Small-scale Food Initiatives in Southwest Minnesota:
Oral History Project 2012-13
Institute for Advanced Study
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Interviewee: Sunny Ruthchild
Merryweather Gardens
Lamberton, MN, July 16, 2012
Interviewer: Peter Shea
Transcriber: Gabrielle Orfield
Interview and transcription archived at:
https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/taxonomy/term/845
MHS Grant Number: 1110-08587
This project has been made possible by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund
through the vote of Minnesotans on November 4, 2008.
Administered by the Minnesota Historical Society.
Sunny Ruthchild: Well, I actually grew up here. I grew up in Minnesota. I grew up just three
quarters of a mile from where we are right now, and I left when I finished high school because
pretty much young people were urged to leave. I think the reason we were all urged to leave
was because the thought of living in the city seems like an easier life. One of the main
problems with living in the country is that you come to realize that you’re not in control. This
particular moment where we have this intense heat and drought that is just going on and on is
the perfect example. The crops are firing. If we don’t get rain very shortly, the rain is going to
fire, as they say, which means it’s going to not produce; it’s going to die. The soybeans won’t
mature. For those of us who are raising table food crops, it’s very difficult to get a crop at all
this year. The strawberries were small and misshapen. The raspberries are not forming up.
The garlic went down a month early and it is much smaller than normal. You can do
absolutely everything that you know to make things work, but you’re not in control. You
cannot control any of the big factors when you’re living in the country and I think that’s one
of the reasons that those of us who were born after World War II, our parents really felt that if
we went to the city and got an education, we could get a more controlled life, but of course
that’s an illusion. I left and went to school, was a VISTA volunteer and traveled a bit and
moved to the west coast and had a couple businesses there, but my heart longed to be back in
the country. Then when my parents were getting very old, I cut a deal with my dad that I
would come back and help with whatever parent survived if he let me live in this beat up old
house. He died first and he in fact gave me this house with a little bit of land. So I came back
and helped with my mom as best I could. While it’s isolated and my social group is too small
and there are problems of that sort, I totally love it here. I really don’t regret this decision at
all; I like it here. So, that’s how I arrived here.
Why I do what I do? Well, what I am doing is I am a believer in sustainability. I am a believer
in ecology, that it is very important that people eat food, like other creatures, that is raised as
close as possible to where they live. We are a member of a community here. In my case, I am
a member of this community of soil, this community of animals, this community of plants.
The more I build myself out of the other members of this community, the better I will fit in
here and the healthier I will be. This is what I believe. I’m here. I study diligently and I am
building the soil life as best I can. I am saving water and using the ground water as little as I
can. I’m trying to be sustainable; I’m trying not to waste. I’m also trying to build a food
community here in this neighborhood of so many miles around here. That’s what I’m doing.
Peter Shea: Tell us a little bit about your studies.
Sunny: As a beginning college student, I studied sociology and psychology and criminology,
a lot of social science and got a degree in psychology. Then I became a VISTA volunteer and
worked in the Civil Rights Movement. I came back and got a degree in education and I taught
for a few years. Then I moved to the west coast and started seriously studying plants. I started
studying soils. Then when I came back here, I started studying for my doctorate in
naturopathy, which I’ve completed now. That is basically the study in deep ecology: how
your body lives in its environment and how you can make decisions to enhance the way your
body develops, and your mind and spirit, for that matter.
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Peter: Can you tell us something about what you’ve done with this land since you’ve been
here?
