We've all heard of flash mobs. But did you know there are also crop mobs? TC Daily Planet explains.
[Note: if you're interested in trying out a crop mob for yourself, Simple Good and Tasty has one scheduled for this coming Saturday. Details here.]
Crop Mob delivers for Cornercopia
Rain water dripped off ponchos and smiling faces Saturday morning,
June 12, as 27 Crop Mob volunteers made their way inside the "greenhouse
building" on the University of Minnesota's St. Paul Campus. Many had a
thick layer of mud on their pants, shoes and hands from kneeling to
plant the last of nearly 1,500 tomato, onion and shallot seedlings for
the organic, student-run Cornercopia
farm.
"Trying to make volunteering a learning experience,"
explained Cornercopia Volunteer Coordinator Michael Pursell, is one of
the farm's objectives, and also an objective of the Crop Mobs that are
popping up all over the country. Recent stories by the New
York Times and National Public
Radio inspired some of Saturday's participants to seek out local
opportunities. Crop Mobs offer people who are interested in learning
more about growing food, local food systems or sustainable farming
practices a chance to get hands-on experience and a hearty lunch while
providing local farmers with the help they need.
"We need help or a lot of this is not going to happen this summer," was
the call Crop Mob organizer Barth Anderson said he heard from local
farmers. For simple tasks from planting and weeding to baling hay and
repairing broken down fences, they simply need extra sets of willing
hands. A board member of the Sustainable
Farming Association of Minnesota, Anderson said he selected
locations by asking members if they had a full day's work to be done,
how many people would be needed for the tasks, and when they would be
ready to go.
Cornercopia was chosen because it relies heavily on volunteers and
has trouble meeting the need for planting and maintenance between the
end of the spring semester and the start of summer courses. With delays
caused by all the recent rain, Pursell said having the Crop Mob's help
was, "an opportunity to get a big push of planting done." In only two
and a half hours, the group planted seedlings, weeded pathways and
mulched them with cut alfalfa from an adjacent field before succumbing
to increasingly heavy rain. The work they accomplished would have taken
the current Cornercopia staff at least three full days.
Though
sustainable small-scale farming may be seen as a return to low-tech
methods of growing food, Anderson is organizing Crop Mobs using very
contemporary mediums. One third of Saturday's volunteers signed up
through his Fair Food Fight
website or follow his Twitter feed, Anderson said, another third came
through the Twin Cities
Crop Mob page on Facebook, and the rest were students.
Fair
Food Fight started as an online
blog and conversation sponsored by Equal Exchange, an employee
owned cooperative committed to fair trade relationships with farmers for
crops like coffee and chocolate. River Cook, an Equal Exchange sales
representative who participated Saturday, said that Fair Food Fight and
the Crop Mobs are "our way of making a local connection to the work
we've done internationally."
After cleaning up, the Cornercopia
Crop Mob air-dried while eating lunch donated by the University of
Minnesota's Campus Club in a classroom. The mostly urban twenty- and
thirty-something volunteers filled up tables and talked with those
around them. Conversations ranged from the mainstreaming of organic
products to farming experiences and plans to attend future Crop Mobs.
Of course, communities coming together to help farmers when they
need it most is nothing new - so why the sudden interest?
"We
were trying to get work groups together two years ago and nobody wanted
to do it," Anderson said. He has since learned, he added, "you call it a
Crop Mob and 30 people come out in the rain."
Copyright:
©2010 Jennifer Thomsen
