Down on the Farm

Peter Aronson is 21 years old and on the autism spectrum; he is learning to use a shovel to load a wheelbarrel with woodchips, which he'll placed amid rows of crops at Brookfield Farms in Massachusetts. His mother, Naomi Dratfield, is hoping to create an "intentional farmstead community, where both able and disabled individuals would live and work together," the May 29th Amherst Bulletin notes. Dratfield, an occupational therapist, is working with an organization called the SAGE (Special Adults Greener Earth) Crossing Foundation and notes the positive aspects that working on a farm offers her son:

..... being at a farm allows Peter to have a varying routine each day.

It also brings him closer to nature and animals, though when he first started working at the farm he didn't like the free-range chickens that wandered the property.

Peter first started doing similar physical work at the Hampshire College Farm before coming to Brookfield, which is only three miles from his home.

On a recent afternoon, Dratfield helped her son with his work, repeatedly shouting encouragement to him. "Let's go, lovey! That's a boy!"

The challenges for Peter doing his job are obvious, as he can be easily distracted. For instance, instead of shoveling the woodchips, he decides to break several large twigs and place them in compost piles. But Peter also shows ingenuity, like when he can't easily turn the wheelbarrow around without hitting the crops, he instead navigates the wheelbarrow backwards.

Dratfield cites other examples of intentional farming communities, Bittersweet Farms in Whitehouse, Ohio, where "people with and without disabilities live in mutually beneficial relationships," and another community at Camphill Village in Copake, N.Y., where "adults with disabilities, co-workers and children run a farm and bakery and do woodworking and arts projects."

I like the idea of Charlie working on a farm. He likes being outdoors and the kind of work one does when gardening strikes me as combining many of the things he's drawn to do. Judging from his indifference to computers, he's not likely to be a candidate for doing data-entry. And various sources have been saying to me, they're aren't going to be any of those sorts of jobs left when he's an adult----??!??!!?

Driving back from the post office earlier today, we saw a father and his young son digging in a huge pile of dirt in front of their house. The boy was younger than Charlie; I could see how eager he was to be helping his dad and I think the fact that he was getting to work with (play in) the dirt had a lot to do with it. Working at a desk isn't for everyone, that's for sure (even in the industrial-suburban Garden State---there are farms here).