Who can build?

Food system infrastructure in Iowa and Palestine

As a farmer, whenever I travel I think about food systems. As I travel, I am often using carefully planned and fairly straightforward public transportation systems that move thousands or maybe millions of bodies a day, and inevitably I wonder how all these people get their food! There’s a less visible system from farm to market (or supermarket) to table, but it’s just as complex as the public transportation system and gives as many choices to the people involved. It’s kind of miraculous—an industrial miracle. And I always find myself grateful to be part of the rural place-based miracle of the food growing and distributing I do with Humble Hands Harvest—it’s at a scale I can wrap my mind around, a scale at which relationship matters.

As my plane landed in Tel Aviv, my farmer sensibilities perked up: we were flying over agricultural areas, with rows upon rows of tree crops and so many greenhouses! I even saw some greenhouses with palm trees coming up out of their tops—they reminded me of my co-farmer Emily’s Iowa-grown coconut dream: a silo made of glass for a tropical perennial greenhouse. It was really interesting to see all of the industrial-scale agriculture from up above. I wonder who works the Israeli fields.

And now, at a Palestinian-owned farm in the West Bank, I’m experiencing an interesting cognitive dissonance: this place is 100 acres, and lots of people work as volunteers here. It could be a big commercial enterprise, producing olives and almonds and figs as well as vegetables and livestock. I could envision it! And it’s not for lack of land or labor, here: it’s for lack of access to infrastructure.

In my experience as a farmer & farm business owner, I’ve observed that success follows appropriate infrastructure. In our first years at Humble Hands Harvest we worked incredibly hard, lived in provisional dwellings without running water, and paid ourselves significantly less than we paid the people who worked for us. Toward the end of our second year, we built a pole shed that transformed the way we could organize the farm and manage harvest. A few years later we put a walk-in cooler in the pole shed instead of having a crawl-in cooler in our market van. Both of these things dramatically increased our ability to produce food efficiently, which made it possible for our business to pay all of our people better. A few years later we built a house—after asking for and receiving a lot of financial support from our community—and with that the farm feels fully stable, able to grow lots of food and support all the workers in having decent lives. Without those capital inputs, though, our farm simply wouldn’t be able to sustainably produce food at the scale that we do.

On this farm in Palestine, I can hear the lowing of cows from the Israeli settlement to the southwest, and I can see solar-panel-covered barns where they live. Cows are water-intensive and would be an automatic no-go for this farm, which stores all of its water in cisterns, collected from the rain or purchased. There is no opportunity to dig a well or to connect to a water utility, so we are extremely frugal about our water usage. In this moment, it’s supposed to be the rainy season when plants get to grow happily, but it hasn’t rained for a couple weeks and so the productivity of the hundred acres is impacted. Some young trees might not survive a drought, and there’s simply no way to save them all. A settlement in this same situation would simply have an irrigation system!

This farm also has demolition orders against it—new structures are not allowed, and if they were to build something, an Israeli bulldozer could come at any time and take it down. So, most of the volunteers here live underground in gussied up caves—with doors, painted walls, and even electricity from the farm’s solar panels (no, the farm isn’t granted the opportunity to connect to the grid), and we use composting toilets that are set up in strategic places around the farm.

Meanwhile, this morning the Israeli settlement to the east brought four shipping containers full of building materials to the corner of the farm, just over the fence 50 feet from the composting toilet that I use, on land owned by Palestinians who don’t have the energy or money to take the settlers to court. There’s a land grab happening in this very moment, with (illegal) Israeli settlement construction beginning on the neighbor’s land, and meanwhile if Palestinians were to build on their own land, it could be destroyed by the powers that be.

Looking out the back of the composting toilet to shipping containers placed on the neighbor’s land this morning, and beyond that to a school building and settler houses on top of the hill.

At home, I’m deeply involved in questions around how we can resource local farm and food businesses with the land and capital needed to make the businesses stable and capable of contributing to rural places. I’ve been part of initiating the Grow the Good Grant Program and the Farmers Land Investment Cooperative, both as part of that mission of mine. But here in Palestine, this farm already has the land it needs, and it has a wide network that could support with funds for construction of infrastructure, but it is impossible to do that because of demolition orders and similar structural barriers. So the farm continues as mostly a subsistence enterprise, maintaining a connection to the land.

When I drive around Iowa I make a practice of imagining the landscape full of diversified farms—savannas of chestnut trees, apple orchards, animals grazing on perennial pasture, and the occasional vegetable acreage in addition to small grains, hay, corn, and soy. Think of how many people we could feed, so well, while keeping our waters clean and our communities vibrant! There are structural barriers of landownership, capital distribution, and environmental hubris that are our task to dismantle.

Here in Palestine, it’s obvious to me that the food system could be vibrant and productive—the Mediterranean climate, good-feeling soil, and the view I saw from the airplane outside of Tel Aviv all point to that. But the barriers in the way of Palestinians are so much more intense. It isn’t so much a matter of accessing capital as it is a matter of accessing the legal privilege to build something productive. As I rode into Bethlehem with Amal this afternoon, she pointed out the new barriers preventing their Palestinian car from accessing route 60, which used to be their direct way to the farm. It was rush hour and we were bumping along behind a barbed-wire fence while we watched the traffic on a four-lane highway zip along on the other side. Reflecting with anger and helplessness at today’s events, she asked rhetorically, “until when?” I wish I knew when freedom will be possible for Palestine. It would make the wait easier.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

I’m proud to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Each Sunday, Julie Gammack shares a roundup of articles that collaborative members have written in the past week. Check out last Sunday’s roundup, here.