Sophie Henry

At dinner on my first night on the farm, Brandon pulled a tick off his hand and chopped it in half with a pocket knife. “We’ve got a lot of ticks,” he told me in a scratchy baritone as he pushed the corpse around the table with his index finger. “And rats this big,” he said, holding his hands a possum-length apart. 

Brandon was a farmer, and his skin was matte from 12 years of caked-on dirt. He and his wife, Christine, had once worked for Whole Foods. They left shortly after the Amazon acquisition to explore regenerative agriculture in rural Connecticut.

I had found their farm on a website dedicated to student farm “internships.” At the time, I’d been looking for a place to spend the summer. The pandemic had uprooted me from college; I took the year off, and I spent most of my time either alone or on my computer, almost always in my room. I was living in New Haven, but I didn’t really feel like I belonged there anymore. I honestly didn’t know where I belonged.

But I knew I liked farms. Like many in my generation, I have a romanticized view of rural life. Nothing seems more purposeful than a hard day’s work and a gratifying walk back to a farmhouse with a basket full of carrots and tomatoes. The open air, the night sky, a great expanse of greenery. So I applied to work at Brandon’s farm, and I got the job.

Brandon’s farm practiced regenerative agriculture, a set of agricultural practices that rebel against industrial techniques. The regenerative movement focuses on undoing the damage done to our crops and soil by things like pesticides and manures. Over the years, when soil is treated with regenerative methods and not disturbed by farmers or massive machinery, it can grow fertile and resilient. And when done right, regenerative agriculture has climate change-fighting capabilities. Soil on a regenerative farm can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, stowing it away deep below ground.

Things that don’t belong anywhere else — insects, rodents, even carbon emissions — belong on a regenerative farm. I was hoping I could belong there, too.

I arrived at the property about a month later. Christine scuttled out of the farmhouse and gave me a warm hug, pressing her big red cheeks into mine. Brandon was out working in the field, so she brought me inside and showed me to my room.

Brandon and Christine’s house was built in the 18th century and smelled like it. When I stepped into the room, the first thing I noticed were the floorboards: they were spaced sporadically, some as far as half an inch apart, and I could see ants crawling through some of the larger gaps.  Christine had thrown a rug into the room to cover up some of these gaps, but the bugs still found their way into my 18th-century bed. The room I shared with the ants was small, and the luggage I’d brought barely fit. But there was a chair where I could read, a desk where I could write and a window through which I could see the whole farm.

I wonder if Brandon was disappointed when he first saw me. The deep, bassy voice he heard over the phone probably made me seem a few years older, a few inches taller and much, much stronger. So when he met me, a 5-foot-7-inch, bespectacled wimp, it’s not unlikely that he — tall, bearded, and brawny — was a bit underwhelmed. While he chopped ticks at the dinner table, testing me with his list of critters, I couldn’t help but sit there quietly, shyly, feeling endlessly small.

Brandon put me to work the following morning. I was allowed to wake up at 9 a.m. instead of the soon-to-be-standard 7 a.m. By the time I got out of the house, dressed in tick-proof pants and drenched in lemon-eucalyptus bug spray, Brandon and Erin — another farm intern, who’d arrived a week before me — had already been working for two hours.

I spent the day on a single row in the high tunnel, a greenhouse-like structure that kept the plants warm enough to stay alive and kept me warm enough to pass out. For hours I shoveled compost and dug holes. The work quickly left me exhausted and sore. Brandon let me stop working at 4 p.m., three hours early, probably because he could see how pitiful I looked, my sweat gluing shirt to skin, back arched, calories sapped, on the brink of collapse. He told me if I could dig three more holes without damaging the carrots in the next row, he’d let me go. I was panting heavily, and I could barely control the movement of the shovel. I ended up crushing two or three carrots, but I kept it to myself and was allowed to leave. I walked back to the house with my head pointed down, the seeds of regret germinating within me as I considered the arduous summer ahead. 

 

In the church of regenerative agriculture, soil is sacred: it’s home to a microbial civilization integral to the success of any plant. Brandon worked to keep those microbes alive. So, he didn’t till his soil, instead letting the tiny beings mingle and thrive. He relied on the doctrine of nondisturbance, live and let live, grow and let grow.

Regenerative agriculture is not a lucrative industry, and it’s not easy competing with the cheap bounty of produce offered at supermarkets. Brandon often told me that we were crusading against large corporate farms, the sort of operations that lowered their overhead by employing migrant workers who’d be offered cents for every pound they picked. Farm workers experience poverty rates twice the national average, partially because many are undocumented immigrants who are easy targets of wage theft: if they’re being underpaid, they don’t really have anyone who will help them or any authorities they can call. And they’re the reason you can get a pound of tomatoes for just a couple bucks at Target or Walmart.

Brandon and Christine didn’t employ migrant workers. They employed, well, me. They were a progressive couple who strove to be as ethical as they could — it’s what led them into the regenerative movement, and it’s why they put an effort into getting to know me and Erin. But ethics don’t mean profits, and they weren’t able to offer me much in payment. Each week, after my 60 hours of work, I was to receive a room to live in, all the vegetables I could eat and a stipend of $100.

