Novella Carpenter

Novella Carpenter’s Farm City is a memoir of how the author transformed a vacant lot next to her Oakland apartment into GhostTown Farm, a functional urban farm. Raised in rural Idaho by hippie parents, Carpenter wanted the satisfaction of living off the land without sacrificing the culture of city life. Carpenter now harvests vegetables and raises livestock on her little lot, but those who envision a relaxing urban idyll will be disabused of that notion in short order: farming is, in Carpenter’s words, “a shit-ton of work,” no matter where you do it, and obstacles abound. The honeybees abandoned their hive. The pigs ate so much that Carpenter and her boyfriend, Bill, had to don headlamps and Dumpster-dive several times a week to keep them in slop. Stray dogs and a possum helped themselves to her birds. The dogs escaped; the possum met its end at the wrong end of a shovel. Carpenter relates the ups and downs of urban farming with a wry sense of humor and a deep sense of history. We spoke to her about Farm City, what’s next for her, and the future of farming.

You have three jobs. How do you manage your time? Is the farming one of those jobs?

Farming is one of them. Farming is one of the jobs now.

And writing is one of them as well.

Yeah, and then I’m a freelance writer. Besides writing books I’m a journalist. So I’ve been doing that, and then I work at a biodiesel station.

Exactly how picky are the animals when it comes to time? I know that you had to wake up to milk the goats this morning. Has it been a challenge to juggle the time needs of the farm with your other commitments?

I used to keep turkeys and that kind of thing, smaller animals. It’s different with the goats. You get up in the morning, feed them, and then go to work. It’s something that even rural farmers do. There’s no money in farming and so you have to have another job. So it’s just one of those things that you balance out. You do what you can in the early morning, because most people don’t have to be at work at 7. Then when you come home from work, you just do your chores at night. With the goats, they have a really specific schedule. They’re like children, and so they have to be fed at 7 or they’ll just freak out. And then they need to be put to bed at 11.

You have to put them to bed?

You have to put them away, and make sure they feel safe. Give them a little grain. It’s just like putting kids to bed. You take them down to their little pens and put them to bed. It kind of makes it hard to have a rock and roll lifestyle. If I go out late and go to a show or something, I’ll either put the goats away earlier or wait and pay the price later, because then in the morning they’re all freaked. They know that you put them away at 2 in the morning instead of 11, and they act weird all day. It’s one of those things where you just realize, “Okay, I can’t really do that anymore.”

You did a little book tour. Did Bill take care of them, or did you need a babysitter type of situation?

Luckily, Bill took care of them. We also have these new downstairs neighbors who are totally awesome. He’s from Cuba, and in Cuba they do this thing where you’re trained in guerilla warfare and also trained in farming at the same time. It’s like, milk a goat, shoot a gun — so he really fits in in Oakland well. He comes and milks the goats. But it’s funny because I just did a reading last night with Mas Masumoto, a peach farmer, and he was the same way, like, “Holy crap, I have to be gone for three days.” And that’s what I did too, I’d have to be gone for three days and I’d come back and it would just be total pandemonium. You just have to go and do the book tour and rush back as fast as you can.

You talk a lot about the difficulties and rewards of urban farming in the book. It does seem like your parents were a really big influence on you. I’m wondering if you feel like you could have gone through some of the harder moments — killing the possum who killed your birds, for instance — without the perspective of your parents ‘experience. Do you think if you’d been raised in a suburban setting from the get-go, you’d be able to handle the grittier realities of farming?

I think that it really does help to have this well that you can draw upon, because otherwise you’re like, “Wow, this has gotten so out of control. I’m executing a possum in my yard. Is this really normal?” Because it’s part of my heritage, it does make it easier to do, because farming is hard. When I was talking to Mas last night — he’s a third-generation peach farmer — he was reading this part of his book about how hard the work is. You sweat constantly and you’re getting old from growing the food, and it hurts a little bit. But at the same time, you look back and you see that your father did it, and this is just your lifestyle. It’s kind of reassuring. If my parents had been investment bankers, there’s no way I would be doing this. No way.

You talk about urban farming being the Utopia 9.0 to your parents ‘Utopia 8.5. Do you think the current movement is sort of picking up where your parents left off, or do you think it’s more of a case of cultural amnesia?

I think it is actually cultural amnesia. People are like, “Urban farming forever, right?” But it’s not like that because that is not how we operate. If you read any history of urban farming, it usually happens during a recession — hello — or some kind of economic calamity: the World Wars, the Great Depression. That’s when people start urban farming, but then they stop, because it is a lot of hard work, and it isn’t like your fantasy about farming. Americans have this whole idea about it, built up by Martha Stewart, that you have to live in this perfect, beautiful fantasy world, and if you’re not doing that, you’re not doing it right. So I think that there’s a lot of pressure.

