also contributed to the body of knowledge that is the spirit of the farm. He has added to the wisdom of the place, as it were, and that wisdom and accumulated knowledge is not easily passed on to a new member of the team. It takes time, it takes mistakes made and plenty of small victories, and lots of repetition.

Zachʼs hands know the earth as it is at Lapaʼau, and the earth here knows his hands. Farming—doing it well—at his new place too will take time, will take mistakes and small victories, and lots of repetition. But the earth there will grow to know his hands, and he will grow to know his land. Of that I have no doubts. So pour him a nice tequila, spin some old vinyl with all those lovely clicks and pops, see where his opinions and curiosity take the conversation. Perhaps you, like me, will grow to love his inclination to play devilʼs advocate, his affection for early Kanye and his unsettling Bostonian fanaticism for Tom Brady, and his principled stand on farming barefoot.

A hui hou, sir. I know weʼll see you around—it is a small island after all—but Lapaʼau wonʼt be the same without you.

Three Strands of the Farming Life

In the first post, I tried to put some words to the question ‘What is a farm?ʼ The paths I followed were grounded in the day-to-day work of a farmer (me, anyways) and were also aspirational - if we pursue the hope and beauty of what a farm can be, if we listen closely and well, what might we receive? It involves a common life, a relational life between farm and farmer, in which our attention and care are gladly given and we are in turn gifted with abundance from the earth. Donʼt be misled though: on occasion, our plantings also fail. Sometimes epically. Maybe a virus descends upon our cucumber plants, ruthlessly turning hundreds of healthy climbing beings into hanging corpses in a matter of days. Maybe cabbage moths banish our broccolini into off-grade purgatory. Maybe rats shit on our cauliflower and maybe we get more rain than we thought climatically possible, drowning our onions.

This, too, is farming. Such death and failure offer less proud-plant-parent vibes than does abundance, but farming insists that they have equal standing in the world we inhabit. To avert our eyes from their formidable power is to live incompletely; it is also a disrespect of the primeval rhythms and balance of the earth, our only home and our greatest teacher.

What lessons can we learn here? In the wake of a grim reaping, what can be gleaned?

At its heart, a farm is in a constant state of conflict, a forever-cycle of life and death and life and death—not always in the ways we wish. It is the duty of farmers to manage that conflict, to see to it that the farm to which they are responsible continues to produce vigorously and efficiently within the boundaries and constraints the place itself imposes. A small, simple example: we rotate our crops religiously, almost fanatically. When we harvest a bed of, say, purple daikon, weʼre not going to plant anything else in the radish family in that bedʼs next succession. This ensures that we are offering our seeds and starts the best chance they have to flourish in the absence of the microorganisms that love to eat them. Because, you know, WE love to eat them! Crop rotation can be thought of as a response to this constant state of conflict; it is one way to, in a sense, allow for the inevitability of conflict—in this case an underground, microscopic battle. Let them duke it out. Your only intervention is non-action. Restraint.

Farming, from this perspective, is an exercise in continually renegotiating your relationship to forces outside your control. Those examples at the top are very real, and very frustrating. Harvests—and dollars—just withering or washing away, thanks to too much wind/rain/pests/the Fates from Greek mythology yanking you around just for fun. (And that doesnʼt even take into account human error.) These troubles are in large part why a diversity of crops is so important to us at Lapaʼau. There is a flexibility and a capaciousness within the small farm that grows many things; poor germination of one crop during one seeding means one bed, maybe two, wonʼt yield a good harvest. What do we do when this happens? We try to learn from it what we can. We re-prep the bed and plant something else. A little time lost, a little seed lost - itʼs not nothing, but itʼs a manageable cost. Even the more painful ones, the epic fails, are tolerable within the context of a diversified farm strategy. We understand that itʼs part of the deal.

