Crop Mob: Getting Dirty on an East Atlanta Farm

Patent attorney Collen Beard normally works behind a desk. But on a recent Sunday morning, she got her hands dirty as part of a mob. Specifically, a Crop Mob.

As birds chirped and green sprouts emerged from the soft red earth at Gaia Gardens in the East Lake Commons Co-Housing Community, Beard hauled a wheelbarrow full of weeds to a compost pile, as about two dozen other green-hearted souls worked to refill her load. Like Beard, most were novice gardeners interested in getting a little exercise, helping a local farmer and learning something about organic food production in the process.

“It was wonderful,” says Beard. “It was a lot of fun. It was nice to meet other people and see the farm.” 

Welcome to the agrarian movement of the digital age, a kind of barn raising through Facebook. The only pitchforks being wielded by Crob Mob are used to move hay or compost. Crop Mob is a self-proclaimed “group of young, landless, and wannabe farmers who come together to build and empower communities by working side by side.” The concept began in October of 2008 when farmers, farm apprentices and others got together to harvest sweet potatoes at the Piedmont Biofarm in Pittsboro, N.C. 

Since that first event, more than 50 Crop Mob groups have emerged, around the local area, in Atlanta, Savannah and across the U.S., with memberships that are “dynamic, changing and growing,” according to Crop Mob originators.

Graphic designer Mike Lorey of Alpharetta helped found Crop Mob Atlanta about a year ago after reading about it in the New York Times.  The Atlanta-area mob has worked all over the northern half of Georgia, Lorey said.

The group is  “a bunch of people who are interested in local food, and whose interest extends beyond buying food at a local farmer’s market to contributing to the hard work it takes to produce all this food,” Lorey said.

Farmer Joe Reynolds of Gaia Gardens led a recent Crop Mob at the 5-acre organic farm and woodland. The urban farm is adjacent to and owned bythe East Lake Commons co-housing community, a family-friendly housing complex that emphasizes resource sharing, community involvement, sustainable living, and diversity.

Standing in a field of soft earth, Reynolds directs the volunteer mob not to walk on the tilled rows. “We’re going to walk between the rows,” while moving across the field pulling up weeds, Reynolds said.

Gaia Gardens grows diversified crops, including vegetables from arugula to zucchini, muscadines. A stack of logs inoculated with mushroom spores is growing gourmet fungi. Some of the produce is sold through a fully subscribed Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, others is sold to local restaurants, said Reynolds, who lives in Grant Park. Reynolds will sell Gaia Gardens produce at the East Atlanta Village Farmers Market on Thursday afternoons starting May 5.

Decatur and other local schoolchildren often tour the farm said Reynolds, who hosted students from Winnona Park Elementary in March.

The Crop Mob's work helped clear weeds from Gaia Gardens without pesticides. Modern industrial farming methods are far less labor intensive than in the past, Crob Mobbers explain, making farming “a more independent and solitary career.”  

According to the group’s main website, “Crop Mob was conceived as a way of building the community necessary to practice this kind of agriculture and to put the power to muster this group in the hands of our future food producers."

The Crop Mob Atlanta also hosted a “Speakeasy,” or a social event at Decatur’s Farmstead 303 recently to “take off our boots and gloves and talk over drinks instead of pigweed.” While quaffing beverages, mobbers discussed the merits of a “dispersed city farm,” or growing herbs, tomatoes, mushrooms and a variety of other crops in urban farm beds and sharing the results.

“We had a fertile discussion,” quipped Kimberly Coburn of Sandy Springs, a co-founder of the Crob Mob Atlanta. Kneeling in the East Atlanta field in bright yellow boots, Coburn yanked weeds while explaining that the local mob has more than 1,000 Facebook friends, with an active volunteer base in the hundreds. The Atlanta group's T-shirt asks "are you in the mob?"

John Colabelli of the Summerhill neighborhood in Atlanta, grew up on a farm in upstate New York and watched his family lose their farm to agribusiness interests. But he spent a Sunday morning mobbing in East Lake to reconnect to his farming roots.

“My dream is to have a farm someday,” said Colabelli, who works in financial services in Buckhead. “Whatever I do in college or in a job, I always try to keep my hands dirty.”

Ben Rieger of Chamblee, who recently moved to the area, is mobbing as a way to meet people, get out of the house and to experience farming before he starts up a degree in environmental science at Georgia State University.

Some volunteers are like Michele Hanson of Midtown, a home-schooling mom, with chickens in her back yard, who showed up “for something to do on a Sunday. Natalie Ray of the West End said she joined the mob out of her concern for healthier food.

“The cheap stuff is less healthy,” said Ray. “We need a good source of health foods, and healthy organic foods that aren’t expensive. The more help organic farmers get, the better.”

.........

The brief operating principles of the Crop Mob:

• No money is ever exchanged.
• Work is done on small-scale, sustainable farms and gardens.
• A meal is shared, often provided by the host.
• This is not a charity. "We crop mob for crop mobbers."