“I used to be pretty.” A drunk girl at a party had just chipped her tooth on a beer bottle, and this was her memorable lament on an otherwise forgettable night of my late teens. At the time the only value we placed in that utterance was the laughs it produced upon occasional retellings of the story. I'd never have guessed I'd start a farm essay with it twenty years later.
But here we are: I used to be pretty. I mean, definitely in the literal sense of the amount of general sagginess that now defines this ol' dad bod. My upper arms are like Dali's melting clocks. But it's a good metaphor, too. When Vanessa and I started our farm business in 2011, we made our farm newsletter a priority because we sensed that part of the value proposition of our produce was the connection it offered our customers--to people producing the food, to a specific piece of soil, to a sense of community, things somewhat lacking in Food From Somewhere Else. Emphasizing these points in a newsletter seemed like a no-brainer. Also relevant: we had so much time! The acreage was small! No children! Vanessa was not a midwife! People read and liked our newsletter. I was pretty.
Times changed. The farm grew, my late-twenties exuberance (Look at this picture of a butterfly on my cucumbers!) gave way to persistent irritability (Just buy my damn cucumbers.), and then the children arrived so it was all over for a while regardless. I mean, there's more to it. It began to bug me that projection of my lifestyle and values was a requirement for good sales. The idealist in me wanted the fact of (hopefully) healthy soil and tasty food and happy staff to be enough to sell the crop. The requirement to constantly present the shiniest version of those efforts sometimes made me feel too much like Michigan J. Frog (I know that’s self-defeating. On my gravestone it will say: Self-Defeated).
Simultaneously, the culture changed. Other industries, many lacking the value proposition outlined above...began sending newsletters to customers.
So, yeah, arguably there's less interest in the newsletter format now. Regardless, I'm determined to be pretty again. I am introverted, or even agoraphobic, but still I miss the connection the newsletter, at its best, used to maintain, and the creative outlet the farm communications could be, when I devoted sufficient time to it. And in spite of the frog-feeling, I never fully lost my grasp of why knowing the people and stories behind the produce matters to people.
And right now, there's lots to talk about. The focus of my farming has changed greatly the last couple years. I'm now mainly growing grain corn and dry beans, which has puzzled many of those with a sense of the general unprofitability of those two crops (Many of you wrongly assume I’m simply doing it for the sex appeal & glory of growing corn and beans…you’re not wrong, but that’s not the full story. Stay tuned). Also, I have redesigned my website so that my produce, my gardening seeds, and my farming podcast can all be found in the same place. I’ll talk about that some more soon. Finally, it's a strange time to be living! And I'd like to be part of the ongoing conversation about that.
All of which is to say, this is one of your farmers trying to get back on his horse, in spite of his injured groin and pear physique (both metaphors but also not metaphors). Talk to you again soon, I hope.
