Editor’s Note: The following is by a pair of grant recipients in a program launched in 2022 by The G&LR, the Charles S. Longcope Jr. Writers and Artists Grant, which was awarded to two recipients last year. Awardees are expected to produce an article for the magazine as part of their project, of which this is the first of two.
“ELDERBERRIES are very queer,” Sadie says as she sits across the couch from Tig, a doctoral student at Notre Dame. The sun has just dipped below the horizon on a farm in rural Wisconsin as Sadie begins to illustrate her practice of ecological storytelling with tales of elderberries. “I think of them as the queer medicine aunties of the ecosystem of the farms that I’m on. They’re beautiful, anti-capitalist, generous, giving—it’s this very mutual-aid vibe.”
Sadie is one of more than seventy queer Midwestern farmers that Tig met during their doctoral fieldwork, many of whom used ecological metaphors—or what we would come to call “earth lessons”—to make sense of themselves and their identities. Thanks to funding from this magazine, a collective of thirty growers produced Playing in the Dirt, a spiral-bound, full-color book to share these earth lessons, as well as other stories, art, and writing, about what it means to be a queer land worker in the heartland.
Here we use the term “Midwest” to describe the traditional homelands of Indigenous people such as the Miami, Peoria, Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Iowa, Odawa, Anishinaabe, Dakota, and many others. This expansive definition shows that queer Midwestern farming can look like community gardens fighting for food sovereignty. It can look like foraging practices that build place-based relationships. It can look like planting trees against the grain of the monocrop corn belt. For every queer farmer, there is a unique approach, a new set of questions, an alternative way of looking at the world. Some farms are big and some are small; some land is rented, other places are owned, and still others managed collectively. Queer farmers might sell their goods at farmers markets or to local distributors or give to neighbors or share with friends.
A major throughline in queer farming is that the relationships with plants, bugs, land, and animals that farming affords are life-affirming. They expand our understanding of care and joy and depth. After all, how unnatural can top surgeries be when we know that care for apple trees requires pruning? How impossible can democratic collectives be when we see healthy honeybee hives that, collectively, will travel as far as the moon and back every day? In lieu of agricultural narratives about ecological competition or economic control, queer farmers find abundant examples in the world around them that show care, joy, collaboration, hope, and resiliency are possible.
“Plants are pretty gay,” one farmer told Tig. “They’ve got all their sex organs in one, or something. They’re little weirdos in a great way.” In this spirit, here are three plant lessons from queer farmers that provide lessons about meaningful Midwest food and medicine production.
Sunflowers and Self-Expression
“I’ve never felt competent at self-expression,” one farmer said. “I’m not a fashionista, I’m not super extroverted. I’m not personally the most flamboyant, but those sunflowers were fucking flamboyant. And it felt like a way of getting at self-expression. I can’t create a piece of art, but I can grow some sunflowers, and they’re beautiful. And okay, there’s my gender in the flowers.”
Sunflowers pop off. There are countless varieties: “Mammoth Russians” that tower and explode into heads that weigh a pound or more, perennials with their reserved disk florets, “Moulin Rouge” with their surprising red petals, and “Taiyo” with their picture-perfect stalk. This summer, a mammoth variety planted itself in the middle of a vegetable bed that the Zumwalt Acres crew—a farming collective that Patricia is part of—were tending. They decided to leave it there all season, even though it shaded out some of the seedlings. It was so proud, it felt wrong to rip it out.
In the making of Playing in the Dirt, we watched queer artists pop off, too. The book features collages with organic mélange, homemade linoleum stamps, a hand-dyed quilt, and various fiber arts. Artists also contributed photography, digital art, a multi-page comic series, poetry, essays. We also included recipes and DIY instructions for preparing foraged goods. For every queer artist, we used a unique vantage and mix of materials and methods.
Beyond the dozens of contributors, six queer farmers sat on the editorial board. Within this group, conversations on topics like the appropriate color scheme of the book or resonant fonts often stretched for weeks. We knew we wanted to deliver something that was confidently earthy, Midwestern, and queer. Beet-stained pages, explosive scans of flowers, and detailed microscope photos of weeds were some of the design elements that helped define the book’s personality.
For a long time, Midwestern agriculturalists turned to almanacs for folk wisdom, used an astrological calendar, and marked holidays. Historian Marion Barber Stowell described the almanac as a repository of miscellany: “It was clock, calendar, weatherman, reporter, textbook, preacher, guidebook, atlas, navigational aid, doctor, bulletin board, agricultural advisor, and entertainer.” Playing in the Dirt doesn’t set out to be an almanac, but its unique jumble of miscellany does, indeed, harken to this tradition.
In the early stages of this project, we sometimes referred to it as “that queer farmer art thing” because it was hard to put into words exactly what to call it when a zine meets a literary journal and a collaborative art book. Similarly, many queer farmers may struggle to identify themselves. Oppressive systems that thrive on silence and rigid categorization have made it challenging to build the relationships and vocabularies that are resonant for growers.
