Community Gardening

I've been thinking a lot about community gardening lately. This Saturday, we'll be part of a potluck and event to promote community gardening in Ames, get people involved in deciding how they want gardens to progress in Ames, and also have a seed swap to get people some seeds to start gardening. I've been interested in community gardens for a while, and have recently been thinking about our farm's relation to the idea of community gardening, since we'll be at the event to talk about our farm and meet with other people involved in community food production in Ames.

One issue with our involvement in this event is semantic; the contrast between what is a garden and what is a farm. The question can be a question of scale, saying an area of land larger than a certain size is a farm, and anything below that is a garden. But in large cities, a community garden could be several acres, larger than the average farm size in many regions of the world. Our decision at founding to call ourselves the Mustard Seed Community Farm a farm wasn't really a decision based on size, especially since we didn't even have land when the name was chosen, so the name means something more than a declaration of size. In some sense, the name difference may be more a question of relative importance.

We're in a social environment where real farming is the standard agronomic crops, anything horticultural such as growing vegetables is just gardening, a relatively unimportant part of Real Agriculture: I think of what I imagine my grandparents' farm was, with fields of corn, beans, and whatever else they grew dominated by men and a fruit and vegetable garden of a few acres run by my grandmother. And our decision to call ourselves a farm, whether intentional or not, is a challenge to this idea, a declaration that we and what we do is just as important as any other type of farm.

Which, at first look, seems like an unambiguously good declaration to make. However, accepting the idea of "farm" as a desirable identity to be claimed, you get into a common experience of movements or individuals attempting to gain power or equality from positions of marginalization: In attempting to gain access to equality an individual or group will try to be or act more like the favored "normal" group as a strategy for gaining rights and recognition, but that strategy runs the risk of marginalizing those who cannot or wish not to imitate the dominant group, and on an internal level, is a betrayal of the marginal group's identity as something separate and different from the central group. I'm taking this idea from Frantz Fanon, who wrote about colonized Algerians' relation to the French colonial authority, but to bring it back to agriculture, I think about a statement from a speaker at a PFI conference from a year or two ago: "we want organic to look exactly like conventional" and to a lesser extent, our statement that we're a farm.

These statements may be valid, they may be useful, but the first serves to marginalize organic farmers who don't want their farms to look more normal. As to the latter, if one of its goals is in fact to say we're not less valuable than other farms, then within that statement is the idea that being a farm is better than not being a farm; farms are better than gardens. Which is a bit of a problem, maybe.

Anyway we've decided to get involved with the Ames Community Garden Coalition, and will be presenting as one of the gardens sharing what we do at the event.

I was also thinking about common property and how it's an entity that as a society we're quite good at getting rid of at this point in history, but have difficulty recreating it, because of a social emphasis on private objects and private control and/or a legal infrastructure based on private ownership, as exemplified by community gardens, entities which have a goal of being all about the community, but in practice are either controlled by just a few individuals, who decide where the produce goes, or are divided into small purchased plots, in which one person supplies the inputs for their plot, then takes the produce for themselves, and only occasionally include common areas open to all comers. I was thinking about how these models of community gardens, community farms, and other types of common ownership of property compare to the pre-revolutionary Russian communes, the later utopian communes, the yuppie ecovillages, and city government plantings of edible fruits. But this was supposed to take a lot less time, and I'm not really sure what my purpose was in writing it all, and I have to go to bed.