Bean Fest Remarks

This weekend, Indigenous People’s Day weekend, we acknowledge and recognize that we are on the stolen land of the Mohican and Stockbridge-Munsee people. We know that these communities were and are in meaningful relationship with the river. In Sheffield, Indigenous people long used the floodplain to grow food and the health of the river sustained people for generations.

Agriculture has played a significant role in the forcible displacement of Indigenous people from the Northeast. The landscape of New England changed with colonization as settlers expropriated more and more land, clearing forests and putting into place an agrarian landscape. By the middle of the 19th century, seven or eight generation in, settlers had cleared about three-quarters of the land in central and southern New England. Today, land acquisition for livestock feed production in places like Brazil remains one of the largest drivers of the present-day displacement of Indigenous people globally.

So we feel that our farms today have a particular responsibility to respond to harms done in the name of Empire-building. If you made a donation today at the welcome table, your gift will be donated in full to the Native Land Conservancy which works to rematriate land into indigenous control in the Northeast, not simply to “save the land” but also to preserve cultures which have thrived in relationship with it for thousands of years.

We feel a responsibility to the river in our backyard which the Indigenous communities on this land treated as the bedrock of life. That bedrock of life is, today, as you may have noticed, highly polluted.

W.E.B. Du Bois actually gave a lecture in 1930 called “The Housatonic River,” and he mourned its contamination long before it came the PCB-laden dumpster fire as we know it today.

I would like to read a few paragraphs from his speech; words which were so prescient in their time and have everything to do with our situation today:

“This valley must have been a magnificent sight. The beautiful mountains on either side, thickly covered with massive trees, and in the midst of it all, the Housatonic river rolling in great flood, winding here and there, stretching now and then into lakes which are our present meadows and so hurrying always on toward the sea. And I think everyone would realize then and now that the river was the center of the picture. In a sense the mountains exist for the river; and no matter how much one might climb their sides, they look back upon the river as the central beauty of the panorama.

What has happened? The thing that has happened in this valley has happened in hundreds of others. The town, the whole valley, has turned its back upon the river. They have sought to get away from it. They have neglected it. They have used it as a sewer, a drain, a place for throwing their waste and their offal. Mills, homes, and farms have poured their dirt and refuse into it; outhouses and dung heaps have lined its banks. Almost as if by miracle some beauty still remains in places where the river for a moment free of its enemies and tormentors, dark and exhausted under its tall trees, has sunk back to vestiges of its former charm, in great, slow, breathless curves and still murmurs. But for the most part the Housatonic has been transformed into an ugly disgraceful thing.”

Du Bois points out a now-generalizable truth: our watersheds are being massively polluted by fertilizer, pesticide, and manure runoff into our rivers. Toxins flowing from harmful farming practices, including in our community of Sheffield, load the river with excess nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and chemical pollutants like glyphosate.

What I think Du Bois is asking us, and what I am asking today, is this: what does the food on your plate demonstrate about what you believe about land use? Do we eat in a way that makes good, efficient use of the agricultural land we’ve got, and in growing, does our food production treat our rivers well? How many acres does it take to produce the food you eat? If everyone ate the way you ate, could we sustain a population of 8 billion and the planet?

This brings me to why we are growing in the way we are growing, and why I would like to suggest that the beans we are now excavating from the bean hole might show us something about how we could begin to heal the ecosystem Du Bois calls “an ugly, disgraceful thing.”

If you are not already aware, we are growing dry heirloom beans and other storage crops without the use of external inputs, meaning that we rely on “green manures” and mulched leaves for soil nutrition, not blood meal and manure. We do not use fossil fuels in cultivation, we rely on simple mechanical hand tools for most everything, and we have never once watered our crops. We don’t even own an irrigation system. We do not till the soil. On less than an acre, we have produced hundreds of pounds of beans which we will sell within a small radius in our community, saving seeds each year and making rare, near extinct foods commonplace as they once were.

We are showing that you can grow an absurd amount of protein on a very small piece of land with no water, in the middle of a drought, with moderate-average intelligence and some sticks our neighbor let us take from his woods. If it’s possible to provide organic, delicious, low-input, climate conscious food in this way, we feel there’s a responsibility to do so– and let thousands of acres that were once used for chemical agriculture instead sequester carbon as deciduous forests and wetlands, since letting nature simply do its thing is the most brilliant solution we’ve got in the face of climate change.

So I want to end by saying: we hope that other people will steal our ideas and replicate what we are doing here. But more than that, we hope that our community will try to think about how we might eat our ethics and imagine another future for the land than polluting our waters and growing GMO corn to be sprayed with Roundup. Wendell Berry says that there are no “unsacred” places, just sacred places and desecrated places. The Indigenous people of this place understood that there is enough abundance here to feed us all, to grow food that nourishes us and makes us whole, if only we steward the land and the river as sacred. We can all make food choices that make that world reality. And with that, let’s eat!