Food and Music Are Connectors

Each summer we open the farm for a few Friday evenings of food and live music. We call them Farm Food Fridays, and having just closed out another season, I have been thinking about why they matter to me as much as they do.

Putting Down One Hat

It is a unique experience to set down the hat I wear as farmer and business owner, pick up my guitar, and play music with my friends.

From behind the microphone I get to watch people come down across the road from the parking area, find their spot on the grass, and settle in for the view, the food, and the music. Friends, community, neighbors, and visitors who have never been here before.

It reminds me why I grow food and why I love to play music. Both of them are connectors. They are how we find our way to each other, and to new places and new people.

Why a Farm Hosts Dinners

There is a practical version of this answer and a real one.

The practical version is that people who eat food from a farm they have stood on tend to keep buying it. That is true, and it is not why we do it.

The real version is that a farm is a place, not a supply chain. Serving our own food, to people sitting on our own grass, while playing music with people we love, collapses the distance between growing food and sharing it. For one evening the whole thing is in one room, or rather one field.

Most of what we do is invisible to the people who eat it. The daily moves, the early mornings, the repairs, the decisions made two years in advance. An evening like this is the rare moment when the people and the place and the food are all in the same spot at once.

Thank you to everyone who came out this year. We will do it again next summer.