Jesse Fleisher '94 returns to Nashville
Will McLemore '94 recently talked with Jesse.
An Interview with Jesse Fleisher
An Interview with Jesse Fleisher
Prodigal Son
After years afield, Jesse Fleisher has returned to Middle Tennessee to "settle down." (I'll believe it when I see it.) He and his wife, Athena, have just purchased a 55 acre farm in the Maury County community of Fly. Grand plans to develop the tract into a training center for effective participation in international NGOs and nonprofits and a model farm for a type of farming known as permaculture are underway.
Interview Transcription
Jesse
I went off to a small Quaker college in Indiana called Earlham. I spent four years there and it was awesome. I loved every second of my time there and I got a very liberal artsy sort of degree they called human development and social relations, but it was basically anthropology and sociology. I'd always been interested in peoples and cultures but another thing that happened to me there is that I got interested in agriculture. I hadn't really done much with that. I had been interested in outdoor activities and nature as a kid growing up and I'd done a lot of outdoor stuff with my dad but I'd never really done gardening or agriculture stuff.
Earlham had a small working farm and I spent some time there. But sort of through the grapevine I ended up working several—maybe two to three of my summers when I was in college I ended up working at a farm outside of Washington, DC growing organic vegetables. That proved to be a very formative experience for me because it ended up being something that I've done quite a bit of subsequently. It was a pretty cool place.
It was a place run by a couple of political science professors who had dropped out of their tenure track college teaching at one of the SUNY schools up in NY and decided that they were doing too much of “talking the talk” and not enough “walking the walk.” Knowing nothing about farming they had started farming probably sometime in the early- to mid- seventies. By the time I got to them they were supposedly among the top 1% of small farms in the US in terms of annual profits.
Will
What's the name of the place?
Jesse
It's called Wheatland Vegetable Farms. They retired three or four years ago now, so it is no longer in operation. But it was a great place and when I finished college I actually ended up going and working there more for about a year. So I did a full year there and I had been toying with the idea of joining the Peace Corps all through college .
I had the opportunity to go overseas to Kenya my junior year of college and that was one of the reasons I went to Earlham. Almost everybody got to study abroad whether you had financial aid or a scholarship or you were just paying tuition, it didn’t cost more to go overseas. It was basically the same as going to school for a semester.
There were three things that happened in college that were all pretty formative. One was being interested in doing sociology and anthropology, which—I was already interested in people and cultures before I went but getting into some of the agriculture stuff and getting to go to Africa was pretty important. I had travelled a bit before that but that was the first time to Africa. I had thought about going to the Peace Corps but I wasn't really sold on it in college. Even though it's a fairly independent entity, I wasn't sure I wanted to be working for or representing the United States government overseas and I had heard a lot of positive things and I had heard some stories from other people who had had negative experiences. I mean there are people who just don't like the experience of the Peace Corps. What I was worried about—I had heard a few stories about people who had been put in a situation where they had gone specifically to get to know a certain population of people to assist them in whatever they could. That was their priority and reason for doing the Peace Corps, but then they were put in a situation at some point where United States foreign policy changed while they were there and had a big impact on what they were doing on the ground. And so I didn't want to be a part of that situation so I held off from going to the Peace Corps for a couple of years after college and I worked farming and in bookstores and ran a farm summer camp.
But I really wanted to get back to Africa. It had been a really fascinating place and I wanted to figure out how to get back there but couldn't. I didn't have any money so there were a lot of problems. There were a lot of jobs that you could get in Africa but you had to have experience first and I didn't have any experience. There were volunteer programs or internships of the sort where you pay lots of money to do it and I didn't have the money and that idea didn't appeal to me at that point anyway.
I had to find a way to go where somebody would take me without a lot of experience but would also not cause me to pay lots of money so the Peace Corps ended up being a really good option because they take you with whatever college degree you have and some limited set of skills and it helps if you have some language under your belt already. So you don't get to choose where you go but you can sort of guide—you can't pick an individual country. It's fairly competitive to get in and if you say “I'm open to go anywhere,” you are much more likely to get selected to be a volunteer. I told them I would go anywhere. I had learned Kiswahili which they speak in a lot of East Africa and I spoke French which I had taken at USN and college.
