commonplaces

Via Rod Dreher, I read this from the New York Times this morning. Yeah, it's trendy and sort of Boboish, but I think it's cool:

“Who brought their own wheelbarrow?” Rob Jones asked the group of 20-somethings gathered on a muddy North Carolina farm on a chilly January Sunday. Hands shot up and wheelbarrows were pulled from pickups sporting Led Zeppelin and biodiesel bumper stickers, then parked next to a mountain of soil. “We need to get that dirt into those beds over there in the greenhouse,” he said, nodding toward a plastic-roofed structure a few hundred feet away. “The rest of you can come with me to move trees and clear brush to make room for more pasture. Watch out for poison ivy.”

Bobby Tucker, the 28-year-old co-owner of Okfuskee Farm in rural Silk Hope, looked eagerly at the 50-plus volunteers bundled in all manner of flannel and hand-knits. In five hours, these pop-up farmers would do more on his fledgling farm than he and his three interns could accomplish in months. “It’s immeasurable,” he said of the gift of same-day infrastructure.

The article goes into a bit more detail about how this works. Basically the organization gathers interested agrarian and sustainable food types through word-of-mouth once a month and they descend on a locally owned farm somewhere in North Carolina. It's like Monastery Work Day twelve times a year instead of just once. Maybe the Oklahoma Food Coop should start something like this.