 I'd like to thank Orca Media for filming this event tonight, and I'd like to let you know that you can sign up for our newsletter, it's being passed around. You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook to learn about upcoming events. Our next event is actually this Friday night, November 1st, and it's a gin Austin literary cocktail party, which is kind of a fun event for the bookstore. We're going to have Bar Hill Distillery, they're coming here with a pop-up bar. We're going to have local author, M.T. Anderson, who's a National Book Award winner, and he will be hosting the event in full costume. We will have a costume party with prizes. Tickets are available here at the store. A ticket does include a free drink ticket from Bar Hill Distillery. And then we also have, coming up in November, save the date, November 30th, for the beloved Vermont children's author, Catherine Patterson. She'll be here signing her newest children's book. And now on to tonight's event. Welcome, please have a seat. Thank you for coming to our program with Kristen Kimball. She's here from Essex Farms. She is the author of the 2011 best-seller, The Dirty Life, a memoir of farming, food, and love. And she now presents her follow-up memoir, Good Husbandry, Growing Food, Love, and Family on Essex Farm. And I knew I liked this book by page two, when Kristen used one of my favorite words, eat you late. Oh, my people. I love that word. And she used it to describe what a sprouted seed might do, if not given enough light at just the right time after germination. I used it in a poem once. Nice. And it was about motherhood. Really? Yeah. I don't farm and I rarely garden, but there is so much to learn and enjoy about this book. I especially like the passages about birthing and family and the shifting of balances between family dynamics and the farm's own insistent work. Kristen is honest and straightforward, and her words draw a picture of life, work, balance, hope, and grace. She will talk tonight about the book and maybe briefly read the passage from the book. And then we'll have a Q&A and a book signing time. So please be sure to pick up your copy of Good Husbandry or The Dirty Life, if you don't have that one. And anyone is also welcome to take home a winter squash, courtesy of Kristen and the farm. You can dare around and they're also at the front counter and there's a basket of them. So please help yourself to that. Please also help yourself to refreshments. And now let me tell you a little bit about Kristen if you don't already know her. She's a farmer and writer living in northern New York. Prior to farming, Kimball worked as a freelance writer, writing teacher, and as an assistant to a literary agent in New York City. She's a graduate of Harvard University and the author of The Dirty Life and Good Husbandry. She and her husband Mark have run Essex Farm since 2003, where they live with their two daughters. Please help me welcome from Essex Farm, Kristen Kimball. I should say right off that the ratio of people to squash here is such that you should definitely take home a lot of winter squash, or else we're going to burden their pond books with loads of squash. So we have the butternut, which is good roasted. We have the acorn squash. We have pie pumpkins. And then my favorite this year is the Skyla Cabocha, which is a Japanese variety. It almost tastes like chestnut and you just split it in half, put tons of butter on it, roast it. That's good. So please clear out a lot of squash tonight. I wanted to say thanks very much to Bear Pond for having me here. I always love being at an independent bookstore and I really deeply feel like as much as farmers complain about how difficult it is to survive in this era. I think indie bookstores in the age of Amazon can probably relate to what is like to be a farmer. And I imagine that the booksellers who own and work in these businesses do so for the same reasons that farmers do, which is that they believe that what they sell is magic and that their presence is important for their community's health and for the ideas that circulate around their towns and in their communities. So thanks for what you do. Before farming, before writing, I worked in the book business. I worked as an agent. So I had an idea kind of of how books are sold and marketed. And as we've shifted to a very different kind of world, what we see is controlled largely by algorithm. And the list of books that you might come across by algorithm is really different from what Sam or another person here might hand to you when you walk in. So just the fact that they're here and doing it means a lot to me and I'm really grateful to be here. I'm pretty sure that this was the first place that I read when my first book came out. And I was reminded when I walked in that my younger daughter that night was about four weeks old. She was a teeny tiny little baby and she's nine here now. So it's been quite a while since the first book came out. And I remember walking in for that first reading and not knowing what a reading was or what it was like and being like sweaty under the armpits and nervous and wondering if I was dressed okay. And then walking in and realizing I'm in Vermont and I'm among farmers. So I think people can probably handle both the sweat and the