In the Days Still Left, We’ll Walk in Fields of Teff

I love farming. No one is more shocked than I am, not even my mother. She used to have to goad me into doing anything physical as a kid. I think I was a pretty unmotivated child. Some might even use the word lazy. I prefer to think of my younger self as dreamy, caught up in imaginary worlds and not much interested in the here and now, especially if it involved physical labor.

Farming is not necessarily what I would have picked out for myself when I was a kid. I’ve been an English teacher, theater director, stay-at-home mom, and Country Representative for Mennonite Central Committee. But I must have at least a bit of my dad in me, because when I turned 50 I decided with Bruce to try to be a farmer.

Understand that I don’t really know what that entails. Bruce and his brother managed a maple syrup farm pretty much on their own when they were 12 and 14, and Bruce knows his way around tractors and farm equipment. (If you want to know, a maple syrup farm is called a “sugar bush”.)

I picked up the little that I know by being around my dad, who knew his way around a jembe, or a Swahili hoe. In this photo we’re mounding up tutas to plant sweet potatoes near our house by Lake Victoria in Tanzania. Dad knew a little bit about everything–how to fix a car/water pump/bicycle/piki-piki, how to translate from English to Swahili, how to plant banana trees, how to piss off an elephant and how to get out of her way when she charges you. Not nearly enough of his know-how made it over to me, but the older I get the more I appreciate the things he and Mom tried to teach me.

These days I fall asleep at night thinking about what I’m going to do out at the farm the next morning. I’ll turn a problem over in my mind, trying to visualize solutions. How many asparagus crowns should we plant? Just a test plot of 100? Three years down the line when our asparagus is sending crazy numbers of spears through meticulously maintained, weed-free soil, are we going to regret not putting in more? We have to do somerthing at scale, or we may as well call ourselves homesteaders and not farmers, with our four goats and 36 chickens. Maybe I should have bought twice as many broccoli crowns. I mean asparagus. Then I’ll wake up at about four and think, Holy shit! What am I doing? I don’t normally cuss much except inside my head and at four am. Dead of night seems to be a good time to ridicule my farming aspirations. Who am I kidding? I don’t know how to do this.

Now and then, we run into Real Farmers who are renting some of the fields at the farm and actually doing farmerly things that bring them money. They have Big Tractors and Mowers/Rakers/Balers/Cultivators and other impliments I don’t recognize yet. There are three Old Order Mennonite guys who farm out there, making hay and growing organic vegetables. These guys have been farming for generations. They stop by on their Big Tractors and ask us what’s our five-year plan. One of the farmers is a girl, hardly out of high school. She drove up today on a big blue tractor with her cape dress and bonnet. Honestly, I feel like a fraud.

Our plans are teff. Other than the chickens and goats and other pastured meats we might eventually get into, our plans are teff. It’s a grand plan, and full of pitfalls.

Teff is a magical and ancient grain that is indigenous to Ethiopia. It is a grass seed, and the smallest–as well as the oldest–cultivated grain in the world. In Ethiopia, it is ground, fermented for three days, and poured (clockwise only, mind you–I poured it counter clockwise once when I was learning and my instructor had to laugh at me) onto a round flat pan to make injera. Over the last five years, we ate injera almost every day. Not only is it delicious, in its distinctive, sour-dough way (it is only sour because the runny dough is fermented) it is also really good for you. It’s gluten free, and high in iron, protein, and minerals.

Teff is all set to be the next super grain in the US, like quinoa. Ethiopia realized this and made it illegal to export teff grain, knowing that all the world would want to buy it, and regular Ethiopians would be priced out of the market and be left with nothing to eat. Teff makes up a large part of the Ethiopian and Eritrean diet.

The only teff product that is exported from Ethiopia is fresh injera. If you’ve ever eaten Ethiopian food in a Washington, DC restaurant, that enjera most likely came in on the direct Addis to DC flight.

There is some domestic teff grown in the US, mostly in Idaho and Nevada. Teff grows in Virginia, but is only used as fodder for animals. It’s a fine stemmed grass, and produces a nutritious hay that horses supposedly love. No one in the valley has grown it through to seed. So we decided to do that. With no equipment whatsoever.

But we had some guy come over and teach us how to handle a scythe.

This grass is called poverty brome and looks a bit like teff. (It’s called that because it’s nutritionally poor and doesn’t make good hay.) If it handles the same as teff, we need to practice a LOT before fall. Fortunately, we have lots of poverty brome to experiment on. Of course teff is cut when it’s mature and golden and looks like Rumplestiltskin’s work stacked in the fields.

When the cicadas emerge, we know the ground will be warm enough to plant our teff. Stay tuned.