Nature’s Contribution · north-east of the stile · at moonrise
Trees, crops and animals in the same fields
All Together Now Farms
Nut trees with crops between them, the Three Sisters, sheep, goats and chickens, and everything the farm grows going to the café in its old dairy and the honesty box on the street.
The sun is going down on one side of the farm and the full moon is coming up on the other, both on the horizon at once, so everything here is lit by two lights: warm on its west side and silver on its east. The barn has a warm wall and a silver one, every tree a warm edge and a cool one, and the sheep under the trees are the same. Nothing on this farm grows on its own. The trees shelter the crops, the animals graze under the trees, the chickens follow the animals, and what comes out of one goes into another.
From the gate
In words: the sky is apricot on the left, where the sun sits half down on the horizon, and periwinkle on the right, where a full moon is just up. A line of trees runs along the back. A brook winds in from the left. In the middle stand a red barn and a small white dairy beside it, each with a warm edge on its left wall and a silver edge on its right. In front, two rows of round nut trees, with mounds between them where corn stands up out of squash leaves and a bean winds up the corn. Sheep graze under the trees on the left, two goats on the right, and hens peck between them. Every tree and animal has a warm rim on its left side and a cool one on its right.
Mixed farming
A farm where the crops and the animals are one farm rather than two businesses sharing a gate. The definition a group of agricultural researchers worked from:
MFS are defined as farming systems conducted by households or by enterprises where crop cultivation and livestock rearing together form integrated components of a single farming system.
Their paper was about small island farms in the Caribbean, where land is short and storms are not, and it ends on a sentence this farm runs on:
We argue that farmers and other relevant stakeholders should form part of the team from the very start.
Agroforestry
Agroforestry is the intentional combination of agriculture and forestry to create productive and sustainable land use practices.
The USDA names five practices. Four of them are on this farm, and the fifth says why it is not:
Windbreaks
Linear plantings of trees and shrubs to enhance, protect, and benefit people, livestock, and soil and water conservation.
A line of trees along the north and west edges, between the farm and the weather.
Riparian forest buffers
Natural or re-established streamside forests made up of tree, shrub, and grass plantings.
Along the brook, where it runs down to the sanctuary's wetland.
Alley cropping
Agricultural crops grown simultaneously with long-term tree crops.
Rows of walnut and hazel trees with the crops grown in the alleys between them.
Silvopasture
Combines trees with forage and livestock production.
The sheep and the goats graze under the nut trees in the shade, and the chickens follow them.
Forest farming
Cultivation of high-value crops under the protection of a managed forest canopy.
Not here. The farm has no woodland of its own: the wood belongs to the campgrounds, and nobody has drawn a map of it.
Silvopasture is the deliberate integration of trees and grazing livestock operations on the same land.
The Three Sisters
Corn, beans and squash, planted together. They are Indigenous agriculture, and the story of them belongs to the nations that tell it, so it is not told here. The Onondaga Nation publishes a book of its own about them, by Dehowähda·dih – Bradley Powless, and the Oneida Indian Nation says almost every Native nation has its own telling. Read them there.
What this farm does is plant them the way the Onondaga Nation’s book describes the Haudenosaunee planting them: together, but not all at once. Corn goes in first, on a mound of earth; the beans go in beside the corn once it is up, and climb it; the squash goes in around the mound, and its leaves keep the mound shaded and damp and the weeds down, while the beans feed the soil the corn grows in. On this farm the mounds stand in the alleys between the nut trees.
The animals
Sheep, goats and chickens. Some of them are raised for meat, and the farm says so on the honesty box’s board; none of the residents at the sanctuary next door ever is.
Sheep
Graze under the nut trees and between the solar farm's rows, which keeps the grass down with nobody mowing.
They give wool, milk, cheese and meat, to the café in the old dairy and the honesty box.
Goats
Clear the brush along the windbreak and the brook, and eat things nobody else will.