Sunny: Okay, I had been learning. I grew up on a farm; I had gardened a lot as a child, but
then I left for many years. Coming back and learning this environment again has been a little
bit like a beginner’s world. What I’m doing is I seem to naturally accept that you build health
from the soil up. The quality of the plants that a soil produces is way down the food chain in
plants. If you want nutrient dense food, then you help the things that live in the soil to be
vibrant and alive and very ample. So, I compost constantly. I mulch heavily. I try not to water
with groundwater; I try to only use rainwater. All of my fertilizing happens in the fall. I don’t
use any fertilizers at all in spring. In other words, I don’t feed the plants that grow above the
ground at all. I feed the plants and creatures that live in the soil. I believe that that’s the right
way to do it. I know that my food tastes good. I’m trying to be as self-sustaining as I can. I
raise not only fruits and vegetables; I’m also raising as much of my own meat as I can. I try to
treat all of my creatures with deepest respect. So this goes to that part about I’ve made a
commitment as best that I can to not eat prisoners. I believe that your body is built out of what
you put in it, and that includes the energy of the food more than anything else. I mean, there
are minerals and vitamins and proteins to worry about, but that all breaks down to energy. If
you have happy critters that are providing your meat, that’s the kind of energy you’re taking
in. If you have happy fruits and vegetables that are living in a supported environment without
chemicals and stimulants, that’s the kind of energy you’re taking in. Theoretically, that should
build your healthiest body. Going back to what we were talking about earlier, the meat is
really intense food. So, if you’re a meat eater, if you purchase a cow or a pig that has been
raised on pasture, having a life, running around, not imprisoned, that’s the kind of energy you
take in. If you eat meat that has been raised in confinement and is intensely packed together
and is wishing to escape and is angry and frustrated, then that’s the kind of energy you’ll take
in. It’s a serious concern for me. The cost is of course a serious factor. A lot of people won’t
buy, for example, grass-fed beef or pasture pork because it’s pricy, whereas they can go to the
grocery store and buy much less expensive pork or beef that was raised in confinement.
Here’s the key, if you look at the bodies of people who eat pasture pork or grass-fed beef,
they tend to be leaner and more athletic. My belief is that’s because that’s what they’re taking
in. Perhaps if you eat food that costs a little, you’ll eat a little less. Perhaps if you eat food that
is raised to be nutrient dense, you’ll be satisfied better and you won’t be craving food so much.
Your body will reflect the fact that you’re eating nutrient dense rather than calorie dense food.
Peter: When I was asking, there’s a lot going on above the surface here. The orchard, the
ovens, the garlic operation. I don’t think people will realize without a little bit of a tour just
how much can be done on a…how many acres have you got here?
Sunny: I have fourteen acres, but probably five of it is shelter-belt, which is very necessary
out here. We have amazing winds out here and extreme cold and weather conditions. I think I
probably have five acres under tillage. Five acres you can raise a great deal of food, with
rotations, without repeating the same crop in the same spot. I have planted a pretty extensive
shelterbelt on the southwest corner because that’s where I find the most damaging winds
come from. While it’s growing, some of the trees are up to about eight feet or so; I’ve found
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that if I make planting beds in between the rows of trees (the trees are twenty feet apart so
there’s plenty of space) —I go down the middle and I make this bed for strawberries,
asparagus, tomatoes, whatever—the trees grow better. The trees aren’t getting more water.
They’re not getting additives in the fall or anything, but going down the center is this other
species, this nurtured crop. By default, the trees get attention. They get talked to. The trees
grow faster if I have a garden bed going down the middle, which is kind of fun. But yes, I
think that on five or six acres, you have all the work you can do, as a single person and
probably as a couple. I know people with more mechanization can handle more than that, but
I like hands-on. I like being very intimate with my work. This is enough. I love my fruit trees.
I love my fruit trees. This spring, after I made my clay oven, I learned about cob- these
different building materials you make that are based on clay. I was reading Michael Phillips’
books about holistic orchard growing. He’s says, well you know, those tree trunks really
appreciate a spa treatment. If you go out there in the spring, you mix some fresh cow manure
and some clay from your land together and you smear it on the trunks, your trees will thrive.
So I did it this spring. And guess what? Despite this heat and this drought, my trees are
thriving and they still have got their spa treatment on them. I do spray the trees a lot, but I use
no chemicals. I use fish emulsion and I use neem oil for bugs and I use a little kelp in the
water and a few effective enzymes to build what’s happening on the leaves. The trees like that.
By building the immune system of the tree, I use nothing to kill anything. I like that; that
pleases me. I do pull thistles; I will admit that. That’s part of the game.
Peter: You mentioned the project of building a food community here. Say a bit about that.
