Farms Not Arms is an organization of farmers who wants to provide work opportunities for Iraqi War veterans and give rural people a voice against war.

Michael: We realize that agribusiness opposes the vision of holding onto family farms, and opposes strengthening our rural communities and family farms that are growing local produce. 90 percent of the fuel spent in our food production system is the distribution, only ten percent in actual production. So let’s grow the produce closer to home. Let’s grow our own fuels. Let’s support the Midwest and get out of the wars in the Middle East. Let’s bring veterans back to work on our farms as a place to heal and to gain vocational training. As the people who are taking care of the land and feeding the country, we can help bring our country back to earth and get it a little more grounded, and offer not just a protest against the war but a positive alternative of a better way of living and a more democratic society based on the Jeffersonian concepts of distribution of land, production, wealth and power.

AM: Are you a veteran?

Michael: No. I’m an anti-war veteran. I went to jail six times during the Vietnam protests. I was very active in that before I went into farming. I’ve been a lifelong pacifist and I’ve stayed true to that my whole life.

AM: How many farms are signed up for Farms Not Arms?

Michael: About 300 around the country and also a number of farming organizations. We’re finding energetic support in the Midwest. We probably signed up another 100 farmers while at the Eco Farm Conference.

AM: One of your goals is to provide an opportunity for healing for soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Michael: We talk to vets and they are very excited about the project. All of us who went into farming as young men and women were attracted to farming. The military has an attraction for young people. It has to do with having a sense of purpose. It has to do with having a sense of camaraderie, and a sense of working for a common good. Also it’s a way of feeling your oats and strength and physicality. We think the farm is an alternative lifestyle. It’s a peaceful alternative for young people who are drawn to the military. You know, “Be all you can be.” Yes, be all you can be, but leave the guns out of it.

AM: How has war affected you and your family?

Michael: On 9/11 my daughter Ann was working at One Liberty Plaza in the building facing the Twin Towers and was in the street when the plane hit. She waited at the door facing the people who left the building; some were burned and some were without clothes, some dying, and people jumped out of the building in front of her. My youngest son, raised in a pacifist family, within a few days signed up for the military with the idea of wanting to protect his family. He ended up having to leave his four children, including a new baby, to spend a year in the Coast Guard guarding the coast of Cuba off Guantanamo. Our farm almost went belly-up because our production is based in Mexico. The U.S.-Mexico border was shut for several weeks. We lost several million dollars. We had to cut labor back; everyone had to take a day off without pay every week for several months until we could build back up the company. So I realized that not doing something about the insanity of the cycle of war and terror would be like not weeding my fields. It would be as crazy as not watering the crops. It’s just part of what I have to do. It’s just one more thing we have to do and we all have to do it.

Isaiah had 20 pages in the Bible, but the words that everyone remembers are “Take the swords and pound them into ploughshares. And take your spears and beat them into pruning hooks.” So how do we take that thing which is threatening everybody on earth right now, this insane growth of military power, and physically beat it and change it and turn it into something positive? It’s not just a protest. It’s not just “No Arms,” but it’s “Farms not Arms.”

Will: I grew up on a farm in southern California when there were lots of farms in southern California. My folks had a small farm in the San Fernando Valley. My dad was really a good farmer. We raised a lot of pigs, and we had big gardens. In those days a 10-acre farm was a fairly good-sized farm. The average cotton farm was 17 acres in 1946. Now the average cotton farm is 1,000 acres. That time period was the end of the subsistence agriculture in California and the beginning of enormous urbanization. Land was just being sold as fast as people could sell it. My folks sold out when I was in high school. And I went into the Marine Corps afterwards because I got into a little bit of trouble as a kid and really didn’t have a direction. So I was in the Marine Corps for three years between Korea and Vietnam. I got out in ’58 and went to college and got a Ph.D. in anthropology of agriculture, studying tropical forest farmers in Peru. So I didn’t fall very far from the nest. Then I got totally involved in the Vietnam War because I started teaching at the University of California Santa Barbara in 1966. I was the faculty advisor to the student body, a radical student body. There was SDS, Black student unions, and MACHA, which is the Mexican American community.

I went to some of the first anti-war marches in Chicago. In those days people threw coffee cups at you and they were full of coffee. I mean, you would be marching down the street and be pelted with stuff all the time. That was the very early days of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. When I came back to Santa Barbara, the anti-war and the civil rights movement was really getting hot. By 1968 it was a full-blown movement. I was fired by the University of California because I was too radical, and the students went nuts. They did all these demonstrations over my firing. Angela Davis came and spoke for me. All these radicals of the ‘60s were saying, “Look, this is ridiculous. This guy is political, and that’s why you’re firing him.” There was a series of demonstrations. Then there was a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert on campus that Jerry Rubin and several other high profile anti-war people came to. The police decided to pull the plug prematurely on the concert. So people stormed out of that place. They had been assaulting the Bank of America for about a month. So when people came roaring out of that concert they lit some Dempsey dumpsters on fire and pushed them into the bank and burned the bank down, literally burned it to the ground. I got accused with 19 other people of burning a bank. But there were thousands of people surrounding the bank when it burned. So they put me in jail, gave me a year, and it was time well spent. I learned a lot and it really changed my perception about people that are in jail because they’re for the grace of God go you or I. Just one little mistake.