awkward clothes and everybody's going to be fine. So I still haven't ever figured out what always works for a reading. I think sometimes it's boring to hear something read if you've just read the book and it's confusing if you haven't read the book. So I've kind of settled on this little formula that I do where I'll do like very tiny brief readings and then encourage a discussion and questions so that you don't have to sit through 20 minutes of me droning on a plot line that you don't understand. But it might require more of you than you came prepared to give. So I'm warning you that I'm going to ask you to ask me questions. And with that we begin. Anything is open for me for questions. I talk about food. I talk about family. I talk about what it's like to have a farm. And sometimes in especially in bookstores people want to talk about how memoir is made and how you make those choices and what's that like to write about people that you know. So all of those things are fair game. I imagine that some of you have read the first book and some of you haven't. So I'm going to give you my little thumbnail sketch of what the first one's about and give you a preview of the second one. The first one covers the first year of our farm's existence which was 2001. I'm sorry it was 2003. It started when I was still living in New York City. I was reading a lot about our food system. And I was interested in it in a completely professional way. I just wanted to write stories about the food system and talk about the people who were growing food. I had read Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation which had kind of spun my wheels a little bit and that book was all about what was the food system looked like when it was going wrong. And what it made me want to know more about was what would the food system look like if we could do it differently. What if we could do it in a way that's better for communities that's better for farmers that's better for eaters. And I started interviewing farmers up and down the Hudson Valley. There were a bunch of brand new first generation farms popping up that year. I found those people really interesting. I wanted to figure out what was so great about farming that would make them want to you know some of them were like living in a tent farming an acre of vegetables. And I wanted to know what was so fun about what they were doing that they would be willing to live like that. And eventually I went to Pennsylvania to meet this very tall very talkative very opinionated man named Mark who was growing vegetables and pigs and apples for a bunch of families in central Pennsylvania. And when I met him I knew that he was a great subject. He was like he talked all the time. He had these great ideas. He was audacious and there was a conflict everywhere around him and conflict is what makes plots. I was like this is great. This is my subject. And then I vary unprofessionally and at some points I've thought unwisely fell in love with him and fell in love with what he did farming simultaneously. And he left his farm in Pennsylvania. I left my apartment in the East Village and we started Essex Farm together. And the idea of Essex Farm was that we wanted to grow a full diet year round for our local members who would pay one price at the beginning of the year and take everything that they needed to eat an interesting and nutritious diet year round. Mark was ambitious enough to think that that was possible. And back then I was ignorant enough to believe that it was possible. And we jumped in. We started on as we found this piece of 500 acres in a place that I'd never been in before in the Adirondack Park. And from our first season we produced dairy, beef, pork, chicken, eggs, vegetables, grains and flowers, herbs and some extra things like soap, sauerkraut, kimchi, value added things that we could store and sell. It grew a lot after that first year. We started with seven members our first season. And this year we have about 300. Some of them are local, but we also deliver to New York City now. So we have a van that goes from our farm every week, travels through the Capital Region, drops some things in Albany and then goes down to New York City and delivers door to door in New York City to members who are just like our local members, can pick whatever they want in any quantity or any combination from everything that we produce on our farm. That was a big mouthful. What do I want to tell you about this first reading? So this book picks up where the last one leaves off. And it's kind of about the transition between the romance of a new relationship both with Farming and with Mark and that kind of dangerous territory where that romance becomes real relationship. And this one is about navigating that. We have kids at this point. We have one child who's three and one on the way. The farm's grown a lot. We have employees. We have one former employee here tonight in the red shirt over there, Sam. He comes up in a later reading. And let me see if there's anything else you need to know. I'll just read it and then you can ask me questions if you want to. So I think at this point in our lives, Mark and I are discovering how different we are and trying to figure out how to make that work for us. But what we have between us is this farm that