Common Thread Farming Hits Home

I began my internship last Wednesday at Common Thread Farm, and was surprised to find a personal connection during my day of harvesting ugly carrots and bagging sweet onions. Asher, an owner of the CSA, asked us all about where we grew up, what our families did and what it was like to live there. I’m from even further Upstate New York – Oswego County, near Lake Ontario – and have honestly always found it unremarkable. I have a very shallow supply of “fun facts” about my hometown. In theory, the first curveball was thrown right down the street from my house. The Oswego River, which flows through my hometown of Fulton, NY and empties into Lake Ontario, is one of the few north-flowing rivers in the world. Benjamin Franklin listed Oswego, our county seat, as one of the four would-be great cities of America, along with New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. We were the only area he was wrong about.

Oh, and we have a guy from our town that was in the NHL for a while, but that’s about all that’s ever really been notable.

Asher immediately started asking if I knew any farmers in the area as I was shucking onions and putting them in 50 lb. bags. My cousin, who grew up two houses down from me all my life, just married a son of the most prominent farmers in Oswego County. The Sorbellos, as I learned from their website (click here), came from Sicily in the late 1920’s and started working as a tenant farmer on plots in the Oswego-Fulton area. Today, the family has something of an “onion empire.” They even wear sweatshirts with the “Sorbello” name on them, the “O’s” drawn as onions.

When the first Sorbello came to Oswego County and bought his first muck farm on Route 48 in Granby, he didn’t know how lucky he was. Muck, or “black dirt” as it’s called in Orange County, is made up of between 20 and 80 % organic matter, which accounts for its dark color and its ability to yield a large quantity of diverse and healthy crops. It takes over 500 years to create muck 1 foot deep. Clearly the richness found in this type of soil is rare. According to this article, my cousin’s new family is farming onions and soybeans on 600 acres of muck soil in the Granby area.

But they aren’t the only ones who supported local agriculture or the small economy of Oswego County – it goes deeper and more personal than that.

According to an Oswego County agricultural planner, it was the Italian immigrants in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s that got the muck industry going. Suddenly I recalled long forgotten stories from my dad, a 2^nd generation Italian, talking about his summer employment on muck farms during the 1960’s.  He started his day at 5 a.m., worked until the height of the afternoon in the searing heat, and bit into a head of freshly harvested iceberg lettuce as his only source of hydration for the day, just as his dad did.

Unfortunately the muck in Oswego County, and everywhere farming occurs, is disappearing. Soil erosion, land overuse, and flooding all contribute to the decrease in this remarkable resource.

Once again, I am reminded of the plight of my hometown – a small city plagued with poverty and unemployment, alcoholism and obesity, and a pervasive apathetic attitude. As soon as I learn about a remarkable natural resource found not far from where I played as a child, something unique that affects my family, something from home that I can be proud of, I am faced with the harsh realities of the dangers of exploitation. Maybe exploitation is too strong of a word, but what I’m really discussing is a lack of sustainable practices, and in many ways, the inability to take care of our own.

Fulton has had a hard go of it in recent years. Factories have shut down, our school systems have experienced dramatic changes in leadership, and language and art programs have been cut. The fertilizer from local farmers leaked into our small lake and blue-green algae has killed dogs and fish and geese populations. Maybe these issues are unrelated, but to me they all speak to a greater cultural habit – the attitude that we do what we can get away with, that we don’t have to worry about the next guy, or what happens tomorrow, or somebody else’s problem. Has competition left us unable to think about the long run, dependent on practices inherently bad for our communities and our environment?

I’m not trying to prescribe some Marxian solution to the complicated cultural, environmental, and economic problems of our time, but I do find some solace back at the Common Thread Farm. On Wednesday I worked, on Saturday I reaped the benefits from my farm share. They taught me what to do, I put faith in them by paying for a semester of goods, they put faith in me by letting me help harvest and sort, and together I think we helped take better care of each other and the community.