Historically, Americans have mostly done it during depressions. But if you go to England, they have these beautiful allotment gardens, and that’s part of the culture. Until urban farming becomes part of the culture here, it’s never going to hold on. In America, culture is a moving target. The only thing that gives me hope is that there’s a huge immigrant population in America always, and those are the people who are doing urban farming because they can’t find certain vegetables or animals available on the market, so they’re going to have to do it themselves.

There is a tradition of Americans being amateurs, having a little amateur hobby farm, for instance. Amateurs are often the ones who keep culture going, because they’re doing stuff not for money, but for love.

You mention a few times in the book instances of rural farmers not necessarily being enthusiastic about what you’re doing. Have you gotten any feedback from the rural farming community?

I am totally humbled by real rural farmers. They are the ones growing the majority of our food. Even in places like Detroit, where they have so much urban farming it’s insane, they only grow 3% of their food in the city. So that number’s tiny. It’s really important not to sound like, “Hey, come out of the country and start urban farming!” The land is hard to acquire and access. It’s impossible to grow those crops they really need, wheat and rice. You can’t really have a cow in the city. Urban farming is like subsistence farming. I have some surplus that I give to my neighbors or sell to underground restaurants and stuff, but for the most part it’s really just scrapping. Rural farming is really important. I don’t want to be either/or, urban farming or rural farming. We can do both, and we should support each other.

But people are psyched. I actually had this lady write me through my blog, where she was like, “I have 3,000 acres in the Central Valley, and you have your little lot, and we’re both farmers.” I thought, “That’s so cool, she’s like a real farmer.” So I think people are positive about it because they want us to know how much work it is to be a farmer. Even on a small scale, it’s just a shit-ton of work. If it’s a lot of work for me on my little plot, imagine having acres and acres that you’re taking care of. I think urban farming has opened people up, because in an urban population, if you’re exposed to it, you realize, “Wow, this lettuce really took a lot of work. I shouldn’t just eat half of my salad and throw it away. It’s really valuable and important.”

You do raise meat animals, and I’ve read a few interviews with you when you seem surprised that you haven’t received the phone call from PETA you were fearing.

I’ve been really surprised. A lot of vegans and vegetarians come to my readings. We’ll be talking afterward, and I don’t know they’re vegetarian, and they’ll tell me and I’ll say, “Oh my God, why are you at my reading? Why do you like my book?” And they say, “Well, these are the issues that people who eat meat don’t think about. They’re not looking it in the eyes. They’re just consuming what’s available in front of them without any thought.” So I feel like people who choose not to eat meat are excited that I’m showing people what it really does mean. I’m not always that psyched on it. We just killed one of our male goats, and it was really sad. I was just thinking, “God, I can’t believe how many times I’ve eaten goat tacos or something and just not really thought about it that much.” It’s not all fun and games, that’s for sure.

When you first got turkeys, you were reluctant to name them. Do you now name your meat animals?

I do name the meat animals now, because I think it’s a way to show respect. If you name something, it’s kind of like you’re saying, “This thing is important,” instead of being like “Oh, that one,” or whatever. I think it’s really important to name an animal that you’re going to kill. And you also want to give them an extra good life, because they’re going to have a short life. So why not make it the best available?

You have goats now. Are they your main project?

I have bees and rabbits and chickens and goats. The goats are the ones who take up most of my bandwidth right now. They’re like cats: They’re kind of independent, but at the same time they kind of want to cuddle with you. They’re just really great. And it’s great to have a milk goat. I haven’t bought milk in a long time. That’s a really nice feeling, too. Especially when you hear the crap about dairies. So many chemicals poured down the drain in the name of cleanliness.

If you’re talking to someone who was raised in the suburbs or the city, and really doesn’t have the experience you have, would you recommend that they try urban farming?

I don’t want to tell anybody what to do. I would say you can totally do it if your parents weren’t farmers. Especially now. Maybe a while ago it was a little bit more of a strange thing to do, but now there are so many urban farm organizations in every single city that you can totally find a community that way. If I moved to a new city, I would be like, “Okay, where’s my urban farm? Who are my peeps?” It’s a total community now. I think you can really access that in a way that you probably wouldn’t have been able to 10 years ago. Because of that, you’re less of a nut ball. You can draw strength from talking to other people. Also, it’s comforting to read historical accounts of urban farming. Because if you live in the city, everybody’s history is that. Historically, everybody was a farmer in America at some point, or has some roots. It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, most people can find a connection to urban farming, or farming of some sort, in their family.