we've created and that's kind of the magnet that keeps us together through this period of our lives. Mark and I came from different backgrounds, had different values, different motivations, and a different perception of the place we'd landed in together. But the farm was the sturdy bridge between us. During the first years of our marriage, we worked 16 hours a day together to build it. What it gave us in return was the scaffolding for our relationship, for a family, a life. And it gave us food. In my old life, food was usually not much more than a need that had to be met every day. Here, it was the center of everything, who we were and what we did. The quality and taste of what we grew was so different from what I had been used to that I felt I'd discovered a lost continent. Seven years in, I still couldn't get over it. Seasonality had been invisible to me in the city, where anything was available at any time. Here, every week brought new flavors to perfection, and then they were gone, replaced by others. It was a never-ending cycle of longing and fulfillment, directly connected to our work. And learning to live this way was like hearing a tune I had known once and forgotten. It just felt deeply right. After Jane was born, my happiest moments were in the kitchen, sharp knife in my hand, small child underfoot, taking apart something that, hours earlier, had been warmed by the same sun that was warming me, and fed by the soil under my feet. All farms reveal your inner self, whether you like it or not. Your daily choices shape the soil, fields, buildings, and fence lines, sketch the plants and animals in your own soul's likeness. Your values are visible in the way a farm looks. Your ambitions, strengths, and weaknesses are there for everyone to see. The farm we made together was a physical manifestation of who we were together. When we'd arrived with a measly $15,000 in savings between us, the land had been out of regular production for almost two decades. The soil hadn't been asked for much in that time, which meant it was in pretty good shape. Bringing soil back to health after it has been misused can take years, or sometimes generations. We had all sorts of soil types, from gray, impenetrable clay to light sand. Millions of years ago, this land was under a vast, shallow ocean, and the sea creatures laid a bedrock of limestone, which made the earth sweet. Then came ice sheets a mile thick, pushing down from the north, melting back, leaving rubble and erratic boulders in their wake. The meltwater rushed across our land and filled the basin of Lake Champlain. The lake covered most of the farm, but its edge is now a mile from our house. A stretch from our house to the neighbors was a freshwater beach. Clams grew there in abundance, and when the land dried, topsoil formed over them. Occasionally, we find their shells, a half-inch long, bleached white by 12,000 years underground. They aren't fossils, but actual shells. Mark considers them lucky, and when he finds them, he eats them, crunching them between his teeth. The very best acres were formed when the lake level was six feet above our fields and primordial storm surges roiled the waters. The turbulence dispersed the fine silt that forms clay, and left behind the coarser particles so that the soil is not as dense as it is in other places in our valley and is more hospitable to the roots of plants. We have more than 100 acres of the good stuff in two different places. The soil was a gift. The rest of it, sagging fences, leaking roofs, was fixable. We spent much of our first year pulling down what couldn't be saved and patching what could. Over the ensuing seasons, we added enough infrastructure to qualify as a small nation state. Three new barns, a new well, improved roads. Six years in, we dug the footings for a grant-funded solar array to supply all the electricity our farm required then. The solar project was part of our plan to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel. We wanted to try to make a farm that did more good than harm to the soil, the water, the climate, and the community, as well as be productive and profitable, which is much harder than it may seem from the outside. So, hi. Maybe I got a question. First person to ask a question gets a hat. We've got things moving around here. Did you grow up in New York City? Uh, no, I didn't. Here's your hat. Did you say you never forget where you were when you were like 10? It's kind of like... We're like salmon, yeah, totally. So, like, I'm curious, like, what you're, where you grew up that maybe you just transitioned into all the, who wanted New York City and then something completely different? I grew up near Syracuse in Central New York, so a little town called Rome. My dad was in the Air Force and there was an Air Force base in our town. I went to the city directly after college, so I spent the 10 years between graduation and meeting Mark in the city, but my home landscape was similar to what the park is like, but nothing is really like the Adirondack Park. I mean, we live in a village of 700 people and my kids go to a school system that until this year, when they merged with another school system, had 200 kids from kindergarten to 12th grade, which actually, I'm in Vermont, so that might not sound as shocking as it would