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For ten years, people have asked me, “What are you growing at the farm?”
My answer has changed over the years. But to understand that change, I need to tell a slightly longer story of the land that we now call the Farminary.
To our knowledge, the longest inhabitants of the land that is now the Farminary were Lenni-Lenape Native Americans. Their legacy of care across millennia is extraordinary. The legacy of their removal from the land is tragic, traumatic, and horrific. I don’t have time here to unpack these legacies, but they must at least be named. The land holds the memories of the Lenni-Lenape. I have held the artifacts in my hands. The stream that runs through the farm surely remembers.
More recently, the land at the Farminary has known other models and modes of relationship between people and place. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the land knew the exhaustive practices of sod farming—a form of agriculture that removes a thin layer of topsoil with each harvest.
I recall the sobering reality of attempting to start a small garden at the Farminary when teaching the first ever Farminary class in the spring of 2015. It’s hard to grow a garden without topsoil. What we suspected in those early days has since been confirmed: the land at the Farminary bears the wounds of an extractive and exploitative model of relationship between people and place.
The Farminary story begins with exhausted land that bears witness against every extractive and exploitative model of relationship between humans and the world they inhabit. From the beginning, the land at the Farminary had more to teach us than I ever could have imagined.
Thanks to some compost and topsoil that we hauled in for that first humble garden, we managed to eke out a few vegetables. Some potatoes, greens, and a few tomatoes. (As I recall, the green beans were a total flop.) It was humbling, but it was also a profound joy to teach and learn in that space.
As I chatted with people about the Farminary and described what we were doing, people would inevitably ask, “What are you growing at the farm?” For years, I answered according to the presumed intent of the question: “Potatoes, greens, and a few tomatoes.”
As the Farminary grew, my answer got longer. “Potatoes, greens, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, carrots, beets, chickens … ”
As I gave these responses, I never lied to anyone, but my response failed to convey a deeper truth. It’s taken years to learn to articulate a response that sits closer to the mission of the Farminary.
What are we trying to grow at the Farminary? A different kind of leader. Myself included.
I wonder about the place where you work and serve. I wonder about your congregation, school, nonprofit, or neighborhood. And I wonder how much it resembles the land at the Farminary. My deep hunch is that the resemblances are greater than we might first suspect.
Recall again the sod farm. Recall the legacies of exhaustive models of relationships between people and place. I suspect the place you inhabit bears some of the same wounds as the land at the Farminary—the wounds of exhaustion, extraction, and exploitation.
It has never been the goal of the Farminary to graduate a bunch of farmers. Maybe a few, but that is beside the point. The point is a quality of education and formation that yields leaders equipped to respond to the world’s exhaustive ways with the slow, patient affection that nurtures rest, renewed vitality, healing for deep wounds, and the hope of resurrection life.
One extravagant gift that the farm perpetually gives us is the reminder that we are not alone in our search for healing and vitality. Innumerable creatures willingly join the quest—they uniquely facilitate healing and vitality. No place at the Farminary has taught us this more poignantly than the compost pile.
The compost pile is ground zero in our efforts to move the farm away from exhaustion and toward vitality. Every time we prepare garden beds for a new crop, we add a layer of compost. We give compost to the garden beds in thanksgiving for that which the land has already given and in anticipation of gifts yet to come.
I regularly tell students, “If you can learn to preach half as well as our compost piles, you’ll be just fine.”
Consider the makeup of a compost pile. At the Farminary, the main ingredients include leaves from the trees, food scraps from campus dining and housing, and spent coffee grounds from Small World Coffee. In other words, the compost pile takes into itself all that is passing away—the decaying leaves, apple cores, banana peels, moldy bread, and rotting greens. But it does not do this in order to give death the last word. Rather, the compost pile journeys unequivocally through death for the sake of new life in another season.
That sounds a lot like the Gospel to me. And there’s more.
What does the average adult in the Global West perceive when they look at a pile of leaves or a bucket full of rotting food scraps? Waste. The systems and structures of our economies and societies (and too often our theologies) condition us to see these things as waste, fit only to be set at the curb and hauled off for someone else to deal with.
It takes the eyes of the good gardener, the good farmer, or the excellent ecologist … it takes perception attuned to the Gospel to recognize treasure and the keys to new life where the world only recognizes waste.
Like the savior of the world hung on a cross outside the city gates, at the garbage heap, all too easy to categorize it as waste. And yet in the divine economy, the garbage heap turns out to be a crucial stop on the journey to world-changing, vitality-inducing transformation.
This is the quality of perception the farm is trying to teach us. This is the kind of leader we are trying to grow. This is the kind of leader I am trying to become. Someone with Gospel-inspired perception. Someone attuned to seasons. Someone willing to enter the exhausted and exploited spaces and places of our world. Someone capable of perceiving treasure, beauty, and the keys to new life in that which the world labels as refuse and waste.
What are we growing at the farm? A different kind of leader.
If, in your neck of the woods, you find yourself in conversation about the Farminary with neighbors, and they ask you, “What are they growing at the Farminary?” I hope you’ll take them out to the compost pile. If you don’t have one, maybe now is the time to start one.
And when you come to the compost pile, say a prayer of illumination, then stop and listen. You might just hear the Word proclaimed in a register you never could have imagined.
Thanks Be to God.