Sunny: Well, you know how cultures are. They get going on thought and there’s mendacity.
Mendacity is such a good word. This concept that a whole lifestyle can be built on something
that has marginal or no truth; it can be built on a lie. We have that going here. We have this
concept that farming can be done like a factory, that you can grow this fields of corn and
soybeans almost as though it was hydroponics. You plant the corn, you feed it chemicals, you
spray it, and you kill everything you don’t will. And you usually, God-willing, you get huge
crops and fortunately, the farmers can make a great deal of money, but what’s missing is that
it isn’t food they’re growing. What they’re growing is a commodity that will be altered very
seriously and used as fuel and then fed in an artificial environment or processed into packaged
food that have very little nutrition left in them, unless artificial nutrition is added to it. At the
same time, here we are in some of the richest farmland in the world, and it’s hard to find table
food. It is hard to find good, clean, health-enhancing food. There are many people who have
small gardens and raise a bunch of food for their own family. Many of those people in
southwest Minnesota, which is a 13-county area, there’s probably a hundred of those people
who have surplus and take it to farmer’s markets and sell it. That’s really good. I’m glad
because those little tiny gardens that are loved and cared for where people spend their
evenings and their mornings and their Saturdays, that’s top quality food. There’s nothing but
good energy going into that food. So that’s really good, but there’s a problem about schools.
Farm to school is a great idea; it’s a fabulous idea. I know that the Statewide Health
Improvement Program is committed to it and is trying really hard to make it flourish, but the
problem is that the producers aren’t cooperating. So I say to myself, “Why are the producers
not cooperating?” Well, I think they aren’t because, number one, if you look at the bottom
line, the cold, hard facts, you can’t make a living. You can work your tail off, but you can’t
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make the bottom line be enough to support yourself and your family, no matter how hard you
work on it. You have to have a day job or another means of income. So you go off and do
whatever it takes to make the money that you need to live on and then your gardening, your
food production, has to be secondary. So they have small gardens and they sell small amounts.
There’s just not enough to deal with this huge market that is the schools. Schools are huge
markets. If you think about the number of children who have to be fed at least one meal a day,
that’s more food than we could presently produce. The reason we can’t produce it is because
it’s not lucrative enough. I see that building the food community needs to involve a couple of
things. It needs to involve, first of all, producers being willing to produce enough to feed the
kids. This is big. We need to know who the players are. We need to know who’s involved so
we can start talking to each other, so we can start planning, so we can start (each of us)
increasing our production. We need a consciousness-raising thing going on so that people will
spend the extra dollar to buy the top quality food so that the food producers can afford to raise
the food. This is a major change that has to happen. We need a renaissance here. We need
people to understand that it’s like buying a pair of shoes. If you buy a cheap pair of shoes, you
will have a cheap pair of shoes that might even look good, but how long will they last and
what will they do to your feet? Or you could buy a really nice pair of shoes that cost a fair
amount of money, but they’ll feel good on your feet and they will be good for ten years. It’s
the same with food. If you take in really good quality, high-energy food, your medical bills
are going to be reduced tremendously. Much more than the extra money you’d be spending on
food. In fact, somebody figured it out and they said you get three times the benefit. So, the
food community that needs to arise has to consider these factors. How can we make the public
aware enough to pay what it costs to raise the food? How can we get the producers to trust
that if they put the time and energy into increasing their productivity that they will be
adequately rewarded for it? That’s what I think. There’s actually a community of maybe
twenty people in southwest Minnesota who really would like to raise food for a living. The
young couple near Lucan figured it out last year and after spending their year raising very
good quality food doing a CSA, they figured they made about two dollars an hour. And they
have a family at risk. This economic environment makes it really difficult if you’re making
two dollars an hour.
Peter: I think the Farm to School movement arose when I was sleeping. Could you tell us a
little bit about that?