Garlic Scapes and Generosity
“I’m learning how to just use plants in all of their different ways,” one farmer said. “Garlic scapes [stalks]have been fun and new to me: You can pickle them, you can put them in salads, they’re so fun. They have helped me think through different ways to use plants and give gratitude to them as well.”
Planting a garlic clove will produce an entire garlic bulb. In early summer, hard-necked varieties will try to form a flower by shooting a tough stem outward. If you remove this stem, the plant will instead direct more energy to producing a larger bulb. If you wait a couple of weeks, however, this stem will spiral and form a funky-looking curlicue called a garlic scape. You can harvest that and get the same, larger big bulb—in addition to a woody, flavorful, early-season allium. In our capitalist food system, garlic scapes are an expensive specialty crop. If you have a row of garlic, however, you’ll have more scapes than you know what to do with.
Gift-giving and generosity were central to much of what we learned about queer farmers. Social identities like race, class, gender, (dis)ability, and sexuality shape the ways that farmers are able to engage in agricultural networks, resources, and communities. Marginalized identities, queer and otherwise, are under-resourced: They struggle to get access to land, to find suitable markets, and to become enmeshed in the necessary peer networks of farmer education and resource-sharing. And yet, like garlic scapes, they’re finding funky ways to tap into abundance and generosity.
For example, many are connected to the Queer Farmer Network. This group has an active listserv, a social media presence for resource sharing, and a growing online list of queer growers. They also host bioregional and racial affinity convergences for queer farmer community-building and skill-sharing. Queer farmers share opportunities and connections, even if the government or nonprofits overlook our needs. Queer growers’ mutuality is also displayed in the ways that they often work in economies that subvert dominant ones. For example, an artist on our editorial team wanted to try an experimental dyeing method using elderberries for their work with Playing in the Dirt. Within a week, we’d bartered for them from another queer farmer friend.
Queer farmers often share knowledge freely, borrow equipment, crash on each other’s couches, and barter for goods. We learned about a farmer who takes photographs in exchange for haircuts, and another who will bring herbs in exchange for dance lessons. As Maya, a farmer from Wisconsin, said in her interview with Tig: “We need to come up with some alternative of how we’re going to meet our own needs outside of extractive colonial capitalist processes. We can be ‘anti’ all we want, but if there’s no alternative, then we’re going to be limited in what we can actually accomplish.”
Queer farmers are coming up with alternatives. Like garlic scapes, they may be funky, or curlicue, or stinky. Just in the production of the book itself, we’ve been able to distribute dozens of copies for free and raise thousands of dollars for mutual aid by offering the book on a sliding scale. Access begets abundance.
Ecologies and Diversity
“There are all of these plants and animals that grow the soil by being soft and quiet and only popping up for two months, like the spring ephemerals—they just pop up for two months and then they go back down,” one farmer said. “And there’s all these different ways to be in the community in these ecosystems, and that has been really grounding and important for me to continually remind myself. It actually wouldn’t be useful if we were all the forty-year-old dude-farmer, lugging stuff around and trying to muscle through it. It’s actually really important that there are way more versions of us out there, checking each other and meeting each other’s needs.”
Farmers know we need biodiversity. Plant too many of one species in one place, and all season you’ll be fighting pests that love that. Many plants need cross-pollination, and promiscuous interplanting can address this. Similarly, we need a diversity of methods to take down heteronormativity, the patriarchy, and other oppressive systems. Tig’s doctoral research is finding that queer farmers’ political engagements often do not look like front-line protests or get out the vote campaigns. Instead, queer farmers are finding integral niches within the expansive and expressive queer farming movement that can draw upon their unique skill sets. A farmer, for example, may be gifted at facilitating hard conversations or have a practice of cooking for a disabled friend. And, yes, some might even be muscular and capable of “lugging stuff around” for needed infrastructure projects.
“I feel like I have so much to learn from the other life around me,” Cedar, a queer farmer working in Illinois, says as they weed a row of beets while chatting with Tig. “Ecosystems hold all kinds of different life, and the ways that they function just hold so much knowledge that isn’t always completely recognized, and even when it is, there’s so much more that we don’t even know about how things intersect.”
A diverse mediascape is important, too. And when it comes to place-based information, like plant care or agrarian seasonality, independent publishers are doubly important. In this way, the project takes inspiration from Lobelia Commons, based out of New Orleans, and its annual Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac or Mergoat Magazine’s quarterly on environmental and posthuman politics for Appalachia. We recognized a need for thinking and theorizing about what is happening in queer, agrarian flyover country.
Reading, writing, art-making, fermenting, cooking, sharing, and celebrating are all important pieces of the dynamic world that queer farmers are building. When we know our niches, our communities, our resources, and our needs, we’re better able to show up in solidarity for others. We need our strong, daring oaks as much as we need the understory trilliums that arrive each spring. We need our funky garlic scapes and our flamboyant sunflowers, and, of course, our elderberry aunties.
Patricia Ann Mathu is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Univ. of Alabama.
Taylor Hartson is a PhD candidate in sociology at Notre Dame.
