ago, when I first met John at the university where we both taught, I was delighted to learn he owned a farm. I had fond memories of summer vacations gathering eggs and playing with baby kittens in the hayloft at my grandparents’ farms, so when John invited me for dinner at Stonebridge Farm to celebrate my birthday, I accepted. I would get to know more about John and I would get to spend time on a farm. Not a bad date.
The sun was still warm as John showed me around Stonebridge, a charming ten-acre farm outside of Boulder, Colorado. Tucked just off the Ute Highway that travels west into the St. Vrain Canyon of the Rocky Mountains, Stonebridge is lush with lofty willows and cottonwoods that line venerable irrigation ditches trisecting the land from north to south. As the farm’s name suggests, a stone bridge arches across the lower Palmerton ditch that curves around the back of the house. Wooden bridges built from massive timbers span the middle ditch, named the Rough and Ready after the pair of brawny horses that plowed the steep banks, while the third, wider Highland ditch marks the eastern boundary of the property. With its 1911 farmhouse, weathervaned barn, and double-doored tractor shed, Stonebridge reminded me of my grandparents’ farms in North Dakota, farms that even in my childhood felt like stepping back in time.
But on that late March evening I was thinking about the future, not the past. While dinner cooked, John and I walked out to the gardens to pick herbs—marjoram, chives, and tiny green onions—for an early spring salad. Touring the fields as the sun slanted behind the foothills, we looked for the hopeful tips of fall-planted garlic breaking through the moist soil. In another bed, newly emerging pea shoots whispered a season’s promise, as if to say, “With care, something might grow here.”
In the many years we’ve been together since that first visit, “walking out” has become a routine for John and me. “Do you want to walk out to the garden?” I’ll ask. “I need some spinach for dinner.”
“I’ll walk out with you,” John grins. Crossing the first wooden bridge by the flower garden, we listen for the splash of a startled muskrat diving toward its den in the muddy bank and note how high the ditch is running as the water, each drop owned and accounted for, rushes by. Taking our time, we scan the sky for red-tailed hawks while we chat about the day’s events. We wander under the arching branches of the century-old cottonwood tree that leans alarmingly closer to the flower garden each year, and through the roses to note which are blooming. We pop a few raspberries in our mouths and pick a few more for dessert, and plot the next season’s garden, all before we pick whatever vegetables we need for our evening’s meal. On the way back to the house, we stroll across the farthest bridge near the herb garden, looping past the lush meadow and the sunny greenhouse before crossing the stone bridge back to the waiting kitchen. “Walking out” each day gives us a moment to catch up with each other as we ponder our future and plan the evening’s homegrown meal.
Walking out, too, is part of living on the land. As we go through our days, we have chores to do, chickens to feed, gardens to water, and crops to gather, just as my grandparents did. As I cross and re-cross our ten acres, I think of my grandparents on their land—my grandmothers gathering eggs and tending their gardens, my grandfathers milking cows and working in the fields. When Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Half the walk is but retracing our steps,” he could have been talking about farming, with its trips back and forth from house to field to house again. The steps I take each day also repeat my farming past. In walking out, I retrace my grandparents’ steps with my own.
When John and I first met, we each had full lives with teenaged daughters to raise and teaching careers at the local university. We joke that after we met, I got a tetanus shot and John bought a watch, acknowledgments of the changes necessitated by our pairing. Even that first meal together involved some negotiation of our differences: he had made pork chops and I am a vegetarian, something that had not come up in our coffee shop conversations. In this first of our culinary collaborations, he ate a second pork chop and I enjoyed the roasted potatoes, homemade bread, and salad with fresh herbs.
As we adapted in those early days to the rhythms and demands of each other’s lives, the farm became our meeting place, not just as a geographical location, but as the site where our dreams could be joined and together fulfilled. The farm is now our home, but it is also much more. Each day, we are the beneficiaries of what I call farmgiving, the boundless and bountiful generosity created by placing our lives alongside the land. Farmgiving teaches us lessons about how to live with reciprocity in the natural world of which we are a part, drawn together by a sharing of gifts given freely and with love.
One of the lessons we have learned from farmgiving is to make the most of what we have. From abundance, we also learn thrift. If we waste what the earth so generously provides, we not only fail to appreciate those gifts, but we miss an opportunity to be generous with the earth’s abundance. We need to think about what we can do with what we already have, whether it is a few vegetables that could create a delicious dinner, or a whole farm that could raise vegetables for many, many dinners.
Our farming friend says that the biggest crop we grow at Stonebridge is community. That’s because, as a CSA, our farm grows for members who join the farm in the spring and receive a weekly share of the produce during the growing season, which for our farm is from the second Saturday of May until the last Saturday in October. Each share is held by a family, household, or group of members who collaborate on how those vegetables are used. Most of the members are subscribers who pay a fee at the beginning of the season, while others are barterers who exchange weekly labor in return for their share. Within CSA, people organize community around the desire for fresh produce, as well as a concern for food security in the form of local access to organic, non-genetically modified, and seasonal produce.
Although CSA seems to have several roots, the one from which we trace our farm started in Japan following the environmental and economic devastation of World War II. There, women consumers approached farmers to grow crops specifically and personally for them to ensure food safety and security. This concept is called teikei, meaning “putting a farmer’s face on food.” In this mutually beneficial arrangement, consumers share the risk of production by paying farmers at the beginning of the season and sharing the bounty or losses of the fields. Subscriber members share an interest in the farm that is social as well as financial because they have a personal stake in the survival of their farm. The teikei concept was given the name “Community Supported Agriculture” in this country by farmer Robyn Van En in 1985 at Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts.
In 1992, Stonebridge became the first Community Supported Agricultural farm in Boulder County when John, who was renting the farmhouse with his daughter, started the CSA with a farming partner of the farm’s owners, an older couple who were retiring from farming. After a few years, they sold the farm to John and some partners, who later left to pursue their own endeavors. Soon John and I became co-owners of Stonebridge, and many seasons later, the CSA continues to thrive.
At Stonebridge, we like the idea of putting the farmers’ faces on food since we believe people who know their farmers will support the farm each season, despite the ups and downs of farming. Stonebridge’s slogan—“When the community feeds itself, the land and the people prosper”—means that not only does the community support local agriculture, but that the farm in turn helps create and support a community that cares about each other and the earth. Our subscribers pay their share in the early spring to help purchase the seeds and equipment we will need for that season. Other members barter their time and labor for their shares and take part in the decisions facing the farm each year. The relationship we are building in our community is a reciprocal one that challenges the anonymity of food systems today by placing those who eat food face to face with those who grow it.
While all CSAs are built on the idea that members share the bounty and the risks in variability and volume of crops each season, Stonebridge is a “share-the-harvest” CSA: instead of selling a portion of the crops to farmers’ markets or grocery stores, all the food we produce is shared equally among members. Our members get first choice on what comes into the barn because it all goes to them, with the exception of bumper crop vegetables we sell to our friend’s natural foods market in the small town nearby. Another way we’re share-the-harvest is that we don’t base the shares we give on the market value of each week’s vegetables.