I was determined to know beans," Thoreau affirmed, reflecting on his two years of sustenance farming at Walden Pond. After those two years, he moved on, with other lives to live, but he forever returned in his thoughts and writings to his days beneath the sky and the limbs of trees. Regardless of whether or not his mother brought him brown-bag lunches daily, or if he went into town on a regular basis, his acquaintance with beans and bugs and weeds, influenced and informed his life as a writer, philosopher, and naturalist.
It was Thoreau's geographical location (semi-rural New England), education (Harvard College) and response to the dismal mediocrity of his fellow man that provoked him to step out for a moment from the urban schedule into the countryside.
Dartmouth College has long provided its students with freedom and liberty to explore and learn that which they wished to explore and learn; and often the College has provided monies to fund such exploration and research. One such recipient has been the Organic Farm. Just as Thoreau squatted on a piece of ground outside of Concord town, students encouraged the College to help create a center for organic agriculture and education on a large open field just north of campus, exposed regularly to the sun, alongside the Connecticut River, against the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire, on springy soils, with lush grasses. A space to come to make concrete the abstract, to actualize the potential.
Just as at one time the College provided for the far-reaching tentacles of its liberal arts' scope -- Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, the jewelry shop, the woodsmen's team, and the Dartmouth Contemporary -- places and groups that have become or may become incorporated into the Dartmouth mythology and tradition, it indicated genuine interest in furthering the pursuits and goals of the Organic Farm. Just as the pottery studio is more than a house in Vermont for several crafts-type folk to mold things -- rather a place where, when spinning clay, one learns art, meditation, production, physiology, solid-fluid dynamics, geology and mineralogy -- the College saw the multiplicity of interests in and for the Farm.
The College, through the Outdoor Programs Office, hired Scott Stokoe, full-time farm manager and teacher, to pour out what he knows. He is the resident mentor, naturalist, farmer, activist, punster and community member on the property. The College's faculty members have repeatedly included visits to and work at the Farm in their curricula (seven courses this quarter). Departments have sponsored student independent research in engineering, soil science, creative writing, botany and system dynamics on the Lyme Road plot. Student farmers volunteer thousands of hours to the propagation and harvesting of plants.
Why is this? Why does the College care; why do professors care; why do students care? The Farm fills a broad and deep role in a liberal arts education. It both complements on-campus activities (laboratories, movies, the Appalachian Trail) and fills voids, absences in the 10-week term cycle.
Remember Horace: "Haec decies repetita placebit," -- "things which are repeated are pleasing." Hoeing or seeding or transplanting for three or four hours consecutively frees one from the endless nagging of time, time synchronized with the network server. And when nearly all activity is immediate-goal driven, the Farm is a place where there is no care to be done, to quickly hurry-up, to finish. There is no finishing when farming, 'til the end of the growing season, when one starts again. There is only improvement -- to remove some weeds, to prepare the rows for a tomorrow's deluge of rain and wind, to improve one's scything skills, to remember what combination of grains to grow for next year. There is doing for the sake of doing for.
The Farm most evidently, and most superficially, is a place for growing vegetables. It educates about the food industry, food consumption and the feasibility of organic and sustainable agriculture. It is a place for scientific inquiry and research, for anthropological discovery, for teasing out the relations between gender and the environment, between religion and ecology, between philosophy and education. It is a place to learn responsibility and choice-making: caring (not in a cuddly way) for other living things. I must do this work now, or else actual consequences will follow. See what happens when onions are not watered today? Or over-watered? Even though you had plans for the afternoon, you should go to the Farm, because a window of sunshine has opened between days of rain.
The College has decided to stop funding the Farm. The Dartmouth may have reported otherwise, and perhaps there will be funding -- nonetheless, for a time, there was to be none. Exactly one month from today, it could very easily be the case that no money will come to the farm to pay for seeds and equipment, water and phone, and, most importantly, the salary of the farm director and the wages of the interns. Some administrators agree that the Farm should be preserved -- but from where would the money come? they ask.
The College, of course, does not have, theoretically-speaking, infinite supplies of money. Each of its innumerable programs wants to expand, improve, and survive. Some programs are fairly more secure than others. But practically-speaking, the College, and its network of supporters, can fund whatsoever it deems valuable to fund. For the hundreds of students and community members who come out to the farm over the course of the year, for class, for a project, for the sunshine or for themselves, the Farm is valuable. Let us preserve the Farm, with all its diversity of roles, and make the College as robust as we can.