And I tested out of French—I thought, "thank God I'm done with that, I'm never going to use that again" and then four years later I found myself going to the Peace Corps and they asked if I spoke French and sent me to a country called Gabon which is in central Africa. Most people don't know where it is. I'm pretty sure I didn't know where it was when I got the phone call even though I had been to Africa before. It's on the equator on the west coast of Africa. It's similar in geography and ecology to Brazil, mostly all tropical rainforest.
I got there at the end of '99. I was there for two and a half years and I was assigned to be a sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, which is raising fish, and forestry extension agent. So I got trained and came in with some of the sustainable agriculture aides—but a lot of it goes out the window because what we do in the US is quite different from what one would do in a tropical country, and even more different than what one would do in a very resource-poor environment. So I'm going to come back to that. But I'll tell you sort of the rest. I did that for a few years.
Normally that's a two year commitment when you're done with training. Training happens in country when you first get here for three or four months.
At the end of that time I was actually one of only a couple of people who were selected to stay to do a third year but the program unexpectedly got cancelled. So then I was supposed to get shipped off to Madagascar for a third year. Then they had a coup so I ended up going to Guinea in West Africa.
Guinea confuses people because there are three in Africa, none of which are Papua New Guinea or any of the two Guianas in South America. In Africa there's the Republic of Guinea, which is where I went, which is French-speaking and there's Guinea Bissau which is Portuguese –speaking, and Equatorial Guinea which is Spanish-speaking. People in Africa call it Guinea Conakry after the capitol. Same with the Congos. Congo Kinchasa, Congo Brazzaville.
Will
They have iron there.
Jesse
They do in the southeast part of the country. They have a very large iron deposit. It straddles the border between Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone—though mostly Guinea, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast. And it's a controversial sort of place because people would really like to mine all that iron. It also happens to be a UNESCO World Heritage site for its extreme ecological biodiversity and there's a bunch of endangered stuff down there. It's an interesting part of the country down there.
I spent another, say, six months as a Peace Corps volunteer when I got to Guinea and then I got hired by the Peace Corps. I actually worked as an employee for the Peace Corps. So I spent about three and a half years in Guinea in total. And though I did not know it yet, I met my wife while I was there. She was a Peace Corps volunteer at the time.
Will
Athena?
Jesse
Athena.
I trained her group when they were incoming. And we were friends and then years later back in the United States—that’s another story but that's where I first met my wife, Athena.
And [in Guinea], similarly, I did a bunch of stuff. I worked for the Peace Corps but also did a little bit of consulting. All of it was related to agroforestry, environmental education, and wildlife conservation. And I got to go to a regional meeting on chimpanzee conservation and represent the Peace Corps, represent Guinea as part of the Guinea contingent of folks. I had a really good time in Guinea. It was not a place I expected to go but I had a really good experience. And I spent a good amount of time in Ivory Coast and Cameroon for different work things for the Peace Corps, and some for consulting.
I did a little bit of work for an organization called Windrock International which is an international development agency which operates in many countries around the world and does a lot of things—agriculture, public health, environment, small business development—they work primarily on contracts from the United States government and the European Union, which is where most of the money for development in the world comes from. So I did some of that and I came back to the States and during that time I had the opportunity to stay on there. I got offered some jobs but I had figured out after about six years in Africa that I wanted to go back to school so I came back. I left undergrad with no particularl intention of ever going back to school, no desire or intention.
I was glad to be done but I went back after eight years away from school because I had figured out that I had an interest. My undergrad was in social science and following sociology but a lot of my work had all been with natural science related stuff, a lot of conservation work and sustainable agriculture and things that overlapped. Flora and fauna had become a particular interest. I had learned a lot in the field doing my job and some job-training professional development stuff. Working in the field I had figured out what I was missing and needed and wanted to go back to school.
