Photo credit: Natalie Baszile

Calypso Farm and Ecology Center
Ester, Alaska

In her Instagram post, Melony Edwards hoists a twenty-pound Chioggia beet onto her shoulder. The vegetable is larger than Melony’s face, and its mass of stems and oversized leaves sprouting from its top match the bunch of braids she has gathered with an elastic band on the top of her head. Wearing a gray fleece and white sunglasses, Melony kneels in the dirt. Acres of leafy greens stretch into the distance. The caption reads, “We grow beets this big that are not woody and grow big from the result of LOVE.”

Melony was one of the first young Black farmers I came across. She was wrapping up a three-year stint at Willowood Farm of Ebey’s Prairie on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle. She’d soon be heading to Alaska to attend farm school as a learning sabbatical.

It’s 2 p.m. on a drizzly June afternoon when my flight touches down in Fairbanks. Dressed in overalls and rubber boots, her hair in five braids that fall past her shoulders, Melony waits for me in baggage claim. She leads me outside through the sliding doors, where the gray sky hangs low and the air is heavy with the acidic smell of burning wood. For the last two weeks, wildfires have raged across Alaska. An evacuation alert has been issued for parts of Fairbanks. We toss my luggage in the back seat of her VW Jetta wagon and strike out for Calypso Farm and Ecology Center.

One month ago, Melony traveled to Fairbanks from Seattle—a distance of more than twenty-one hundred miles. From Whidbey Island, she headed north to Bell-ingham, Washington, where she boarded the Alaska Marine Highway ferry. Her aunt had generously purchased the $1,500 ferry ticket, but the additional $500 for a private cabin was beyond Melony’s budget, so for three days, she tent-camped on the windswept outer deck as the ferry navigated Alaska’s inside passage. She disembarked in Haines, Alaska, and drove for twelve hours, crossing the Yukon and stopping occasionally to photograph moose tracks, snowcapped mountains, and placid glacial lakes.

Melony’s journey to farming is as circuitous as the road we’re following. Her car chugs along as we climb the foothills to the small town of Ester. Just past a small painted sign that reads CALYPSO FARM, we turn off Old Anchorage-Fairbanks Highway onto a dirt road. It’s still drizzly, and across the road, treetops pierce the layer of fog that has settled in the valley.

For the next five months, the thirty-five-acre Calypso Farm will be Melony’s home. Founded by Susan Willsrud and Tom Zimmer, this working educational farm and ecology center is nestled into a terraced, tree-rimmed hillside. Here, one can learn everything about how to operate a farm, from sheep shearing and blacksmithing to mechanics and carpentry.

What follows is the story of Melony’s journey to becoming a farmer, crafted from conversations we had during my four-day visit as we cooked, harvested vegetables, spun wool into yarn, milked goats, and helped build a log cabin that will eventually become the farm’s woodworking shop.

Originally from Ohio, Melony moved to Seattle with her mom, cousin, brother, and twin sister when she was fifteen. Her mom had been offered a job, and the chance to expand her children’s horizons in a more diverse state with better opportunities convinced her to make the move.

After high school, Melony took a gap year to figure out what she wanted to do. She loved fashion and briefly considered pursuing it as a career, but she didn’t think of herself as artistic. Curious about photography, she worked as a children’s photographer. “It was good for me to take that time to think about what I wanted to do,” she explains. “One day I woke up and realized I didn’t want to work in a mall for the rest of my life. I need to go to school.” She’d always enjoyed cooking, so she decided to go to culinary school.

She enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu in Portland, Oregon, where she was trained as a classical chef. “I loved culinary school. At first, I thought I wanted to open a restaurant that fed and employed the homeless, but people told me I wouldn’t make any money, which was discouraging.” For a while, after graduating, she worked at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, one of Seattle’s best restaurants. But like so many female chefs, she found the male-dominated restaurant culture to be problematic.

“I decided to go back to school and get my hospitality and restaurant management degree. I was twenty-one.” Just as her mother had done seven years earlier, Melony packed up and drove across country to Miami, Florida. “It took us six days. We had a flat tire in Chicago, went to Mount Rushmore and the Spam Museum.” She got her bachelor’s at Johnson & Wales University, after which she worked briefly on a cruise ship with Norwegian Cruise Line in Hawaii. Eventually, she found her way back to Seattle.

It was in Seattle that Melony started thinking more seriously about her health and nutrition. She realized that she and her family were all overweight and began questioning the root causes. “We were so unhealthy. I’d done the Special K diet, I’d done this diet and that diet, and the weight just came back. I started to wonder what was happening. I searched online for information on how people improved their health. I realized the answer was food. Having access to fresh fruits and vegetables was the key. I looked around and realized that no one of color in my neighborhood or at the farmers’ market was growing or eating fruits and vegetables.” She began to examine the connection—or rather the disconnection—between people of color and their food sources. “I had all the questions about food and its production. Why are we afraid of killing a chicken? Why are we afraid of dirt on vegetables? Was being connected to food something that only white people did, and if that was the case, why?” A longtime science fiction fan, she began to imagine what might happen to people of color in her community if something catastrophic would happen. “My biggest question was, What happens if we don’t have someone to provide for us anymore? How do we feed ourselves?”

