I can remember five, six, seven years ago when, yes, there was only a hundred, so this
is intimidating.
There's a lot of us out here in the audience, which is great.
Tamar and everybody else so far has mentioned that we do have a long road to hoe in this
movement.
And as I sat and listened and got inspired already, even though we drove from upstate
New York and it took us four and a half hours, I am deeply inspired and I hope to do the
same.
And what I realized from listening to the previous speakers is that this is really about
people.
It's not about me rolling out a bed at 5.30 in the morning doing paperwork, going into
the greenhouse making sure that the heat didn't burn up any of my babies in the seedling house.
It's really in the end about people because the food that I produce and that you want
to eat is more or less a building block of the human being and the human community.
And if we use it in the wrong manner, it could also kill us.
So the bottom line is it's about people.
And this is where I'm going to talk about how my faith, how Islam is necessary and everybody
here has to have some kind of a faith system to guide them because this world is complex.
It is full of evil people lurking in the shadows, but that propensity isn't just them.
We always have a tendency to point at those evil people out there and we have to remember
that when you're pointing, there's a thumb sticking back at you.
And this I'm trying to inspire myself with this as well and remember that I too am prone
to doing evil as well as prone to doing good.
But if I don't have perspective on what good is and what evil is, I can get lost in the
heat of the moment because to give you an example of what happens on a daily basis at
Norwich Meadows Farm.
Generally speaking, we roll out a bed at 5.30 to our morning prayer and then when nobody
else is going to call me and there's no honey come do this or do that, I do stuff that requires
a lot of attention to detail.
And then I run out to the greenhouse and literally I run to the greenhouse in the morning, one
it's exercise, two it's because I got a whole lot of stuff that I got to do.
Run out to the greenhouse, check the greenhouse, water, see if anything is developing disease
just because we haven't had sun in the last couple of months it seems like and plants
like sun.
Then I run back in and it's around 8 o'clock, the phone might ring, my wife might get up,
visitors might come by, things break down on the farm, people get sick and don't call
you and all of a sudden the chickens need to be fed.
The chickens need to be fed regardless of whether I'm sick or somebody else is sick.
So it's a very, very long day.
It usually is from 5.30 to up to 10, 10.30 p.m.
So in that busy day I have to keep perspective so once in a while when it's been a really
hard day you fall back on that system that either your parents taught you or a combination
of your parents taught you and you've learned it along the way whether it was formal education
or otherwise.
And there's days when you can't even remember those things because you're so entrenched
in the day-to-day activities and all the problems that can happen.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about the framework because I really think it's very
important that we, again, we've got to have a framework.
If you are going to do the proverbial we've got to deal with our enemy you have to have
a framework for that.
You have to understand them so that you can deal with them.
So the first thing I need to always keep into perspective is what's my goal?
Why do I even do what I do?
I mean farming in general is a beautiful vocation but it's nothing like what you see on TV.
It can be romantic.
It can be very nice.
It's a great vocation but it's full of daily breakdowns, people who don't show up to work,
government officials that show up at the door unannounced and you have to deal with
all of that.
So my goal first and foremost is to serve God.
Now thank God that he actually gave me a little bit more guidance than that because if that's
all he said I'd be in trouble.
Serving God, one of the ways of serving God is serving mankind and that's kind of what
we do.
We're feeding people.
So I take that very seriously.
So we say I want to feed you what I eat.
I'm not going to spray a toxic pesticide and then sell it to you because, you know, do
on to you or do on to others as you want to, you know, that's part of the ethos of Islam
as it is with many other religions.
Now another thing that as I was thinking about what I was going to say about this that I
keep forgetting but is that really human relationships is all about peace and I'm not talking about
wars now.
We're talking about wouldn't you, wouldn't it be lovely that if you walked out of your
apartment here and the doorman, let's say you have a doorman smiled at you and you walked
out into the street and everybody was smiling and you went to buy something and the person
said I'm going to give you a discount today.
I think you're just so wonderful.
I mean everything that we do could be distilled into peace.
That's what we're all seeking.
You come home from work, you don't want to hear a bunch of kids whining and yelling and
screaming or your neighbors fighting.
No, you want to hear tranquility.
So peace and tranquility is at the center of what we're after.
So that's the goals.
Well now the businessman, farmer, organic farmer, Zade Khurdia has things that they have
to do, business transactions.
I've got to buy.
I have to sell.
I have to meet with customers, talk to people, all of that.
I have to have a framework for that as well.
So to give you an example, we have a really, really big problem in Islam and it's called
banks and interest rates.
And I know that problem now has become a worldwide issue but nobody really thought of it until
the bubble of 2008.
We can't deal in interest and we can't deal with banks.
So what do we do?
Well, thank God for CSAs.
So the meshing of what we do with our goals and our framework is working out for us because
we can do that.
On the production side of things, in Islam we're taught not to waste that the land is
not our land.
We're basically here stewards.
This piece of ground that I'm farming now, I'm going to die and it's going to go to somebody
else one day.
So I can't abuse it.
So all of these things I have to take into consideration when I'm doing my business.
The problem is I do live in a modern world where everybody looks at profit maximization,
cost minimization.
Well, that doesn't set very well with organic production because certain crops produced organically
are going to cost more and I still have to compete with a person that's selling broccoli
at the half the price that I do.
So those things are definitely running through my mind during the day.
So how am I going to sell broccoli that's twice as expensive?
It's something that I have to deal with.
Am I going to schmooze people or am I going to tell them the truth or how do I deal with
that whole dilemma?
It's sometimes a dilemma.
The other issue is just dealing with people on the farm from day to day.
We have a local population that unfortunately in my jaundice view of the world is completely
dysfunctional.
Every single person that I have hired from our local community and with no exception
has a personal soap opera that I have to deal with because they have a hangover and they
don't show up to work or the police took them off to jail because they got caught with drugs
and the list is very long and that's another human being.
There's two ways I can deal with it.
Fire them and don't have to deal with them at all but then there's the compassionate
way of trying to do something to help these people.
Well, it's not an easy thing even though my ethos says you should help this person.
I don't have a profit margin where I can basically hire double or triple the amount of people
that I have to be able to do this but we still try.
I mean this is a work in progress.
The human interactions that we have with our customers, with my employees, just to give
you a perspective, total employees that we have at the peak of seasons could be upwards
of 45, 50, all of the employees and I don't enjoy necessarily dealing with the problems
of 45 to 50 people.
I mean I can barely solve my own problems let alone all those people so it's this tremendous
detail that is in my religion that actually helps me to get through the day.
I'm not going to be able to give you a lot of examples but for example we're taught
that if you all of a sudden feel yourself angry and you're going to start lashing out
that you should go and lie down.
Calm down so you don't do or say something really stupid so there's a lot of detail in
my system that allows me to cope with a business that is near and dear to us but it has a lot
of challenges.
I could talk forever on this subject but what I really want to do here is remind myself
and remind you that in this world if we are not thinkers, if we are not proactive, if we're
not flexible about taking on new ideas, if we're not optimistic and Lord knows there's
days every year my wife can testify to this I tell her this is the last year we're farming
we're done I can't handle this no more and she pretty much is in tears she loves it although
when we started she didn't I quit a job I used to work for Cornell I had a paycheck
now I rely on Sandy to disrupt our life and I've gotten to the point where even Sandy
doesn't bother me and it comes from really believing that what God gives you is what
you have to deal with and it's just another day so this framework we have to develop it
and we have to nurture it because it fades some days it's not there things have gotten
to you so I ask that we all discover a framework build on it help each other because this is
all about humanity and community and lovely food is just a side benefit of all of this
thank you very much.