Sunny: I actually don’t know the history of it. I’ve been aware of the program for a few years
and basically it seems to focus on school food directors, giving them incentives to buy from
local people. So if they are open to buying from local people, then they get these machines to
make their work easier, to save them time and so on. I have met a half a dozen food service
directors in schools around here who are great people, who are more than open to local people
bringing food and really want to provide fresh and local food for the kids. The problems are
that they have a budget crunch always and so they’ve had to cut staff. If you bring in fresh
produce that hasn’t been trimmed and cleaned up and packaged or “minimally processed” I
guess it’s called, then that has to be done at the school. Potatoes have to be peeled and
quartered or broccoli has to be trimmed and chopped and they don’t have a person to do it.
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There’s a need for education of producers as to what is required to make their produce fully
acceptable to the school. If they go through the extra work to prepare this, then the schools
will buy it. There’s a little bit of a standoff and we need to get past that. So, what we have
going right now is I’m a conservation supervisor for our county. We will be doing an Area 5
(which is southwest Minnesota) meeting in Redwood Falls in September and it will be a
political awareness program. All of the candidates who are running for anything will be there
for all of the conservation people to interact with and we will be serving lunch. We’re going
to do a local foods lunch. This is a first. I know it isn’t up in the cities, but it is for here. The
food service director for the Redwood Falls schools is going to be cooking; she’ll be the chef.
She’ll coordinate it all. Now we just have to find enough local people to produce enough food
to feed 85 people on that day. This is a step. You know, it’s like step by step. Like the local
foods catalog, where we list out everybody we can find that produces food, all of the school
people who are open to it.
You were asking about Farm to School, weren’t you? I think it’s a matter of building
confidence. We have to do things to make the local producers confident that they can sell to
the schools and get a fair price and not get there and have their stuff rejected or whatever. In
terms of turning the economy for local food producers, the school is a huge market. If we
would start producing even 20% of the food that is sold at schools, it would greatly enhance
the income of all these local food producers. I mean, if they knew they had a market, for
example, think of the potatoes that a school goes through. I mean, there’s mashed potatoes,
there’s baked potatoes, there’s herb potatoes and of course, there’s French fries. Every week,
if a school has 800 to 1,000 students, think of how many potatoes that is per school. It’s huge.
That’s an acre of potatoes and it’s a lot of money, whereas now you raise a few, take them to
the farmer’s market and hope to sell them. Suddenly you could sell 800 pounds of potatoes in
a week? This is encouraging. Same with tomatoes: pizza sauce. If people had a way to trim
and roast their tomatoes and make them into pizza sauce and sold that to the schools, the
schools would be getting a far superior product, a much fresher product. That would be the
value added. They would get twice as much for their tomatoes as they would get at the
farmer’s market. The economics are serious.
Peter: You’ve got a kitchen experiment going, to play around with this value added stuff.
Could you tell a bit about that?
Sunny: Yes, so I have a very small bank. I love to say that I bought the bank, but the truth is
it’s 120 years old and was pretty terribly dilapidated. My goal is to put a commercial,
Department of Health approved, kitchen on the main floor where local producers can come
and do things like roast their tomatoes and make the pizza sauce. Or take broccoli, onions,
carrots and peapods and trim them and put them into packages as stir-fry. Or another person
who wants take locally grown, freshly milled grain and make bread. When you take your
product that you raised yourself and is picked at the prime time and do these trims and these
minimal processing, you can increase your profit quite a bit. I think that the statistics show
that’s what we have to do. I think we have to sell to the schools. I think we have to accept the
fact that we have to sell to the schools and we have to meet the requirements that the school
has to meet. That means we need an approved kitchen where people can come and do their
minimal processing so that they can then take it to the schools and the schools are happy to
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receive it. They get 50 percent more for their product instead of the canning company in
California getting that 50 percent. In terms of sustainability, this would be a huge shot in the
arm for a particular group of people who could really use a little extra money here. This is not
top-down. This is absolutely bottom-up economy building and that pleases me. Just like I treat
the dirt, I like that bottom-up stuff.
Peter: I was visiting with a producer down by the Iowa border the other day, Bill Brandt. The
thing that was bugging me the whole time was, given the population density out here, where
do you get your market to keep your operation going?