Her first step was to try her hand at gardening. “I bought herbs, but they all died.” Her next step was to volunteer at a community garden. Soon, her curiosity pushed her to ask more questions. She wanted to learn about the process of growing food. She worked at Amazon, and then Whole Foods Market. Meanwhile, she began volunteering at a raw dairy farm. “I scooped cow poop and mucked out the barn and collected chicken eggs. I loved it. I’d never worked on a farm before, but it was so nice to be outside, not have to work under synthetic lights.”

Finding a full-time farm position was more challenging than Melony had anticipated. For two years, she applied for internships but was met with rejection, which made her question farming. “Some people told me I was too old; that most people who do internships are in their twenties. I was in my thirties. Then they told me I was overqualified. I thought, ‘People change careers all the time.’ Then they told me I was underqualified or I didn’t fit in. I’d talk to people on the phone and they’d be excited, then they would look at my LinkedIn and suddenly I wouldn’t be qualified. I was about to give up. I thought, apparently, this is an exclusive career for people who don’t look like me.”

A farm that had rejected her application told her about Willowood Farm on Whidbey Island, so she applied. After a lengthy interview, she was hired as an intern in March 2016. “I knew nothing. I didn’t know what a seed was. I barely knew that things grew from seeds. I didn’t know how to transplant or how to weed.” At Willowood, she was immersed in farming. She and a team of six people worked the twenty-acre property, growing two hundred named varieties of mixed vegetables that were sold directly to Seattle’s top chefs. “I made the decision to work at Willowood because I wanted to learn how to farm in a rural landscape. I wanted to learn to drive a tractor and produce large amounts of food for my people. I wanted to learn agricultural skills so I could bring them back to communities of color.”

But it wasn’t until she learned about Leah Penniman, founder of Soul Fire Farm, that Melony began to rethink the farming practices she was learning. “I realized I was learning Eurocentric farming practices. There were previously Native Americans on the land, but there wasn’t one Native person in the community. There were Chinese immigrants on the very land I was farming, but there wasn’t one Chinese person in the farming community.”

For a long time, Melony thought she was a first-generation farmer. It wasn’t until she was preparing for her move to Alaska that she learned that members of her family had been farmers for generations. “My family on my father’s side are from Tupelo, Mississippi. After Emancipation, my forefathers were first sharecroppers who were eventually able to purchase land. Family members still own the land to this day. They have an annual family reunion, which is occasionally held in Mississippi on the property. They call it ‘Homecoming’ because everyone comes home to the South. I couldn’t believe my dad and my grandmother never told me.”

Photo credit: Natalie Baszile

Summers in Alaska mean that the sun never completely sets—which is great for growing but challenging if you’re trying to sleep. It’s past 9:00 p.m. on our third day together, and the sky is a dusky rose as Melony hauls out the spinning wheel and teaches me how to spin wool into yarn.

Spinning is harder than it looks. It requires a steady hand and a good sense of timing to work the pedals. As she threads a thin piece of yarn through a series of loops and hooks, she shares her ideas for what type of farm she’d like to start. She explains that most farming programs focus on vegetable production, but Calypso Farms is one of the few farm schools to offer instruction in fiber. Interns tend the small flock of Shetland sheep and learn to sheer, card, hand-spin, and dye wool.

“I came to Alaska because Calypso Farm’s program focused on skills that the Black community had moved away from: skills like blacksmithing, woodworking, using fiber to create wool, food preservation to extend the season so that once I’ve grown all the food, I’ll know how to preserve it through a long winter season. I remember my grandmother did things like that, but I didn’t grow up doing them.

“I’m a person of color in Washington State, which is predominately white. There are a lot of yarn makers, but there are very few people of color. I only know of one other in Washington. I’ve always had an interest in fashion, just not high fashion. But I don’t see a lot of people of color in fiber arts. I think people need to know there are people of color in this space. We knit; we crochet; we raise animals for fiber. This goes back to the idea of relearning lost skills. It’s about reminding people that there are people who look like us who do this. I want to work with BIPOC [Black, indigenous, and people of color] fashion artists to create designs that my yarn can be used for. I like wool because it reminds me of my hair, and much like my hair, wool can be transformed into beautiful works of art.

Photo credit: Natalie Baszile

“I want to be independent. I’ve worked with people and managed people; I don’t want to do that anymore. One of my goals is to create my own fiber farm where I raise my own sheep for wool and cultivate an environment that fosters textile art and creativity.

“I want to make sure my farm is a people of color–led space and that we recognize the previous stewards of the land. As landowners, we need to recognize and show gratitude to the people who came before us.

“Last year, at a conference, I met a lot of First Nations people. We were touring some white farms, and the owners kept saying they owned the land. A Native woman on the tour was in tears. When I asked her what was wrong, she said Native Americans don’t think about land in terms of owning it. She expressed frustration that people whose farm we were touring didn’t recognize that before the white farmers bought the land, other people were there. One of my core values is land recognition—recognizing who was on the land before us. Another core value is getting away from the word ‘own.’ We live in a monetary system, but we can think about it in a different way. We can talk about being stewards and caretakers of the land. I’m thinking about how to change the language.

“I think this goes back to why I want to create a space for people like me who want to learn from people like me. I still have a lot to learn. I’m not a master by any means. I know that when I start my farm, I’ll have challenges and learning curves. But those challenges are what makes you grow. I’m excited for that challenge and the opportunity. I’m ready.”

24.

Four Days in Alaskan Farm School