Ever Growing Family Farm

There's so much about Ever-Growing Family Farm -- the farm Nfamara Badjie and Dawn Hoyte began in 2013 in Esopus, NY -- that I don't yet know how to describe. It is the only commercial rice farm in NY, and Nfamara, Dawn, and their family and friends have grown it into something that feels like a miracle, with a mix of traditional Jola techniques, specialized equipment, regional innovation, and community spirit.

This year I was fortunate to join Ever-Growing for two cool October Saturdays with a group of volunteers helping to harvest paddies filled with at least 5 varieties of rice, from Japanese to African red to an experimental sake rice patch. Folks waded barefoot through the shin-high water, squelching feet up out of the mud, handing off hand-scythed stalks to be lain out on tarps, destined for drying, threshing, winnowing, and eventually hulling and polishing down to edible grains.

We were all novices in the process, but Nfamara and his friend and collaborator Moustapha guided us into a nearly-efficient machine. They both came to the US as performers (Nfamara is a master bougarabou drummer), both from the Jola tribe but from Gambia and Senegal respectively, and they braid a musical rhythm into the work, singing, slicing, and stacking in the kind of flow we generally think of being reserved for athletes or musicians. They identified this low-lying, damp patch of land as a place that rice might thrive, despite all the conventional wisdom that you couldn't grow rice here, and now are inspiring and educating other farmers to consider the possibility of a new regional grain.

While it's common now for eaters to understand and assign value to "farm-to-table" produce and meat (think of spring's ramp frenzy, summer tomatoes, pasture-raised beef), that understanding is still mostly unextended to crops like grains, drying beans, and other foods we experience as "commodities" and "staples". Specialty and heirloom wheat varieties are, perhaps not surprisingly, the earliest grain crops beginning to wedge into that awareness in the US, especially when shaped into naturally-leavened loaves of bread. But there's much more on our tables that deserves the same level of attention and intention, in consumption and in growth.

Eating and cooking can seed appreciation for ingredients, and by extension the people and processes behind them (though that "by extension" should really begin with the people and the land, and work outward from there). It's often true that searching for great sushi may lead you to a deeper appreciation of rice; that tortilla lovers might be better-versed in the stories of fresh masa and heirloom corn. Even more incisive, in my experience, is a visit to the farms themselves. Not that one should have to encounter a place (or person) to act or eat in solidarity with it, but setting foot deep into the soil of Ever-Growing is a sure way to understand rice farming as equally intentional, impactful, and delicious as anything else. In this way, these community harvest days do more than provide labor for the farm and its mission...they grow storytellers for it as well.

The harvest days also ended with some of the best food I've eaten, almost entirely prepared by Dawn, including the meat dishes which she as a vegetarian doesn't taste but still cooks perfectly: curried venison (trapped on the farm after getting greedy with the veggies); stewed thai eggplant; thick and sweet goat-and-peanut stew; mushroom risotto made with last year's rice; fish cakes; jerk and bbq chicken; spiced tofu; floral and fiery hot sauces; cool hibiscus and mint teas; and tall frosted cakes, moist with bumper crops of squash in place of carrots. It probably goes without saying that I think of these meals, and the connections and conversations that sprouted through them, as a kind of poetry, too.

For more news about Ever-Growing community harvest days, plus the chance to purchase some of their rice, visit their facebook page. - Evan

"Let's say it's all text--the animal, the dune,
the wind in the cottonwood, and the body."
- Natalie Diaz, POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM