Harvesting to the Sound of Earth Movers: Veggie Share Week #9 – Aug 2, 2023

Harvesting to the Sound of Earth Movers

I try to tell myself that change is the only thing we can count on in this life.

Just because I know this fact, it sometimes doesn’t ease the feeling of change when it is unwanted.

We started our farm on Pioneer Road back in 2005. At that time there wasn’t much but farm land and a few rural homes around us.

We’ve watched, or maybe rather listened to the sound of the development to the west going up for years. The homes there are not connected to city water, so we listened to each and every well get pounded in.

We watched the church go up to the east of us.

We watched apartments and condos go up to the south of us.

Up over the hill starting getting developed to the north of us, but generally we were buffered from the sights and sounds.

As we have watched listened to all this development over the years, we’ve always been buffered from it just a little. Farmland still encircled us to the south, east, and north.

Now it’s being developed.

It makes me sad.

The fields are gone.

I understand that for the mainstream economy, home building and development is considered a good thing. Many of you perhaps live in newer homes that were built on what used to be farmland.

I am not saying it’s bad. I’m just saying that it is very sad for me personally, as a farmer, to find myself on land that now feels more and more like a suburban farm. It has completely lost its rural character.

The whole system is complex. It’s not so easy to just build up in Madison. It’s a growing city and people want new homes. Meanwhile, as Madison IS getting built up, the cost of these new developments pushes out those who can’t afford the newer, high rise life style.

It’s complicated.

I’m not proposing any sort of politics or solution here, just recording a feeling.

AllI know is that this morning when I was working in the fields at Pioneer, I couldn’t hear the birds. I could barely hear my coworkers. As we harvested organic sweet corn, we did this to the sound of over a dozen roaring earth movers on the land adjacent to the east.

My heart feels heavy.  

Farmer Cassie