Simple Acts By Farmer Audrey Gerkin

Audrey Gerkin is married and a mother of three girls. She is also a farmer, and a dedicated advocate of the local food movement. This week my Family Food Diaries features an excerpt of an article that Audrey wrote and submitted as part of a competition. In this heartfelt story, Audrey shares with us her deep connection to the earth and our health and how she tries to make the world a better place, one carrot at a time.

Simple Acts 

By Farmer Audrey Gerkin 

On Pickpocket Farm, in Brentwood, New Hampshire, I've created a place where my reality and my vision are one.  A Community Supported Agriculture (C.S.A.) farm, I grow food for seventeen families who pay up front for a weekly share of organic vegetable harvest, which lasts from June through October.  In tune with the seasons, the shares reflect Mother Nature's temperament and my ability to accommodate her mood swings. 

At the peak of the season, the heirloom tomatoes pile up in my small hand-pulled cart, like multi-colored croquet balls, revealing colors and patterns of red, yellow, orange and green stripes.  Often, while pulling the fully loaded cart to the hill's crest where the small barn sits, I experience a moment of clarity, when I know why I do what I do.  I can reach for a Green Zebra tomato, handpicked and warmed by the sun, and say to my girls,  "You can't buy that at the grocery store."

On a June morning in the summer of 2010, I bent over the carrot patch, thinking about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  The night before I had read about toxic rain, which could travel northward from the Gulf, and how it might affect the farms of New England, 1500 miles away.  I feared for the health of the farm.  Almost a year later, NASA released a report confirming the formation of toxic rain, a result of the chemicals and dispersants used to eliminate the spill and the natural cycles of evaporation and precipitation.  Although New England farms were fortunate not to have felt the direct effect, farms to the south suffered.  I wonder, what will be the long-lasting effects-to the soil, the farm crops and the seafood harvests from the water?  Will we be affected and just not realize it? But I mostly wonder, will human nature be the death of us or will we learn to come together and heal our planet? 

To see the full article article, click here.

For more stories, go to www.traceymillerwellness.com.

If you have a story you want to share, contact Tracey Miller at tracey@traceymillerwellness.com.