Coming back before going off to grad school coincided with Hurricane Katrina toward the end of 2005 so I actually had this window of time. I had come back and I didn't have a job and I wasn't going off to grad school for six months so I got a call from the Peace Corps folk again saying they were going to send a group of people who spoke French and had some experience with disaster relief, which I had some of in Africa with the World Food Program, mostly just doing food distributions. I had never really been to a DISASTER disaster.
So a couple of Peace Corps buddies and I ended up going down to New Orleans and we spent several months down there after the hurricane and that ended up being a really interesting, really interesting experience, then I went off to grad school. I went to the University of Vermont, my first choice of programs I had applied to and I was surprised and happy to get in to it because they only take five or six people a year. But it's a field naturalist and ecological planning program and so that combines two things I was interested in. One is a lot of field sciences, teaches you how to read the landscape, understand a landscape from the ground up from geology to soil science to soil to hydrology and water science and plants and wildlife and climate and air quality. All of those things and how they fit together, basically ecology, applied ecology, and then the other element of it was planning which is more like urban planning or regional planning but with a focus on sustainability and using ecological principles to inform the planning process.
I spent a couple of years up there to get a master of science. And I stayed a little bit longer. I loved Vermont. That's kind of like visiting another country in and of itself, coming from Tennessee, it’s definitely a different world, as blue a blue state as you can find, even, for better or for worse, more uniformly blue than a state like California. It's also just really, really pretty and very friendly so I enjoyed my time up there.
I had never spent time where—I had always been a warm weather kid, so I never spent time in a place where, you know, you walk in your house and snow would be up to here on either side of the sidewalk like walking down a canyon, but it was pretty awesome. Then I worked for a town up there, worked for their planning commission. Everything is organized in towns up there. It's a little different but the towns are basically equivalent to counties here, a little smaller.
Will
What's the name of the town?
Jesse
Williston, Vermont. And I basically was doing a big survey of a number of areas that they were interested in potentially conserving as green space, but the larger part of what I was doing was basically facilitating a community planning process. Looking at the whole history of the place from 240 million years ago up until yesterday, all those different layers we talked about but also at the cultural layer. That's what I really went back to school for was to figure out how to put my two interests together, people and community and human development with natural resources management and conservation and those two things are often presented as being in conflict and I'm always interested in how those things can work together to meet everybody's needs, both in the short term and in the long term. The long term view necessarily means thinking about our impact on the environment around us which is a difficult thing, frequently.
That was a pretty cool process. It was a process that culminated in a lot of community education events and culminated in a community planning process. It's not the sort of thing that would work in the same way as in a big city, although Nashville has its own version of planning processes that are pretty interesting—sort of community input mechanisms. In this case it's a small enough place where a community planning process has a really big impact on guiding, say, the next 20 years or next 50 years of development and what people want in their communities. So that was fun.
You’re sort of getting the picture already. I've not had what most people would consider a career. I have had a range of adventures and life experiences with some common themes running through them.
After grad school I came briefly back here to Nashville and thought I was going to live here and started working with an organization that was trying to set up entrepreneurial urban farming here in Nashville but I had only gotten three months into that before I decided I was going to chase the lady of my dreams, Athena, out to Arizona where she was just starting grad school.
Will
I remember running into you at that time. You mentioned you were going out to Arizona.
Jesse
Yep. Went out to Arizona. We lived in Tucson for a couple of years while she was in grad school and I had a lot of trouble finding good work in Tucson. I was a science tutor at a magnet school. I couldn't—I had just finished grad school and couldn't find—I was not using really what I had done grad school for and that was kind of frustrating. I had a lot of time on my hands so I did some volunteer work and worked as a tutor but learned how to do dry land farming so I had six gardens around Tucson. It was interesting. I had farmed in cold places and I had farmed in places like Tennessee and in Virginia, and I had farmed in tropical places. I had never farmed in a desert before so I got some good experience doing that.
I ended up leaving there even while Athena was still in grad school just because one or the other of us needed to make some money and also I needed to do something meaningful. It was the first time I had gotten stuck in a place where I had not been able to find meaningful work, be it paid or otherwise.
