elderly farmers multiple times over the growing season. It seemed so logical: there was a cohort of aging old-timey farmers that knew the old ways and I had recruited a gaggle of able-bodied youth, eager to learn what they knew. It was my hope that the extended exposure of the two groups to one another would build trust and facilitate the students being able to glean fantastic seeds and rich stories about them as well as hands on knowledge of how to work with the seeds to sustain their lives. To me it was a perfect alignment of county resources; what farmer would not want free labor?
To recruit community elders to the study, I reached out to county residents that I had known for years; they were elderly folks that I knew saved seeds and would be fantastic sources of knowledge for our project. In my mind they were my aces in the hole of the study; I thought the older farmers were one piece that I really didn’t have to worry about falling into place. I could not have been more wrong. Although I began reaching out to folks in late April, the seed saving group did not meet with their first elder until the second week of July. I had
underestimated the impact of age. Acquaintance after acquaintance reported being too sick, too injured or just plain too tired to put out a garden. On one hand I felt validated; here was empirical evidence corroborating my narrative that traditional ways of farming in Bailey County were literally dying out. On the other hand, I was dismayed that participant recruitment was so difficult.
After coming to the end of the list of farmers I knew and still having no luck, I followed the snowball protocol of participant recruitment (Patton, 1990). By relying on the people I knew as traditional gardeners to refer me to other people who put out gardens the old way, I followed a
precedent set for ethnobotanical research in Western North Carolina (Veteto, 2008, 2013). Unfortunately, I had no luck with that second tier of potential participants either.
The interactions I had with Mrs. Simmons were an exemplar of how difficult it was to get an old-time farmer to agree to have a group of kids come out and help them in the garden. Mr. and Mrs. Simmons had been recommended to me by multiple sources; I had one old-timey farming couple identify the Simmons as the people they go to with questions. I got Mrs. Simmons on the phone and she and I had an enjoyable conversation; she “allowed” that the project was a great idea but each time I pitched that we come out and help her, she deflected, saying, “Well, if I run in to anything we need help with, I’ll give you a call.”
After a month of encountering these polite demurs again and again, I realized the flaw in my study design. The plan to have kids volunteer for old-timey farmers was unconsciously rooted in an industrial production model of agriculture, a model that inscribes process inputs - "labor" - as uniform. In industrial commodity production, it doesn't matter who is staking tomatoes or hoeing your beans as long as the work is getting done. The "owner" of the farm should be happy to have the free help.
Traditional family gardens, of course, have nothing to do with industrial commodity production. Family gardens are intimate spaces in which family members perform the ceremony of raising the food that will feed them throughout the year. The people who work in the gardens are not anonymous, interchangeable units of labor. For all they knew we were bumbling
neophytes asking to participate in a sacred ritual without being even a baseline initiate. Why in the world would a farmer want a bunch of gangly teenagers stamping around their precious gardens?
This second misguided assumption was borne of a marriage of unchecked academic arrogance and industrialist assumptions. Like my experience with Meghan, it is important to highlight these occurrences not just as instances of reflexivity, but as data that point directly to the perniciousness of the coloniality of being. To prepare for the study, I had spent months reading about coloniality’s persistent structuring of our lives (Mignolo, 2007; Quijano, 2011) and paid specific attention to writings about disrupting the coloniality of being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Richardson, 2012). Still, my own colonial/modern assumptions ran deep enough to blind me to the ways in which I built colonial/modern assumptions into the study design.
The parallels between industrial agriculture and the neoliberal education are hard to ignore. As colonial/modern constructs, both reduce life to non-living entities, units, categories, anonymous roles in systems. It is frightening for me to think - and hard to admit - that my day job probably influenced my decision making in this project. Did I see the students as inputs in an industrial production process because I look at them all day as score sets on spreadsheet? Am I so indoctrinated by the habitus of 21st century neoliberal commodification, so hypnotized by processes of thingification (Cesaire, 1972) that I mistook a family’s front yard for a factory floor? Apparently.
So I changed my model and began looking for traditional farmers that would be willing to simply meet with us and talk about gardening and seed saving. I advertised through the schools; I placed a flyer in the school mailbox of nearly 200 faculty and staff members at the middle schools and high school. I also continued to work through my own network of
acquaintances. Ultimately we spoke with seven Bailey County residents either at their homes or, later on in the research period, at the high school during the students’ lunch period.