The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal • January through April 2022 • Page 59
The Community Farm of Ann Arbor was founded in 1988. It was one of the first organic, and perhaps the only biodynamic, farm in Michigan, as well as one of the first CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture).
Margarete Walsh, Dan Gannon, and Karen Chalmer
We started looking and found three dear, sweet, delightful young people, one of whom had actually farmed before. They were wonderful, and they did their very best, but they also had an impossible task. They were strangers to each other and three is not a great number, somebody often gets left out. They gave it their best and then one of them left and two of them carried on the next year, but life called them off into completely different things. So, there we were in October 2019 with no farmers.
Margarete: Last year, because of the pandemic, I think everybody was looking for community and Karen put the call out, [asking] who of the former members would be interested in having a workday to come to the farm and take care of the many, many tasks that have been not done for a while.
Earlier, in 2017 or so, Randy Wright and Lucia Ruedenberg had bought the house [on the farm] and they were so happy to have a biodynamic farm in their backyard. So, there we were in 2019 with Randy and Lucia and some remnant of us who really wanted there to be a farm. We’d done some soil testing and we knew that the soil needed a rest. So, we thought, ‘Okay, we’ll plant cover crops and look for a farmer. If we can just figure out how to pay the taxes and electricity, the insurance… we’ll keep going.’ There were 30 members who were willing to support it for a chrysalis [transitional] year.
That might’ve been the most community year of the entire farm in some ways, because there was nobody in charge. —Karen Chalmer That might’ve been the most community year of the entire farm in some ways, because there was nobody in charge. It became so apparent that Annie and Paul had held all these different threads between them, and they tried their best to pass it on, but you don’t even know what you didn’t know until… So, we just kept putting our heads together and figuring things out. Then, Randy died of a heart attack one workday. That was a really traumatic thing. He and I had been the most intent on keeping the thing together. He was the only one that knew how to run the tractor. After he was gone, we had to get a bunch of people together to figure out how does this tractor work? How do you put equipment on it? Luckily there were some guys who knew a lot about that stuff, so we did it. We planted the cover crops, and we kept the farm going, but we still didn’t have a farmer. And then this wonderful thing happened. Margarete Walsh encouraged us to put a little paragraph into the Journal for Anthroposophy. It was way at the very end in tiny little print and it said “the Community Farm of Ann Arbor needs a farmer.” Dan Gannon, a farmer out in California, saw it and was interested. We had interviewed maybe four or five people and there were some really great people, but nobody who really fit. But Dan did really fit, and I think the farm is a great fit for him. Margarete Walsh and her family have been members of the Farm for about thirty years, but after she retired last year, she upped her commitment. She began regularly working at the Farm, joined the Farm’s Board, and became a member of the chrysalis group, which is the educational arm of the Farm.
Often, again and again, I feel healthier, happier, more in balance, just having greater equanimity, after I’ve been at the farm for an hour. —Margarete Walsh San: It’s almost a silver lining of the pandemic that the community came together, that something good has come out of it. Margarete: We definitely called it a silver lining. People came who, I don’t know how they found out, but they saw an opportunity to be cooperative with other, similarminded people. We were outside, we kept our distance, we wore masks when we were inside cleaning up the barn or whatever. It was lots of laughter, some singing with masks. (Laughter) I think it really fulfilled a need. And it was an open, inviting gesture to enter into the community.
