Of goat apprentices and chicken bazookas
There’s a spot in Berkeley near San Pablo and Bancroft which takes its name from both an ecological concept and a identify-redefining gay movement. It has goats, rabbits, chickens, fruits, vegetables, and a beehive. It sells milk to pet owners, and teaches apprentices to care for and milk goats. From the street, it’s impossible to tell there’s anything more than just a house.
In 1995, Jim Montgomery bought a 1920 one-story house with two friends, and immediately began turning it into Green Faerie Farm. The garden measures only 6,000 feet - just a little over 1/10th of an acre - but in its urban setting it feels huge. Really, it’s a backyard that also happens to be a farm.
Jim has a degree in molecular biology, and teaches math at Maybeck High School in Berkeley. His family has lived in Oakland dating back to 1860, where his grandfather was a pig farmer in the hills. As farmers, his family weathered the Great Depression - and as Jim sees possibilities for another economic crisis, he’ll be ready again.
Jim inherited an unusual trait from his father: he was born with only thumbs on his hands. He wears wrist straps with metal plates that extend out and help him grip things. Around the farm, he has no trouble: “I can catch bunnies better than most people.” We actually interviewed him holding a little white bunny (forgoing a chance to have him hold a lethally cute baby bunny and not-as-cute larger black one), and he certainly handled it with much more aplomb than I.
When he was 12 he got a 2-foot-long Burmese Python, and marveled at the way he fed it living food. It got him to thinking about his own food consumption: why was did his food come in packages? Why was it so different than what his snake ate? “There was a disconnect there that I wanted to connect.” He later started making the connection, and now, years later, he knows exactly what he eats - because he either harvests it or slaughters it himself. He estimates he gets about 60% of his meat from his farm, and in the summertime, up to 80% of his fruits and veggies.
As a man who counts over 40 friends and acquaintances lost to AIDS, Jim is in some ways a survivor of a generation. His ultra-chill demeanor belies a busy and often challenging life, and it’s hard to imagine him doing much more, or living a life any closer to his ideals and beliefs.
He believes if everyone were educated and well-fed, a lot of the world’s problems would be solved. He also knows why cosine is gay and sine is straight, but he’s going to explain that one next time. He thinks the fact that chickens have been bred to be little egg bazookas sort of epitomized what is wrong with large-scale industrial meat production. He can stroke a cute bunny while he’s talking about what he’s going to make from its fur. He thinks you need to have a relationship with the animal you’re going to kill.
So where does he fall in the urban farming spectrum? This sums it up pretty well: “Our food travels 50 feet to get to the table.” Green Faerie Farm is probably as good an intersection of idealism and practicality as you’ll find. Plus, he loves it.
Jim was a great interview. Being a teacher, he knows how to answer a question with stories and to how keep a flow going; he generally made Adam’s job easy. There’s a lot left for us to capture - Jim’s walks around the neighborhood with the goats, milking with the apprentices, possibly a slaughter. And bunnies - always more bunnies.
He even gave us a couple ideas for Future Magic - all in all, a good day.
2 years ago