in other places. When I say that in New York City, people are like, oh my God. But the town I grew up in was a, you know, a small city of 50,000 people, so the cultural difference, the way the community worked, the landscape itself, you know, within the park, there are no billboards. There's really strict zoning for, you know, how much land you need to build a house, so the whole landscape itself is really unique. And it's just, you know, it's just right here across the water from you, so, and it was only three hours from where I grew up, but a completely different world that I didn't know at all when we moved there. Yeah. I got another hat. You got another question. Seriously, guys, I have soap, too. This is, yes. Hat or soap? Which one would you like? Sure. Okay. I think you guys have become kind of like an inspiration for North Korea. A lot of people have come in and learned from you guys and gone elsewhere. How has that been processed? And how, like managing new, like farmers that want to do stuff that might have different ideas, or just like the whole, or then seeing them go elsewhere and doing farms that may compete or not, or, you know, how's that whole mentorship thing and being an employer work out for you guys? That's a really good question. And it's in this one a little bit because I think this was the era when I was trying to work that out for myself. When we first started the farm, the people who came to work for us or work with us felt like peers. And as we grew older, there was more separation between us as far as age went and experience went and it began to feel different like it was us and them. And that was a really awkward transition for me. Meanwhile, a bunch of people who had worked at our farm had gone and started farms, you know, right in the neighborhood around us. And my nature was to kind of tense up at that and worry, what are we going to do? This is such a small market. We're all selling the same thing. This is going to be disastrous for everyone. And Mark's reaction to that, Mark's nature is different from mine, was this is amazing. We're going to have a functional small farm community here. We can be supportive of each other. We can, you know, diversify. We can, we might be able to, you know, actually have other businesses that spring up to support these farms. And he was right. I was right too, in a way. But, you know, for example, now we have adjacent to our farm a business called the Hub on the Hill that's a big commercial kitchen and handles all the transportation for the farms in our region. So this week we were sending up all the rest of our hot peppers to her kitchen and she'll ferment them and bottle them in her licensed commercial kitchen and we'll be able to sell them in our farm store or give them to our members all year long. And she's doing that for, you know, the 10 farms in our region that are all doing the same sort of produce. The fact that she handles transportation is amazing because, has anybody ever read East of Eden? So you remember like the plot point in East of Eden is they have this great idea to ship lettuce from the Salinas Valley east to where the market is and I think Chicago and that the train breaks down and all the ice melts and all the lettuce just rots. And I should have remembered that when we decided to start going to New York City because transportation and getting fresh food to a big market turns out to be really complicated and hard. And Jory from the Hub on the Hill has taken that on and she bought a refrigerated truck which is great for all of us. But I was kind of right too that our little population could not support all of these farms that we're trying to sell directly to our communities. And that's when we decided to start going further afield and taking our product to larger markets like New York City which felt against what we believed when we started the farm. We really wanted to grow for our community and our neighbors but it was necessary if we wanted to keep going and make a bigger pie for everybody who was trying to make a living from the land in our little area. Yeah. Yes. You want a hat or soap? I have soap too. Hat? Okay. This is the last hat. So one of the things I really liked about your first book was how you used animals to do everything on the farm and how you traveled so far to find the tools and the implements to use on the farm. I'm wondering if that's something that you are still actively pursuing? Have you had problems finding equipment as you've grown? So I just wonder about that piece. Yeah. That's one of the major arcs in the new book because the scale of the farm changes tremendously over the five years that this book covers. And we started with a team of two horses. And as we grew we kept adding horses and training people to use them and adding horses and training people to use them. We scaled up our equipment so that instead of using two horses we I think maxed out at six horses on one implement that was scaled more like tractor scale equipment. The farm continued to grow after that and we ran into a problem which was that it would take us maybe two years to really train somebody to be a competent teamster. And at that point they were ready to go and start their own thing. And that wasn't tenable. Like we couldn't just keep putting resources