Sunny: The schools are there. I mean it’s not easy. Farm to school has been going for, I don’t
know, at least three or four years and it is still struggling. It is struggling. Most of the schools
don’t do any Farm to School, and those that do around here in southwest Minnesota, where
big commercial farm is the mode. Down here, a school may purchase from four or five
producers, but that’s about it. That’s small. That’s why I say we need a renaissance. We need
an awakening to the fact that there’s this huge market that needs our service. That’s the ready
market. The steps are that the producers need to understand good agricultural practices, they
have to understand post-harvest handling, they have to understand cool and dry, cool and
clean, but it’s common sense. If we just take a little bit of energy and tell the producers what
is required, I believe that they would understand that they could meet that. We might very
well have to do some cooperative work. The kitchen that I’m talking about is meant to be a
cooperative effort, you know. You present the kitchen and you invite people to come. We
need someone who caters with local foods. This would be a huge step if someone catered with
local foods. The kitchen would be there; they could come in and buy from local people for the
Chamber of Commerce Annual Banquet. It would be a win-win-win, all the way around
situation. The market is there; it is there in the schools. I don’t think there is anything more
important. There is some great saying that I probably won’t get right, but it’s something like,
“It is easier to build a healthy child than it is to fix a broken man.” If we could get the kids
eating healthy food, again it’s a win-win-win; everybody wins. Instead of going home and
drinking soda pop and eating chips or whatever kids do when they get home, if they actually
wanted a good carrot, this would be a huge step forward.
Peter: I have a friend at a local nursing home and she makes the same point about nursing
home kitchens and nursing home food, all of these big institutions. I know at some point in
your career, you supplied major quantities of garlic to food chains in the cities, so when we’ve
talked earlier, I’ve thought about your ideas in connection with getting good food to the big
city where there’s a huge market. Have you given up on that in favor of this kind of local
cycle?
Sunny: You know, I have. I’ve actually really moved on that point. Accepting the ecology
perspective. Just a little while ago, you said to me, “Ask and it will be provided.” This is how
I feel about a lot of things. What you need is immediately at hand. It is already there
immediately at hand. You just have to wise up to be able to see it. I believe that when it
comes to food that this is a very important point. We need to be part of the community of soil.
We need to eat food raised as close to where we are as possible. This is basic ecology. This is
one of those points that tends to go right over our heads. We like olives. We like bananas. We
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like oranges; so do I. The majority of what we eat should be raised locally. Those of us who
are fortunate enough to raise food locally, we need to feed our immediate community first.
Then if there’s some left over, then it goes out to the next ring. It should start here. It should
stay here. We should build healthy bodies here.
Peter: That is a move.
Sunny: Yes.
Peter: What kind of reception have you found for these ideas among the people living around
you here?
Sunny: When you talk one-on-one with people, if the thoughts that you are presenting are
new and foreign, you get strange looks. It takes several exposures to an alternative concept
before it makes sense to a person, as a general rule. This is me talking about me here. I have
found in the years I’ve been here, that I have said things…it’s like, who was it? Schopenhauer.
The first time you present a truth, it is ridiculed. The second time you present it, it meets with
violent opposition. The third time you present it, it is accepted as self-evident. I think that is
how it is with lots of things, certainly with thoughts. When I first came here, for example, I
was raising garlic. I came here and I was looking for a crop that I could grow and I noticed
that the native lilies, the little plantains and the asparagus that grows wild in the ditches. I saw
the lilies did pretty well and I thought, “I wonder about garlic,” because I happen to be a huge
lover of garlic. Also, I had planted onions, and onions did very well. Then I thought, “I’m
going to try the garlic thing.” So one fall, I planted a bunch of garlic. And the next year I had
gorgeous garlic. Over the years, I began building my garlic crop and I’ve tended to have
really fine crops. The first few years that I raised garlic, I peddled garlic around here. I
peddled garlic. I went to restaurants. I went to farmer’s markets. I went everywhere I could
and I had a heck of a time. I managed to sell a little bit of garlic, but it took a whole lot of
work. Well now, I am at the other end of the spectrum: I cannot raise enough garlic to satisfy
the market. Now, I go to a farmer’s market and they wipe me out. I go to a different farmer’s
market; they wipe me out. I go to Garlic Festival and sell several thousand bulbs in an
afternoon. You get people used to the idea that they can eat garlic. You can actually get
Swedes and English people to eat garlic. It doesn’t happen the first year, but after a while, if
you do enough garlic tastings, you make roasted garlic butter, people start liking garlic.
