REPOPULATING FARMLAND
Designing the New Agrarian Settlements
Fourteen years ago, while driving on a west coast freeway, I had a vision so vivid that I overshot my destination by 17 miles. In my mind, I saw people arriving on farmland devastated by chemical-based agriculture, pouring out of colorful semi-trucks – vigorous young people, children and elders, too. They all were highly organized, and well-supplied.
Some trucks were set up for cooking, others for carpentry. Already, the group had erected mess halls, bunkhouses, shops and bathrooms to accommodate large numbers of people. And crews were working the land, using technologies to remediate polluted and sterile soil to grow organic food. They were an Earth Restoration Corps.
At the time, I was deeply involved in running a community dance project in several cities, so I put the vision on the back burner of my creative kitchen. A few years later, though, I had the space to bring it forward, and I began to dig into the challenges of creating a sustainable culture, including the critical need for healthy soil. Soon, I was growing my first home garden, then came a community garden in San Pancho, Mexico, and finally the creation of Gaia Gardens, a large urban farm in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
From those experiences a larger vision emerged. A year and a half ago, the Mil Abrazos Community Land Trust, a nonprofit created during the Gaia Gardens experience, purchased 32 acres of irrigated land 30 miles south of Las Vegas, NM, along the Pecos River. Mil Abrazos’ mission is to create a new agrarian settlement that will be a farm with affordable housing, a school for learning life skills, and a demonstration center for deploying appropriate technologies in the modern world. Beyond this, it will be a place of practice for cooperative living, for the young and the old and everyone in between.
I am already hard at work constructing the foundation of this settlement. I have been building a basecamp, and begun reaching out to both the local community and the larger Northern New Mexico area, to start a conversation about how to create an agrarian settlement that can inspire and support a rejuvenation of our farmland.
When driving through our region, be it Mora, Abiquiú, Chama, Villanueva, Ribera, Penasco, Anton Chico and many other irrigated areas, you can’t help but notice how little “agriculture” is left. Most of what people call agriculture in the region consists of growing hay and grazing a few cattle on irrigated pasture or on public land, both of which can harm the land unless done with a holistic approach.
It was not always this way. Until World War II, these areas were the breadbaskets of the region, growing an abundance of diverse foods. But the cheap price of oil after the war made it possible to import food from far away places, food usually grown on large commercial farms powered by underpaid and abused immigrant labor from south of the border. Young people did not stay on the family farms, and were drawn to the new jobs offered at Los Alamos, Sandia Labs, Kirtland Air Force Base and other urban areas. With good salaries, they could afford to buy cheap food grown elsewhere.
The people who stayed on the land resorted to grazing cattle for a living, which doesn’t require nearly as much labor as growing vegetables, fruits and grains. With able bodies deserting the family farms, rural food stores disappeared and fresh food was no longer available as it had always been. People’s health started to decline. With poor health, poverty crept in and more farmlands were abandoned.
Today, in New Mexico, over 90% of the food we consume is imported, while thousands of acres of fertile and irrigated land is either left fallow, or is used for growing alfalfa and grazing cattle.\
This dismal situation is actually a golden opportunity for a new generation of rural settlers. The older generation needs help maintaining ditches to keep the irrigated lands alive and to protect their water rights from the State, which is always looking to supply urban and suburban expansion. They also need new ideas for using the land beyond hay and cattle grazing. Many modern city dwellers, on the other hand, hunger for a simpler lifestyle, and for connecting once again with the land.
But bringing these two populations together is not easy. As much as people say they would prefer to live in a rural community, raise their children in a farm setting, and spend their elder years in Nature, there are many obstacles that keep them from their dreams: The price of land is high, and though we might imagine the bucolic village life, the truth is that it requires patience, skills and courage. And the families that have lived for generations on the land are not always welcoming to outsiders who come in with new ideas or who lack an understanding of the cultural context.
So where do we start? How do we move from the when-I-win-the-lottery or when-I-retire fantasy, and begin a journey towards a different life for ourselves and future generations.
We can look at history. There’s been a multitude of communal experiments in which people have left the city in search of a more satisfying life. In the 1960’s and 1970’s there were the intentional communities started by hippies, back-to-the-landers movement, and the kibbutz experiments in Israel. But you can go back much further to the 1880’s in Germany, when a young and educated generation left cities polluted by the coal-powered industrial revolution and resettled in the country, launching what we know today as the alternative health movement.
And there is Cuba. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba lost all its subsidies-imported oil, fertilizers, tractor parts and imported food, overnight. They recalled the old timers who knew how to farm with draft horses. They went organic. They cultivated every empty city lot. The average Cuban lost 30lbs. Cuba is now one of the most sustainable countries in the World, despite a 60-year U.S. embargo.
How do we draw from the successes and failures of all these experiments, to design a new form of existence where simplicity, sharing, caring and cherishing Nature are the tenets of our lives. That’s what I have been contemplating over the past 18 months as I have planted windbreaks, built basic housing and workshop space, and become more attuned to the land and community along the Pecos River that has lived in this region for generations.
For me I see an obvious link between the need to reclaim and restore farmland for food security, and the creation of new agrarian settlements. They go hand in hand. Farming must return to a community model. Agricultural land must be reclaimed into the commons.
I also see that it must be done in collaboration with the elders who are still living in these remote agricultural areas; they hold a wealth of knowledge, as I have learned as a member of my local acequia. We need to capture the story of their generation, learn about the food they grew, and the grain surplus that was milled all over the region when most of the food grown was for human consumption.
Much like those well-organized farmer-settlers I saw in a vision 14 years ago, I am eager to collaborate with people who are ready to tackle the challenge of revitalizing our rural areas while rising to the bigger ecological, social and economic challenges of our times. Together, I believe we can prepare for what looks like a difficult period of massive climate change; we can harness our collective resources, ingenuity and wisdom to create food security for our region; we can start innovative cottage industries that can co-exist with small agriculture and provide a resilient economic base to the rural communities of the future; we can help young people re-populate farmland, raise their family on the land and live a good life; and we can all learn how to work together with fair-minded practices of governance and love.
I know we can do it. Now is the time to engage a deeper part of ourselves, to radically broaden our imagination, rediscover our humanness and create new models of sustainable existence.
We must bring people back to the land to care for the land that feeds us. These ancient breadbaskets in our backyard are where civilization will survive.
As much as the ecological predicaments we have created can seem insurmountable, we can also look at the task ahead as a sacred mission to rebuild our beautiful World.