After apprenticing for a year with a family practicing organic and biodynamic agriculture on a 20-year old fruit and vegetable farm in El Hoyo, a small village in Patagonian Argentina, Jason Angell and Jocelyn Apicello moved back to family land to join the growing movement of young (meaning new) farmers who want to find a satisfying way to live, re-establish a simple connection to our earth and reclaim our future's health and contentment.
Longhaul Farm, launched in January 2011, is a farm and think/act/learn space located in Garrison, NY in the lower Hudson Valley. Longhaul Farm practices organic, sustainable agriculture while striving to make farming, gardening and issues of food and social justice accessible, relevant, and present in the lives of as many different groups of people as possible.
Our organic, sustainable farm is built around principles of ecological balance: committing to zero waste; using compost, animal and plant manures to feed the soil instead of chemicals; growing diverse crops, herbs and flowers to naturally keep away pests and disease; raising livestock as contributors to our ecological system; working at a small enough scale that most everything is done by human hands; honoring the earth as a living organism that shares interconnections between the plants, animals, people and all other living and non-living things; and finding joy in the simple pleasure of being able to walk into your backyard to harvest dinner.
Longhaul Farm is Jason and Jocelyn's first step at re-purposing life.
Why "Longhaul"?
Long: adj; Far reaching
Haul: v; To move by pulling
- To "longhaul" fundamentally means taking action over a long period of time that has a far reaching result. The farm is our vehicle for direct action in the world. It represents a way of living we are dedicated to and our belief that small individual actions can produce great change over time.
- The clearest measure of the true value of any work is its permanence, particularly within the context of sustainable agriculture and permaculture. We want to build a farm in harmony with its surrounding environment to the degree that it can support itself permanently. The genius and balance of Nature is the standard here: valuing patience over the immediate result; embracing a rythem and scale more in tune with the natural world than the world of industry; and expanding our time horizon beyond the individual life to the life of following generations.
- "The Long Haul" is the title of the auto-biography of Miles Horton, founder of the Highlander Folk School that taught the leaders of the early labor and civil-rights movements. He believed that any social cause that could be achieved in the course of an individual life time was not big enough; you have to be in it for the long haul. We see the farm growing into a place that can provide a forum for education and action on issues of social justice and actions that can help contribute to broad cultural reformation.
- There's a whole lot of work to do and just a few hands to do it. It's going to be a longhaul.
