Most of the views on this farm are familiar.  Last year’s running all over the farm fencing in all kinds of animals afforded me some bucolic gems—the view of 2013’s vegetable field from the triangle of weeds where we grazed the horses in desperate drought-induced ingenuity, the whole farm view from the top of Beef Hill, the eastern side of the barnyard seen over a stretch of clover, the back pasture.

So a few days ago, when Matt and I were flipping through daily photos on his smart phone, I was struck by this picture:

 I had never seen this view before, and I was confused.  The next picture, though, cleared it all up:

The picture that confused me is the view from the scaffold where Matt was putting up siding on the new building, a view I haven’t seen. 

The building he is working on is the hope of Greyrock Farm.  I try not to think in absolutes, and also try not to place all my eggs in one basket nor count chickens before they hatch, but it’s hard not to think of this building as a real game-changer for the farm.

In its prior incarnation, this was the old machine shop on the farm.  It was crowded with tools, lengths of hose, a complete glass pipeline for a dairy, broken things and old things.  The dark, crumbling basement was where we wintered pigs. 

In September, Matt started clearing the whole thing out, and in October, Dale Rodgers and Erik Wardle came from Vermont to get the project moving.  It has been a wild experience, not without its hardships.  In the toughest moments, I tell myself that this is all in the service of learning, of experience.

But with the siding up, with walk-in coolers framed out and waiting for insulation, this feels like it could actually be real.

The center of the building, the old machine shop, will be our new distribution space.  Instead of shivering and watching vegetables freeze in our current set-up in the old dairy barn, we’ll have a comfortable, heated space for CSA members and Farmstand customers.  We’re hoping that in time, this space will become an aggregation point where restaurants and eaters can find food from a range of local producers.

The south wing holds three walk-in coolers, which will allow us to store our produce, as well as produce from other growers.  We also have space for a walk-in freezer, which is a dream for another day.  The north wing will have a food-processing kitchen where we can preserve food on a commercial scale.  It will also be where the farm crew cooks and eats meals, which is a huge improvement over the cramped kitchen where we currently eat.  The new basement, with its slick, radiant heated floors, will have a shower, some storage, housing for visitors, and probably an office and hangout space for farmers.  A friend dropped a combination foosball-air hockey table off last week, so that could make its way in.

It’s a promising new view.  In our best hopes for the farm and for this new project, the building becomes a community space for movies, lectures, and meetings.  We’re adding our part to the growing food movement in our area, making it easier for our neighbors to find the food they want to eat and for farmers to get it to them.  Now and then, of course, we’d also like to have a rowdy barn dance.

You can learn some more about this project—also about donating to help fund it—over at the “Barn Renovation Project” tab on our website.

Gillian

It’s not a great excuse for such a long blog silence, but I’ve been on vacation.  Matt and I visited family and friends in San Francisco, headed to New York City for a few days, and then went on to a farming conference in Pennsylvania.  February is conference season for farmers—we’re caught at a slack time, cooped up inside for a few days with incredible, innovative farmers, and we return to our farms with a burst of energy just before the growing season begins.  Before vacation, we went to Saratoga Springs for our first conference of the season.  Luke is headed to a dairy conference in Auburn, and I think a Vermont conference is on the horizon for Sam and Brooke.

My feelings are predictable after a conference.  I come back to the farm super-charged, grand visions of new tools to buy or build, little tweaks and big changes.  I like to give myself to overexcitement for a day or two, and then I reel in.  I digest the whole thing, try to figure out what would actually work and what changes are, for now, better left as dreams.

One big change for this season is irrigation.  We have rapidly draining soil, and after last year’s dry summer, it’s clear that having no plan for irrigation is just reckless.  I’ve been staring down a brutal lack of experience on my part and trying to learn as much as I can. I’ve got some ideas, but next on the list is calling every vegetable grower I can get my hands on.

I have very little idea of what has happened on the farm in the past two weeks, so sorry this post is short on farm news.  We got some round bales delivered for the beef herd.  We gave up on keeping any winter greens in the hoophouse, and now the laying flock is inhabiting the whole thing—we are getting over 100 eggs daily.  We are nearing 11 hours of daylight each day, and things are getting ready to really grow.

In lieu of news, let’s talk ideas.  In this planning season, I’ve been feeling the little stresses of the unknown.  I am making long spreadsheets of seeds to order and when to plant them, plans for how we will harvest and water, and wondering—will we have enough food?  Will we have too much food?  Who will buy it?  Will we have time to harvest and sell it all?  Are we getting a good price? 

I keep coming back to the money thing.  Some farmers use metrics to determine a fair price for their food, weighing seed cost, man hours, fuel, and a handful of other factors, but I can’t help feeling something is lost here.  It’s an abstraction and those are only sometimes helpful, but I am trying to see the food that we grow and raise as a gift.

I’m conflicted about this mind frame I’m trying on.  What does it mean?  How can I make any money if, instead of selling food, I give it away?  I am a farmer, a businessperson hoping to make a life for myself, to someday live in a comfortable house, to take vacations, to retire.  But farming is a peculiar business.  The food we grow feels so special, and so hard won, that any monetary value we place on it seems meaningless.  What do you pay for security?  It would be incredible if, at our Farmstand, instead of weighing pounds of potatoes and paying us an arbitrary price, customers reciprocated our gift of food with a gift of the value the food had to them.  It would more often than not be money, but maybe it would be a lesson, or time, or a bunch of really funny jokes for a bunch of carrots.