Jevin Lauver ’26,
Strength to Love II Farm is not the kind of farm I’m used to seeing. There are no sprawling hills and fields, nor livestock, nor creeks running through the grounds. It’s a series of rows of crops contained inside of several hoop-houses, which function like greenhouses and maintain humidity inside of their tarp coverings.
Together, our group helped weed out one of the hoop-houses in order to prepare it for planting. Everybody was very optimistic about the experience and I appreciated our group’s dedication to the work.
I particularly enjoyed our meeting with Baltimore farmer, photographer, and author Shae McCoy, who works at the farm we visited. Her insight on how communities develop and her own role at both the farm and in Baltimore as a whole was interesting to listen to.
Later on, I went on a walk with Chaplain Kurt Nelson, Jaiden, Julia, Shaheryar, and Dora. We walked through downtown Baltimore and visited the Harbor Wetland.
I want to paint today as an allegory of the future. So much of what I experienced today are visions of how I want the world to look. Sustainable agriculture that is focused in community, concentrated in shared experiences, completely cued to the needs of real people rather than the needs of larger agriculture companies and their shareholders. It also, as I’ve reflected, was not entirely what I envisioned beforehand; and I believe that’s crucial. The ideal future where nobody experiences hunger is enwrapped in layers of political movement, in resistance from various systematic and ideological forces. When change like the type I’ve described occurs, it won’t look familiar.
Our walk in particular caused me to reflect on this. I’ve worked in freshwater streams before while doing research at Bucknell. Despite the significant differences between those freshwater streams and the definition of a wetland, the wetland here looked nothing like any part of nature I’ve seen. There were geese nesting in plants that were sitting beside the sidewalk. The entire Harbor Wetland is on an inflatable, and floats up and down in order to stimulate a tide because the harbor was dug out, causing the natural tide to not be as dynamic as it normally would be in a wetland.
Humans made a change. When we try to reconstruct the wetlands, they inevitably look different; they adapt. In a similar sense, we have created the expected aesthetics of agriculture. When agriculture must change in order to be sustainable, it will look different than expected, and that is to be celebrated.
This has been many words to try and explain how change occurs and the weird division we have aesthetically between what we know and what we want to change into. Perhaps it is similar to the work of Shae McCoy, which she described as documenting the history of West Baltimore through photographing dilapidated buildings. McCoy told us that she remembers speaking with community members about how certain buildings existed in their prime, and what purpose they served. In discussing this, she conveyed a sense of how the scenery of the city changed, adapting to meet modern needs, but also how a sense of community still exists long after the buildings.
Why is this an allegory for the future? Because that’s what I want this trip to be. I want the sense of community, the drive, and the radical optimism of the people we’ve worked with to change us long-term. The purpose that is pulling us together is something that I personally want to be part of my life moving forward, even after this trip is gone.
It may take different forms and look different and not match any expectations in how it manifests. Ultimately, though, just like the man-made wetlands, the urban farm that appears so unconventional to what a farm is, and the new buildings and businesses like Mama Koko’s in Baltimore, I want the after-trip, the future, to maintain the spirit of what came before. The drive, purpose, and energy of this week and my classmates and the many inspiring figures we’ve met is something I want to bring into my everyday life. This is how today was an allegory for the future.
In general, I appreciated very much the work we did today, and it felt fulfilling.
