Turn Here, Sweet Corn - Atina Diffley

Today I'm talking with Atina Diffley, author of Turn Here, Sweet Corn. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.  You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe.

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share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Atina Diffley, the author of Turn Here Sweet Corn. Good afternoon, Atina. How are you? Hello. It's really a treat to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Oh, I'm so thrilled you had time. I reviewed Turn Here Sweet Corn on my book blog years ago and I haven't read it since and it's been a while, but I remember just being smitten with your writing.

00:57
Thank you. was really fun to write it and really healing. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine it would be. was so  like, it was so comforting to read it and know that I'm not crazy to love everything about the lifestyle. Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah. The good, the bad, the ugly, the aberrant, the fantastic. It's all there.  Exactly.  So because not everybody knows about the book.

01:25
Asina, will you tell me about yourself and what the book and what you're doing now? Sure. The book is a memoir. And when I started writing it, really all I knew is that I wanted to write a memoir about my experience as a farmer. our farm started in 1972. My husband, Martin, started it in Eagan, Minnesota. So for those of you who are familiar with Minnesota, Eagan is now 100 % developed as a suburban.

01:53
area, it's 20 minutes downtown Minneapolis. So he grew up there at Fifth Generation Family Farm and saw all that change happen. And that in and of itself is so much what this book is about because  he knew that land through his ancestors and their experience as settlers, as Fifth Generation on land that had been in that family since it was taken from the Indians.

02:23
And that was rolling land.  It was diverse. It was never farmed industrial style because of the topography of the land. wasn't  flat and possible to put big equipment in it. So it was small fields settled into a diverse landscape that still had an intact biological system from pre-colonial days.

02:53
fields that he grew there were small vegetable plots, settled into this extreme diversity. And as a certified organic vegetable farmer, before anyone knew what organic was, he was really utilizing that diversity of that land.  So that right there is a great place to pause and to really just sort of celebrate this word biological diversity that has now become somewhat of a

03:20
buzzword and a catchword and it's now being greenwashed, but it really is that the essence of all life on the planet. Well, yeah, because  different is good and same is not good. It's boring. And from a health perspective, the more diverse any system is, whether it's a living natural ecosystem or a relationship,  and you talk about any system, diversity is healthy.

03:50
and creates  reduced disease transmission, reduced disease issues.  When you think about it from an agricultural perspective, as long as we had a diverse landscape around our fields, we really didn't have disease or pest issues.  And I was really naive when I joined Martin in the  80s. I was young and

04:17
There wasn't really a lot of science and research and conversation at that point in time yet about this and how it works. And so really, I organic farming was really easy. I mean, it was hard physically. We worked our butts off. But the management of our fertility and our pest-centered disease and our water needs was done through the diversity of the landscape and didn't take a lot of effort. But I didn't know that at the time.

04:46
I just was doing the task of planting and harvesting and I didn't really understand the impact that diversity had on it until the sky fell out and that land was developed.  Yeah. It's,  I, okay,  I'm sitting here thinking about how to say this next.  We lived in Jordan for 20 years, Jordan, Minnesota, and we moved to our little piece of heaven like a little over four years ago.

05:14
Our little piece of heaven is in the middle of the corn fields right now. And it's a 3.1 acre lot and our nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away. And part of the reason that we chose to leave Jordan is because stuff was starting to get built up. There were a whole bunch of housing developments that went in. And when housing developments go in, population expands and then big box stores come in and they want to

05:43
They want to buy up land to put their stores in. And I didn't want to watch this town that I had lived in for 20 years become  what Egan has become. You know, it's really hard because I'm all for progress, but I'm not all for destruction, if that makes any sense at all. No, it's really complex societal issue and there are positive ways to go about it.  And I think one thing that's really critical to point out here,

06:12
is that the destruction that happens when a suburban development happens, it's really obvious because they come in and American style, they take every tree, every bush, every blade of grass, they scrape off the living soil and they sell it. And then they build the houses. But it is not development that is a leading cost of ecosystem loss and species extinction and diversity habitat loss. It's actually agriculture.  Agriculture uses 70 %

06:42
of the planet's water. It is the leading impact on natural diversity habitat.  creating dense urban settings actually is a smart way to deal with housing. And the fact that we have a lot of humans that do need housing and do need, you know, don't want to have to buy everything on Amazon, at least I don't.  So it's a human need that we have to work with and we can do it in a way that's concentrated.

