I gave someone a tour of the farm the other day. When I asked them if they had any thoughts or questions at the end of it they said, “It is much smaller than I was expecting.”

I think this is actually a common sentiment when I give a farm tour. The actual field space I use for my annual vegetable and fruit production is only two acres, and half of that is under summer cover crops. I have two production greenhouses, and a small planting of grapes, blueberries, and hazelnuts, all of which are not going to be producing for another 3-5 years. But it is all small compared to just about every other farm. 

I could say that the farm has an identity crisis, but without the crisis. I don’t want Firefly Fields to be a big farm, or even a medium sized farm. I think that is kind of the point of what I am trying to do, have a lot of smaller plantings of diversified crops. That is part of how I am trying to help keep a healthy ecosystem. The largest planting I have is of strawberries, around 8000 plants in production each year. Which, by number, may seem large to the average person, but is actually barely feasible for production scale. At the same time, I don’t want to plant more strawberries because the whole point is diversity.

When I tell people that I am a farmer, or that I own a farm, I think people picture acres and acres of neat, weed free, rows of…something…corn (often), lettuce, strawberries, whatever they see when they drive down route 7. Those are all farms after all. But that kind of production, often monocrop systems, of farming that may grow 5-10 cash crops at most, is not what I am doing here. Maybe I am not a farmer? Maybe this is not a farm? Those words evoke images of something different than what I am doing.

This is not a garden either. It is too large, uses too many tractor implements, and focuses on production over aesthetics.

Probably the best description is market garden.  I am a market gardener, I am going to have to sit with that and see how it fits. It is by no means a new phrase in our lexicon, but it is relatively new for me to define myself, my work, as such. I don’t know what image it evokes in people and maybe that is a good thing.