Photo courtesy of Randy Ramsley
The Tao of Farming
Growing organically—and spiritually—in a harsh land
By Chip Ward
Caineville, Utah, is a remote, dusty outpost between where we have been and where we are going next. Under a harsh sun, its bare mesas, with their pleated skirts of pale ash, may seem plain, especially compared to their more colorful and celebrated redrock neighbors down the road. Most visitors zoom by it on their way to or from Lake Powell or Capitol Reef National Park. It is easy to miss the dance of luminosity and shadows that define the horizon, but there are subtle hues of violet, yellow, and blue among the gray tones. This is a landscape of nuance, patina, and pentimento.
Those who do stop are often towing all-terrain vehicles behind their trucks, using Caineville’s wide-open spaces and extreme landforms to test their machines against the limits of gravity. You could say that Caineville is what you make of it—a haven of solitude and beauty, or a carnival of combustion, depending on who’s in town.
Randy Ramsley is one of a handful of Caineville residents who is always in town. For a decade now, Ramsley has been farming the bottomlands of the Fremont River as it makes its slow descent toward the Colorado River, and hoping passers-by will pause a while on the porch of his Mesa Farm Market, just off State Route 24, where he offers fresh-baked bread and organic vegetables.
It’s easy to speed right by the market because it is almost hidden from view by trees and there is no sign announcing its presence on Route 24. “We’re like a worm dangling on a hook,” says Ramsley, “and if you swim by, you have to decide to turn around and come back to check it out or just keep going.”
A typical shop owner might see this as a signage problem that must be solved to increase business, but Ramsley finds the situation amusing and welcome because it adds elements of chance and intention to who arrives at his little desert garden. Ramsley is not your typical entrepreneur, and he is not a typical farmer.
Caineville is Wallace Stegner country, and Ramsley personifies the great Utah writer’s seminal theme: the contradictory and conflicting impulses in his beloved West, impulses that are also evident in the world at large. On the one hand were those Stegner described as “boomers,” who saw the frontier as an opportunity to get rich quick and move on. They were the conquistadors, the gold miners, the buffalo hunters, the land scalpers, and the dam-building good ol’ boys. They are still among us, trying to make a killing so they can end up on Easy Street.
On the other hand were those Stegner described as “nesters” or “stickers.” They came to stay and struggled to understand the land and its needs. They were less concerned about what they could get away with and more concerned about what the nature of the local land and water would allow. Their vision was to become independent, frugal, settled, small freeholders. Historians call it an aspect of “Jeffersonian democracy.” The settlers’ hope was to become native to this land. They, too, are still among us, and they are still trying to call this place “home.”
But that distinction between boomers and nesters is too simple, because there is some deep and abiding call within all of us that expresses the orientation of the nesters. And all of us, at least through the conditioning of our acquisitive culture, are boomers. We drive, we build, we consume, we use, we move. So we are torn between staying and going, caring and not caring. Our choices in the struggle to choose wisely and to live with each other’s choices—the struggle to practice ecological citizenship—are rarely clear or final.
Unfortunately, there is no manual for relating to the land and one’s community; we’re all working it out as we go. But if we want an instructive example of how it’s done, Ramsley will tell the lessons he’s learned since abandoning the rat race up north and landing feet first in Caineville 10 years ago. Although his long, blonde hair brings to mind a youthful surfer, a weathered face betrays his middle age and a lot of hard living.
If he had a tattoo, it would read “Born to Farm.” He grew up on the rolling plains of South Dakota, fascinated by the botanical arts, especially as expressed in the pioneering work of Robert Rodale, the father of organic growing. Like countless other sons and grandsons of America’s farmers, he dreamed of farming, but couldn’t raise enough cash to compete in what has become a very expensive business. So he became a backyard gardener instead. Gardening was a soothing balm during the many years he lived along the Wasatch Front while building a successful kitchen remodeling business in Salt Lake. But the dream lived on.
When a weekend trip to the San Rafael Swell was aborted by roadwork that blocked access to a favorite canyon, Randy and his wife, Debra, stumbled into Caineville and then Capitol Reef National Park for the first time. The dream must have tagged along for the ride and tapped them on the shoulder, because they soon found themselves buying farmland
in Caineville.
They planted a huge garden there and tended it on weekends, selling the melons they raised at Patagonia’s farmers market in Salt Lake. “I would leave my business at six o’clock on a Friday evening and drive down. Then I’d work until four in the morning on Monday and drive back,” Ramsley says.
He discovered there was a market for his organic vegetables and greens: The Capitol Reef Inn and Café Diablo in Torrey valued food that was both healthy and delicious, and they bought whatever Randy could grow. Torrey residents also wanted to get in on the harvest.
