Reciprocity

Summer is my favorite season, hands down. It always has been. Give me all the sunshine, all the daylight hours, all the air shimmering with tropical heat. I want to feel the sun in my bones. I want its rays to still be coursing through my body long after it sets. Send me into the greenhouse in midafternoon please, because I need that sweat.

My coworkers think I’m crazy. I think a humid greenhouse mimics the womb so it’s a comforting place to be, actually.

It seems only natural that summer is the season where I feel enlivened, the season in which I’m most excited and energetic. It would be a strange dissonance if this weren’t so—doesn’t all the life around me respond in similar manner to the summer sun? Our tomato plants are growing at least a foot a week right now; energy is just bursting forth from the earth, we can hardly keep up. And because we can hardly keep up—because each day is filled with life and the caretaking of that life—I am reminded that my life, too, must be carefully tended. It’s hotter for more hours so I’m sweating more - drink more water! I am pushing myself through accumulating fatigue - get more sleep! I am asking of my body a lot, exerting my muscles and tendons - get on that foam roller every night, use the neck massager, the rolflex, the rolling pin… the whole maintenance routine. Eat well. As I’ve said before, agricultural sustainability as a concept means nothing if farmers are not themselves being sustained. By all means, sacrifice for the farm—it is your duty—but recoup that sacrifice in time. Give of yourself, trusting that your animal self is meant to give, but then receive, trusting that your animal self is meant to receive.

We are not fully enclosed beings, though we like to think it. For all our contemporary talk of holding ‘boundaries,’ our bodies are not really so bounded. What are you breathing right now? Are you not exchanging molecules with the plant world, offering them your carbon dioxide while they in turn gift you with oxygen? And hitching a ride on those air currents (themselves utterly unbound, crisscrossing the planet) are pollen and dust and microscopic beings, all moving through your respiration. We sweat, a stroke of genius passed down by our fur-less mammalian ancestors, the law of thermodynamics cooling us down atmospherically. We eat, nourishing ourselves with other lives; we digest and then send the unusable or extra organic matter through our systems and out. We are held, every last cell of us, in a gravitational embrace by the earth. We hug and we cuddle, or throw ourselves grieving upon a friend’s shoulder, drawing some essential aspect of life—perhaps we can use that inexhaustible word love here—from the skin contact, from looking one another in the eyes.

Why not live into it?

Reciprocity is the very nature of life; it is the warp and weft of existence. The farm—being alive, being an ecosystem—holds us the farmers within it. Even though we commute to and from the property, we are part of the ecosystem. From the perspective of the farm, I imagine we are a migratory species; kind of like the birds we come, do our attentive work of living, and we go, following the sun’s own migration across the sky. We give the soil its nutrients, we give the seedlings a (relatively) safe start, we give irrigated water when the sky does not offer its rainfall. We supply to our plants what protection we can from pests and disease; we give our thoughtfulness and capacity for care. And we receive a bountiful harvest not only of food but of beauty, of camaraderie and communion (and, lest we be dishonest, an income!). We are bound together on this farm: all the humans and, in the phrase of David Abram, the more-than-human world. This giving and receiving is at the heart of it all, not only on the farm but in every breath each one of us takes. So long as we desire to be alive, this reciprocal exchange with other lives is inescapable—these other lives are, indeed, inescapably necessary.

When I was contemplating becoming a farmer, the strongest source of its appeal was its straightforwardness. I felt in my own life and in the world around me a kind of incoherence, a complicatedness that felt distracting, anesthetizing, hubristic. I didn’t want my one short precious life to be informed predominantly by those qualities. In contrast, I saw in an agricultural life a type of integrity that I found (and continue to find) irresistible. It is a way of life nearly antithetical to the kind I just described: good farming is attentive, not distracted; deeply feeling and embodied, not anesthetized; humbly serving, not proudly commanding. Perhaps most of all, it’s foundational. There is no civilization without agriculture. The whole of our lives rests upon our ability to grow, procure, and consume food. That’s what I wanted - to touch the foundations. I needed its sturdiness. I still do.

I believe most people want something similar, even though most people are not farmers and/or do not want to farm. Most of us desire to live attentive, embodied, neighborly lives in which we are aware of and blessed by the relational exchanges that surround and support us. Most of us want to feel close to the ground of our existence, even if the temptations of weightlessness swoop us up and away sometimes. To discern how we can move towards a life so richly textured, and then to act: this is for me the paramount call. The great difficulty, of course, is being a mere mortal and thus holding only a finite amount of power to bring to bear upon our environment and circumstances. Nevertheless, we have agency. We have hearts, minds, bodies, and we can place them in the service of our land and our neighbors.

