If you had met me two weeks ago and had asked me to picture my personal ideal farm, I would probably bore you with a description of a very ordinary plantation(And perhaps this is due to my lack of farm exposure). Don't get me wrong! I am not saying that ordinary farms are boring per se since I fully appreciate the complex and intricate dynamics of any farm and the hard work that farmers endure to ensure the optimal growth of their produce. However, what I am trying to say is that the ordinary farm can seem rather mundane compared to that of High Mowing Seeds.
Driving towards the farm, we are faced with a very rustic façade of the building itself, typical of any farm that a bourgeois, like myself, would imagine. But within a few minutes of Tom Stearn's tour, we immediately realize that this is much more than the ordinary farm. In a way, Tom paraded all of his high-tech gadgetry of his farm to all of us and indeed, with what appears to be a collection of state-of-the-art contraptions such as his vacuum seed organizer and his outdoor weather simulator, it would almost be a shame, perhaps even rude, if he did not.
Next up, the farm! This is where things get interesting. Prior to this visit, all my exposure of various vegetables and what I knew about them was limited to what was sold in most markets. I knew that carrots were orange and broccolis green. I never knew or perhaps would never imagine otherwise. There is obviously an established convention in our society when it comes to most people's perception of food. People want their carrots to be orange, tomatoes red, and broccolis green because of either what they have been taught by society and their ancestors. But Tom Stearns obviously does not abide by these established conventions. In his farm, he crossbreeds various types of plant to form hybrids of incalculable possibilites.
There is something quite rebellious or "bad-ass" in what Tom is doing in his farm. He is not afraid to stray from the norms of society and attempt to produce something new, exciting, and undoubtedly revolutionary. Of all the types of bad-asses that exists in our world, this is the type I certainly want to be.
There must be other people who want to be bad-ass like Tom, too, since he is successful in selling those seeds for crazy-colored carrots, tomatoes and broccoli! I think vegetable consumers would like what he's doing in general, even those who don't know it's possible - it's just that large-scale producers grow acre upon acre of one single variety because it works with their industrial methods. Growing different varieties of vegetables takes patience, attention to detail, and - most of all - flexibility. Most of our producers don't have these characteristics, but hopefully the minority that do will grow in number with time.
ReplyDeleteTom really is totally cool, because he brings us back to the highest quality greasing methods. GMOs manipulate one aspect of the genus of thie plant without considering the implications of the change. However, when you bread by visually inspecting the parent plants and choosing the ones that display the strongest abilities, you are looking at the whole product and how the plants traits complement each other. This produces better, stronger and more nutritious plants that also require less external inputs making them cheeper for the farmer to grow in the long run.
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