Farming the Fringe
A Users Guide to Growing Food, Gleaning Garbage and Healing Yourself, Family (and even Neighbors)
I was six years old, perhaps, when I got a major epiphany about “garbage”...
People often throw things away not because they’re useless or broken or finished, or spoiled, but rather because they don’t know what else to do with things they no longer want. As a culture we came of age in the post-WWII era of conspicuous consumerism, trendy spending and economic growth... To be fair, many times these qualities were/are considered virtues and emblems of patriotism, affluence and success...
Same for food, jammed compulsively into overcrowded, oversized refrigerators, food that will invariably be forgotten out of site and abandoned for “take out”, all the while racking up wasteful electricity hours keeping it uselessly cold.
Once you realize how wasteful and mindless we humans can be there’s a flash of excitement and the potential to wake up and do better, to become more efficient and less wasteful, for the planet, yes. But also for “selfish” reasons! What it says is: “there’s so much richness to plumb in this epiphany, many new/old realms to glean, to go back and re-examine all assumptions of value and waste. So many people we may have judged and discounted, encounters to revisit, discarded friends and acquaintances to re-consider, so many molecules of potential in every particle of soil...
Hitch hiking was a powerful epiphany in understanding the vast wealth potentially gleanable from of chaos and the richnss inherent in every moment, nomatter how vast and anonymous, for kindness, for connection, for meaning...
We’re all PTSD survivors if you will... All looking for that calming salve that will give us relief, peace, safety...
My vision is that everyone can be a farmer... SHOULD be a farmer! Not because our backyard plots and kraut crocks are going to feed the hungry or “save the planet”, but because they might help to save ourselves...
I personally have found enormous healing affect over the years from growing and nurturing plants and animals on our farm and suspect the same treatment could help thousands if not millions similarly afflicted with the stress, angst, anger and ennui of living through and enduring these hyper-urgent times of climate calamity, endemic violence, economic instability, racial tension and celebrities acting very badly...
We live in a hyper polarized world and it’s easy to get drawn falsely into these false dichotomies and world views that neither serve our greater needs nor are true in any real sense...
- GMO’s vs. world hunger
- Black vs. white
- Democrats vs. Republicans
- Real farmers and wannabe’s
- Military supporters and anti-militarists...
Permaculture teaches us that with some simple planning, tools and knowledge, nearly anyone can grow/produce substantive quantities of healthy foods even those with marginal land and resources... By “substantive” I mean far more than enough to feed one’s own self and family. In other words, enough to not only provide a majority of her family’s needs but actually contribute in a regular and meaningful way to the local food economy, whether through gift, sale, barter or donation... This is a revolutionary truth because it flatly dispels the widespread notion that the common citizen, man or woman “can’t really do much to affect the Bigger Picture regarding our food chain/climate crisis” and the various myths about the historical necessity of industrial farming and genetic engineering.
There are numerous examples through history of people, whether through urgency or inspiration, substituting sheer numbers for sheer force, replacing the roar of technology with the ripple of a thousand hands, and succeeding!
The lesson is well-applied to cooking...
And to friendship...
And to love...
We have to rediscover this innately human spirit of struggle and triumph for worthy causes. The truth is, we the people represent a vast, untapped army of citizen producers, goatherds, agronomists, fermenters, greenhouse operators, brewers, and backyard growers, fully capable of supplying much, if not most of our local and regional sustenance. What a worthy endeavor. What an exciting adventure!
Posted: to Laughing Dog Farm News on Thu, Apr 9, 2015
Updated: Wed, May 6, 2026