They give milk, cheese and meat, to the café in the old dairy and the honesty box.
Chickens
Follow the sheep round the pasture a few days behind them, scratching through it and eating what they find.
They give eggs, and meat, to the café in the old dairy and the honesty box.
Their manure goes to the cannabis farm’s beds and the chaos gardens, and the alfalfa the cannabis farm grows comes back to them.
What grows
Corn, beans and squash. Grown together, the Three Sisters, on mounds in the alleys between the nut trees.
Walnuts and hazelnuts. From the trees in the rows.
Sunflower and squash seeds. Saved for next year, and the rest roasted for the café.
Herbs. Dill and coriander along the alley ends, alongside the cannabis farm's basil.
Flowers. Along the field margins, for the bees the solar farm's flowers bring in.
The milk is pasteurised
The milk here is the goats’ and the sheep’s, and every drop of it is pasteurised in the old dairy before it is drunk, made into cheese or put in the honesty box. There is no raw milk on this farm, and the people who know why say it plainly:
Pasteurization is crucial for milk safety, killing harmful germs that can cause illness.
While good practices on farms can reduce contamination, they cannot guarantee safety from harmful germs.
And in Colorado it is the law for anything sold:
Retail sales of raw, unpasteurized milk shall not be allowed.
Where it goes
The Dairy, the farm’s old dairy, is a café now, and everything edible on this land ends up on its menu.
The Honesty Box is a farm stand on the street, with the farm’s wool, meat, milk, eggs, cheese and produce, prices on a board and money in a box.
The screen in the barn
The barn has a screen, with two racks under it. The first holds films about growing, grazing and the Three Sisters, picked for this room and each checked on its own page to play here, with Indigenous growers telling their own farming first. The second is the last month of Farming While Beige, the channel of Blackbird Farms in Westmoreland County, Virginia, which our Infodumplings wrote about, refilled every morning with the oldest going off the end. Nobody here watched those first. Every film plays where it hangs or goes up on the screen, nothing loads from YouTube until you press play, and every button says how long the film runs before you press it. The titles are the channels’ own, and none of the channels is ours or affiliated with Stimpunks.
The screen in the barn. Nothing is on it. Any film on either rack can go up here with the button under it, and nothing loads until you press one.
The first rack: growing, grazing and the Three Sisters
Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson presents on Hopi Dry Farming: 2000 Years of Resiliency
Dry Farming Collaborative · 3 February 2022 · 40:45
Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a member of the Hopi Tribe and a researcher with the Native American Agriculture Fund, on Hopi dry farming.
Living Earth 2023: Zuni Waffle Gardens and Contemporary Practices
SmithsonianNMAI · 9 August 2023 · 37:03
Reyna Banteah, of Zuni, on Zuni farming on the Colorado Plateau and its waffle gardens, at the National Museum of the American Indian.
Ganondagan’s 3 Sisters Garden Preparation and Planting
Ganondagan · 16 June 2020 · 2:06
Ganondagan's traditional Haudenosaunee Three Sisters garden being prepared and planted, by the people who keep it.
The Three Sister Plants at the Indigenous Garden
University of Toronto Scarborough · 28 June 2022 · 2:59
Isaac Crosby, an Indigenous mentor at a campus farm, on the sister crops in the Indigenous garden.
When ancient wisdom beats modern industry - Rebecca Webster
TED-Ed · 20 February 2024 · 5:45
Rebecca Webster tells the story of the Three Sisters and what it teaches about growing food, animated.
How This Indigenous Farmer Is Solving Food Insecurity
PBS Terra · 1 June 2023 · 16:12
Michelle Week, a farmer drawing on her Sinixt knowledge, on seed saving and dry farming near Portland.
ʻUlu Agroforestry Series: Multi-Story Cropping – Then & Now
Hawai'i 'Ulu Cooperative · 9 November 2022 · 7:06
Multi-story cropping under breadfruit, a Hawaiian agroforestry, from Hawai'i 'Ulu Cooperative.
