Carefarming at the Marriott

I just got back from the Carefarming Network Conference, a marvelous gathering of planters, harvesters, seed savers, animal rescuers, egg collectors, artists and many others engaged in one way or another with carefarming. For those new to the term, carefarming is a form of therapeutic agriculture that fosters well being, health and connection. Over two hundred people came from all over the United States and Canada–and Ireland and the Netherlands, too.

I loved it, but it started off weirdly. Or maybe it’s better to say I started off weirdly. I arrived at the hotel—the Marriott in Gaithersburg, Maryland—the night before, and awoke in a beige themed room with a view of the “lake,” a frozen water feature bordered by restaurants and multi-tier parking lots. I went downstairs, figuring there’d be some kind of complementary breakfast. But no, just a restaurant called The Bench featuring a broken cappuccino maker and $18 eggs. Feeling this was a little excessive, I went outside in search of something better. The establishments that bordered the “lake” were closed or uninviting, so I checked my phone to see if there was anything else in walking distance (I’d taken a train to the conference, so no car). Acccording to Google Maps, Mom’s Organic Market was 1.6 miles away, a 35 minute walk. I don’t usually walk that far for breakfast, particularly in freezing weather, and the lazy part of me considered slinking back to the Marriott, but the part of me averse to being cooped up in overpriced beige places won the day.

The view from my window

Alas the industrial park within which the Marriott was located turned out to be nestled within a vast net of industrial parks. There were no sidewalks. Or perhaps there were, under inches of crusty snow, but they hadn’t been shoveled. I walked on slushy four lane roads, SUV’s whizzing past, in the shadows of mirrored office buildings and brick and glass developments with names like Axos and Levoi. Sometimes I clambered up pitted snow banks as there were too many cars and they were coming on fast. It’s amazing how alone you can feel, when you are the only unwheeled person on an unknown thoroughfare. I passed over Interstate 270. I waited at a crosswalk as more cars curved down an entry ramp. To my surprise and delight, one of them slowed to let me pass. I waved my thanks to the driver, a woman about my age. She nodded back as the man behind her blared his horn.

The bleakness of the buildings, the endlessness of the automobiles, the impersonal speed with which they roared by–oh Gaithersburg! You used to be a farming community. What happened? You can imagine my relief when I got to Mom’s Organic. People ambled down the aisles, chatting in Spanish, a language that makes me happy as it reminds me of my youth. An old man nodded to the songs on his earpods, singing along. his voice raspy and out of tune: “A place he’d never been before, found the key to every door.’ There was a little cafe. I ordered cauliflower tacos from a girl with purple eyeliner. She made them for me. They were delicious. There was nothing mom and pop about this store, it was, like everything else in that stretch of concrete, large scale and moneyed, a local version of Whole Foods. Still, the people inside had turned it into a pocket of warmth.

When I returned to the Marriott (I wimped out and took an Uber back) the carefarmers had arrived and were working the same sort of juju. They buzzed about, introducing themselves, putting up homemade cardboard signs with snapshots and drawings of their farms, arranging pots of honey and mason jars of native seeds. I picked up a zine from Seed & Bloom, a horticulture program that runs out of the Penitentiary of New Mexico in Santa Fe. It featured poems and recipes from the inmates, including this passage by a man named Zac Jaramillo:

Thank you, Zac Jaramillo. Your words might not be as subtle as the words of a flower, and they might be written in English, that strangler of native tongues, but they are nonetheless magical. They have passed through the bars of a penitentiary. They have crossed state borders and pierced my heart in a Maryland Marriott.¹

The first thing on the conference agenda was a tour of Red Wiggler Farm, whose founder Woody Woodroff also founded the Carefarming Network. I have long wanted to visit this farm, as folks with and without intellectual disabilities have been growing vegetables there for upwards of thirty years. And everyone gets paid. Alas, due to the snow and freezing temperatures, the onsite tour was canceled. Instead, the Red Wiggler crew brought the farm to the Marriott in the form of slideshows and presentations that spanned four rooms. Growers and staff members partnered up and took turns showing us how they did their work, igniting us with their enthusiasm and knowledge.

Clare, a grower at Red Wiggler, tells us about her work at the farm.

I learned of tools to make planting, weeding and harvesting more accessible, food safety procedures, new ways to teach visitors and volunteers about regenerative agriculture. I would learn of still more in the following days— studies we can use as evidence to show that carefarming improves the health and stability of individuals and communities, tips on attracting corporate sponsorship, best sorts of mushroom packaging. There was tons of useful stuff, but what I found most valuable was the nourishment I felt from being surrounded by so many people whose lives revolve around tending to the earth and each other.

Carefarming can take all sorts of forms: small family farms, urban community gardens, animal rescue sanctuaries, therapy centers, commercial farms and ranches with hundreds of acres and multimillion dollar budgets. The populations involved are likewise diverse: people in recovery, prisoners, formerly incarcerated people, veterans, people with Alzheimer’s, people with cancer, people with mental or physical or cognitive disabilities, people escaping domestic abuse, people who have been through the ringer. We are all doing different things, there is not one typical care farm, and yet we have so much in common.

Including, perhaps, a wistful desire for a Dutch passport. It turns out the Netherlands, with a population of 18 million, supports 1,350 care farms! How many care farms are there in the United States? It’s a difficult question as not everyone engaged in this sort of work has heard of the term. The Carefarming Network was formed in part to reach out to these people, to let them know that there’s a name for what they do and an organization that can support them and connect them to funding sources, free webinars, mentorship programs, and more. If you are reading this and have just discovered that you are a carefarmer, check out their website, put your program on the map, and join us. It won’t cost you a cent.

I introduced this with complaints about the Marriott because I wanted the hopefulness of the conference to be rooted in a reality of paved over meadows, whizzing cars, and corporate beige. You don’t need pristine conditions for carefarming. No verdant hills fields are required. You just need sun and water, soil and seed, people who respect each other and are willing to learn from plants. Like Seed & Bloom’s greenhouse garden in the New Mexico penitentiary, carefarming can spring up anywhere. You can start one in a window box at an old persons home, in a suburban backyard, in a schoolyard. The possibilities are endless, the rewards simple: fresh food, friendship, closer connection with mother earth. But you don’t need to start one. You can volunteer at one. You can support one. There are myriad ways to join this gritty, grounded growing movement. Consider this an invitation!

A crew of geese rewilding the water feature

1. Zac’s poem reminded me of the women who used to come to my qi gong class at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. MDC was an awful place, a sprawl of jails designed to dehumanize both guards and inmates. But you should have seen these women, their faces illuminated with kindness, their attention and care for each other defying the windowless walls and gates that shut them in. Anyone who has ever taught in a prison will tell you that their students teach them more than they could ever teach them. To be in the presence of people who have managed to free their minds, or at least found filaments of freedom under such staggering conditions is both humbling and illuminating.