07:11
and that incorporates diversity into it. Once those developments happen, there actually is a lot of diversity that can happen in a housing development. And it can be a diversity reservoir. But when we get into America's agricultural systems, which  are monocultures, the whole system is based on, we don't want anything but one plant species in that field.

07:37
you know, the cash crop that we're aiming after, whether it's corn or soybeans or whatever it is, we want that one species. We don't want any other plants. We don't want any animals. We don't want any insects. We don't want any diseases. We don't want any funguses. And so it is a vast monoculture and that is an absolute biological diversity desert. Yep, it is because there's nothing else. And

08:04
And I'm telling you, I hope that the people that farm the fields around us switch back to alfalfa in a couple of years, because this cornfield thing is driving me insane. Hey, refresh me. Do we have an hour or half an hour? Um, half an hour, 40 minutes. Okay. So, you know, going back to my book and how that relates to all this,  when that farm was developed,  we experienced an ecological collapse.  We were renting land.

08:32
from the developer actually, because they developed over a three year period. the fields, the land around our fields that we were still running were bulldozed and we couldn't pull a crop out of those fields. We were overrun by pests and disease. And that's when I started to really understand how much biological diversity is doing for us was as I experienced that extreme loss. And it's a really powerful part of my book because

09:02
The reader experiences it through my children's loss. young. And children at that age, they just connect with nature. It doesn't have to be a big environment. They can connect with one rock or a little tree or a bush or sitting under a plant.  And it's really quite spiritual for them. And when that was bulldozed, they really went through the loss of innocence.  They experienced it as a rape victim would, that their parents

09:30
these caretakers that are supposed to keep them safe cannot protect them from everything.  And they're really not supposed to figure that out till they're, you know, teenagers, rebellious teenagers.  So that was a profound moment in my life and in my book. The reader really goes through that process and has the opportunity to really grieve whatever losses they have had in their own life, whether it's land or relationships or people, it doesn't really matter.

10:00
The emotion is the same. It's grieving those losses and recognizing  how complex and valuable they are. And then we bought a new farm  just south of Lakeville. It had been conventionally farmed. was 100 acres. They plowed it from one end to the other. And the first thing we did was walk that land in a heavy rainstorm and understand how the water was moving. We staked that out and we planted those to waterways so that  we wouldn't have so much erosion.

10:30
And then we laid out fields to the contour of the land, 45 smaller fields on a hundred acre farm. And between the fields, we planted biological diversity habitat, diverse flowers,  plants, bushes, bunch grasses for dung beetles and various beneficial insects.  And we had to restore a diverse habitat on land that had been destroyed. And that was a lot of work.

10:59
You know, we just had that need because it hadn't yet been destroyed  from how it had been  colonial. And here it had been destroyed at our new farm, but we had to create that.  that's another really great part of the book is the reader starts to realize, yeah, destruction has happened.  You're experiencing that with your cornfields, but it can be recovered. And life is inherently resilient. Every time people make an effort to

11:29
do biological diversity recovery or water cleanup. They're always astonished at how quickly  systems can recover. That happened big time with the river when they cleaned up the river and how quickly fish returned in a river that was dead on the Mississippi. Yeah, I have a question. How long did it take you with your new land to  get it healthy again? Well, we were certified organic and in a certified organic process,

11:58
you cannot use prohibited substances for 36 months.  So we couldn't take a cash crop off of our new farm for 36 months. So we didn't try to, we just spent 30.

12:15
through soil building crops  and getting these systems in place. So was very intensive and not everybody can do it that way.

12:25
We were ready.