At Lapa’au, we can offer you food (and flowers!). No more, no less. Depending on the season, there may be greater or lesser variation. Depending on the weather and the pests, there may be greater or lesser abundance. Depending on the workload and available hands, things may happen on time or… not on time. These are constraints, but they are also catalysts for creativity and intelligence. They can jumpstart our collective imagination for what is needed, for what might work better than before. A preeminent example is our CSA, which Michael and Lauren began when the pandemic hit. With Community Supported Agriculture programs, the consumer is connected directly to a farm and receives a variety of fresh, local produce. The payment for this multi-month arrangement is made upfront, meaning that farmers actually have a financial backstop when planning the year ahead. Rather than relying purely on credit or being only able to plan month to month, this program offers farmers a little bit of breathing room—a relative rarity in agriculture.

The Lapa’au CSA is a six month program in which we deliver to your doorstep a box of fresh produce every two weeks. Except various root crops that (having a much longer storage life) could have been harvested a week or two prior, everything that goes into the box is harvested a mere one or two days before delivery—if not that very morning. We strive to ensure that over the course of the program our customers receive a wide array of produce, some familiar, some novel; some flavors are sharp and fresh, some are rich in depth. You might even be unsure from time to time what vegetable we have placed in your care - but there’s the internet and your own tastebuds, so we trust you to do good work with it. Speaking from personal experience, it is difficult to overstate just how easily you raise the floor of your home-kitchen game with fresh high quality produce. I can attest to its power in making my in-laws believe I’m actually decent in the kitchen, and yall if that’s not testament enough I don’t know what is. (Lauren does try to make it easy on you too, she includes recipes each week for a bit of neighborly inspiration.)

To be honest, without our CSA we probably would not grow such a diverse assortment of crops. It’s an easy decision to make, financially speaking, to grow fewer varieties for fewer accounts. It requires less brain power, less time-intensive labor (less labor *period*), less keen vision and creativity. Economy of scale is the fancy term for this, I suppose. This sweet voice of temptation that so persuasively whispers when we are tired and our bank accounts are low—that’s the voice that always over-promises and under-delivers. That’s the voice that has done modern agriculture and its rural communities such a disservice, and that’s the voice that only the strong bonds of a rooted people can counter. If we are truly invested in our community, and if our community is invested in us, it is less difficult to make the wise decisions.

A wise farm is smaller, more diverse, more beautiful, more wild than a foolish farm. It has a greater eyes-to-acres ratio, as Wes Jackson says. It understands it is local—local land, climate, economy, people. It is full of curiosity and embraces its quirks. Its farmers, very simply, enjoy the work and enhance the liveliness of the place.

As I type this we’ve got, I dunno, sixty different varieties of crops in the ground right now on less than two acres. I think that’s awesome. A bunch of types of flowers, a bunch of varieties of tomatoes, different squashes, different beets, chard, artichoke, kohlrabi, onion, leeks, green onion, dill, cilantro, shiso, Thai basil, corn, multiple varieties of: peppers, cucumber, carrot, eggplant, potato, arugula, lettuces, beans. All that is in the ground right now, plus the oyster mushrooms in their house. (I’m probably missing some too.) We’re always fine-tuning, discovering new gaps we can fill in the market or just gaps in our own tastes we’re missing. Some tomatoes we won’t grow again because they are not productive enough or too susceptible to disease. We’ve tried one variety of cucumber that was a total bust for us, and another that was killer enough to bring back this year. Lapa’au—like its people, like its place—will never ultimately arrive. We will always be becoming.

In this way, I think our CSA is the most potent expression of Lapa’au’s reciprocal place within Maui. We’re going to try to take care of every advantage this particular land has to offer, tending it towards abundance, strengthening it as a cohesive ecosystem to which we are responsible. As we tend to this farm, attempting to improve it always, we too will improve. There is no doubt, for that is the core of the relationship between the land and the people that love it, that lovingly work it. And damn it makes for good veggies.

This produce is a harvest of the qualities I mentioned earlier: attentive, deeply feeling and embodied, humble. (Neighborly as well; we know how good this produce is so we want yall to be able to have it fresh, abundant, and often too.) Yes, our relationships with the restaurants and wholesalers are vital—they do, after all, constitute a majority of our annual revenue—but it is another thing entirely to harvest, process, pack, and deliver our favorite vegetables (and some fruits and fungi) straight to the homes of individuals and families. If you’re part of the CSA, we know you have chosen us; this place has connected our lives. And you have chosen, in effect, to participate in the life of the farm by sharing alongside us the burden of agriculture’s inherent economic risks. You have chosen the continuity of a relationship with us—and the kind of mutual respect earned only over time.

Mary Berry, daughter of one of my icons Wendell Berry, asks, “How can farmers afford to farm well, and how do we become a culture that will support good farming?” Our CSA members are living towards this through their participation, and we work hard to farm well because we respect the hell out of their choice to join in this agricultural life with us. Every week we emphasize selecting a wide array of produce, we harvest as fresh as possible, and we deliver it in as good quality as we can to Maui residents. It is a microcosm of our values, and we trust that buying into our CSA is a reflection of yours—your commitment to becoming part of a culture that supports good farming, a world where farmers can afford to farm well.

Reciprocity is not only about the present; we are responsible to our shared future as well. The summer CSA is a fun one - take a look if you’re interested. If you’re not, no worries; we’ll be here when you are.