FARMERS diary
NOURISHING a COMMUNITY VRDNT FARM
by ADA BROUSSARD / photography by PATTY ROBERTSON
F
or those who weren’t
accompanied her dad to these communities to help translate.
born
farming
“Agriculture was always the fundamental indicator of the health and
family, the learning curve
wealth [of a community]. Witnessing the strength and resiliency of
can be steep. That is, unless you’re
their agriculture was really when I got interested in agriculture, in
Becky Hume, owner and operator
general,” she says. At age 16, Hume spent a long summer apprenticing
of VRDNT farm in Bastrop, who
at a farm in the Philippines sexing tilapia, among other transcendental
had a strong agriculture interest
tasks for a 16-year-old, and while surrounded by a jungle of bamboo
by her mid-teens.
and barely anyone who spoke English, Hume realized what she wanted
into
a
Hume was born in North Carolina
to do with her life.
but most of her childhood was
It wasn’t until Hume returned to the U.S. for college that she got a
spent in China and Thailand
glimpse into the commercial and industrial agricultural practices
where her parents worked as
that dominate U.S. food production. “The first time I saw the huge
medical missionaries. Early on,
combines and cornfields, it almost didn’t compute,” Hume remembers.
she developed a relationship with food and agriculture. “I was really
“From the get go, I was already realizing that there are a lot of
young and my Chinese nanny would take me to the market,” she
different ways to grow food.”
remembers, “and she would teach me how to bargain for vegetables, how to choose the good quality ones from the bad quality ones.” When Hume was a teenager, the family moved from China to Thailand where her dad established free medical clinics in rural hillside villages. Because she was fluent in Thai, Hume often
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