ANOTHER ONE OF JEFF'S BARNS
YELLOW WAGON IN MUCK
SWINGING SOLO
SWINGING ON THE PORCH
This morning we ate oatmeal with blueberries, honey, and cinnamon. Mark, the intern supervisor, came over early and gave us a maul so we could split wood and stack it on our porch, while he and Jeff finished sausage making. We spent part of the morning helping Riley and Will get the wood in order, then Mark called instructing the two of us to come over to Jeff's place as an opportunity for us to get to know them better and them to get to know us better.
We arrived and helped them complete their sausage packing. Jen labeled the packages and Aaron stored them in one of the numerous outdoor freezers. We cooked Jeff and Mark some lunch: whole wheat penne with defrosted summer corn and garlic in a pesto sauce. Also, we munched on cabbage and semi-frozen radishes plucked from the earth 5 minutes before they reached our plates. Dessert was a store bought honey dew melon. Listening to Mark and Jeff talk about agriculture was enthralling and informative. Mark is a mushroom expert, and taught us morel mushrooms appear at the same time when May Flowers bloom. May Flowers have red buds with clover leafs. If we see May Flowers in bloom, we'll look for the edible mushrooms.
After lunch, we spread compost onto the fields. Jeff believes the key to all good growing is compost. While we spread the compost from buckets onto his fields, he rode his tractor on another field and made 50 pounds of compost. Then we read a collection of Jeff's weekly newspaper publications in an attempt to help him organize them into a coherent grouping suitable for a second book publication. The material is already written to fill a book, but he wants the contents of this book to differ from his first book, "The Best of the Barefoot Farmer." We read while cooking beans, tomato sauce, frozen corn, onions, and frozen red bell peppers in a crock pot. Jeff returned shortly after sun fall, while Mark had already left for the evening. We ate the beans with potatoes and onions cooked on the wood stove (due to a gas leak that subsequently lead to Mark turning off the gas at Jeff's house for a day) and a red leaf salad with honeydew and thyme/honey. After we ate, Jeff answered some of our many questions at the dinner table.
Jeff supplies food for a 200 person CSA with a drop off in Nashville. Almost all the surrounding farms in this rural area of Tennessee grow tobacco, corn feed for cattle, or raise cattle. Jeff stands out in the community as someone who grows a tremendous variety of organic fruits and vegetables. He has been farming here for over 40 years and is well respected by all community members. He regularly and annually harvests a plethora of produce, more than he can ever eat or sell. So, he gives a tremendous amount of food to his neighbors for free and donates large quantities to charity organizations. His heart is in the right spot and he believes food should not be a commodity. He claims food as a commodity puts money into the hands of greedy corporations, forcing millions to starve, despite there being an abundance of food locked up in stores. He gave us a brief history of agriculture to help us understand better the state of the USDA and how it relates to Americans and American farmers today. In answering our questions, he gave us new questions to ponder. We're both eager to pick his brain over the next few days and learn as much as we can here. Before the night was over, Jeff gave Aaron some guitar lessons and we all enjoyed playing and singing several Beatles tunes.
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