The deal? When you make an agreement with the earth, that agreement will be binding; she will exact something from you, and it may wound you. Accepting those wounds is not something that comes easily. Seeking retribution is a pretty natural human response when youʼre hurt. You taste the iron on your tongue, feel your bloody lip after getting popped in the mouth. Of course you want to hit back. But—of course—a farm is a farm. You are not dealing with another person or the built environment, youʼre dealing with essentially a stalemate between the wild world and your little cultivated one. It is, as a good friend wrote to me, “a place that defies control yet responds to stewardship.” So: When fighting with weed pressure or pest pressure, itʼs all about thresholds, not absolutism - can you contain them below a certain threshold you find aesthetically and economically acceptable? When struggling with soil fertility, are you willing to properly replenish the nutrients lost to your harvests - will you allow the microorganisms in the soil to flourish and do their best work, or will you exhaust their efforts through starvation? And when a storm is approaching ...can you pray? To any and every god who will listen, who might listen, those who have never listened to you before but maybe-just-maybe tonight they will? Farmwork drives home the truth again and again that this world is not ours to simply do with as we please. The world forever eludes our grasp, at least a little. In fact, if it appears we have our farm in a visegrip of control, we are most probably just asking the future to hold the debts we are presently incurring. The bill always comes due.

You can never take the conflict out of farming; you can never control the totality of a farm. The workings of any given ecosystem—and a farm undoubtedly is its own ecosystem—are unimaginably complex. There was an effort in the twentieth century to circumvent that complexity by synthesizing and manufacturing inputs like fertilizers or pesticides; organic chemistry had cracked the code, so the thinking went, and now farming would be simple, easy, certain. Then, with an arrogance that would make the builders of Babel blush, Nixonʼs Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, told American farmers to “plant fencerow to fencerow” and to “get big or get out.” By any honest accounting, that effort has been a trainwreck of shame and sorrow: soil erosion on an incomprehensible scale, chemical runoff into our planetʼs waters, massive concentration of agricultural wealth in only a few hands and an economy where the price of food is tragicomically low. (But always we must be honest and humble - itʼs easy to cast blame with the benefit of hindsight. If a credentialed, thoughtful, earnest scientist had come to me back midcentury and said, “Hey, farming is really really tough right? Well, weʼve developed a fertilizer that has exactly the right amount of what your crops need to grow, and weʼve also created this stuff you can spray on your fields to stop the weeds and pests, AND hereʼs a big olʼ tractor so your job is less back-breaking...” ehhh, I canʼt say I would have been smart enough or principled enough to resist that Siren song.)

The opportunity for us today is that we can receive those discoveries—the ingenious and creative methods and tools from our recent past—and apply them with more wisdom, restraint, humility, and context. We must ask where they fit into the life of the farm, not the other way around. How can we do what humans do best without straying into our worst impulses? That is to say, how can we creatively use tools to satisfy our needs and curiosities without falling prey to our sloth and avarice? How do we create mutuality with the living farm rather than seek a power over life itself?

Collaboration not control; the artful use of appropriately-scaled tools; a diversified farm strategy that accepts losses as an inevitable aspect of material, bodied reality: These. Are. Necessities. They engender faith not only in the rhythms and plenitude of the earth, but also faith in our own capacities and wisdom - and as we learn to trust these three strands of the farming life, we can begin to sense traces of the same threads throughout the wider world and indeed throughout the rest of our lives. Those traces, it seems to me, will set us free.

What is a Farm

What is a farm, really? Itʼs a question hidden in plain sight, and a question that has bothered my consciousness for the past few years, ever since I first entertained the idea of becoming a farmer. Like a small stone lodged in my boot or a scrape that doesnʼt bother you until it is once again reopened, my awareness of it comes and goes, even as the call awaits my response. What is a farm? (What is a farmer?) 

A farm grows food and/or raises animals. Obviously. But… not really. As Ben Hartman writes in The Lean Farm, “It is not really accurate to say that farmers grow food or raise animals. Farmers alter environmental conditions in such a way  as to maximize a plantʼs or an animalʼs innate ability to do its own growing.” A  subtle shift with profound implications. It signifies to me a common life shared between the plant and the farmer, between two intelligent and purposeful creatures. I, as a farmer, want this plant—let’s say a tomato plant—to grow strong and healthy, to flourish and produce much fruit. The tomato plant wants, well,  basically the same thing. (The difficulty is when those desires diverge. For example, I want the tomato plant to grow up nice and straight and tall but the damn thing just wants to shoot out a thousand suckers and sprawl out like a teenage boy on a couch. I’ll return to this divergent desire difficulty another time.)  So, I can trust the tomato to do its thing. It is relying on me to do my thing: “alter environmental conditions,” which in my role generally involves laying down appropriate amounts of compost and fish fertilizer, incorporating these into the beds, watching out for intrusions of pests and disease, and just generally paying attention to its growth. Before that, we take into account such factors as seasonality, sunlight, temperature, and hardiness of the crop to discern where and when to plant. That may sound like a lot (and …it is) but still. Lord knows I donʼt know how to turn sunlight into food. I canʼt eat light. But every individual plant living on the farm—crop, grass, weed, or otherwise—does know. Photosynthesis is pure magic to me, and yet this little tomato start, a babe just taken from the nursery (and before that merely a tiny seed!), contains all the intelligence of life in its very form. This is its “innate ability to do its own growing.” It does a disservice to the plant to discount this; more than that, it is an insult to the very life of the farm, for a farm is alive. It is emphatically not a machine. 