into training people who were going to go start their own places even though we were glad they were starting their own places and we were really glad that they were interested in using draft horse power. But we hit this crisis point where we had the horses, we had the equipment, but we had people who were using the horses who were not adequately trained to be safe and responsible with themselves and with the horses and it was dangerous. And we started pulling back, we bought a new tractor. I had only farmed with horses so this it was like a miracle when I saw how much you could do in a day. Mark would laugh at me because of course he came from tractor background but for me it was just like we can grow a lot of food now. Um and for a while it looked like we were going to let go of horses entirely but then this other thing happened right at the end of this the years that this book covers which was that we got fewer people who were coming to us wanting to train and work and start their own places and we were starting to get really short on labor and we were starting to get really worried about that and then an Amish community arrived in our area and suddenly we had horses, we had equipment and we had people who could use them again and who couldn't use tractors. So we use a lot of tractors on our farm now but we also have a very real and very meaningful way of keeping the horses employed and working on the farm. So they're still there. We sold a team last spring, we bought another horse last summer our first pertran we always had Belgians and Belgians and suffix and this was our first pertran and she's lovely and great. So and then we have all the Amish buggy horses who live on our farm and and the Amish people who live on our place use them for transportation but they're not our horses. Yes, soap. All right, I won't throw it because it might hurt you. This is lemongrass soap that it's made from that from the animals on our farm. If anybody else has ever been crazy enough, amazing enough to do this. Yes. I know I should, people are asking me that question these days and I need to do a little research to see who is still doing it but I know several farms started a full-diet model. Not all of them, you know, quite as diversified as we are. Dairy is a big step, you know, if you're going to have a dairy there's a ton of infrastructure and expense that goes into that. But there was a piece in the Washington Post, maybe like six years ago, that was all about farms that were trying to provide a full-diet for a membership. I don't know how many of them are still here. I actually talked to Mark a couple times because I was thinking that I would like to, I'm so taken with this model I was thinking of going across the lake on the ferry every week. Yeah, you would be welcome. We would love to feed you. I'd love, I'd much more love to help one get started here on a farmer but I'm just passionate about, I just love your first look. There was a farm here in Vermont that was goat dairy based that was doing meats and vegetables and I know they had pork as well as goat milk and goat dairy. I think it was called the Green Mountain Girls, something like that, did you know that farm? But I don't know how diversified they still are. Maybe somebody else here knows better than I do. Anybody? No? There's a lot of trouble with being a highly, highly diversified farm. You know, it's very complicated management-wise. It's expensive to own all of the infrastructure that you need for all of these different enterprises and it, when it's working really well, it's beautiful agricultural synergy but when something is not going well or there's some crisis of labor or finances, then the whole thing becomes like a very unstable tower and it feels pretty shaky. So I think it takes a very specific type of person to want to manage a farm that's that diversified and I think Mark still finds incredible joy and beauty in keeping all of those balls in the air at once but I think there's probably a good reason that there's not a million of them everywhere. Should I do a little more reading? You want to hear a little more? Okay. So one of the main things that's happening in this book is that we have kids. So I'm trying to come to terms with what it means to give a kid a good life and is that different from what I had chosen as a good life for myself. The farm also, particularly our farm, kind of shoved us into very traditional gender roles and I found that so hard when I had been equal partner with Mark and building the place and working on it. Suddenly he's in the field doing the muscly things and I'm in the house with the kids and cooking and it created a real separation between me and the farm and a deep competition about whose needs are going to get met. So this section is maybe anybody who has had kids and their own business might relate to this but this is about what happens to your identity when who you thought you were is not the person that the rest of the world thinks you are. People who came to the farm during that period saw me as a different person from who I thought I was. It hurt in the weirdest way. To these young newcomers I was a mom, middle aged, with tired looking breasts and sun damaged skin and therefore mostly invisible. I wasn't the farmer but the farmer's