After I got out of jail I felt like my career in academia was really over so I decided to go back into farming. But I stayed an anti-war activist, a civil rights activist and a social justice activist all the time. I felt the same way Michael did. There was never any representation of the rural community. It wasn’t just farmers; there were no rural people there. All of us farmers are way too busy. Every farmer I know is maxed. You don’t feel like you can take a lot of time away from your farm because it’s going to fail if you do. So a lot of people don’t get involved who have the passion for it. So Michael came to me and said, “Look we’re trying to start this organization called Farms Not Arms.” My wife Kate and I became the Eastern co-chairs because we live in Vermont.

AM: Why is Farms Not Arms important to you?

Will: It’s a vehicle for rural people to get involved. There’s such a disproportionate number of people from rural areas that are dying and getting injured. Vermont is a state with the highest percentage dead and injured from this war. I think a lot of people go into the services, especially out of the countryside to try to get that discipline and to try to get a skill that they can market. A lot of farmers we know are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder related to bankruptcy and the fear of bankruptcy. The highest injury rate among occupations in this country is farmers. A lot of them have lost a hand. A lot of them have lost a finger, lost a foot, lost an eye. So we are natural allies.

The other thing about it is the centering aspect. We don’t pretend that we’re going to heal these people. We’re going to need to get a lot of psychological help through the VA, through a wide variety of resources to help us do this project. We want to provide a place to heal. What are you going to do in the inner city to heal? You’re not going to be able to heal in the inner city.

Michael: I really feel like it’s going to take profound changes in how we live our lives and how we relate to the rest of the world. We have to give up this sense of being the super power. We have to let it go and we have to start treating countries like China and India better. We have to start treating the people that are going to be stronger than we are in another 10 or 20 years very nicely right now, so that we just might be treated fairly nicely when we’re not in the position of power.

Bioneers deals with the concept that how we live makes a difference. I believe that’s the story that has to be told. The American people need to see a different way to live without the oil. We can live without controlling the rest of the world. We can have a more peaceful world without a huge military. We could spend a fraction of the money on the military and feed and give medical attention to the billions of people in the world that live on a dollar a day.

Will: There were four points that Bush made when he decided that he was going to up the ante in Iraq and send in 22,500 more troops. His fourth point was we have to protect U.S. resources in the region. A lot of people focus all their attention on the oil, but flowing through Baghdad are the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which are the backbone of agriculture. People are not starving because they’re in the breadbasket of the Middle East. Iraq produces an enormous amount of food. Those rivers don’t just flow in Iraq, they flow south. It’s really important for people to realize we didn’t take that place just for oil, although oil is a critical piece of it. It’s also to control the water in the Middle East, and to control agricultural development. The U.S. wants to change the agriculture that exists there now, which is mostly small-scale agriculture. The U.S. wants it to be large-scale agriculture. That’s something that the rest of the peace movement is not talking about. I think there’s some real opportunity for Farms Not Arms to talk about that issue and talk about the farming realities. Ultimately what would be the most desirable thing is to bring some Iraqi farmers here.

Michael: Israel went into Lebanon for water also. At the mouth of the Jordan River there are Israeli settlements on the West Bank. It’s a desert with pockets of water. And all the settlements are on the pockets of water. They’re fighting for the ability to feed themselves and they’re fighting over the future of the control of water.

AM: One of the first things that the U.S. did when it took over in Iraq was to pass a law that prohibited saving of seeds. Iraqi farmers have been planting and saving heirloom wheat and other seeds that go back hundreds of years—as you said, the original breadbasket of the Middle East. The U.S. set up a legal structure that forces Iraqi farmers to buy commercial seeds many of which are genetically engineered. So you’re absolutely right, farming is high on the list in terms of U.S. ambitions in the region.

Michael: Who’s going to tell this story to the farmers? We need to do that. Our biggest challenge is that we want a group that the farmers control because we want a voice, we want our voice. But at the same time we’re looking for folks in other organizations that can help, help us get that word out to other farmers and get our story out to other people.

Will: People are going to realize the farmers really do need to have a voice and that voice can be a loud one because people are not going to get their produce at the farmers’ market until they listen to our rap. It’s that simple. You don’t get your change back until you hear this.

When Vietnam vets came back the government blew them off, just blew them off. Now those are our homeless population. Nobody took care of them. Nobody tried to heal them. And now they cut two billion dollars out of the budget that was going for vet rehabilitation. The vets knew right away they were being blown off. We were cannon fodder and now we’re going to be Swiss cheese. So we feel like any kind of effort you can make to try and rehabilitate these kids because they went believing that they were going there to do the right thing. A lot of them are just sweet kids that got stuck in the wrong place.