THE PEOPLE WHO PUT THEIR HAND UP
The day the district walked the farm
By Sam Marwood
Post 9 of 19
Once a year the district walked a community owned farm, and this was that day, in the season after the family took the place on.
The couple did the milking first, so the yard people walked into had already done its morning. Before anyone arrived they hosed the concrete and left the plant quiet, and the visit sat on top of work the farm had already finished.
Utes came into the yard and people got out in town shoes and in boots. Some had been with this farm from the start, and some were neighbours who had come because this was the day the district did it.
The couple were still in the clothes they milked in. Locals own the farm together, with a farming family running it, and the couple were that family, here to tell the season.
The one page was the month written for the locals, in the form a farmer already knew. Cows, feed and the work ahead were all on it, and the couple used those same plain words in the yard.
People could see the track the cows used, still wet from the morning, and the couple named that paddock the way the page named it. They had the month in that order before anyone arrived, and they did not dress it up once the yard was full.
The doctor, the retired farmer and the hardware store owner were in the yard for that telling. The hardware store owner asked what the season asked of the farm, and the answer was the same one that was already on the page.
The retired farmer had read the page at his own table, so nothing in the yard was a surprise and nothing was grander than the page. The doctor followed it from where he stood, because the words were cows, grass and jobs.
The couple kept the telling to the season in front of them, the cows, the feed and the jobs. They named the cows, the feed and the jobs again if someone had missed them.
A neighbour who had never read the page could follow it from the yard, because nothing in the telling was larger than the month.
The farmer who rang them after milking stood with the others, and this place was his. He left the telling to the family who ran it now, and he did not take it over.
They walked out together as far as the mob, on the track the cows used at milking. The couple stopped where the cows were in view and said how the feed had held.
They brought everyone into the yard after that, while the talk was still the season and the work in front of the farm.
To keep farms in local hands, the district stood on the farm and heard it from the people who farmed it. The couple treated the day as part of running the place, and they would do it every year.
When the season had been told, people headed off and the yard started to empty. The couple returned to the job that was waiting, and by lunchtime it was only a farm again.
This is an illustration of how it could unfold when it goes right. The district and the people in it aren't any one place or person.
Community Owned Farms is free at cultivatefarms.com/resources.