Despite having been on the farm blitz list since my freshman fall, I actually never made it out to the farm until my sophomore summer when I took Professor Ross Virginia’s Ecological Agriculture class. That’s how I first got to know Scott and made a connection to the farm. I had always been interested in organic farming and gardening, and I jumped at the chance to actually study it in a class here at Dartmouth.

I loved the class, and was eventually inspired to consider being a full time intern the summer before my senior year here. However, I also had an offer for an internship with WISE, a crisis and resource center for victims of domestic and sexual abuse. Scott helped me decide to take the internship at WISE with the idea that I’d do an independent study exploring the connection between women and agriculture.

I talked with Scott over the summer and that fall I started working with Ann Armbrecht, in the Women’s Studies department. It was such an amazing experience! The project went through several incarnations, starting as a basic research paper on women farmers from different cultures across the globe, and eventually becoming a much more personal story of my own feelings about doing agricultural work. I ended up focusing on interviews I had with several women working closely with the land in the northern New England area.

I realized at some point in the thick of the project that what was really inspiring me was not only an academic interest in gender roles in agricultural production, but also a deeply personal interest in what inspires a person, especially a women in our modem age to farm. Farming is hard work! I knew that from the limited time I had spent on the farm. I also knew from personal experience out in the fields, working with the land, that it made me feel fuller and happier than just about anything else I’d ever done.

Through my independent study, I was able to take that personal experience and investigate it in a more academic fashion, with Scott and Ann’s help. I was interested in what it means to feel a connection to land that is so strong that your love for it gives you the strength to work hard and live a life that is contrary to most of what our culture tells us makes for a successful life.

This summer’s job was a test for me. I had done so much thinking, academically and such, about what it means to do this kind of work, but I had never really tested myself. I asked other people what it meant to them, in my interviews in the fall, but I was only listening to what they said. This summer, I tried it for myself. And now I know what they were talking about.

Even when I wasn’t working out there, the farm always represented a place of peace for me in this hectic community. It was always a place I knew I could go and be fully in myself, ifthat’s what I needed at the moment. I’ve found so much joy in the community of people who are attracted to the place for reasons similar to mine. It’s a wonderful, wonderful community.

Meredith Eilers ‘03 majored in Environmental and Evolutionary Biology modified with Anthropology. She is currently suffering from shock that her idyllic summer at the farm is over, and is busy trying to find a way to continue her love affair with farming, and,
hopefully, get paid for it.