Gimme the Dirt….On What is a Farmer?

I’ve worn many hats in my life. The wool felt hats I favored in my youth, covering tidy, reddish-brown hair, have been replaced by a favorite, tattered, wide-brimmed raffia hat that sits low on my flyaway, graying head. This is the hat I wear in spring and summer to shade my eyes from the bright, hot sun. It’s made by a well-known designer of such hats and makes a wonderful case for something my father used to say: “Buy something of quality, Rebecca Lee, take good care of it, and then you’ll only have to buy it once.” The black canvas ribbon that adorns the crown of my hat is now faded to semi-gray (just like my hair), and the woven raffia has stray fibers I need to trim with sewing scissors once in a while. I bought this hat in another lifetime when I used it for gardening, sitting on the dock at the lake, or paddling out on the water in my kayak. Now my hat is working hard like I am, tending cows and chickens and pigs, fixing fencing, or cleaning out water tubs. Back in my wool-felt-hat days, I was a classical musician, and I drove to gigs in my little car, feeling artsy but anxious. I tried to tell myself that my nerves before a performance were the spark that lit the fire of my creativity, but for an introvert like me, the scrutiny of the stage was stressful, no matter how prepared I was. I was never at home on the stage, even amongst a sea of musicians in an orchestra. I found solace in my time outside in nature, with animals that gave me comfort – back then, it was dogs and cats–or the quiet escape of a really good book.

Now, my work is my peace unless the cows are out, which happened recently because I was in charge of the gate the night before (to be fair, the jury is still out on whose fault it actually was). Unless the weather isn’t cooperating. Unless a tree falls on the fence. Unless…well, the reality is, there’s always something. All of that aside, I’m often out the door before dawn to care for the creatures that are our livelihood and responsibility. I’m no longer afraid of the dark when I head outside (often at 2:00 am with coyotes howling) to do calf checks or investigate suspicious sounds near my chicken coop. Alongside my husband, I watch the sunrises and sunsets, with the hours in between filled with hard physical work and sometimes even more difficult emotional work. The “farmer’s carry” that has become part of gym workouts for so many is a real-life thing for me. I haul two large buckets of chicken feed from the barn to the coop during morning chores – not a small distance – and then do the same with the water dispensers, which are heavier and unwieldy. Feeding hay with a pitchfork, mucking out cow stalls, refreshing bedding, scraping out the coop – farm work is constant physical labor. It’s also a dirty job. My hands are hard to keep clean; the filth of dirt or animal “matter” gets embedded in the creases of my palms and collects in my fingernail beds.  My fingers have cracks in the wintertime. I try to close them with a stinging liquid that smells like nail polish. I keep my nails clipped very short, but the dirt still accumulates under them. My hands, once important tools of my musical trade, are now simply implements as work-worn as my garden trowel. I used to have trouble defining myself by a professional label. Now, I’m learning to embrace the titles inherent in my work: I am a writer, a cheesemaker, and yes, I’m a farmer, too. Setting those words in writing makes me uncomfortable. Imposter syndrome lurks in the corners of my days; I still have so much to learn. I compare myself to my husband, with his lifetime of farming under his own hat, and me, with just under 20 years farming by his side. But the love of my work – and believe me, it’s work – gives me courage. It’s deeply satisfying labor, and I’ve learned to own my work as a fundamental representation of who I am, even with so much still to know.

Combining my work life and reading habit has been tricky; I am a true bookworm. Most nights, I’m too tired to curl up with a book, and my eyes grow heavy after just a few pages, even if the words grab me. And so I squeeze in bursts of reading with a mixture of articles in farming journals, a cheese blog post or two, or (my favorite) some photo-gazing in Culture Magazine, the official publication for “cheese people.” Getting through emails is an unwelcome part of my work, and I often receive e-newsletters from people who profess to be farmers. I see social media posts with the same theme: farming appears to be trendy. Because curiosity always gets the better of me, I did a deep dive into the question: “What is a farmer?” What I found certifies that all those hats I wear are genuine, especially my wide-brimmed raffia one. But my research also confirms a nagging suspicion: there are many imposters who’ve latched on to the farming-farmer trend in order to get attention. And in the getting, they’re also cultivating a lot of green, and I don’t mean vegetables. These false prophets have hijacked the honest work of farmers, along with our voices, to make themselves money. Farmers are free market enthusiasts for the most part, so this isn’t what really bothers us. It’s that these pretenders are speaking for us, and most often, they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. The real problem is that they believe they do.