12:28
that were certifiable. They hadn't had chemicals on it. We were renting 18 different properties with a 32 mile radius to grow our cash crops at the same time that we were rebuilding this hundred acre farm. So it was a very intense  period of our lives to be managing cash crops  on so many different properties and build this farm up.  But we got through it. I would say it took

12:57
three to five years for things to start really being solid systems at our new farm. You were saying that your kids went through grieving the loss.  The only story I really have about that kind of thing is  my husband and my son and I used to really love and go hike and check out the public land in Minnesota. And  if my listeners don't know, in Minnesota,

13:22
You can harvest things on public land. You just can't dig anything up. So if there are wild plums growing, you can pick the wild plums. It's totally fine and take them out of the state lands. there was an old  like homestead out in towards St. Patrick and  it became public land. State bought the land.

13:48
And there were two absolutely gorgeous ancient apple trees on that land.  No one has touched these trees in forever.  And we happened to find them just before it was apple picking season.  And we checked out the apples and they were not buggy. They looked like they had been taken care of and no one had been taken care of these trees, I guarantee you. So when we knew it was time,

14:14
We enlisted a friend and her daughter and we went and picked apples till we couldn't pick apples anymore.  That was amazing. Did it two years in a row. Third year went back, trees had been cut.  And I cried,  I'm not kidding you. I sobbed.  That was like our special secret trees and they were gone.  And I cried. sat in my car with my husband and I cried like

14:42
big ugly tears. And he was like, they weren't our trees. And I said, no, I said, no, they felt like my trees and now they're gone. And he just, he was so like, he felt for me, but I think he was more amused at how destroyed I was that they cut those trees.

15:05
Oh, that's actually how I met Martin.  I see my book, but  I,  had been an orange and apple picker professionally as a young person, as a migrant. And  I lived in Minneapolis and I was so  missing the country. I was a real person at heart and dying in the city. I knew he had a cider press. Someone had told me,  I'm, you're not there. What it take to get you back?

15:36
Oh, there you are. My phone said you weren't.  Somebody told me he had a press and I called him up and asked him if I could borrow it. And I just drove from Minneapolis to Eagan and stopped any time I saw a fruit tree and asked if I could pick it and arrived at his place at  like 20 bushels. And he accused me of stealing them.  So we started to have a little spat,  which fits for us.  That was how we met. But that that relationship is so critical and

16:04
We all want that. And it's a beautiful thing for people that are homesteading or, you know, even if you live in a city, you can plant a tree in your yard. You can plant a garden in a pot on your apartment building patio deck. You know, it doesn't have to be a lot of space, but just having something growing in our lives  is huge  and really a  spiritual healing process.

16:29
I always think of growing plants as being responsible for something. And I think it's why, I think it's why people have pets if they don't have plants,  because there's something really good for the soul in taking care of something else.

16:47
Yeah, I'm pretty attached to my house plants.  To finish the story on my book, after we got our new farm put together and became the  main supplier of organic produce to the Twin Cities co-ops, and we're pretty well known as a farm. In 2006, we got a letter from a crude oil pipeline owned by  the Koch brothers.

17:16
And Boya Hearts just stopped. They wanted to eminent domain our new farm for crude oil pumping station and a pipeline. And we already knew what that meant as far as development. We knew that it would be the end of our farm, that we wouldn't continue here. And it was just heartbroken. So I decided to start learning about the legal process. And what really caught me was as I...

17:44
reading the court documents, there was a document called an agricultural mitigation impact plan. And what it is is the agreement that the pipeline company has to fulfill when they cross a farmer's land, basically says they're going to put this pipeline through there and then put everything back the same way it was. So it's the detail of how they're going to do that. And it said that they would not knowingly allow more than 12 inches of topsoil erosion.

18:15
Not knowingly.  And that was the moment I got mad. I got really mad. Because that is not putting things back the way they found it. And do they know how long it took for that 12 inches of top-celled abortion to be created? So we intervened in the legal proceeding. And this was an absolutely brilliant move on the part of my attorney, Paula McAbee, because it meant that we were part of the actual routing permit process.

