Markets Are the Place by Eugene Wyatt

Photo by Hannah Maxwell

September 2005

As has been done for millenniums, farmers gather at a crossroads, display their produce, wait for buyers; and hopefully at the end of the day, go back to the farm with enough income to cover expenses. Market day is festive; it celebrates the end of a week's work and it adds sociality to the solitary profession of farming. At market, farmers commiserate with fellow farmers about the weather; they describe their produce to buyers, often hearing compliments and occasionally hearing complaints. But mostly, farmers talk about food and what it touches upon, which is almost everything, nutritional, environmental, social and political. Food is the meeting of nature and culture; farmers' markets are the place.

In addition to doing the Liberty Farmers' Market, I soon took on markets in Callicoon, in Warwick, in Nyack and in Hastings-on-Hudson. It was fun, driving from market to market; I thought of myself and my sheep as players, we were opening our play on the road, making changes to our choreography and getting ready to open on Broadway. In October of 1999, Greenmarket accepted my application and offered me, not Union Square, but markets Off Broadway; we played Tribeca, Tompkins Square, on 97th St., at 77th and Columbus, and Off Off Broadway at Borough Hall in Brooklyn.

Break a leg, a space in Union Square opened up and we were on Broadway at last. But yarn sales are seasonal and I wasn't selling enough lamb to make a go of it in the Summer months so four years ago I decided to plant vegetables to have income during the growing season. I would have an integrated farm, fertilizing the soil with sheep manure and feeding the sheep with surplus vegetables. But if I were to grow vegetables, they would be grown organically; this seemed like the right thing to do after the Fall of terror in 2001, when so many people were wondering what they could do in response to the catastrophic events that had been visited upon New York. I couldn't change George Bush's blind response of fear and vengeance, I couldn't prevent the Patriot Act from becoming law, I couldn't dissuade my fellow Americans from believing the Administration's lies. Yet I saw myself as lucky; I had a response that would have a result, albeit a small one, but a result just the same, one that mattered more than a vote. I was a farmer and I could touch my ground in an appropriate way, with my hands, without using the government's agribusiness chemicals to fertilize, without using their herbicides and pesticides that inflict vast collateral damage on the Earth's soil and water.

This farm would be an agribusiness-free zone, and as much as possible, a government-free zone; as corporatism is the government of America, I would have seceded my 40 acres from the Union if I could have. But what I could do was to touch my ground in a natural way, to cause it little harm for me and for you, now and hereafter; and to take care of my sheep as they have taken care of me.

Eugene Wyatt