ABSTRACT
This chapter will describe how and why I believe that farming, growing food, and making contact with consumers can be acts of social change. I have been and continue to be involved in other movements that are more easily identified as being part of social change—a peace group, a Central American solidarity group (in the 1980s), environmental groups, and various reading groups that explored alternative political theories. However, I am a child of the soil—some of my earliest memories are in the garden, feeding the baby calves, hiking the pastures, and putting up hay; and growing food feels as though it is in my bones, something that is a part of who I am. How the food is grown and how I treat the soil and the animals are all part of a new and emerging different relationship between people and their environments, whereby they are part of rather than separate from and working with rather than against the forces of nature. Though this movement or community of sustainable agriculture activists has been around for more than 25 years now, we are still a small, somewhat close-knit group. We see each other at conferences that are more like happy family reunions and notice that, over the years, our hair has grown gray, but the sparkle is still in our eyes. Each of us, in our own way, feels as though we have been called to participate in a mission—sometimes in partial isolation on our respective farms, sometimes in a very social and public way, as teachers and organizers in farmer- and consumer-advocacy groups. I have found a way to combine the solitude of farming with a career as an extension/research person at my home-state land-grant university.