So I got a job around the time the earthquake in Haiti happened in 2010. A big earthquake that basically destroyed the capital city, Port-au-Prince. I had maintained a lot of networking connections with people who I had worked overseas with so I ended up going to Haiti and I thought I was going to do one thing and ended up doing another. I got hired to train farmers in Haiti, people from the urban areas who'd been displaced by the earthquake more or less permanently and the government was trying to resettle them in more rural areas and I was supposed to do a training. I was supposed to be a trainer of trainers. So take a bunch of young families and train them in sustainable tropical farming and have them train other folks.
In the end I got there and they decided what was really needed was—the big problem was actually housing and how to rebuild the capital city and rest of the area affected by the earthquake in a sustainable way and in a way that was going to be less susceptible to future disasters than it had been previously. I went expecting to use some of my agriculture skills and I ended up doing more of the planning piece which ended up being good because I got to use my relatively newly acquired skills. It was definitely trial by fire. Of all the places I have lived and worked, Haiti was the most challenging. I spent not quite a year there—around 10 months. When I first went I was at USAID which is the official United States development agency where all the big money related to development goes. So when the United States does disaster assistance in a foreign country in the past it goes through USAID, something called the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and several other offices all of which have acronyms. They love their acronyms.
So I was working at the embassy there. They assigned me to work for a newly formed agency called the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. It was modeled after a similar entity that had been set up after the big tsunami in Indonesia and Thailand in 2005. It was basically, agency's not really the right word, organization's not really the right word, I'd call it a quasi-governmental entity. It was formed by an act of the Haitian Parliament but it was made up of members of the Haitian government and the major donor countries. The European Union sort of acts as a big body, the US acts as a big body, and there's an Asian bloc as well, but it's also representatives of all the NGOs, disaster relief organizations, international finance organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, etc, etc, all housed under one roof which was a big tent for a couple years.
And so I worked for the housing and environment team to figure out what to do with over a million people who were basically sleeping in tents in either camps or in the streets or in what had been city parks or along the main boulevard in front of the Presidential palace which had collapsed. I did that for a year.
Then I came back to the US. The recent stuff's hard to remember.
Oh! I got married. That's actually why I came back from Haiti. I had gotten an offer to extend my contract in Haiti. Haiti was the most lucrative job I ever had but the most frustrating one. I turned down an opportunity to stay in Haiti so I could come back and get married and see Athena graduate from grad school. So we got married.
My family has some land in Hickman County. We got married on the land out there and then we headed off for a dual adventure. My wife's field is public health. She has her masters. She had been a Peace Corps volunteer. She had worked in Dominica where I had also spent some time visiting her after the Peace Corps. I'm leaving out lots of shorter term things but we went to Kenya. We thought we would just do a one off that was not exactly either of our fields, but our honeymoon so we thought we were going to go run an orphanage in Kenya for a year.
Will
What?
Jesse
So it ended up not really being a honeymoon per se, but it was an experience.
Will
How were you allowed to do that? That seems . . .
Jesse
Well, you know, through some connections, friends and people we had worked with, connections who were looking for people who had lots of overseas experience to go basically try to fix an organization that was flailing and in trouble. They wanted us to go manage a situation and at the same time they were trying to expand into doing community development and public health stuff and wanted to start a farm. All those things are right up our alley so off we went. That experience ended up being challenging in ways we had not expected and it turned out we don't really—turns out sometimes you learn things by doing. A lot of our experiences have been learning by doing. We found out we don't actually really agree with [the idea of] overseas orphanages. We don't think orphanages are necessarily the best circumstances in Africa. There's a lot of stories from Kenya. We did that for a while and we came back.
We came back and decided we were going to settle. We came back to Tennessee because it was where all of our stuff was. We had all of our stuff in the barn in Hickman County. That was a whole separate adventure. I did come back to help build our cabin out there and the barn which was a good family thing.
I took a job in Cameroon working for the World Wildlife Federation last year. For the first time I got over to Cameroon and I had only spent a few months there because for the first time in all my years of rambling around and working overseas in different places I finally had that moment of thinking to myself, "you know, I'm actually a little tired of being transient all the time. I might be ready to settle down," and as soon as that thought started it became stronger so I actually finished up in Cameroon sooner than had been my original plan.
