That's Farmin'

What did I learn in my first season [of farming]? . . . That some farm days end in high-fives and others in tears. One night last spring it was the latter, brought on by utter fatigue and some now-forgotten frustration. Our neighbor Steve, who has farmed for nearly all his eighty years, pulled up in his truck as I was indulging in a good weep. He looked at my streaky face, asked no questions, passed a can of ice-cold beer out the truck window and said, 'Well. That's farming.' Then he drove off, to his own evening chores.

The words of Kristin Kimball from a 2005 essay on farming located here. (See more about the unique CSA she and her husband run at Essex Farm here.) I'm currently enjoying her book The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love. There's a short slide-show of Essex Farm with commentary by Kristin Kimball here. Note her comment about people being "hard-wired" to be agrarian. Her Harvard education must not have included the first three chapters of Genesis where the connection between "man" and "dirt" is laid out ("dust to dust").