18:41
They couldn't get their route permit. They could not build anything on their pipeline until the three parties, the Gardens of Eagan,  was our intervention, the Pipeline Company and the Department of Commerce, which represents all people impacted by the pipeline. We all had to stay at the table. So,  you know, in a lot of these cases, if it's just a one-on-one lawsuit, you could win the lawsuit, but then the company appeals it and the person ends up losing because they can't afford the appeals.

19:10
It goes on and on forever. But in our case,  they couldn't just keep appealing it because then it would have held up their pipeline process.  So we intervened in the legal proceeding and our goal was to establish that organic farms are a valuable natural resource like a wetland that should be avoided when feasible and when they cannot be avoided to be protected through specific mitigations.

19:39
And we wrote a specific mitigation plan that addressed all of these issues on an organic farm.  Went through the legal process  and  we accomplished that goal of writing a mitigation plan, an organic mitigation plan that is now standard procedure for any public utility in the state of Minnesota. A number of other states have copied it and a number of  utility companies have just taken it on on their own because they see it's

20:09
it's going to make life better for them. And I don't want to go into a great deal of detail on that simply because we don't have the time. But I think what's really critical here and what the reader really gets in the book is to  kind of get a grasp on how as citizens we can really engage in lawmaking and in things that are going that are not good. In this particular case,  when

20:36
I had this problem facing me. felt like I don't know anything about public utilities. How in the world could I fight this? But I realized that what I do know about is organic farming. was an expert on organic farming. It's what I'd done my whole life and I was good at it. So that is really what I had to speak to.  And as we were a direct market farm, we went to our customers and we said to people, would you write a letter to the judge and tell them how you will be differently impacted by this?

21:06
pipeline because it's not just us the farmer that would be impacted.  It's our customers. And that's how we differed from a corn and soybean field. And you can just go up there all commodity crops. You can buy a hundred bushes of corn. doesn't matter if it's from Bill's farm or Mary's farm, but we were not a commodity crop. so 4,600 people wrote a letter to the judge. was really astonishing to read these letters. They were so personal  and they talked about

21:35
how they would be impacted. They too did not have to understand anything about pipeline law to write this letter or pipeline issues. They really just had to say how they would be impacted. And people talked about the fact that they were chemically sensitive and that they really counted on food from this particular farm for their health. Other people said every single year we have our family reunion in the middle of August when the garden's vegan sweet corn is ripe and the watermelon.

22:03
people talked about having eaten from this farm for four generations. They were really phenomenal letters. And I really want people to know that they don't have to feel voiceless. There's so much stuff going on in the world that  may be of concern to people, certainly is to me. And I know that I'm not voiceless, that it's really important for me to engage as a citizen and that we do have an impact.  And I think it's what

22:32
people really get when they close that book. And when you read the last page is really understanding that role as a citizen to be engaged. You don't agree with what is going on in the world. You have the right to say so. You have the right to contact your senators or your representatives or your congresspeople or whoever by letter or by email or by phone and say, this is how I feel about this thing that's happening. And

23:01
It's their job to listen and to try to try to do something about it.

23:09
And I encourage people when they write those letters to go beyond feelings and talk about how they're impacted. Because a lot of our laws are actually based on impact.  Ecuador passed a law that gave nature a right in court as an entity. It's the only country in the world to my knowledge that has a law like this. In the United States, we have to prove how humans will be affected if the river is damaged or the land is damaged.

23:39
in Ecuador, that river itself has a right to exist. That sounds very,  very much like the Native American beliefs.

23:49
Well, that is why it passed because they have a majority of native voters there.  How they passed that law there. Um, I doubt that we will ever pass that law in my lifetime in the United States. Um, but that's why I tell people, if you write a letter or talk to a Senator to talk about impact to you, to the human being, because that's what our laws are based on is impact to the human being. And a lot of times  my attorney said a great thing to me at the start of our case.

24:17
Because I wanted to do all these great things and I wanted to get at the things that were unjust. And she said, Atina, right  now, if you want to change those laws, that's really great. But right now, you don't have time to do that before you deal with the issue at hand. So you deal with the issue at hand. And then if you want, you can come back and change the law, work on changing the law.  And I thought that was just a really valuable thing for her to have said to me that.