wife. One Friday our friend Matt came to visit and stayed for team dinner. Team dinner was the dinner that we threw every Friday after everybody had picked up their food and anybody who'd worked on the farm plus their partners and their kids, anybody else was welcome to team dinner. Seeing Matt was always a treat. He ran his own farm in a different part of the state, a diversified CSA and draft horse powered like ours. He'd come to work for us part time in our second year farming when he was a college student across the lake in Vermont. If our farm could have invented for itself the perfect person to help us work it, it would have come up with Matt. He was a star rugby player who didn't drink, a philosophy major who was grounded by physical work, a heavy metal fan who went to mass every Sunday. In other words tough, strong, serious, intelligent, fun and thoughtful. One of the biggest compliments in Matt's vocabulary was savage. His best rugby teammates were savage. The drummer from Pantera was savage. Matt quickly fell in love with farming and nothing we threw at him could shake him from it. He drove the hour from his campus to our farm after classes some days and he spent most weekends and vacations with us. When he graduated he came to work for us full time. Around that same time we hired Sam. Mark had known Sam since he was a little kid, the much younger brother of a good friend. Sam had just graduated from college and like Matt was smart, strong, athletic and soon in love with farming. We four made a good team. Mark and I taught them to harness and drive horses, butcher cattle, pigs and chickens and milk cows by hand. They were eager to learn and they worked themselves to blissful exhaustion. They built their own cabins to live in, next door to each other in the woods along the farm road, surrounded by cedar, sumac and wild blackberries. They had no electricity or running water but each one had a small wood stove inside and lots of insulation and were snug and comfortable even deep in winter. It was a beautiful thing to watch those two work. When I think of that time on our farm I see Matt and Sam running through the hayfield at dusk. The remnants of August heat coming out of the ground, throwing 50 pound bales onto the horse-drawn wagon that I'm driving. Mark is behind me on the swaying wagon, stacking, chaff stuck to him, his long work-hard arms swinging the bales above his head as if they're bits of mere fluff. There's the good green smell of the new bales and the sweat of the horses and the dusty scent of the hot raked earth. The grasshoppers and crickets are jumping in front of us like popcorn in the stubble of the cut grass and Jett, my dog, in his youth, pouncing on them. The red-tailed hawk is circling above scanning the newly bare ground for bowls and mice. Matt and Sam are singing loudly as they run. Fox went out on a chilly night, making up new verses. They run all evening from bale to heavy bale jumping over the tongue of the moving wagon because they are young and strong and they can. Those were moments of pure beautiful happiness, a crystallized image that combined all the best parts of farming, which is, in the end, a vigorous team sport. We were hosting a big dinner the night when Matt came to visit. There were 20 people eating, a group made up of volunteers and farm visitors in addition to our full-time crew. Everyone except me had spent the day in the field haying, harvesting, weeding, moving animals to new pasture. I'd been inside most of the day with the kids, cooking the enormous dinner, hauling several loads of laundry from the washer to the line. All the leaves were in the table and still it was too crowded. People spilling onto the grimy couch or the piano bench or perched on folding chairs against the wall, plates balanced on their knees. Passing between the kitchen and the table with a platter of food, I heard a newcomer ask Matt what it had been like when he'd worked here. Well, it was just the four of us, Matt said, raising his steady voice to make himself heard above the general roar. Sam, Mark, Kristen, and I, we did everything. Kristen used to farm then, the newcomer asked, glancing up incredulous. Had I farmed? My mind shot to one particular day during haymaking, five years earlier, when Matt and I were in the loft at the east barn, stacking bales in 100-degree heat, the bales coming along the overhead conveyor at a fast clip, crashing to the barn floor, the hay dust floating thick in the soft light and sticking to our sweating skin. If we slowed down and got behind, the bales would pile up on the floor of the barn or worse, come down on our heads. The gritty, good feeling of hard exertion and teamwork shifted to a sort of gasping, determined desperation. I tried to match Matt's pace and keep up with the relentless bales, and for a while, I did. And then I suddenly had to stop, double over, and throw up. We yelled to Mark to slow the pace of the bales a little, and then we finished the load. Yes, young man, I thought, I farmed then. I wondered if Matt remembered that day. Kristen, Matt answered the newcomer. Oh, yeah, Kristen farmed. She was savage. He remembered. I smiled to myself and cleared away the dirty plates. All right, how about another couple of questions, and then we'll wrap, and I have one