Re-Storying Community

Meeting people where they are has been one of the drivers during our trip. Was it surprising then that I wanted to meet a local farmer in Ontario on our last day in North America? Probably not.

I was lucky to stumble upon Sonset Farm while flipping through a “Discover Southern Ontario” magazine from 2017. Something in their words resonated, made me feel.

Andrea and I didn’t talk much about practices, farm facts, or numbers but dived immediately into the challenges of the current system and the underlying sense of regenerative farming – of restoring relationship to the land and the people.

We talked about the importance of community events, reading Wendell Berry to your children, and sharing stories from the daily farm lives within the region – even if ‘they have to fit a red light stop’ like one of her friends asked for.

“Often, it does get romanticized. But it’s hard to farm. It’s really hard.”

Farmers try to beat a system which has been designed not for but against them. Why do they feel they are alone in this? In trying so hard to make it work? When did we define farming to be an individual’s task? What have we lost in doing so?

Nature operates on the scale of watersheds, ecosystems, and therefore, necessarily, on the level of community. Not on an individual’s level.

Hasn’t agriculture always been an act of community? How can we rediscover the communal within our current system? How can we find our personal role within agriculture – no matter if we are on the land or in the city?

Re-storying our relationship to the land and the people.

The pigs were grunting and playing happily behind us in their outdoor pasture when we said goodbye for now on this beautiful November day.

I couldn’t stop smiling the whole way back.

#regeneration #regenerativeagriculture #designingregenerativecultures #theworkoflocalculture