Will
Was Athena there with you?
Jesse
She was not. She was about to head to a job in Nigeria. We were going to be country-wise next door neighbors and were going to have to commute back and forth.
So I came back here and she had not left for Nigeria so then we started a process of deciding, "ok, it's time for us to set up home base, where do we want to do it?" We went through a really long process of deciding whether we wanted to live overseas or in the States. To make a long story short, we decided this was as much or more home than anywhere else so we decided to stay in Nashville with the intention of buying some land, which we've just done.
Will
I read about it on Facebook. I've been out to the place where you bought. It's in Fly, right?
Jesse
Yes, in Fly.
Will
Near the Natchez Trace Parkway.
Jesse
We're in Maury County.
Will
There are some places that are back in the woods . . .
Jesse
Oh yeah, very much so.
Will
It's not too far from Hickman County either.
Jesse
So our process—we had to figure out what we were actually interested in in terms of land. We decided we wanted to be able to do—when we first started looking at land we either wanted to just find a piece of land where we could have a little homestead—build a little house and do sort of a permaculture homestead, somewhere along the line I got a permaculture design certificate, or whether we wanted to have land where we could do actual farming—big enough and the right type of soil where we could do actual farming—or some place that was big enough to do both, which we weren't sure we could afford. We ended up deciding we were interested in doing farming and we could have it be big enough to do farming plus have an extended homestead as well. So we were looking—our big criterion was good soil, I guess the number one criterion was good water. Because I can make good soil, with time, out of crappy soil. I can make a farm off a slab of rock at this point if I needed to, but it's a lot easier if you have good soil to begin with. Good water, year-round spring, pond, creek, in the end we got all three, but I would have settled for any one of those. Some flat bottom land with really good soil, we got that, but I didn't want the whole thing to be flat. Some elevation makes things more interesting and allows you to do more interesting things with catching water on your own property and from a permaculture perspective, having some slopes are a good thing. We wanted it to be not too far from Nashville because there's a good chance that one or the other of us will want to maintain employment in town. Couldn't be more than an hour away in a price range we could afford. We looked in a big circle. We looked in every county surrounding Nashville and in Davidson County too. We did drive around the city. Robertson County has some nice farmland. That was one of the places we looked extensively.
Will
In Wilson and Rutherford counties you might actually have to figure out how to make a farm on top of a rock.
Jesse
Yep.
We couldn't afford Williamson. We have done a lot of interesting things. We have not made a lot of money. We don't owe anyone any money but we don't have a lot of money to throw around. We had to go figure out where we could afford but we ended up with an awesome piece of land.
55 acres with a little barn, a spring fed pond and another spring. It's on Leiper's Creek, a year-round creek. It has a timbered ridge top, limestone bluffs and a cave. It's got the bottom land, about 15 acres and another four to five acres of terraced land which will be very good for farming organic fruits and vegetables, which may or may not be certified.
It was owned by a member of the Fly family. But it's been a farm—it was originally—I haven't done all of my homework yet but I gather than the parcel it was originally a part of was a land grant at the end of the Civil War to I'm guessing a Union soldier but maybe not. It was a land grant and I believe the bottom land has pretty well been farmed since the Civil War. Most recently it’s been in corn and hay. Probably tobacco at one time. It's a little wet for tobacco.
It's cultivated right now. It's got corn on it. They'll harvest it in October. The same guy's got his cows on the pasture up the hill.
Will
He'll probably be sad to lose the farm.
Jesse
I've talked to him a bit already. He will be sadder to lose the pasture land. Good soil. The entire property is good soil with the exception of the ridge top. Really good soil makes for really good grass which makes for really fat and happy cows. He has a pretty big dairy operation down the road. You wouldn't see it from the main highway. There's a turn off from the Natchez Trace. Definitely the biggest dairy farmer in Maury County. He would be among the bigger operations in Middle Tennessee, I would expect. This guy's milk is going to Purity or some place in Alabama or Kentucky.
Will
You've pivoted. You've laid down roots. It sounds like you've identified a property you intend to improve for the next few decades.
