Learning to Farm is the First Growing Season

Been interested in farms and farming since I was very little.  Pastures, barns, fire ponds, Jerseys, barb-wire and locust fence posts all around me, both sides of the road.  There were the Chittendens, the Bentleys, the Smiths, the Crowleys and probably others. But I was not yet in sixth grade when most of these went out of business and left.  Not so the Chittendens.  Three generations of them by the time I graduated from high school.   And in college--one of those north country liberal arts institutions-- my best friend hailed from Iowa—5th generation corn, beef cattle, soybean, and a little hay.  2000 acres; 2000 head.  His grandchildren make generation seven.  And my other good friend, from a dairy family near Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Majored in agricultural economics and finance at Purdue.  Worked for decades with high end accounting firms. Retired to 600 acres in Kentucky where he feeds beef, grows hay, wheat and “beans.”  Spends a lot of time buying condominiums around the country.  When we talk, though, maybe four or five times a year, it’s farms.

I hang out with farmers when I summer in France.  My campground was a former farm, but most the terraces now support tent sites and little cabins.  But to the east, only a little way down the Durbie River Valley, ole Jean-Paul the farmer retains ten hectares for truffles.  He’s planted oak and hazelnut to host the fungus.  He irrigates, prunes, and fences the land against wild pigs who know all about underground mushrooms.  I sometimes hear Jean-Paul down in his truffle orchard calling “Cherche, cherche.”  You know, the French, second person familiar imperative, for “seek.” He’s talking to his two truffle dogs.  If they do their job, they get a cereal biscuit.  Jean-Paul gets black gold.

Years ago I helped start the Food Project in Lincoln, MA, and still teach a course at WPI for freshmen titled “Feed the World.”  True, I’d never tilled a field in my life, though I’d hauled tons of chopped corn, lifted plenty of hay bales, and cleared rows and rows of soybeans of Johnson grass with a bean hook. (That was before Round-up Ready soybeans and what a difference!)  

Here in town I joined the Ag Advisory Commission in 2013.  I wanted to pitch in, having moved into the Still River area in 1992.  I thought I would be most useful around our farmers, orchardists, and small grower types. It was a pretty quiet first few years until recently when the Ag Commission elected new management and became quite involved in the development of the Municipal Vulnerability Plan.  Not that I’ve done a lot, but I did advise a team of WPI students who helped survey the town’s growers, large and small, in the process asking them lots of questions about what might make farming in Harvard a little easier and more remunerative.  The Harvard Grown initiative is part of that ongoing work.    

In the middle of all that I bought a tractor, a 1969 Ford 2000, a John Deere 513 rotary mower, an old Independent Manufacturing Company disk/harrow and, most recently, a Pequea fertilizer/seed spreader.  Why? Cause, finally, alongside my neighbor and fellow Ag Commission member, Rob Duzan, I decided to try a little farming of my own on the Haskell Conservation Land with support from the town’s Conservation Commission.  Giving some thought to demonstration plots with native drought resistant grasses and pollinator species.   When I write again I let you know how it’s going.

Rob Traver

Harvard Resident & Agricultural Commission Member