24:44
Sometimes you have to pick your battle. It's like raising children. You pick your battle, right? And that was a really important lesson that I got from her. I have a question about those 4,600 letters. Did you read every single one of them?

25:00
It was great in middle of the night when I couldn't read, when I couldn't sleep. did, but I also felt really supported. I would have had to have read every single one no matter whether my face was completely swollen for a week because I cried so much. Because that's really important. And as you were telling your story in my brain, all I could see was a full auditorium of people stomping their feet and applauding you.

25:32
because that's a big thing that you did. That's a huge thing.

25:38
You know, I would have never been able to accomplish it. Well, not only without the support of the community that wrote those letters, but without having had the experience of the loss in Egan, that that was just so educational to me on a spiritual level and on a scientific level of really understanding the loss of biodiversity. So to bring this, kind of home, I think you told me you're, you're a lot of your audience are homesteaders.

26:09
And it's such a beautiful thing to realize that in a sense what they're creating is biological reservoirs.

26:19
And we see the loss you can look out your field your windows and you said you have cornfields out there and that breaks your heart And the fact that even if your land is just a little three acre plot You can make us such a diverse little three acre plot and that is keeping those species safe there so research on what insects are on your

26:43
your little three kerplot and the birds and the animals that come in there and the plant species, it's actually making a difference.  When we were, we're not running our farm as a vegetable farm anymore. We retired from that and now it's  got pasture and animals on it. But when we were running a vegetable farm, the University of Minnesota would often come out and do research here.  And they came out one time  and they just went into a field and they were looking for a pie.

27:12
My new pirate beetles. It's an insect that parasites,  um, cabbage lopers.

27:22
And they came in, I couldn't even see them. I'd never heard of them, I'd never seen one on the farm. When they first asked if they could come, they asked me if I'd ever seen one. I didn't know what they were and I said I never saw one. And then they showed me one and you needed a mag to find glass to see them. Our fields were full of them. We didn't bring them in there. They weren't in the neighboring fields. They asked our neighbor who had a corn soybean field.

27:47
if they could go in there and look, they went in 10 feet, 15 feet, 20 feet into them, there was none. They were on our farm and they'd come there because the plant species that they needed to survive and that  habitat was there for them to survive.  And the researchers were blown away by this as I was, because they thought they had to be brought in. And they really walked away from that day on our farm, understanding that when the habitat is created,

28:17
If there's a reservoir of the species within a reasonable distance, they can come in and  settle in there. So to homesteaders who, you know, just really look at your little plot, you might wish you had bigger land or feel like has to be bigger. Every little bit really does matter and it's a reservoir that's really critical. On that subject, we have so many butterflies, different kinds of butterflies and moths here in the spring and the summer.

28:46
There are these little light blue tiny moths or butterflies. do not know what they are, but they are, they look like little,  very pale blue fairies when they're flying. And I don't know what they are, but I  love them.  I, I, something here, they, really like it because I have not seen these guys anywhere else.  And

29:11
We have all kinds of dragonflies all summer long, all different colors, all different sizes.  So  I think that our little homestead gives a lot of creatures a place to be.

29:26
I think so too. isn't everywhere. Have you ever read descriptions  written by the earliest Europeans  to come into Minnesota? They are mind blowing. They're describing like these hordes of various birds and butterflies and all these insects and there's so many of them and they're talking about how many of them there are. And I often have dreams where I'm in that period of time and

29:56
it's phenomenal to actually be immersed in that kind of an intact ecosystem all at one time that you know is going beyond that three acre plot you're on. know, like imagine if that was 100 acres what you're seeing on your little three acres or imagine if it was a thousand acres imagine was the entire state of Minnesota. That would be fantastic. The other thing that grows here is yarrow. Y-A-R-R-O-W. It's a plant.

30:26
And I didn't know what Yara was until we moved here. And we have  like a yellow and we have a white that's tinged with pink. And they are so beautiful. And I have not figured out yet how to actually use them.  But where they grow, my husband does not cut any grass or any weeds or anything. And he was like, should I cut those? And I was like, no, leave that alone.