last paragraph that I'll read at the end. Anyone want to talk about books? Or yeah. Are you still produced in the 18-wheelers? Yes. Can you catch? Oh. So, yeah. There is also another one, because I'm not finished with the second, because the first one was my dream, and then I was driving by like a week and a half ago, and I was like, I was like, oh my god. So, but I'm not all the way through it, but you, right now you have, there was like, you had just been crushing sourcrow in the barrel, and everyone showed up, and then like Mark took them out, and then, you know, trying to figure out what to do, but like, so it was just curious, like, how's the system going? So, the dairy grew from one cow in the beginning, the first buck, to right now we're milking about 20 jerseys, and we still do it in the same barn, and we have the same milkhouse that's made of a tractor trailer truck that we drove into the side of the barn when we desperately needed to have a milk license, sold the wheels off of the tractor trailer, which reduced the net cost of that thing to like $500, and put plumbing and electricity inside of it, and that's our milkhouse. We use machines now. You probably have crossed that point in the book already, but when we went from seven cows to 10 cows, we just couldn't do it by hand anymore. I think Sam was among the last group of people who milked by hand on our farm, and yeah, it is still the same kind of very basic system. We got a grant last year to help set up a proper creamery, but we haven't implemented that plan yet. We really do need to have a pasteurizer on the farm. Our New York City distribution is deeply in what Mark would call the gray zone, so we really do need to have a pasteurizer on farm and do some pasteurized products, because everything that we do right now is raw. Yes, it's frustrating because our products are really good, and we've been doing it for 15 years, and we've never had an issue knock on wood, but it's also deeply insecure to know that what we're doing is not necessarily illegal, but it's also not clearly legal, so I forgot this is being recorded. Edit, edit. So yeah, they're all delicious and good, but changing. I should have said when you asked that question earlier about diversified farms on the side of the lake, that Sam bought land when was it last year in your farm a year ago, and tell us about your farm a little bit. Give us your pitch. It's a very undiversified area here from Essex. It's called Schoolhouse Farm. We have laying hands, about 1,500 laying hands, a couple of cows, a couple pigs. Yeah, we have our birds this past spring, and it's very, very busy. Uh-huh. And Sam also has little kids. Little kids, yes. And we're in the same boat of a farm that is very rundown, and every spare moment is taken with fixing or patching or turning facilities. They've been in disrepair for a long time and making them useful again. So right now I'm in the process of turning the milk house into an egg washing room that will be insulated for the winter, because right now our egg washer is just flopping in the middle of the barn, which will not stay warm in another couple of weeks. And you can follow him on Instagram, where you can see all of this heavy work to get a farm up and going happening. What is it, Schoolhouse Farm? Schoolhouse Farm. The dairy is the place on the farm that I kind of want to, I'd like to dig in most of all. The dairy and the sheep are the two places where I kind of find my role still. How many times have you been kicked? No matter how many times I've been kicked. I would, so we had a good one wedding over the weekend, and they were driving through a toll booth. Yes. And right before we were driving through the toll booth. So I, so like I've had these times, like can I read in the car? Like will I get car sick? Like but I can't stop. Like how to keep going, because I want to know like the next thing, right? And the best paragraph at the moment was, the two of you driving through the toll booth, and him throwing all the stuff from the backseat to the woman in the toll booth. So excited that he, he was so proud of himself, and he couldn't wait that she was probably going to come visit. I wonder, and I was like, I wonder. No, but we just got back from six days in New York City. We were on like book tour, and he did the exact same thing all throughout the city. One night we were standing, we were getting a slice of pizza. It's one o'clock in the morning. We're standing on a corner in Tribeca, and he's trying to convince the guy who's selling us the pizza, that he should come to our farm. And he's writing down, he's writing down our phone number and our address. And the last thing I hear him say, before I just turn in embarrassment is, dare you, dare you to come. So he's still doing it. And we've gotten a lot of people to come to our farm that way. Some have become dear friends or employees, and some just kind of pass through, and I don't know why or what brought them there, but he is a force for sharing the story of agriculture. And it's, as I get older, I see that we're doing the same thing. We just do it in different ways. He's the extrovert, so he wants to bring people in and show them and feed them and taste them. And I'm the introvert, and I want to write about it because it's an important