Many Hands Sustainability Center: An Education in Nourishment
Photos by Katie Noble
Julie Rawson and Jack Kittredge have been farming land in Barre since 1982, producing organic fruits, vegetables, eggs, meats and more for families in Worcester County, mostly through their Many Hands Organic Farm (MHOF) community-sponsored agriculture (CSA) program. They also run an educational component on the farm, the Many Hands Sustainability Center (MHSC).
Jack and Julie dreamed up this initiative 12 years ago, centering its mission around folks who are often underserved in our community: at-risk teenagers, former prisoners and recovering drug addicts. Partnering with organizations like Stetson School in Hanover and Dismas House in Worcester, Julie and Jack invite boys and men in need of structure to work at their farm. The people who take them up on this offer are introduced to an agricultural lifestyle, taught organic farming practices and given a model of how to build a life around these things. In return, the farm gets more hands to share in its work. This past January, I drove to Barre to see for myself how this exchange works.
I arrived just after 8:30 in the morning, blue skies and sunshine framing the fields, orchards and outbuildings, January temperatures hovering just below 30°. Smoke poured from the chimney of the main house, and that’s where I found Julie spreading frozen fatback on the kitchen table and, at the same time, going over chicken chores with four young men. Three of these boys—D., T. and S.— were students at nearby Stetson School, a residential facility for teenagers working through behavioral challenges. The fourth was Mario, a recent Stetson graduate who, after two seasons proving his mettle and trustworthiness on the farm, had recently joined the crew full-time, his salary paid by MHSC.
Julie is 66 years old, modest in stature, secure in manner, and dynamic—she never stops moving. As the boys headed to the henhouse, I followed her downstairs, helped sweep out a room and fill it with folding tables for some chore that would happen later in the day and listened as she shared the pros and cons of working with boys in transition and men in recovery. There were no former prisoners working on the farm today, she told me, calling this status unusual. She and Jack are still recovering from the loss of two close farmhands to drug overdoses, men who were more sons to them than employees. The work done here—not the growing of food, but the changing of lives—is as high in risk as it is in reward.
When we got back to the kitchen, T. was there, rinsing eggs and stacking the white and brown and speckled ovals—still wet—pointed-side down in recycled cardboard cartons.
“What do we do with the cracked ones?” he asked Julie before she was fully in the room.
“How cracked?” she responded.
A handful of dripping egg and shell was lifted in her direction, and she grabbed a bowl off the floor near the stove.
“That goes to the dogs,” she said. And without any fuss she added, “Now you know two important things: that handling eggs requires a bit more care … and where you can put ’em when they break.”
It was not a reprimand, but an invitation.
The back door opened at that very second, and in came S., more eggs in his hands.
“You’re fired, T.,” he said. “You missed all these.”
There followed some good-natured ribbing and a discussion of chickens who won’t abandon their nest boxes in the morning and how one must be courageous when pushing them aside to collect their eggs. I witnessed conversations like this all morning, both inside the house and out in the fields, an often-interrupted but never-ending exchange that moved to the rhythm of whatever work was at hand.
For example, we talked the entire hour we were outside helping Julie inch forward a massive re-organization of the farm’s tools and equipment. We moved errant shovels, power tools, extension cords and garden stakes to places they belonged, dodging dozens of chickens, a few cats and two dogs as we did. It was an unusual winter dance, and I was taken with how attuned Julie was to her troupe. She has a deep understanding of teenage boys and a finely tuned maternal instinct. She handed out compliments, instructions and corrections in equal measure. She also dangled the kind of irresistible opportunities that keep teenagers invested: ladders to climb, tractors to drive, bonfires to build. There was no time to get bored or cold. Hungry? Well, yes.
But at just the right moment we moved back inside, where Clare Caldwell, long-time farm employee, handed out homemade peanut butter balls, one per person. Julie readied the large kitchen table for our next task: preparing fatback, frozen since the fall, for rendering into lard. As before, Julie and Clare showed us what to do. As before, we did it with an easy chitchat as the soundtrack to acquiring a new skill.
“Should I put ‘good at making lard’ on my resume?” T. asked, half joking.
“Of course, you should,” Julie answered.
By the end of the morning we’d each add “good at applying fertilizer to fruit trees” to our resumes, too. As a bonus, we’d gotten to know one another a bit.
I learned that T. had grown up on a farm and was no stranger to manual labor. “That’s why I come here,” he told me.
And I learned that Mario enjoys punny jokes. “What’d the farmer say at the party?” he asked while feeding the bonfire. Before anyone could answer, he grinned and said, “Lettuce turnip the beets!”
The morning ended as they often do at Many Hands Organic Farm: at the kitchen table. With lard crackling in a pot on the cookstove and a feast of farm-raised foods in front of us, we sat together for lunch. On the menu was a soup Julie had somehow put together before we’d all arrived, a massive bowl of salad greens and sprouts served with homemade dressing and applesauce from fruit produced by the trees we’d just fed. We spooned soup into our bowls, and into the bowls of those sitting nearest, passed whatever was needed and kept talking.
After we’d cleaned up together, the Stetson team left and the fulltime crew members went back to work outside and I asked Julie a few last questions. I learned she’d grown up on a farm herself, that her way of working with the boys was nothing more than instinct and a lot of experience and that she didn’t serve a family lunch for all the magnanimous reasons I’d imagined. Instead, she did it because the crew was always hungry after a hard morning of farming and because she had a lot of high-quality food on hand, food that they’d helped her grow. When pressed, she allowed that the lunch and the work did feel like a family affair.
When I asked Julie what people should know about Many Hands Sustainability Center, she said they’re always up for visitors. You should write to her first, of course, but chances are you’d be welcome to bring a group of like-minded friends—a school group, book club, interested volunteers, corporate team in want of bonding time—for a morning of manual labor, learning and probably even lunch. “Farming and community and enjoyment all go together,” Julie says on the MHSC website; if you’d like to experience this for yourself, to see it and to feel it, I recommend you take her up on this offer. You can reach her by email through julie@mhof.net.
If you can’t visit but would like to financially support the work of the Many Hands Sustainability Center, contributing funds that pay salaries of the boys and men they hire and train, visit manyhandssustainabilitycenter.org.
And if you are in need of locally grown produce and other farm products, visit mhof.net for information on the Many Hands Organic Farm 2020 CSA program.