 "Photo: Peyton McGee; The Daily Texan")
It’s 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday, and I’m speeding down Highway 183.
Decked out in old jeans and a ratty shirt, downing the last of my coffee and squinting to decipher the directions on a printed-out map, I’m on my way to Johnson’s Backyard Garden, an all-organic local farm and venue for community-supported agriculture.
Community-supported agriculture farms, or CSAs, are, as Johnson’s defines them, “direct partnerships between the consumer and the farmer.” In a nutshell, a CSA is composed of interested customers buying shares of the farm in the form of produce.
For a weekly fee, a shareholder can pick up a box of this season’s freshest organic, pesticide-free crops. The farm is maintained by the community. It’s a green, ecologically conscious option as well as a boost to the local economy — win-win.
I pull up to the farm and step outside. The day is dreary — cold and wet. It’s the first winter-like weather Austin has had in months.
I’m greeted by Bess Steiner, an intern at Johnson’s who has been working and living at the farm since November. Handing me a pair of work gloves, scissors and a small plastic crate, she directs me to my first task — clipping and tying bunches of fresh mint. I sit on a mound of dirt and get to work.
Kneeling next to me is Michele Freemon, a full-time trainer at a health services agency and a regular Johnson’s volunteer. The farm welcomes volunteers on harvest days to assist with tasks like this, as well as to help package the boxes of CSA vegetables. As an incentive, volunteers can take home a CSA box of their own after the workday is done.
Freemon and I make small talk. She has only been volunteering at Johnson’s for a couple of months, but already she looks forward to it every week. Mindlessly harvesting broccoli and washing carrots; it’s like a form of therapy.
After the mint is done, I walk over to the main building for my next task. Another volunteer is chomping on a carrot he’s just picked.
“Here, try one,” he says, handing me a small carrot still covered in dirt, its bright green leaves still attached. “It’s like candy.”
After rinsing it off in the giant washing station — a wooden stand topped with a piece of wire for draining water — I take a bite. He’s right; the carrot is probably the sweetest I’ve ever tasted.
Johnson’s Family Garden is the creation of Brenton Johnson, a former agricultural engineer-turned farmer. Before last year, Johnson and his wife, Beth, grew and sold crops out of their backyard in downtown Austin.
When business started to pick up, Brenton lucked out in stumbling upon the location where he is today. Moving his wife and four children to the farm, he began running the farm as a full-time job. Today, the farm sells CSA boxes to about 500 people. Johnson hopes that number will be 600 in a year. In ten years, he hopes it will be 1,000.
Johnson is soft-spoken and looks too young to have four kids. As we work, he quietly surveys the tractor that is dropping a row of cabbage seedlings into the soil, stopping occasionally to exchange pleasantries with some of the regular volunteers.
We all work silently in the garden, each entranced by the monotonous yet consuming work we’re all involved in. Everyone is welcoming, kindly ignoring the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing. However, it’s clear that the overall attitude at Johnson’s is strictly business.
And after an hour of sliding across mounds of dirt on my knees, punching small broccoli seedlings into the ground, I can more clearly see the reality behind the novel idea of volunteering at Johnson’s. As a spontaneous Saturday activity, it‘s fun: In its own small, self-sustaining world, it’s fascinating to observe the components that allow a business like this to operate.
However, doing this for a lifetime? Much more difficult. In a business that is completely dependant on perishable goods, the farm, and subsequently the Johnsons, cannot afford to take even a day off.
“For me, the farm is a 7 day a week job,” Johnson said. Other than taking a week off in the middle of the summer and another off for Christmas, maintaining the crops is hard work, requiring nearly constant attention.
The factors that contribute to the farm’s success are not solely dependent on the hours put in, either. They depend on a steady flow of customers to regularly shell out $30 for a box of produce every week, something that can be more of a luxury than a necessity.
Additionally, the farm relies on something even less predictable than the tumultuous economy — the weather. Like this year, when the lack of rain forced the farmers to install four additional wells, which was both a financial burden and time commitment.
At noon, after four hours of labor we finish the day’s work. I’m exhausted, dirty and still cold. My tennis shoes, worn for probably the first time since I last took a mandatory gym class, are caked in mud.
In a methodically organized assembly line, we take our final positions in putting together the CSA boxes that will go out to members later that day. Passing around cardboard totes, we each drop our designated vegetables into the box. Four grapefruits, two oranges, two tomatoes, fresh mint, spinach, broccoli, purple cauliflower, beets, carrots, two heads of cabbage — All go in the box.
The existence of Johnson’s fulfills the somewhat fabulous-sounding possibility that maybe we could really ‘know our farmers,’ a concept that seems more at home in the days of milkmen and walking eight miles in the snow to school.
The possibility of this operation makes reducing the number of steps between the harvesting and purchasing of crops more plausible. As I leave the farm, I feel triumphant, carrying my box of produce as if it were a hard-won trophy. Truly, this feeling — elation through a box of vegetables — is what Johnson’s has capitalized on. It‘s what keeps the farm prosperous, with a substantial CSA member waitlist.
Now, if only I could figure out what to do with all these beets.
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