30:55
Yarrow is really a favorite of pollinator species and it's a very strong medicinal plant. It actually is a  fever inducer to bring on fever as a burning off of disease.  It's a plant that I think should be used by skilled and I am not a skilled herbalist. So I will have to do my research and find someone who is a skilled herbalist before I do anything with it.

31:20
Either way, it's really beautiful and I want to leave it alone because I really love it.

31:27
When I was young, I was very idealistic.  I still am, hopefully, but I was also very ignorant and I would, you I was just in love with plants and I thought of them as all these great healers and I would just sort of plunge into like utilizing them for medicine and I've had a number of pretty funny stories now. Like  one time I slept in a poison ivy patch and had poison ivy all over my body and I looked in an herb book and it said to use sumac and

31:57
So I went out and picked sumac leaves and put them through a champion juicer and painted that on my whole body. I used poisonous sumac. Yeah, like I was bad before the coca. I was really a mess after that.  And I could tell you about 50 stories like that. I was not as quick learner before I realized how powerful these plants are.  They're very powerful and that's really beautiful. So I'm a much wiser plant user now.

32:25
We've had a few experiences. So I have two things. Number one, is Martin still with us?

32:33
Yep, Martin is alive and well and happy man down in his fix-it-all shop. He likes to fix things. Good. what are you doing now? What's your life now?

32:48
We actually spent our summers now in Glacier Park. And what attracted us there is that it is the most intact ecosystem in the lower 48 states. So I do feel like, you know, as I was saying earlier, imagine if you could walk into Minnesota, pre-colonial, and really experience the ecosystem here. I feel like that's what I'm experiencing in Glacier Park. And we volunteer as citizen scientists. So we get to like go to the back country and

33:18
count how many loons there are on a lake or  lose binoculars and count how many rams there are, how intact a system is. Sometimes we get to collect seeds because when they do  biodiversity rehabilitation in areas, they use seeds that are within 10 feet of the area that they're inhabiting with plants. They're really specific because you could get echinacea from the park, but if it's from

33:47
The side of the rocky, you know, the, the divide or, you know, even a mile away, it's a big park. It's  not quite the same. So that's just really where to be immersed in that. I still write. Okay, Where is glacier park? Cause I'm blinking.

34:06
It's in Montana and it's the Northern Rockies. just, it's right next to Canada. In fact, it crosses the border into Canada. It's an international park. you said you're still writing. Are you writing articles? Are you working on another book or what's up?

34:26
I work on a couple books, but I don't have the same need to get a published book out of it. So whether I will or not is not my driving source. the good news is it doesn't have to be. You just have to express how you feel in words and that's what you want to do.

34:46
I find it  helps me stay very  balanced to have writing in my life on regular You are a beautiful writer, so keep doing that.

34:58
And it helps me be a better talker. I find when I write about things I access words that I wouldn't normally access in language and speaking.

35:10
and then it ends up becoming, it comes into my articulation. It's like transfers over.  It's so interesting that you say that because I have friends, I've had friends, have friends in my life  where I talk with them and I pull words out of my brain that I haven't thought about in years. And I use them correctly. And they're like, where'd that one come from? And don't know. It was just  inspired.

35:38
My theory on that is that I learned those words when I was reading and that's why they come out when I'm writing. And when I was writing Turn Here Sweetcorn, I'd often use a word and then I'd stop and go, I don't even know what that word means. And I'd look it up and I every time had used it correctly.  So that was really fun. We are almost out of time, ma'am, but I really did love Turn Here Sweetcorn. Like I said, it's been years since I've read it.  Anybody who hasn't read it and loves to read,

36:07
should go buy a copy. came out when? How long ago? Yeah, so it's been a bit. A 2012. But it's beautifully written and it's really, really educational.  educational seems really boring. It is not boring. It's beautiful.

36:26
That was my goal. wanted someone who didn't care about organic farming to read it as a story. it reads like a novel. But yes, I freaking love it, which is why I asked you to come talk to me today. So, um, I appreciate your time and thank you and you have a wonderful afternoon. Thank you. And thanks to all your readers for me listeners. Thank you. Bye. Bye.