I think of these hangers-on in categories, something I have steadfastly and intentionally refrained from doing with any human being. Making sweeping judgments about someone until I personally know them feels like slamming a door shut before I’ve let in some fresh air. People are people, after all, and to each their own. And certainly, there is a difference between being judgmental and possessing sound judgment. But these people…these people are taking the thing I value most: a farmer’s ability to tell their own story from a place of acumen and meaning. There are the “influencers:” social media users who take on the persona of what they imagine farmers to be. They wear clean blue jeans or cloying overalls, strategically mud-splattered boots (or spotlessly clean ones – a dead giveaway), and cute, plaid, button-down shirts. They do lots of talking about farming and food on podcasts and social media, but they don’t do the work it takes to actually get food to the plates of their communities, all while acting like they do. There are the “experts:” writers and researchers who speak with a voice of expertise, wielding statistics and coming from a world of ideas rather than practice. These are people, sometimes in positions of power, who either have wealth, a big platform, a loud voice, or all three. There are “entertainers” who host what they call “farm-to-table” dinners in places that used to be farms and are now just event venues. They sometimes have gardens from which they harvest lettuce someone else grew for them (on their property, because appearances matter), box it up in elaborate packaging and get a table at a farmer’s market. All of these people are promoting a perceived lifestyle for personal gain on the backs of farmers who are doing honest work. That is called self-promotion. None of these people are farmers, yet they speak as if they are. They wield the label “farmer” – the one I’m so hesitant to claim – as if they are generations-deep in a powerhouse farming operation. Don’t mistake this group for new, real farmers who are putting in many hours of learning in the barn or fields and often sitting at a desk. We need a new generation of young people willing to put in the work farming requires. We don’t need more people talking about it.

The issue for us is not one of copycatting. And we understand the desire to have the lifestyle they think they see. After all, I’ve already said my farming life is highly satisfying, but it’s far more complicated than that. In my search for a concise answer to the question, “What is a farmer?” I came across a blog post from Wolfe’s Neck Center in Maine that details many of the areas of knowledge a farmer must possess. It’s written by a farm apprentice who definitely paid attention. She describes the different hats a farmer must wear – I guess I’m not the only one who likes this expression! The piece is written by someone who saw the amount of knowledge and labor required to be a farmer. She kept it simple and got it right. Her deep understanding only highlights what happens when someone without her experience gains a platform to use their voice in an assertive way. There is almost always incorrect information promoted, shared, and then presumed by the general public to be fact. Sometimes, statistics are “massaged” to make the influencer’s point, inadvertently harming the farmers they say they support. Sometimes, a farm lifestyle is photographed for a glossy, high-end publication, bringing throngs of so-called “sophisticates” to the country, where they grab up land to build their country “retreats.” The consequence is that this destroys the places where small farms once thrived, along with the rural culture that goes with them. The influencers aren’t influencing anything except gentrification.

We feel used by this crowd, not represented. The best way to use a farmer isn’t by pretending to be one: it’s by purchasing what we sell, making the time to hear our voices in our own words, and by spreading the gospel of sustainably and humanely raised food. Farmers are practical people. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and it has webbed feet and feathers, our good common sense tells us it’s a duck. But when that duck is wearing fancy cowgirl boots and spotless jeans, and their hands are sporting a flawless manicure, we hope you are as skeptical as we are about the information they’re sharing. That duck might just be a silly goose.

Read Wolfe’s Neck Center’s post on “What is a Farmer” by Tierney Lawlor  

Photos courtesy of Rebecca Collins Brooks 

Rebecca Collins Brooks is a farmer, writer and farmstead cheesemaker at Hilltop Farm in Accord, NY.  She is the creator and founder of The Meeting of the Milkmaids, a gathering of women working in the cheese and dairy industry. In addition to a small herd of dairy cows, she and her husband, Barton, raise Wagyu beef, selling meat to customers directly off the farm. Her best friends are two terriers, Winston and Molly, and Sylvie, a truly brilliant barn cat. You can visit the farm by appointment to see where truly good food is grown.

Connect with Rebecca via Instagram @catskillwagyu, on Facebook CatskillWagyu

Check out > INSIDE+OUT’s Spotlight on Catskill Wagyu at Hilltop Farm