What else is a farm? 

Itʼs a place. Another obvious point. But, fundamentally, it is a place. A farm is not in any other place—it has a locatedness that is irreducible. Even the farm down the road is a different place; hell, even the field block at the bottom of the property is distinctly different than the field block at the top. The soil structure is different, the crops we plant are a bit different, even the eyes of the farmer see these two blocks differently (sorry, and youʼre welcome I guess, encroaching weeds at the  bottom of block 5). A farm is a place, truly, of baffling complexity and granular change. Perhaps living in Maui itʼs easier to see this because the island is a mosaic of microclimates; you need simply drive around for an hour to get a sense of how vast and variable the terrain and weather can be. Even on such a tiny landmass  there is a near-infinite gradation of forms of life. It makes a certain sense, then,  that the farm is its own particular entity and ecosystem. Its requirements for flourishing are its own, as are its challenges, as are its elements of ease.  Importantly, its past is its own too. The land remembers, and it carries that memory in each stratum. How was the land used before now? What care or abuse did the previous farmers show to this place? Before it became a farm, had humans cultivated the land in any particular way? How did the epic story that is geologic deep-time shape this land to be this way? And what wildness and recalcitrance does it still reveal to us now, today? A farm is a unique and singular place, thus requiring a unique and singular attentiveness.  

Which means another aspect of what a farm is—part of the farmness of the farm— is that it is a relationship between the human and the other. There is no escaping the reality of this paradox: (1) the land does not need a farm, and (2) a farm desperately needs its farmers. If we pack up and leave Lapaʼau tomorrow, the land will recalibrate, it will swallow our constructions and imitations and it will spit out something new. Our pretty rows of well-tended flowers and baby salad greens will return to the earth under the crushing weight of what we, when we were in charge,  once called weeds. Our (relatively) well-groomed tomato plants will sense a newfound freedom and escape with vigor the confines we once called trellising.  The barn, the wash station, the high tunnels and mushroom house all will fall.  Soon, the victory will be complete, Mother Nature and Father Time once again crowned regents: The land does not need a farm. But once a farm is there, once a human has decided to transform the nature of the place into a farm, well boy  youʼre looking at a spot of earth that will require your relentless attention, effort, vision, and concern. A farm is, possibly above all else, a site of responsibility  (responsibility being inherently and definitionally the crux of any authentic relationship). Everything we plant has been domesticated, its qualities and characteristics nudged this way and that, all to meet our own particular desires;  this crop bred for better disease resistance, that crop for earlier harvesting, yet another for its striking coloration. We are responsible to these plants because they are in our care, and they are in our care because we chose that to be so. As much as they are able, the crops will hold up their end of the bargain—their innate ability to do their own growing—if we hold up our end, which is offering them our intelligence and our senses and our care. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.  

Thus: How attentive can we be? This is a core question a farm asks (is always asking, always inviting, always insisting). How much of ourselves are we willing to put on the line for the life of the farm, and—crucially—can we do so gladly? A  healthy farm is a place of abundance as much as (more than) it is a place of sacrifice, a place of great beauty as much as (more than) it is of great struggle; I  have found that in general there exists a reciprocity between the effort I put in and the peace I receive. There is a deep joy that cannot be bought, cannot be extracted, can only be given. If that is not love, I donʼt know what is. 

About the Author

Matthew Rock is the Field Manager at Lapa’au Farm. He holds a Master of Divinity. While he did not pursue a career in a vocational ministry and instead pursued farming upon moving to Maui, his passion for literature and love of the written word still inspire him today. Matthew lives with his wife Grace in Kihei.