I'm interested—I’ve done some work in South America, working on health improvement projects, and I don't use that experience very much, the language, and I don't use it very much. I shouldn't say that. I use the experience every day, but you've made a big pivot.
Jesse
Yes and no. Part of the idea of coming home was that—part of the idea was bringing it all back home. I wanted to be—I wanted to have a place to apply some of the knowledge and experience I have gained in all these various adventures and world travels over the years for myself and for family and friends. I've always done it with and/or for other people who were far away from where I'm from and so part of the idea is to come back to Nashville to bring some of my experiences and ideas and knowledge that I have picked up in all of these other places and with all of these other experiences and be able to actually, hopefully, bring back to Nashville and bring back to Middle Tennessee, you know, basically help out here as opposed to—I’ve sort of done it the opposite way to the "think globally, act locally" saying. I've always had that reversed. I've kind of gotten excited about actually doing that in the order in which it's stated.
And things in Nashville have changed a lot over the years too. 10 years ago, 15 years ago this would not have been true. I would like to bring some of the things I have learned about sustainable farming and sustainable food systems, but there's a lot of other people doing that in Nashville as well. So it's an exciting time. Maybe Nashville is still in some ways behind the curve compared to some other parts of the country, the Pacific Northwest or California or some parts of New England. So I'm excited about bringing some sustainable farming ideas here and just contributing to what's already happening here. Sustainable farming and in terms of contribution to a sustainable local food system and that also relates to, you know, an interest I've had and Athena's had in public health and nutrition. So we're both interested in and have been and hope to continue being active in those realms. But we're also not wanting to relinquish necessarily our ties to the international work we've done and in some ways hope to continue doing.
So, the long term plan for this property is to do three things. One of which will be a diversified sustainable farming operation. One of which, and that may be the thing that happens first out there and the other two pieces of which will develop more slowly, is to develop a homestead. We'll figure out a way to live out there sooner rather than later. The long term plan will be to have a homestead in what would be considered the permaculture model.
Permaculture, basically, the word itself is from roots meaning permanent agriculture, and it's basically a system of land management that tries to integrate ecological principles so that you're allowing nature to do a lot of the work that people frequently do to manage their property. An example would be rather than having a big lawn that you use a big lawnmower or tractor to mow, which doesn't serve a function other than to spend money on or perhaps feel proud of if your lawn is your thing, using the space to grow food, grow medicinal plants, grow plants that feed your animals in place. It's basically a system that's working towards, in its ultimate perfect form, which doesn't exist, self-sufficiency within a parcel of land. And it looks very different based on climate, whether temperate or tropical.
But the other exciting thing we are going to do long term is to develop and run an international sustainable development training center. We'd like to be able to do two things with that. One would be to offer opportunities to people who are interested in going overseas to do development work or charity work in order to have some training so they don't go into situations blindly and be aware of and able to use a lot of the best practices that have been developed in the field without reinventing the wheel which frequently happens, particularly with smaller organizations, as well as being able to hopefully offer some programs for professionals already in the field to be able to do some continuing education—learn something about an element of what they do that they don't already do—particularly some technical skills. It could be appropriate technologies like solar power, a number of the technologies related to sanitation and water and things of that sort—public health particularly related to nutrition, which Athena is particularly excited about.
The flip side would be being able to bring people from—community leaders from developing countries here to do some similar things, basically, to provide a training of trainers to people who would then go back to their communities with some new and improved skills.
Rather than us going to the world, like we've been doing for 10 or 15 years, it may be a way to bring the world to us or to Nashville and Middle Tennessee, which we're pretty excited about.
And I expect we'll still do some overseas work. Actually Athena is working on her next overseas gig at the moment. My assignment is to set up the homestead at the moment. This last gig was me overseas and she was here and this time I'm here and she's going to be overseas for a while. That's the immediate plan.