I think you can do that with all kinds of good nutritious food. The place where I don’t think
we’re making much headway is in meat. Maybe it’s because so many health-conscious people,
people who take the step to be responsible about what they eat, many of those people go
vegetarian. That sort of makes pasture feeding not a significant thing. People around here are
caught in the cycle of raising grain, having grain products fed to the animals, and then having
the animals marketed back. They feel this loyalty to eat the grain-fed meat. It’s part of their
cycle. Why would they buy pasture pork or grass fed beef when they are raising corn and
soybeans, and those corn and soybeans, after they’re processed, get fed to the cattle. Well, if
you don’t buy that product, then you’re being disloyal to your own business, sort of. That one
is hard to sell. I mean, there is some market. Those of us who think it’s not smart to eat
prisoners, if we’re going to eat meat, we will do our best to always have free range poultry,
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grass fed beef or pasture pork. That one is a real hard one to convince. The vegetables? The
farmer’s markets are doing better and better. When I started the farmer’s market in Walnut
Grove, there really weren’t active farmer’s markets around, and now, when I was researching
for the local food catalog, I found 25 farmer’s markets in southwest Minnesota. Those of you
who live in the city might not find it phenomenal that every town has a farmer’s market, but
it’s a major change here in the last five or six years. That means that people are starting to buy
from farmer’s markets. There are two parts to a farmer’s market: there are the people bringing
the stuff and they have to be there and there are the people who are buying the stuff and they
have to be there. You can’t have just one. So, if the farmer’s markets are proliferating, that
means that the people who are buying from farmer’s markets are proliferating. There is a
consciousness coming, particularly in fruits and vegetables.
Peter: Is anything happening with restaurants? It seems like they would be the cutting-edge
educating places where people would taste something better than they got at home and get
inspired to pursue that more often.
Sunny: It seems that it takes a certain population base to make that work. I don’t know what
the latest census is, but Marshall is probably around 15,000 people now. A few years back,
there was a restaurant in Marshall that tried to sell local produce, but it didn’t work and they
went back to commercial commodities. Brookings has a really nice restaurant that sells almost
exclusively local and that population supports it, so that’s succeeding. I was just talking to the
economic development (person) from Redwood Falls today and she told me that there is a
gentleman who is planning in the next year to put together a restaurant that uses local foods in
Redwood Falls, which is a population of 6,000 or something. We’ll see how well that goes.
Overall, restaurants will not buy from local producers. They have a food service that comes
around in the truck and they can order it and get what they want and that’s cool. Again there’s
the need for the kitchen. We need the minimal processing and the trimming and keeping the
waste on the farm. Time is so important to restaurant people. Maybe if they could get the food
in closer to usable form maybe they would use more local stuff. Hey, the fact that there’s
going to arguably be two or three…well, there’s one in Currie now also that tries to use local
foods as much as they can. It’s coming! One step at a time.
I don’t know when this notion of global economy in food really reached its zenith, but it kind
of got stuck here. It’s partly because we have huge farms. We have farms that are thousands
of acres. Those farms raise corn and soybeans. Like we said earlier, there’s this loyalty to
their own production, their own mode. They will buy corn chips before they’ll buy corn on
the cob. That was so. It’s less so now; now people like corn on the cob again. I’m happy about
that.
Peter: I just talked to a beef producer who was feeling guilty, but implanted beef just doesn’t
taste good. They eat their own. Also on this visit, I talked to a restaurant person who said,
“When the farmers actually come to me with produce, I buy it, but I can’t go to them. I don’t
have time.” And of course, farmers don’t have time to walk produce around to restaurants
either.
