I’ve figured out how I’m going to make my first million: community supported agriculture.

Let me explain. Long before the global food crisis hit the headlines, I was worrying about the possibility of someday not having ready access to avocado sushi and bulk spring mix. I still have access to these things (for a price), but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped worrying about it. But at least now, thanks to community supported agriculture, I have an idea of how to turn this fear into a profit-making machine for myself. No, I’m not proposing to make my first million by introducing avocado sushi into community supported agriculture. My plan is ultimately more complex but no less delightful.

Last week I started volunteering for a local CSA, nestled in the lush rolling hills about 35 minutes from my home. (We’ll ignore the irony of me trying to support local foods by driving 35 minutes each way two times a week to put in a few hours’ work separating tomato seedlings.) It’s a bucolic place, this farm—the kind of place where, on a mild spring evening, you can hear the toads singing, the robins warbling, and the neighbor cursing as he drops his beer in his driveway, causing half of it to froth out of the can. In this, the farm is much like my own home here in the ‘burbs. Death, taxes, the crazy guy next door screaming at the top of his lungs as his precious beer spews out of its can onto the driveway—some things are truly universal. Except at the farm, there’s a wide swath of lawn separating me from the shenanigans of the neighbors, so I suppose it’s still preferable to my place. 

Anyways, all was well at my friendly neighborhood CSA. I was tillin’ the soil, plantin’ green things, gettin’ back in touch with my agrarian roots, and quickly learnin’ why mechanized farming has been such a hit: farming the old-fashioned way sucks. Okay, that’s a tad harsh. Old-fashioned farming does not suck per se. For me, as someone who is generally trapped indoors all day and is brimming with naïve, idealistic notions about working the soil, farming is dandy. At hour four, when starts to get exhausting, I go home. Now, if I did it sixty hours a week, I would be singing a different tune, something with lyrics like “BRING ME THE TRACTORS AND THE DDT!” Monsanto could play the AC/DC cover of my song for their commercials. 

“Fine,” you’re thinking, “but what about the million dollars?” Well, it just so happens that I was working at the CSA this past weekend along with several other naïve, citified souls, all of us on similar quests to assuage our fears of a future with no avocado sushi. Our efforts were all orchestrated by the CSA owner, who is one of those hyper-intelligent people who holds every bit of information she’s ever learned inside her brain—it just may take her a moment to access it. So between our utter ignorance and her moments of “accessing file…accessing file…” things could get a little wacky, in the way that stepping on a rusty nail with your bare foot can be wacky.

For instance, there was the matter of the sledgehammer. We were building a trellis than ran the length of a forty-foot row, to support the tomatoes that would later grow there. This involved pounding into the ground some eight-foot-tall stakes, in between which would be strung an unwieldy length of metal wire fencing. The wire fencing was enough to give me the heebie-jeebies, but the truly scary part was the pounding of the stakes into the soil. For this, I was paired up with a very tall woman in overalls who was just a clueless as I was, and who was instructed to pound the stakes in with a sledgehammer while I cringed below her, holding the stake steady. From the way the morning sun hit us our shadows fell on the ground in front of me, and I stared, fascinated, waiting for her to slip. It was like the final act in a Balinese shadow puppet show, one in which the audience (who is also the cast), knows how it will end.

But I didn’t get hit on the head with a sledgehammer. And soon it was time for me to go help prepare the shiitake mushrooms. The middle schooler in me thinks that shiitake mushrooms are innately hilarious.  Planting them is not. You must drill a great number of holes into a log, into which you insert shiitake-mushroom-spore-covered dowels, paint over them with hot beeswax, then let them sit for a year. Eventually, I suppose, mushrooms come of this. In the meantime, the process is thirty kinds of crazy. First was the matter of the drill, which kept lodging itself in the wood at the same time that the “trigger” got stuck, so the drill would start spinning wildly out of control, taking my hand, arm, etc. with it. That is, until my wrist stopped bending in that direction, at which point the drill would continue gyrating satanically on its own. The only way to stop the spinning was by unplugging the drill, though this solution did not immediately dawn on me and I nearly fainted while trying to think of it.

You’d think it would be hard to get more dangerous than sledgehammers and satanically possessed power tools. Clearly, you haven’t yet thought of a coffee can filled with molten beeswax sitting on a Bunsen burner on a rickety card table. Nor have you considered that the proceedings might also involve a hyperactive eleven-year-old boy. When the world ends, you can bet it will be at the hands of an eleven-year-old boy with a can of molten beeswax. To his credit, he was about as well-behaved as would be possible for an eleven-year-old whose mother has dragged him out to do farm chores on a Sunday morning. Nonetheless, I was fully expecting someone to lose an eye or a limb at any moment. Hopefully that someone would not be me.

But my contemplative powers had been fanned by the folksy surroundings. Losing a limb…hmm. What would happen if I lost a body part on the farm here today? Maybe just a small body part, like a middle toe (since you need the pinky toes for balancing, or so I’ve been told). I think that would be pretty traumatic, don’t you? Pretty darn physically and emotionally traumatic. Enough for maybe a tidy, out-of-court settlement. Something along the lines of a million dollars. After all, I hadn’t signed a liability-waiver form of any kind. I think the farm owner intends to get around to that sooner rather than later—let’s just hope she waits until after I’m a millionaire.