Cows in the Woods: What it Takes to Create a Silvopasture
Clean Wisconsin · 1 September 2023 · 6:48
A grassfed beef farm in Wisconsin turning overgrown land into silvopasture, trees and grazing together.
There is no technical fix for spiritual bankruptcy
Wednesday 23 September · 17:08
The best way to profit from a half acre
Saturday 10 October · 1:52
What “not defending huyite women” means
Friday 9 October · 1:55
Yes, gently tossing day-old chicks is perfectly normal and safe
Wednesday 7 October · 2:22
I apologize.
Tuesday 6 October · 1:03
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Monday 5 October · 1:48
Summoned: worker owned cooperatives, unions, and social safety nets
Saturday 3 October · 2:49
Unwashed hands and unseasoned chicken 🤮
Friday 2 October · 1:20
Lower prices are not necessarily a conspiracy
Thursday 1 October · 2:57
Short-term thinking means stepping over dollars to pick up pennies
Wednesday 30 September · 2:52
Capitalism isn’t why I’m successful. It’s why my success is so out of proportion to how hard I work
Tuesday 29 September · 1:40
Standing on the shoulders of your ancestors does not make you a giant
Tuesday 29 September · 1:56
Bruh…
Monday 28 September · 2:25
How I got kicked out of my own bachelor party.
Sunday 27 September · 2:50
The @SadBeige “run to target” series is some of the most unsettling performance art I’ve ever seen.
Saturday 26 September · 1:58
Millennial dads… this lady knows too much.
Friday 25 September · 2:39
We finally got uniforms!
Thursday 24 September · 1:14
So we’re just making up numbers now 😂
Tuesday 22 September · 2:40
I apologize. I want the dirty oil lady back.
Monday 21 September · 2:59
The TikTok version of my latest YouTube video… (continued in description)
Sunday 20 September · 1:02
What’s good for the goose 🤷🏽♂️
Sunday 20 September · 2:21
Johnsongrass infestation.
Saturday 19 September · 0:56
Buy my danged food (and don’t mind the angle of the sun)
Saturday 19 September · 0:44
The ethics of vegan leather and the way @OffbeatBelts just suddenly stopped talking 😂
Friday 18 September · 2:59
Why plant-based meat is failing. Everyone go follow @hydroxide
Thursday 17 September · 2:59
You would never ever be OK with being considered inherently dangerous.
Wednesday 16 September · 1:56
To all the people sending me Jasmine Crockett videos: you are exactly the point I was making.
Tuesday 15 September · 2:38
Bro how much more free crap do they need? 😂
Monday 14 September · 1:24
The link we’ve established between money and morality needs to be severed with a guillotine
Monday 14 September · 1:20
A word from @hayyyfarms about corporate farms
Sunday 13 September · 2:13
Either we have due process for everyone, or we have might makes right 🤷🏽♂️
Saturday 12 September · 2:56
@seefoodjackie with the violent wholesomeness
Saturday 12 September · 2:04
I ain’t never seen anyone move so quickly to try a MF in the court of public opinion 😂
Saturday 12 September · 0:42
On the farm
Nothing moves, at any setting, and the screen plays only what you press.
Nothing is counted or ranked: no animal against another and no field against another.
No raw milk. Everything from the dairy is pasteurised.
Job marker — a brown egg, laid in the grass by the gate
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: Which practice is not on the farm?
Before the code: The USDA names five agroforestry practices. Which one does All Together Now Farms not do?
Hint 1
It is the last of the five.
Hint 2
Its card has a dashed edge.
Last hint
Two words: a kind of land with trees, and what a farm does.
Give me the answer
The answer is Forest farming. Forest farming, growing crops under a woodland's canopy: the farm has no woodland of its own, because the wood belongs to the campgrounds.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.