story. And 2% of people in America produce food for the other 98, and somebody needs to tell people what it's like. So we both do it in different ways, and I try not to be too judgmental anymore about his way. You want to hear one more little passage? I feel like I should almost read the Ptolebooth section, but I don't think I can find it. Let me see if I can. I think this book is also about, I can't find the Ptolebooth. You'll just have to read it on your own. It's about the middle age of our farm and the middle age of my life. I'm 48 now, so firmly deeply into midlife and coming to terms with, this is what it is. This is what we got. This is what we got to work with. There's not a lot of new raw material that's going to be created and figuring out how to be peaceful with that and figuring out where you are in your own narrative arc of life. So I just wanted to read this last passage that is about a walk that Mark and I took about this time of year. This is the thing that we do together as a couple. I don't know what other couples do. If you don't know a farm, what do you do together? For farmers, we take walks around the farm together and it's half work and it's half pleasure and you make a list of what needs to be done but you also just enjoy this edible landscape that's around you and this is one of those walks. Mark and I took a farm walk. After frost and before the monotone of winter, the farm was in a state of transitional beauty at the threshold between life and death. The tomatoes on the ground were bright red and softening into the earth. The raspberries clung to the canes but their life was gone. Their color washed from vibrant acrylic to soft gouache. Only the hardy chickweed remained green over frost rimmed ground. It had taken hold around the tomato stakes and spread from there. It was tenacious, low growing and strongly rooted, a formidable enemy. It would give us trouble in the spring. Mary came on the walk with us. Mary was my young dog then. She's now my old dog and Jet, who's in the next sentence was my old dog and is now gone. Mary came on the walk with us and Jet trundled along at our heels. When Mary arrived, he relinquished all his responsibilities to her. He seemed content in his dissipation. Mary ran circles through the corn stalks and then bounded back to him, took his snout into her mouth, draped her fore paws over his broad back. He flapped his tail slowly back and forth under her assault, like an old veteran waving a flag at the edge of a parade. She was manic circles of youthful energy and he was mature conservation of efforts. The farm looked feckoned, even in the mode of early decay. The cover crop was particularly beautiful. There was an impressive stand of oats, peas and tillage radish planted to add carbon, nitrogen and friability to the soil. The radishes had dug six inches into the top soil. Their tap roots three feet. When dead and rotten, they would leave organic matter and air space behind them, giving next year's plants the underground oxygen they needed to thrive. Mark pulled up a radish and took a bite. Tillage radish is a sibling to the daikon and it looked like a long white thick carrot. The flesh was frozen at the bottom but fresh and sound at the sorry, the fresh was frozen at the top but fresh and sound at the bottom where the frost had not yet reached. The peas most sensitive to frost were shriveled brown tendrils, 12 inches long. The oats were still green. Mark swept up a big handful and chewed it so that for the rest of the walk, the corners of his mouth were stained green from the juice. It reminded me of a Mark Strand poem I had tacked above my desk when I was in college. Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. My Mark is a person whose intensity and sheer capacity for joy make him want to consume the things he loves until their essence drips from his mouth. It's a lucky thing really that his vices are food, farms and work. The moon came up gigantic and perfectly full. I had heard on the radio that this was the month of the super moon when the two unlike bodies, one large, one small, are as close as they ever get. And the apparent size of the moon is at its most glorious. This is my place in the world, I thought, 500 acres of soil between mountains and a lake. I was a foreigner here not that long ago but I have eaten what came from the soil and the rain that fell on it until my cells were made of it. This was the raw material that knitted two children together in my body. And if a person's essence is made not of atoms but of thoughts or of time, still by any measure I am made of it and I belong here. That's what I have for you tonight. Thank you everybody for coming. Any last questions if we go straight to the signing and the squash gathering? Yes? Are you still taking apprentices? We are still taking apprentices, yeah, for sure, yep. Yeah, you just have to, if you go to our website, there's a line on the top that's Mark's actual cell phone number and you can call him or text him and he will get back to you and probably try to talk you into farming for the rest of your life. I did farm for 12 years and now our 21-year-old is wanting to. Great, yeah, perfect. Good. Thanks again for coming everybody. I really appreciate it. I hope everyone has a good night. Thank you. Good.