Thanks to Moshe Cohen for this guest post. Moshe is participating in Hillel’s Sustainable Agriculture Alternative Break at Kayam Farm in Maryland and sending in “reports from the field.” The alternative break is being led by the Jewish Farm School.

“I had a convo with my chi,” said Alison Fields, recently of Indiana University, leaning on her shovel during a work break in the shade.  After our first full day at Hillel and The Jewish Farm School’s Alternative Break at Kayam Farm, we have already taken a complete tour of the grounds, dined on white mulberries right off the tree, sampled new vegetables out of the garden like garlic scapes and kohlrabi and participated in a morning Chi Gong session (hence Alison’s “chi conversation”).

Every day we have three work blocks where we split into teams to tackle a variety of assignments, working and learning together with farm staff and trip organizers. The first major project we undertook was constructing a fence to keep the deer out of the lettuce, reminding us that our food cycle intersects with other living things, as well. Some of us picked leafy greens from the garden and snuck away from the hot sun to “kasher the harvest” in the kitchen.

After lunch the first day we took respite from the hot sun and enjoyed a presentation on Ancient Israel by Professor Barry Gittlen of Baltimore Hebrew University. One of his archeological digs produced a tablet that informed us of a biblical harvest calendar, a topic we’re eager to learn more about next week when we visit the farm’s Calendar Garden. Slides from another of his research trips showed us the mud bricks that were commonly used for housing, a technique we decided to learn ourselves by mixing our own ingredients, creating our own mud bricks, and using them to build an outdoor kitchen adjacent to the garden!

A new feature for the average kitchen these days is a small compost bin, so we received some firsthand experience on what foods are easily composted and how to speed this process along. Toting our bucket of food waste from each meal, we headed to the big compost pile, shoveled the new stuff in with the old stuff, and turned the pile to allow the biodegrading some air. We were then able to re-use this waste as fertilizer for the next wave of summer crops that we’ll be planting next week.

As we work the land like our ancestors did before us, our discussions have begun to challenge our previous perceptions about food production, consumption, and waste. We’ve only experienced half the trip, and yet we’re overflowing with memories, ideas, and inspiration for our future lives, hopefully ones more closely connected to the earth, to our food, and to ourselves.

Peace & Mud,
Moshe Cohen, graduate student at Louisiana State University

p.s. Enjoy these photos from our experience.