Water

My weekday job at Peet's Coffee and Tea is generally pretty routine compared to the varied and unpredictable nature of farming. For today, tomorrow, and possibly Wednesday however, we can't serve coffee, tea, espresso, or just about anything else that normally sustains our business, so my coworkers and I have had little or nothing to do. The reason for this unusual situation, for those of you who live outside of the Metro Boston area, is that there is currently a water restriction imposed on Lexington, and a number of other communities in the MWDC water district, due to a recent failure in one of the aqueducts that brings water from Western Massachusetts to Boston. Drinking water has to be boiled before it is considered safe, and at the scale that Peets uses water it's simply no feasible to make beverages. So business has ground to a halt.

What does this have to do with Farming? Quite a lot actually, because having a source of clean water is important to growing food as well as making coffee. And as it happens, we are still trying to figure out how we are going to irrigate our fields this season. Our original plan was to use a catchment system and rain barrels, but installing the gutters and hoses need to make this happen may be beyond our meager budget. That leaves us either carting water by hand, or coming up with an entirely new solution. We'll see.

A lot of people in modern society take having a supply of clean water as a given thing. As recent events have shown, this is a mistake, and the current situation in Massachusetts serves to highlight how much depends on the largely invisible but vital services our utilities provide us with. One of our goals with Cloverly Farm is to be as self sufficient as possible, but it's rarely straightforward; our path to self sufficiency is going to be a long and winding one. Still, water seems like a logical place to start, since it is essential for everything we do.

Inputs and Outputs

I make the trip down to Lexington for a few days every week to work my other job at Peet's Coffee and Tea. Most of the time, my farming life and my barista life don't have a lot to do with each other, besides the occasional discussion about the farm with a curious customer, or my habit of recycling coffee shipping boxes for ground covers. But because of Earth Day, my shift last Thursday was a bit different.

On Thursday afternoon, a number of customers came into the shop looking for environmentally friendly coffee beans. I was thrilled to discuss with them the value of direct relationships with farmers, and in one case, the discussion turned away from coffee towards sustainable living in general. Later, after we closed for the evening, I talked for a little while with one of my coworkers about the farm and what makes for a sustainable lifestyle. When I left that night, I was reflecting on how nice it was to have discussions like that in order to make sense of the choices I've made for the sake of sustainability, as well as to help others find sustainable options for their own lives.

It turns out that both in broad discussions of sustainable lifestyle choices as well as trying to pick a coffee bean with good eco-cred, the guiding principle is the same: be aware of all inputs and outputs. This sounds so simple but it's not: you might know you are bringing coffee into your house, but where did that coffee come from, and where is the money you spent on it going? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you to avoid buying a product that was grown in a manner harmful to the well being of the land and the farmer who produced it.

In the case of our farm, being aware of the inputs and outputs is essential, and also deceptively difficult. I'm discovering that there are several currencies a farmer trades in on a day to day basis: Dollars, calories, nutrients, and karma to name a few. Managing inputs and outputs in all of these currencies, as well as conversion between them promises to be a path to a high level of sustainability, but only if done carefully and correctly. If we're careless, a lot of wealth could be squandered.

With that risk in mind, we're going to do our best to make good, informed choices about our inputs and outputs, with the understanding that there might be mistakes here and there. And hopefully some of our outputs come harvest time will make for good (and tasty) inputs somewhere else.

-Dan