Our neighbor spent the past
few years living near Seattle, where sprawl has made it impossible
to see where the city stops. He feels lucky to have moved next to
us, because in his mind, our little place on an acre and a half is
a farm, and that adds to the out-in-the-country atmosphere he was
looking for.
Granted, our rural property near Olympia, 60
miles south of Seattle, is deer-fenced, though we did that to keep
out wandering dogs (a frightened deer once leaped it with little
effort). The fence surrounds one acre of grasses, scotch broom and
other invasive weeds.
We have around 20 chickens that
wander the fenced acre, and one rabbit that sits in an A-frame near
a large vegetable garden. We sell eggs to pay for chicken feed and
give the extra veggies to family and friends.
One side of
our garage is piled high with odd bits of fencing material, scrap
lumber and anything else we’ve collected that we think might come
in handy, which gives at least that side of the building the
appearance of a barn. We pride ourselves on being the Beverly
Hillbillies of an otherwise orderly neighborhood, but we don’t kid
ourselves about being back-to-the-landers or even farmers. We have
real full-time jobs in the city, and our farm is more properly an
acre of scrub.
We used to farm. My husband grew up on a
400-acre dairy farm in the Netherlands, and soon after we married,
we went to work as caretakers and farm workers on a 40,000-acre
sheep station in the high country of the South Island of New
Zealand.
Getting up before sunrise to run down steep
slopes behind mobs of sheep headed for shearing was a part of our
work, as was getting the milking done before school. Watching a
jumble of weeds take over an acre of unused pasture doesn’t
require the same effort or give the same satisfaction. Someday,
we’d like to eliminate the weeds behind the fence and earn a
little income off a fiber animal, an extended vegetable patch or
more eggs from free-range hens. What we’ve found, though, is
that support for local produce is undercut by consumers who choose
organic or fair-trade products from anywhere but here.
Our county says it’s working to preserve farmland, but it
hasn’t begun programs or given incentives to provide markets
for locally produced goods. And farmland is so valuable as
potential subdivisions that few can afford to buy a farm and keep
it that way. So we have cluster developments, designed in part to
help preserve farmland, which contain 20-to-40 tightly spaced
houses overlooking empty fields. If there’s a rundown barn
tottering over a rise, the residents might feel they’re close
to a farm.
But the only tractors they see are John Deere
riding mowers that keep large swaths of lawn tidy. This is tame
machinery compared to the 30-year-old Leyland tractor, a huge
monster, that we fired up in New Zealand to move hay and bags of
feed and wool.
Our neighbor says he feels freer out here
in the country, but given our background, we feel cramped —
sometimes even trapped. We don’t allow our kids to bike on the
street in front of the house because it serves as a final stretch
for cars going to and from a development just a quarter-mile away.
My daughter would give anything for a horse, but equestrians are at
as much risk as pedestrians and cyclists on our shoulderless
country roads. Then again, if we built a shed with one stall and
brought in a horse, our property would look even more like the farm
our neighbor likes to think it is.
Perceptions of what
rural means and what farming is are changing fast, and as they
change, ideas of what needs preserving will change. As we develop
our way into the future, our once-urban neighbor may think of our
property when he reads about the county’s efforts to preserve
agricultural lands. I think of the farms that stretched as far as
the eye could see, the kind of farms that you don’t see now.
I wonder if our neighbor feels like a farmer when he goes
out back to tend his lettuce on a four-by-eight foot lettuce patch
in the corner of his lawn. Perhaps he sits down with a John Deere
catalog when he’s finished weeding the rows.
Suzanne Malakoff is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News. She lives near
Olympia, Washington, and works as the administrative director of a
regional environmental organization.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