Brandon, Erin and I spent the next few days planting. The process went like this: we shoveled compost — several tons of which sat on a grassy patch about thirty feet away from the high tunnel — into a wheelbarrow; we brought the wheelbarrow into the tunnel; we poured the compost over the plot; we raked the compost until it was even; we covered the compost with a thin layer of straw; we dug holes in the straw and compost until we reached soil; we deposited cupfuls of pelletized chicken manure — which smelled like salmon rotting in a truckstop bathroom — into the holes; we mixed up the manure, compost, straw and soil; we placed seedlings into the holes; and we covered the base of the seedlings with more soil. For a 30-foot row, the whole process took about four hours. In the morning, we could plant sweet onions; in the afternoon, tomatoes; in the evening, scallions. Brandon was absent most of the time. When he was there, his role was mostly supervisory. This frustrated me. I was doing work on his farm, and he was barely even helping?

This was not the least of my frustrations. After a couple days, it became apparent I was allergic to the house. I couldn’t stop coughing and sneezing. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to hack up mucus. Even while I was working, I’d often need to leave to blow dirt and snot out of my nose. It may have been the dogs, Ray and Chloe, whose hair clung to every surface in the house. Chloe was an old chocolate lab. Her head tilted eternally to one side, and her eyes dripped as she walked. Dripped, not drooped. Like a slug she left a trail of liquid everywhere she went. Each morning, Christine would need to force pills into Chloe’s mouth just to keep her walking.

I was also expected to provide my own meals. Most days, my 12-hour farm shifts left me too tired to cook, so I’d drive ten minutes into town to pick up Taco Bell or McDonald’s. I’d intended to keep this secret, because I didn’t want Brandon and Christine to know I ate fast food; it didn’t seem very farmerly of me. Of course they found out, my second night, when they found me in their kitchen shoving Taco Bell chalupas down my throat.

But there were times when I could feel at home in this house. Brandon and Christine were in their early 40s — a bit too young to be my parents, a bit too old to be my siblings. Sometimes this made talking difficult, as we scraped our brains for mutual interests; other times, the age difference gave us ripe ground for conversation. Out in the fields, Erin and I could explain things like TikTok and cottagecore to Brandon, and he could tell us about his life and his family.

In the first week, we had a few shared dinners, where Brandon and Christine would cook for Erin and me. The four of us would sit around a table and discuss politics and drugs. We talked about the Capitol insurrection over vegetable chili and whippits over barbecue sandwiches. Brandon told us that he used to deal and almost went to jail for it when he was younger. The experience of getting off without harsh punishment, having a second chance at life, propelled him into the food industry.

During those meals, the four of us became a prototypical American family — except for the illicit discussions and the lack of shared blood. At the end of our long work days, we could find joy in each other’s company. Because of the pandemic, these moments were some of the only times I experienced real connection with new people. We’d talk for hours, and even though I knew I’d have to wake up at 7 a.m., I wouldn’t want to go to bed. I could’ve stayed around that table forever, and I was looking forward to all the things they’d tell me, all the things I’d learn, over the course of the coming summer.

 

A week into my time at the farm, Brandon and Christine sat me down for a discussion. Christine did the talking. Brandon pulled ticks off his arms, taking occasional breaks to remove his hat and comb his hands over his balding head. Christine told me they were disappointed with my performance. The fact that I was dog-tired by lunchtime, she said, was a very bad sign for my work ethic. They weren’t even assigning me the hard stuff yet, she told me. While I was doing my work, Brandon labored over tasks much more arduous and skillful than mine, and they were losing hope I’d ever reach that level. Also, I lacked an attention to detail, and I was too slow and I was a liability because I was constantly almost getting injured. They weren’t firing me, she said, but if I were to stay, they would need to see a marked improvement. I’d get a day to decide what I wanted to do.

I wasn’t totally surprised — of course I knew I wasn’t doing a stellar job. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t offended. To be honest, I wasn’t really used to failing like that. It hurt to be told I probably didn’t have it in me to do the same work they did. And who were they? Who were they to be telling me what I could and could not do? What did they know?

Brandon looked up, probably noticing the tears sprouting in my eyes. I looked down at the floor, avoiding eye contact with the man who had betrayed me. “I don’t want to be somewhere I’m not wanted,” I mustered, trying hard not to croak between each word.

“It’s nothing personal,” Brandon said. “This just isn’t for everybody.”

In my mind, I could see the artificial blood that connected our little family dripping out before me. I had sincerely wanted to impress them, to make them proud of me, like they were my own parents. I had a deep respect for Brandon and Christine. I had respect for their mission and for their ability to do things that I clearly could not physically do. 

Because at some point I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t any good at this job, that I could never be a farmer and like a crop in inhospitable soil, I did not belong here. My body was heavy with dirt, and my lungs were tired from coughing. I told Brandon and Christine that I would be leaving. 

My last day on the farm, I ate oatmeal next to Christine as she lay down by Chloe’s dog bed. When Brandon entered, Christine told him she believed Chloe would die today. “Okay,” he said. “Let me know if she does.” He slid on his work gloves and went out to the field. After I packed up my car, Brandon came back to shake my hand; Erin gave me a hug; Christine, for her part, offered me a wave. I didn’t know where I was going next, but I drove off thinking of Chloe, thinking of the last drops that would leave her tired eyes, her head finally resting peacefully against the soft cotton bed until I reached the highway.

ELLIOT LEWIS