In the meantime it's going to be a little while before the farm is up and running so I'm figuring out what to do with myself here. I work for a landscaping company, a startup landscaping company that converts people's lawns to gardens called Nashville Foodscapes. Our motto is "stop mowing, start growing." We do a lot of cool stuff, everything from gardens in people's yards, rain gardens, rainwater harvesting off roofs, usually all integrated. It's kind of on a permaculture model. So we do a lot of perennial edible plants, fruit trees—replacing a lot of the things that people would traditionally use in their yard as part of the landscaping. We can find similarly sized, shaped, and colored plant material that is also functional beyond just looking pretty. There's all sorts of berries, all sorts of good stuff. The perennials are good and I do a lot of volunteering.
I've been trying to make connections since I got home. I got home a few months ago. Most of the time has been spent on the hunt for land we have just completed, but I'm also sort of job hunting. I do that and I've been trying to make connections so I've been doing work with, making connections with other people who are interested in the things I'm interested in in this area.
I'm hooked into an organization called Nashville Food Project, which is a pretty cool organization. There are number of food assistance organizations in town. This one's interesting because they grow a significant portion of the food they distribute themselves in very intensive, well managed gardens, one behind a church in Green Hills and one on Wedgewood near the fairgrounds. And they make hot, healthy meals and distribute them as opposed to distributing donated food goods.
And then I've also been doing some volunteer work with the Hands on Nashville urban farm which is also a pretty cool place. Metro basically donated to Hands on Nashville some land that was bought out by the city after the flood in 2010 where the houses were razed. The same reason it was bad to have houses there, it's good for farming, smack in the middle of the city and they're doing a lot of good stuff.
Will
There's a war on right now, so far as I understand, in Nashville's organic food community. There's been some very poor coverage in the Tennessean about it. An article about the Devlins selling non-organic food was covered as if everything about it was fraudulent. I thought that must have been a very poorly vetted press release.
Jesse
It certainly was. It's unfortunate they can't all play on the same team, or at least play nice.
Will
Yeah, they're really playing dirty.
Jesse
It got very personal which is when it got dirty. It became not just a professional disagreement but got fairly personal.
Will
I'm glad you know that I am talking about. I think it was the single worst piece of journalism I have ever seen printed in the Tennessean and that is saying a lot.
Jesse
I expect CSAs will be one of the ways we will work it. The Devlins are, in the organic farm world in Nashville, they are both the old boys and the big boys. They're good folks. I've met them all multiple times at the Tennessee Growers Association and at markets.
There's another organization I've been volunteering with called Nashville Urban Food Forests and their goal is to sort of transform particularly food desert areas of the city one lawn or parcel of land at a time and to use a permaculture model so they're installing a lot of perennial fruit trees, bushes, and grasses and combining it with backyard chickens and all that sort of stuff.
Will
There's definitely a trend of people, since Michael Pollan started writing about food—Morgan Spurlock and Fast Food Nation—there’s this awareness now. Everything you're talking about—you've had big adventures, you've gone out and done stuff.
Jesse
Oh man, there are a lot of stories, but it would take hours.
Will
You have to, looking at what you've done you made some decisions to prioritize the sense of adventure but also a deep commitment to improving life for others. I see that.
Jesse
If there's a theme, that carries though all of this, not quite a career but a series of jobs and professions and adventures, I'd say service has always been a big piece and component. I went to Earlham on a scholarship that was based on doing a lot of community service work. I sort of continued that. Earlham's a Quaker school which, though I'm not a practicing Quaker, I'd say I have a lot of respect for a lot of the Quaker values, service being one of them.
Will
In silence, I can see that too. You've done a ton but it's not the kind of thing where . . . You're fairly low profile, although I imagine some of the things you're about to do will require you, in order to be successful, to raise your profile.
Jesse
I think both of those things are true. I tend to be more of an introvert and Athena, they say opposites attract, Athena's definitely the extrovert in the family. Definitely she's more social than I am.
