Scarcity and Cider
Scarcity mentality can dominate your life. We live in a world where many resources are limited. If you have something valuable everybody wants it, and a great deal of effort is expended while the resource owners strive to protect the assets which they have worked hard to earn. Students in our special education programs live in a world where practically everything they need is rationed: Teachers’ time, transportation, summer camps, training opportunities, job internships, fun activities, etc. are always traced to available funding and always at the mercy of the priorities of the educational system.
Mother Nature is a stern teacher, but unlike the government she is organized around a system that is often overwhelmingly generous and rewarding. To those who are willing to go outdoors with her and learn her secrets as well as her ruthless laws, she will teach them what it means to do only what mankind can do, and she will take it from there. At Rock Wall Garden and Tripp Family Farm, we don’t have a choice. We must coordinate our work with the seasons, and we make whatever course corrections are necessary for both our crops and the animals who depend on us.
We wanted the students in Jimmie’s Peer Project class to feel the rhythm of an order where there is enough work for everyone as well as enough food. A cider pressing event is an amazing example of this balance between what is absolutely free, and what takes good muscle and know-how in order to finish the job. Supposedly, Robert Schuller said, “Though you can easily count the seeds in an apple, it is impossible to count the apples in a seed.” A single apple could potentially produce 450,000 apples in one season if all the seeds produced a tree. The business of farming is based on life itself, which is both fragile and extravagant. All I had to do to get raw materials for this cider season was go to my kind neighbors who are overrun with extra apples this time of year. Everything else we had on hand because equipment is reusable. This was one day when we didn’t have to deal with shortages and shut-downs.
Everyone had a fun job. Dipping the apples from one vat to the next with a sieve, inspecting each apple for signs of damage, turning the handle and processing the apples through the grinder had everyone working like clockwork. The students were fantastic. They have learned, perhaps more than most people their age, what it means help one another, and take pride in the tasks assigned. Of course, the most fun clockwork of all was standing in a circle around the press, passing the trunnion lever from one to the next, and laughing while they tested their strength against each other. As the cider flowed perpetually into the containers, one girl said it all. She clasped her hands, looked down at the mason jars I was filling, and almost whispered: “We MADE this.”
We will never know a world without scarcity of some kind or other, but farms should be the centers where we connect our work to the generosity of the earth. We coordinate our efforts with other people and with God. At the end of the day we can look at our results and think: “We made this.”