Entering our fourth year on the farm
Reflections on living in the future (part four)
We are still living in a tent. We do not own the farm. Nothing is promised, and nothing has gone according to plan. The stability in our life has come directly from our efforts in building with our community. This month we’re reflecting on this and the last four years of living in the future. (All of our living in the future newsletters, linked below).
Living in the future series
Before we get going, Alex is holding another fundraiser with a series of 25 new postcards they’ve made. Donations start at $14, because last November Eman shared that this was the cost of 3 onions. Now, she says, nothing is $14 anymore.
Our friend Eman is a talented writer, and was a student of the esteemed Refaat Alareer. As the eldest sibling, Eman is leading the campaign to support her family of 8. Their home destroyed, the family requires support to rent a place, buy furniture, warm clothing, groceries, and other supplies for school-age children.
How to get a postcard
Please donate (at least) $14 to Eman’s campaign: gofundme.com/f/4eman
Send us a screenshot of your donation to our email: buenocompartir@gmail.com
Please include your mailing address! Alex will send you a postcard.
The text on the postcards is by artist Fargo Nissan Tbakhi. Part of a larger quote, “calling on you to join with the revolutionary masses across the globe in fighting for the survival and liberation of Palestinians and all oppressed people.”
“We are bound up with one another. Anywhere and everywhere you are, you can get in the way of the death machine; hold somebody’s hand tight, and get in the way together. Revolution until victory for all of us.”
Alex created the postcards with the same arch motif that they have been practicing for over 20 years. A practice which originated while working with houseless youth and young people transitioning out of foster care. At the emergency shelter where they worked, Alex held art demonstrations of different techniques, as a way to encourage a practice of meditation around creating feelings of safety and stability, where possible. (Modeled after practices of mandala painting in Buddhism).
Community building is the future
Community is why we are entering 2025 with a different energy. We mean that in the immediate sense, like how our communal drinking water works.
But also in the global sense. After seeing another sustainable ag operation embracing technology derived from oppression and land theft, while publicly voicing support for said oppressed people (hypocrisy so glaring), we decided to make a zine. Download a free digital copy to print at home in the newsletter below.
Last year we gave away a lot of our labor, but aspects of this won’t be changing any time soon. For example, our zines in Spanish: la versión en español está disponible gratis para puertorriqueños quien viven en Puerto Rico.
As we’ve gotten better about setting boundaries, people tell us who they are in how they respond. We have course-corrected as needed. Part of that course-correction will be turning off “gift” subscriptions for this newsletter. The gifts are not actually supported by Substack, creating a loophole to our privacy, and causing theft.
We will, of course, continue to extend free subscriptions to folks who have expressed a need (we’re not monsters) but moving forward, a lot less of our labor will be free.
2025 the year of the worker
Most farmers are not also farm workers. When they are not, they care more about soil health than worker wellbeing. We reject this extractive hierarchy and work the earth ourselves, developing terraces that protect both our soil and our bodies.
The goal of terraces is to catch water and hold onto soil. Neither has been important to coffee plantations and the industry has left the earth an inert, hard clay. As a result, much profit is being made from regenerating damaged soils, but at the expense of the workers bodies, as they haul biomass across steep hillsides.
Unlike the terraces usually found on mainstream agroecology operations, ours prioritize comfort, with practical walkways that make work easier. The walkways have had a secondary benefit of providing a toad highway, who come in at night to naturally eliminate insect problems.