All the things I've done I've done because I was interested in them, not because they would be the easiest thing or the most lucrative, but it’s—I think I worked some job in junior high and it was a crappy job and it made decent money and I basically said sometime in high school I'm never again going to do a job that I don't feel passionate about and that I don't feel is meaningful in some way to the wider world. Meaningful to me and meaningful in some sort of broader sense, even if it means I don't make as much money or even if it means that I'm pickier about what jobs I take so I'm out of a job for longer and have to do odd jobs in between. I've been really—there have been times when I have questioned that, but I've never been unhappy with that decision. I've never had a job that I didn't feel was meaningful or that wasn't interesting to me or that wasn't something in a realm or an area that I was passionate about.
Will
I would be terrified, say, if Michael Pollan became Secretary of Agriculture. If that happened I could see the earth's carrying capacity reduced by a third. And your take on things is different, you're not a biologist out there working for Monsanto trying to crack the genetic code and trying to enhance yields, pairing seeds with custom pesticides, developing massive caloric generation, so much so that the historic trend in place for eons has reversed and poor people are more likely to be fatter than wealthy people. Quality and not quantity is the issue.
Why are you not out there pushing yields? Why are you taking 15 acres out of cultivation to do something different? Why do you feel that is the right thing to do? What's your take on that, morally speaking and how do you judge what's the right thing to do?
I want you to tell me why is sustainability in agriculture, in so many different ways you have, why is that the right thing to do?
Jesse
For one thing, small scale farming is what I know how to do. I don't know how to do giant industrial monocropping, but I also don't really have an interest in that. What I know as a—what my biological training tells me and what common sense tells me, as a person who spent a lot of time outdoors thinking about the natural world, is that biodiversity is of the utmost importance to maintaining the long term viability of life on the planet and that is true whether you are taking about the rainforest or whether you're taking about a wetland or whether you're talking about agriculture, and industrial scale monocrop farming is basically the antithesis of maintaining or working with biological diversity in the agricultural world. Agriculture is about plants and soils and all of the microorganisms that interact and in a broader sense it is about water and air but if you look at what we've done with industrial agriculture it's certainly true that we have managed to arrive at a moment in history where we can produce more food of certain types in a smaller area than ever before in human history with less human hand labor.
But it doesn't really deal with a lot of the externalities, economists like to talk about externalities or they don't like to talk about externalities, but it's something ecologists and environmental economists like to think about, so our ability to do all of these things and the massive increase in productivity in these realms is really closely tied to our use of petroleum fuels. And if you were to look at a graph of petroleum product usage exploitation and usage along with a graph of change in agricultural productivity globally you would find them moving in a similar pattern over the last 100 years. The problem with that is we know that petroleum, whether we like to think about it or not, we know that petroleum is a limited resource.
Everybody likes to argue about how limited it is and when it becomes more or less limited and can we use technology to extract petroleum from places and geological formations where we were not able to before but none of that gets past the fact that it is a limited resource. At some point we will, we humans will have to address that in some way.
Getting back to the agricultural side, I would rather not involve myself in a type of agriculture that is so dependent directly and indirectly on a resource as limited as petroleum, and of course using all that petroleum has a lot of other effects as well.
I'm not sure I entirely accept the premise that without industrial scale monocropping we would not be able to feed all the people currently on the planet, but it seems possible that we would with there being lots of arguments about it and some arguing it's a problem of distribution and blah blah blah, but I would agree with the premise that, again as a 7th grade scientist will tell you, when bacteria in a petri dish run out of food their population will crash and the earth is a fairly finite set of resources, so population growth will eventually bite us if it continues to rise. It already bites us in a lot of ways.
I choose to not do monocropping because the world does not completely revolve around corn or soybeans. That diversity of food, the diversity within the foods we grow is what saves us from potential disaster. When you go from—I don't want to make up numbers, but an enormous percentage of the corn grown in the United States is one or two varieties of corn and that's true increasingly for many of the things we eat. And the reality is there are, or sadly in many cases there were, many hundreds if not thousands of varieties of all of these things that we now eat. The majority of us now eat only one or two varieties of those things and that's sad for one because we have lost all of those interesting varieties. And variety is the spice of life, but it also is dangerous because monocrops are susceptible to disease in the end, despite all the chemicals we want to put on them, despite all of these things. It's your grandmother's wisdom, "don't put all your eggs in one basket." Industrial monocropping is putting all your eggs in one basket.