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Sunny: They might. Producers might have time to go to schools or restaurants, but they don’t
have time to peddle farm to farm or house to house. I, at one point, didn’t do a CSA, but I did
a pick-your-own-vegetables. I thought this was a good way to go. Get people to come out and
they can pick their own stuff. It would cut my time down a little bit and people like to choose;
they like to pick their own. I found that people would come out and they’d want two tomatoes
and a pepper and they’d be here for an hour. While that’s entertaining, it was like two and a
half dollars and it took an hour of my time. I don’t have that. I’m fourteen hours a day in the
field until it gets ninety degrees, so that was not efficient. The idea of going house to house
and selling two and a half dollars at each house is not efficient. This concept of time is an
interesting thing that has developed where no one has time. Everyone has become extremely
occupied. This is one of the wonderful luxuries of living in the country. I work off a list
instead of a schedule as much as I can. It gives me a tremendous sense of freedom of time. I
choose what I’m doing. I can do my favorite thing first. If you start with your favorite thing,
your attitude stays pretty good. This thing about time and schedules and phone calls…the
more I live in the country, the more strange that seems to me. It’s not that a person in the
country, or a food producer in particular, spends four hours working. We spend many hours
working. It’s that if you are choosing what you’re doing, the stress factor disappears or at
least is greatly reduced.
Peter: It was the stress of not controlling your life that drove everybody to the city.
Sunny: Exactly! There we go. I came face to face with that shortly after I came back here.
One of the big differences between business people that I have known in the city and farmers
wasn’t the size of their capital investment or probably not the number of hours they work. It’s
that the person who lives in the city and is a businessperson, if they fail, everybody knows it’s
their fault. Whereas a person who lives in the country does everything they can do and if they
succeed, they say a prayer. If they fail, they say a prayer because they know they aren’t in
control. It’s not their fault. I mean, it could be their fault if they screwed everything up, but if
they did everything right, it’s not their fault and they don’t have to live with guilt, whereas in
the city, if he fails or she fails, it’s their fault.
Peter: I suppose this interview is going to work a little bit like a commercial for country life.
It has that role just because of who it goes to.
Sunny: Well it is a superior way to live.
Peter: Well, I kind of gathered you thought that from your first discourses. Does time hang
heavy here like in the evening?
Sunny: I’m not a huge advocate of a lot of technology. I really feel like it’s like way over the
bar. On the other hand, I love having the Internet and I love having Netflix. I love having
books, so it doesn’t. For one thing, in the summer, what time is it now? 9:20. How fine is
this? How fine a life is this? The time that weighs heavy is when it is beastly hot in the middle
of the day and I have things to do and I can’t do them because I’d just melt. Not in the
evenings. The evenings are beautiful. The colors are fabulous. The wind is lovely, the breeze.
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I do love a good book. I still have a lot of friends who live in faraway places and I love having
e-mail and being in touch with them.
Peter: The Internet is a player in making life bearable.
Sunny: It actually is.
Peter: A friend working on broadband in Minnesota will be very gratified to hear that.
Sunny: It’s actually hard to remember life without it.
Peter: Remembering back to when I was growing up, there was a lady in the community, the
wife of a pretty prosperous farmer, who was the idea person. Everybody knew she was the
idea person. You know, so what new thing does she…she was the person who introduced me
to yoga in like 1965 or something. She was always full of ideas and I think she probably had a
great life. I also think it’s remarkable that people didn’t name two; she was the idea person. Is
that the kind of role you’ve fallen into out here?
Sunny: For good or bad. It’s a complex thing, but yes, I suspect so.
Peter: How does that feel to you? Do you wish you had more people to play with?
Sunny: Absolutely.
Peter: More idea people with weird ideas. More people who say, if you don’t sing to your
plants, you can’t do anything.
Sunny: It’s interesting to hear that Chuck Reinert is your cousin because he’s an idea person.
He was one of the first friends I made when I came back. I’m real fond of him. There is a
tendency toward orthodoxy here. This is something that is of necessity going to soften. This
notion that there is a way we do things; we are set and there is a way we do things and that
way is right. If you don’t do things that way, then you’re bad. I’m happy to say that I think
that’s softening. That’s hard on people like me.
