Issue 13: Nature's rhythm

Dearest reader,

Yesterday I drove about an hour south of the Twin Cities to Northfield, MN, to visit and take a walking tour of the Sharing Our Roots farm. I met five members of the SOR team, as well as a farmer who was tending to her crops in the sticky late-spring air. Upon driving to the farm I drove past acres, acres—& more acres—of farmland. A lot of said farmland appears to have been handled in such a way that, to the casual observer (or perhaps just this particular casual observer), it is as though the divine hand assigned with the task of constructing the Contemporary American Midwest went on a cigarette break and told the intern to, under all circumstances, “just paste corn”.1

On the drive over, I listened to episode 595 of Soulection Radio.

The Sharing Our Roots farm represents a stark contrast from the work of our lazy, cigarette-puffing diety—in the best possible way. It exists today as a vibrant nonprofit and is the result of years of intentional development by a team of highly-devoted professionals who I always find very inspiring to be around.

The outcomes speak for themselves. Here’s footage of the farm from back in 2017:

Here’s footage from 2020, just a few years later:

And now, here’s moving footage from September of last year:

The Sharing Our Roots farm has a special place in my own family’s story. I remember, back around ~2015 or ~2016, joining my mother as a sit-in, single-session visitor at a class in permaculture she was taking at the time. Before coming to the US for medical treatment, she was heavily involved in environmental advocacy work in Saudi—especially around preserving the oases of Al-Qatif and Al-Ahsa, and other preservation efforts in the Eastern Province. Upon reflection, I realize now that my first job in high school was a side-effect of her “support your local farmer” efforts. I drove my father’s Land Cruiser around the Dhahran Aramco residential compound, delivering boxes of vegetables to families subscribed to the CSA (community-supported agriculture) program Mom had started. (The farm from which the vegetables were sourced was based in Al-Ahsa, and was one of the few surviving farms in the region from what I recall.)

Oh, and the soundtrack to these drives was consistently one of the following albums, played front-to-back in non-shuffling order:

• American Gangster (Jay-Z)
• The Blueprint (Jay-Z)
• Watch the Throne (Jay-Z & Kanye West)

During her treatment in Minneapolis, Mom got acquainted with local MN farmers and people engaged in what I perceive as a kind of intentional, “anti-industrial” type of farming in the Midwest.

In the summer of 2015, my father left his job at Aramco, and my family moved into a house in Northfield, MN. It was here where they met the founding team of Sharing Our Roots (which at the time was called Main Street Project). My parents grew very fond of the team and the mission they stood for, and eventually helped the organization secure a portion of the 100-acre plot of farmland that would be home to the pilot efforts of their regenerative and community-centric approach to sustainable agriculture.

It’s incredibly inspiring to see that seed, planted around the spring of 2017, come to such beautiful fruition, now over six years later2.

That’s all I have for today. I hope you enjoyed reading.

Love,
Reef