Finally, Debra and Randy made a leap of faith. Tired of all the striving up north, the noise and pollution, and the
feeling that they always postponed what mattered most in life, they wanted to try to live “fully engaged.” Debra
had survived cancer and they knew life was tentative. Her two boys they had raised together were grown, and they were free to move on. So they walked away from all they had known and moved south to farm full time. “It was scary walking away from all we had, and we had what most people strive for—the material things and security. We left all that for a bare piece of ground with nothing going on and assumed we’d figure out how to survive,” Randy Ramsley says.
The first year was brutal. “As a businessman, I had supervised and directed employees, so I thought that’s how you farm—you decide what you want done and then you organize to make it happen,” Ramsley says. “But, no. Farming is all about observation. We observe our microclimate and then work with the environment rather than against it. Farming is hard work, but it doesn’t have to be a battle. Too many farmers are at war with tamarisks, coyotes, raccoons, insects … I decided I could live in peace with the land, but I had to give up control and learn to be attentive.”
The following years have been much better. He added two helpers, Beth and Tim, who share his devotion to living lightly on the land. Muscular dystrophy limits Debra’s physical participation in the work, though her insights and advice are key to the farm’s direction.
One night after that first year, Ramsley experienced what he calls “the shift.” He realized that he could navigate his property’s uneven terrain in the pitch black of night. By then, farming had become a spiritual quest for him. “Farming has taught me about life, myself, people, nature. People ask how I can work long hours and live in a mobile home. ‘What will you do about retirement?’ Well, I guess I’ll keel over in the field. I am fully engaged. This is who I am. I love what I do.”
His customers, who appreciate homemade bread and robust vegetables, also love what he does. But others don’t. In 2006, Ramsley signed on to a lawsuit by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) to control the off-road vehicle drivers who were carving up Factory Butte and crushing a rare species of cactus. As a result, 142,000 acres around Factory Butte were put off limits to off-road vehicles. The reaction of the ORV lobby was apoplectic, and the Wayne County Commission protested. A local burger joint in nearby Hanksville issued a sweatshirt with an image of a cactus in the form of a fist with an upraised middle finger that says, “Protect this, SUWA!”
Ramsley says his decision was simple. “The land was being abused and it needed to be protected.” He is remarkably sanguine about the hostile response from some of his neighbors, preferring to forgive rather than hold a grudge.
“Farming gives you lots of time to think. We do what we call ‘hoe yoga.' You can learn a lot about yourself as you work a row,” he says.
What he learned was to avoid negative emotion and expression, to be mindful of his assumptions, since they tend to become manifest eventually; and to avoid the idea that life is about opposition and judgment—either/or. Randy Ramsley’s “tao of farming” is about “integration and engagement with life itself. It’s all connected. It’s all one.”
The notion that farming can generate such an elevated philosophy is at odds with society’s stereotype of the farmer as a hick, redneck, hayseed, bumpkin, yokel, rube, clodhopper, and hillbilly. Society’s negative views of farmers may be why so many family farmers left the land after World War II and sought the “good life” in cities and towns. When family farms were combined into massive operations tended by massive machines, they became massively expensive investments beyond individuals’ means. Instead of a seedbed of American independence, self-reliance, and resilience, farming became an industrial process like mining, where nutrients are extracted from the ground and sold as food. And when the soil becomes depleted, chemicals are applied to make up the difference.
Sometime in the future, when we run out of oil, we will have to learn to farm sustainably again. When Ramsley’s Caineville soil was first tested for organic content, he was told it was “sterile.” Since then, he has increased the organic content fourfold by experimenting with cover crops in the winter that he tills under in the spring. It’s a positive change, but such labor-intensive local, organic farming gets little support from banks and government agencies. Guys like Ramsley can only afford marginal land, and that makes their challenge even greater. “The people have forgotten,” Ramsley explains. “Nature tells us the truth. Nature tells us who we are.”
The truth is that we are embedded in landscapes, watersheds, climates, ecosystems, soil, and the ageless cycles
of seasons. And nature is embedded in us—what we eat, drink, and breathe gets translated into our flesh and blood and experience.
Ramsley would like to wake us up and help us remember these simple truths. “Recognition of our interconnectedness frees us from struggle and opens us to happiness, peace, and wellness.”
In the meantime, there’s fresh bread coming out of the brick oven next to the Mesa Farm Market. Try it with the arugula-jalapeño pesto that Tim and Beth made last night, or with a slice of that heirloom tomato you can’t buy anywhere else. Here, try some greens that were picked fresh this morning. Slow down. Stay. Talk awhile. Make yourself at home ...Wally Stegner would be pleased.
Chip Ward is an activist and writer who realized a long time ago that “we are what we eat.” The author of Canaries on the Rim and Hope’s Horizon, he co-founded grassroots groups to raise awareness about the links between environmental quality and public health. He retired as the assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library and moved to Torrey. An essay he wrote about his experiences with the library’s homeless users is the basis for a new movie directed by Emilio Estevez, The Public.