Peter: Are you getting young farmers, new farmers, people who got tired of the city coming
in round about you?
Sunny: The Land Stewardship Project is doing their best on that. They have Farm Beginnings
Program and I know several young farmers who have gone through their Farm Beginnings
Program and have come back. The two that I know both have gone back into their family’s
operation and are modifying it or doing something adjacent to it or something, so they do
have family backing which I think is very important. I think Land Stewardship is doing a
good thing with their Farm Beginnings Program. My nephew who farms my farmland has
taken over my brother’s operation. He has, by default, family backing. He got trained and he
didn’t go through Farm Beginnings; he’s more of a conventional farmer. He’s a good man and
he’s a young farmer. The average age of farmer is way too high. The average farmers around
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here are not spring chickens anymore. It is a serious concern. Who is going to take over the
farms? Or are they going to consolidate more and go from 2,000 acres to 4,000 acres to 6,000
acres? I don’t think that can happen because I think the size of the equipment is going to be
prohibitive. This is clay soil. You get any bigger machine and they’re going to be mired in the
mud. That’s my hope, actually, I suppose. It is a serious concern, where we’re going to get
our young farmers. I have three sons, all of whom are outdoor type guys. All of them dig in
the dirt and love to be active with their hands, but none of them want to come and take on my
project here, which is kind of sad to me. They grew up in Washington State so they think that
is the perfect place, whereas I grew up here so I think this is the perfect place.
Peter: You were mentioning before that the original farmstead kind of land, like what we’re
sitting on right here, this few acres, is sufficient for pretty substantial fruit and vegetable
production and isn’t really much good for much else.
Sunny: The areas are too small. There are these opportunities here. Many of these farmsteads
have been vacated. They are in disrepair. There aren’t enough people who want to live in the
country and fight the winter, deal with the winter. Young people have moved to the cities.
There’s a brain drain, blah blah. All of this stuff. When I was a child, there were I think eight
families within a mile of where I grew up. Eight families. Eight houses, eight barns, eight
places with five to seven acres right around the buildings that were used for various things
having to do with living and raising of the table food. Now there’s probably one per square
mile, on the average. One family, maybe two. All those other houses, which would be six
houses empty. Six barns not being used. Six places with five to ten acres that are fallow
because the space is too small for the big equipment. Perfect opportunity for table food
growers. Perfect opportunity for organic orchards, for garlic fields, for potato growers or
whatever. Perfect! If we could just find the people who wanted to do it. They could probably
rent for $500 a month, no problem. They could probably buy them for a fraction of what the
land is worth. This would be a way to provide all that food that we need for the schools. The
pieces are here; we just have to get them to connect. We have to break through that orthodox
thinking and we have to empower the producers to think they can make a living. As it stands
right now, they can’t make a living and that will keep everything from happening. These are
steps that need to be taken. These old farmsteads are perfect for raising the kind of production
that I think would definitely enhance the health of the people of this community. Definitely.
Peter: I know stuff has changed enough in the last while that it’s difficult to predict the future
because you get new ideas and things redirect. What’s your guess about what you’ll be doing
the next ten years?
Sunny: This is at least a twenty-year project I’m on and I’m 66. I think of all the people I
know who have become octogenarians or whatever and the thing they all seem to have in
common is that they are all active. The ones who live around here who live to be 80 or 90 are
all hard-working active. They are outside and they are gardening and they are engaged. What
are the alternatives? Besides, I love to do what I’m doing. What to do with the rest of my life?
Why not do what I really love to do, especially since I believe that will keep me healthy for
the rest of my life. If I’m lucky, one day, I will just wake up dead. Most of my projects will be
at a reasonable state of completion.
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Peter: Well I hope we get a number of interviews out of you before that happens.
Sunny: That’d be good.
Peter: Just from the standpoint of my 20-year project, which is now 20 years in and another
20 will finish it. Thank you, Sunny.
Sunny: Thank you.
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