Crop Mobs Descend
By Jenn (TinyChoices.com) | March 2, 2010
Have ya’ll heard about Crop Mobs? They’ve been getting lots of press lately. The concept is so simple, so beautiful, and so exciting:
From Grist: “The Mob is essentially a group of young people of all ages… who alight upon an area farm once a month and do a whole bunch of work together: weeding, moving compost, digging up fresh beds, harvesting ready-at-once crops like sweet potatoes. In short, the kind of work that seems crushing when one or two people set out to do it, but that’s downright fun with a crowd. When the work is done, everyone sits down for a meal.”
Small-scale organic farming is even more labor intensive than conventional farming, and those farmers often don’t have the financial capability to pay farmhands to help. So, a Crop Mob descends for one day on a chosen farm, and makes huge inroads on multiple projects: building structures, planting crops, harvesting, sorting, packing, etc. It’s reminiscent of barn raisings, and ladies helping each other finish quilts, and neighbors pitching in when there’s a bumper crop of tomatoes to be canned before they spoil.
From the New York Times: “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. It’s the beauty of being Crop Mobbed.”
The Mobbers are rewarded only with the satisfaction of dirty hands, an honest days work in the fields, the good-neighborly feeling of helping out a local farm, and a local-as-can-be meal at the end of the day.
And, I love the idea of Crop Mobs spreading within city limits, too: transforming vacant lots into lush community gardens with a sweaty weekend of work, or descending on a small patch of farmable land and bringing the locals with the ability to grow some of their own food, even within a concrete jungle.
Here’s an NPR interview with two of the Crop Mob founders.
Have you heard of other examples of mob-minded positive actions?
[Image by Jeannie Wallen via Creative Commons]
Topics: Activism, Food | 2 Comments »
I LOVE this idea!! After just having to let our allotment go this kind of thing would be great. We can still get allotments around here really cheap and with little line ups but they are 100sqm (which is close to 1000sqft) so if you don’t have gas powered machines and a hell of alot of muscle it is a daunting task!
This also sounds like great fun… I must look to see if such a thing exists around here (Malmö Sweden).
Pipp, if it doesn’t exist already, maybe you can start up a Mob…!