My name is Sabrina Vögeli. I come from Switzerland. I would describe myself as being a sporty, friendly and open-minded person. Also, I am very reliable and interested in many different issues. My reason and motivation for working on a farm is that I like physical work and I am interested in how to grow food. I am training to become a home economics (as well as sports, German and English) teacher. I chose an American farm because I want to experience the differences between American culture and what I know already.

I used to buy organics for two reasons. First, it just plain tastes better. And second, I saw it as a monetary investment. If I spend a little extra money now on food that is less processed and as chemical free as this earth’s soils will allow, then potentially I’ll be spending thousands less on doctor’s bills when I’m 60 treating things like cancer and endometriosis.

I have not stopped believing in the health benefits of growing and eating fresh and pesticide-free meats and produce. A few newsletters back, Coby talked about her experience with farm workers whose contact with pesticides caused painful and blistering skin rashes. I find it hard to think that consuming even trace amounts of these chemicals over a lifetime will not harm our internal organs and systems.

Working in the literal field of organics, however, I have come to see organic food production as more than just a financial investment or health benefit. And I’m not talking about the long list of environmental perks of soil amendments, crop rotation and clean water or the culinary attractions of fresh heirloom varieties and vibrant “off the vine” flavors. I want to share with you the experience of organic farming as I’ve come to know it in the last two months.

Local organics is more about a lifestyle than a product really. I don’t feel like I am working for a company. I feel like I am working for the health and happiness of an entire system—a system that includes myself and fellow farmers, the CSA and market communities, plants, chickens, bees, bugs, and the soil itself. It was interesting coming into this system knowing only that I liked going to farmers’ markets and that I liked fresh broccoli. I didn’t even know what a broccoli plant looked like, let alone how to plant one and grow one and harvest one, which I still don’t know because (as you well know and I did not) broccoli does not grow so well in the months of summer.

The organic farmer, I have realized, has a close relationship with the earth. When I first arrived at the intern house in early July, I walked into a tree stump in the middle of the living room. “Stump” is a game (popular in Switzerland, so our new intern Sabrina tells us) played with a stump, nails and a hammer. Each player takes turns flipping the hammer and hitting an opponent’s nail until only the winner’s nail remains unhammered into the stump. The stump stayed in our living room for nearly a week.

After living and working at Serenbe farms for a little over two months now, the idea of bringing a stump into the living room seems not so strange. We have brought into our house muddy shoes, tomato-stained overalls, rain drenched burlap table cloths, half-rotten vegetables that seem too much of a waste to throw away, crates of garlic and onions and winter squash for storing, and of course sweat and dirt caked in our hair and underneath our fingernails. I remember the first day Sabrina worked on the farm. We came home for the day, showered, and gathered in the kitchen to prepare dinner. “How do you get all the dirt our from under your nails?” she asked me. I held out my hands and showed her my dirt-stained fingernails. “I guess I don’t,” I replied and went on with peeling tomatoes.

In saying all this, I do not mean to imply simply that the life of a farmer is a dirty one. The organic farmer builds a comfortable relationship with soil and clay, everything that grows in it, lives in it and surrounds it, and even the little pieces of glass, the marbles and the broken hairbrushes buried in it. Here, the earth is not toxic. It symbolizes health and labor and life. It therefore seems strange to me to purify my home of the farm, to completely separate work from life.

Not only have I become accustomed to living with the earth, but I have also learned to work close with the earth. The first day I came to work on the farm, I rode in on a brand new road bike I’d gotten as a college graduation present, a shining helmet, sunglasses and clean white pants. Paige, Coby and Katie introduced themselves. They all had mountain bikes which weren’t new and weren’t clean. They didn’t have helmets. They didn’t have sunglasses. And they definitely didn’t have white pants.

I joined them in weeding a bed of basil on the side of the road. They dug their fingers into the dirt around the herbs, uprooting weeds and mixing them up with the soil. “This is great,” I thought. “I can do this no problem.” I pressed my fingers into the bed and….nothing. No clay balling up in my palm, no soil crumbling through my fingertips, no weeds uprooting in my grasp. Just five little finger imprints. “Humph.” I looked over at Paige who had weeded nearly two feet in the time it had taken me to realize that this dirt is a little tougher than it looks. She was pulling dirt with both hands, running her fingers through the earth as if it were sand, while I leaned over the other side of the bed thinking I must have gotten stuck with the side you have to karate chop to get through to any weed roots.

Just last week, we weeded a new planting of basil on the other side of the road. We all had our hands in the bed, pushing and pulling the soil with our fingertips. I could smell the sweetness of the basil as I worked with both hands, still not as quick and effortless as Paige, but more adapted to the soil. My fingertips are now calloused, my nails short and rough.

There is something invigorating about working with a piece of earth and seeing it change. I came during the height of summer harvest, when we had more tomatoes and squash than we knew what to do with, when our bean plants were full and healthy, and when our chickens were young and cautious. We would spend two days harvesting, sitting for twenty minutes at a time picking the same cherry tomato plant or the same section of bean plants, a jungle of flowering buckwheat looming over us. We would take muskmelons out of the field by the cartload, devouring the cracked ones and the dropped ones. We had volunteer watermelons in our okra and in our compost. Since then, I have seen successions of squash eaten by vine bores and squash bugs, rows of tomato plants whither and brown, and a few chickens grow tail feathers and start to “Cock-a-doodle-doo.” I have seen Coby and Paige till in these beds and others. I have planted cover crop and new fall greens alongside Turtle and I have watered them and weeded them and hoed them and fertilized them and watched as they grow a little bit each day out of the corpses of summer crops.

When you put so much care into growing produce, eating it and cooking it is all that much more rewarding. At the intern house, our meals tend to revolve around which crops we have excess of. I have learned an incredible amount about cooking and enjoying it by living with friends whose culinary motivation and creativity emerges from the fresh herbs and vegetables carried into our kitchen by the bin load. Our freezer is stocked with pesto and tomato sauce. We’ve made baked potatoes, fried potatoes, potato chips, mashed potatoes, sandwiches with roasted vegetables and fresh herb bread, blueberry cobbler and blueberry ice cream, pumpkin pie, cucumber salad, carrot soup, kale soup, and butternut soup, eggplant stirfry, homemade pizza, steamed amaranth, and of course fried green tomatoes and fried okra.

It always amazes me the energy that surrounds fresh organic foods. Often, we’ll spend hours together in the kitchen, preparing meals and sides and desserts while talking about families and music and public health and life goals. I see this energy in our CSA members who share all about the dishes they made and plan to make with all the vegetables they’ve never seen before. I see it in the market customers who try samples of melons and sungold tomatoes and can’t leave our stand without taking some home. One Saturday, Paige offered a woman a sungold tomato as she was paying for other vegetables. “Oh, that’s to die for. I’ll take two.” As she left, she smiled and added, “You knew that was going to happen, didn’t you.” I see this same energy in the children who come to market and beg for carrots and blueberries and cherry tomatoes. I see it in the mothers who tell me their toddlers don’t like birthday cake but can’t get enough of mashed delicatas. I see it in the chefs who buy us out of okra, heirloom tomatoes, basil and fingerling potatoes.

It is inspiring to see this energy circulate, to feel it in the ground, the rain, the plants and to bring it into the local community outside Serenbe Farms. Thank you Paige, Justin, Coby and Turtle for sharing with me your knowledge and friendship, your bad jokes, your delicious meals and your company. And thank you all for your support in our farm and your enthusiasm for food. Keep sharing your recipes, your stories, and your love for the natural organic world.

-Ariel and the Serenbe Farmers