Farewell — The Final Harvest at La Milpa Organica Farm

I am grateful to the universe, to this piece of land we call La Milpa Organica Farm, to the soil, bacteria, mycelium and worms; to the water; to the owls and the rattlesnakes; to the seed, and flowers, and trees; to the wisdom of my teachers and the spirits of ancestors, and to all of you for supporting me during our seven years here. Let us all celebrate in joy and in sadness, the garden that grew here.

The world as I learned it from my Grandmother and Father is gone. Much has been forgotten that should not have been. Some would critique evoking my grandmother as romanticizing the past. I acknowledge that the 19th Century America she as born into included Jim Crow, an ongoing indigenous genocide and the disenfranchisement of women. Perhaps what I am mourning is simply clean water and good soil, un-dammed salmon rivers and the California grizzly; a world not addicted to television, Roundup and Exxon/Mobil.

I am not a conventional person. The very idea of La Milpa Organica suggests a way of being with the world is an ideal that has been lost, but, is worth re-inventing. We are about reinventing the world. We are idealists, we are creative anarchists, we are organic farmers.

What we created here would not have been possible within the schema of conventionality. Visioning and implementing La Milpa was an opportunity to actualize a way of being that is in alignment with the principles of milpa agriculture. My creative process took place largely outside the box of the system, the hologram, the matrix. Our culture looks increasingly like a system of control.

In order to realize this story, it was necessary for us to create outside of the system of control. For years we were able to maintain this farm as an island separate from the freeway that leads away from our front gate. Eventually the nature of our experiment leaked out and agents of the system showed up to place us under its control.

I want to apologize to you for abandoning these fields. I am not clever enough to simultaneously inhabit the natural world of a living organic system and its antithesis – the modern state with the bizarre and un-natural conditions it dictates. Unfortunately, growing food, and living as free people is not compatible with the ill considered and unjust mandates, rules, laws and regulations that are imposed upon us. The penalties have been disproportionate and devastating.

Our world is in transition, from what was, to what will be. I'm talking about the social, cultural, educational, health, political, legal, financial, ecological, etc.

Where is the public conversation and debate that includes the input of citizens about the challenges of our time? Where is the conversation about our dreams for how society will be organized in the future and what steps we need to take to arrive there? What is the purpose of our democracy? Who should decide how we live?

Our society needs experiments. We need places where we can freely explore these questions and build new models for a rapidly changing world. Freedom is a word that has been accorded great reverence in the lexicon of this thing we call America. I believe that we need more of it.

Organic cropland is just .7% of our agricultural production. This is only a tiny dust mote on the field of American agriculture. Am I really such a threat?

People are asking me what can I do? The answer to that question is embedded in another question:

Where should our food come from, and who should control who grows it?

The current answer seems to be China and Monsanto.

When you develop a fierce and unwavering commitment to the control of your food system, farms like La Milpa will be the norm and well supported by public policy; and not crushed as criminal enterprises.

Thank you,