Farm Of Song

“It doesn't have a name exactly, but we meet in the morning around here. In the summer, we're hugging the shade, and in the winter, we're hugging the sun. We do a little stretching and say, ‘What's up.’ And then we talk about what we're gonna be doing for the day. And this little nexus where there's the wash-up area. This is the place where we start. You can see field three, field two, field one, the hoop houses, this big cottonwood tree. I guess it's kind of the view of most of the farm, which is kind of cool. It feels like maybe, the central node of the farm.”

“It was started by myself, Ian, and Owen, all of us are from Albuquerque. I had worked for Ian for three years for his farming project, which is called Solar Punk Farm. This field behind you that you see from the dead cosmos to where those tomatoes Ian and I had grown in this part for a whole season in 2022. The former landowner, Ted, was really kind and let us grow here for free. Ted thought he had to move for different reasons and was like, ‘I need to sell the farm, but I'd like to sell it to people that I know care about land and growing food.’ We signed a contract with him to buy it, and we were lucky to get a federal loan program through the Farm Service Agency to do that, and we found a private lender here to make that work. We went on contract to buy it sometime in early 2023 and then we purchased it September of 2023. This is the third season of Farm of Song; that's the brief story. It’s three years old, however, the land itself has been in agricultural production for a long time. I think before Ted, it had been in alfalfa. Ted built the three big hoop houses and grew a bunch of food in them. Also, in the fields and he maintained it pretty well.”

“The goal of the farm is to grow as much food as possible. We believe in high-efficient production. We want to grow a lot of food for people. We also want to be a very good place to work, as much as we can. This is not lucrative work, unfortunately, so we do our best to pay people as well as we can, provide other benefits that we can and be a good and responsive workplace. Not everyone's gonna love their job, but hopefully it's not, people get up and they're like, 'I don't want to go to work.' Maybe that's gonna happen anyway, but hopefully it doesn't feel like that. That would be one of the goals, be a good workplace. Do those things in a way that is sustainable for our bodies and also for the land. A lot of the beds have cover crops coming out of them, because we try to maintain the health of our soil by keeping living roots in the ground, and by keeping the ground as covered as possible. If you look around the farm, you're not going to see that many patches of bare earth. You'll see some, but other than the pathways, stuff is either going to be mulched, actively being grown in, or covered in tarps. We tried to make the most of the space that we have, which both involve, like I said, using one bed to grow multiple things. It might be, we grow garlic through the winter and into the late spring, and then in the summer, it will get peppers or a summer crop. Or grow a spring crop, then throw a summer cover crop in there, and in the fall, grow a fall crop like cabbage or radishes. It's farming, both intensively in terms of the time and also intensively in terms of the space itself. An example of that, let's say we're growing a line of peppers in a bed, and it's going to take a few months for those peppers to get big enough to shade anything else out. Most of our beds have three lines, so we could plant the peppers down the middle line, and on the outside lines, we could plant something like radishes or salad turnips, or something that comes out fast that will be ready to harvest, and we can take out by the time the pepper has unfurled itself. The radishes, you're still getting that production. We interplant a lot. We want to be a part of a food system that gets food to people who don't have great access. A lot of people in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County don't have good access to fresh, nutritionally dense, and yummy vegetables. So, we don't grow enough to make it true for the whole county, but that's a value, to try and get that food into people's hands.”

“I have a hard time answering that question, because I feel like a pretty new farmer. I think the things that people should know is that unfortunately the way that our economic system is structured makes it difficult to support yourself financially. It just does, unfortunately. It's not impossible, and I think we're learning that we might be able to do it given some other factors. If you want to do it, you just have to show up and do it and be inviting to people. Say yes to community opportunities and take time to make a plan. It's well worth making a plan that is testable that you can then ask, ‘Did we do the things that we wanted to do?” If you're able to answer that, whether you say yes or no, it's helpful, because then you know what you tried and what needs to change if you need to change things. If it's going well, keep doing that. But again, I'm 34, I don't know that I can offer a whole lot of stage advice, to be honest, other than, be a good person. If you're a farm owner, be a good employer. Take time to be a good employer. It's hard to overstate how important it is to plan well. You don't want to let planning paralyze you, but you do want to take a beat before almost anything to just to think about it. It's worth thinking about it, because we have just done a bunch of things, and then a lot of times we're like, ‘If we had thought about that a little, and we had just gone a little further in the future, we wouldn't have done that there, cause that's where our tomatoes need to be. But now there's garlic.’ Thinking about a few months down the line in terms of which crops are going to be coming out, when you are going to need to be putting in cover crops, and all that kind of stuff, is really important. Thinking about the year is like; What are our goals for this year? How do we improve from last year? Are we happy with last year? We just want to make sure that it's repeatable. For a lot of people, cash- cropping is a reality, because that's how they have to make a living. People want to use their farm as a way to try and change the world. which I don't. That's an admirable thing to try and do, but it puts a lot of pressure on a person in a way that doesn't acknowledge that those problems are systemic, and you cannot solve them alone. We till here, for example, I know a lot of people are not about tilling, but there's not like a one size fits all solution. Doing what you can to be a good person, to steward land, to be good to the people around you, to be a good provider of produce is what you can do, and you should do. That's your responsibility stepping into a role like that. I see people get down on themselves when they don't see the change that they want to happen because of the things that they're doing, and that's not their fault.”

“Through friends and community, we get hit up on a regular basis. Our fairly regular basis for youth groups to come out or like a school to come out or Mandy's Farm runs an agro-ability program for adults who have different needs, so we have a lot of those things happen on a somewhat regular basis. Last year, we had someone from Mandy's Farm’s agro-ability program who was an intern here, and he worked two days a week with a support staff person from Mandy's Farm. That was really fun, and we might have that again next year. People have asked to hold poetry readings or other little shindigs down here. We have parties and baby showers here. I've had my birthday here for the last two or three years. Those are the ways that, historically, it has been used by the community and the ways that it's currently being used by the community. In the future, I would love to continue to do educational stuff here. People who want to host things should reach out. Most of the year, the sun's out, the middle of the summer, you want to be here in the evening, and the middle of the winter, you want to be here midday, it's a really beautiful place to be for most of the season.”