An Organic Farm

Matt Goldberg

We should start an organic farm, we said, confidently, while drunk on wine purchased at a Whole Foods conveniently located around the corner from our apartment. We should quit our jobs, we said, and leave this godforsaken city—a transportation hub where we have friends, where I teach English at a local university and where you design websites for tech firms—to purchase land in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, where we’ll till soil and harvest squash and store our surplus squash in barns, which is how it works, we assume.
          This is what we should do, we said, having never planted a seed, our only previous agricultural experience involving a ficus grown indoors from cuttings we purchased from an artisanal plant boutique. We should start an ecologically sustainable farm without pesticides or chemicals, we toasted, alcohol crippling our decision-making faculties, blissfully ignorant that by next fall our first crop would be lost to a series of pine beetle infestations.
          We should sell our crops at local produce stands, we said, thinking back to the delightful farmers markets that we liked to peruse on Sunday mornings in the city before brunch, without the slightest idea of the logistics or certifications required to sell food commercially at viable profit margins. We should watch videos on YouTube about the basics of farming, we agreed, neither one of us having ever stepped foot on an actual farm besides that animal sanctuary in Poughkeepsie which we vowed to donate to but never did.
          We should raise hens and collect fresh, pasture-raised eggs, we cooed, now onto our second bottle of Whole Foods wine, only to awaken eight months later after selling all our worldly possessions and moving to bumfuck rural Mississippi, to find our entire flock of hens disemboweled by coyotes. We should buy cows so we can have fresh milk and cheese, we said, patting ourselves on the back, oblivious to the intricacies of pasteurization and the dangerous microorganisms that would leave us bedridden and vomiting our guts out into a compost toilet.
          We should get closer to nature and live off the land the way our ancestors did, we declared, without realizing that our ancestors endured absolutely horrific lives and died with rotten teeth in their mouths at the ripe old age of forty-four as indentured serfs in Russia.
          We should buy a big tractor, we said, our cheeks flushed, our voices brimming with unearned confidence, unaware that diesel prices would skyrocket due to instability in global energy markets, without considering that neither of us had ever operated heavy machinery, that neither of us even knew how to drive stick shift, and that our only contact with John Deere was a very chic jean jacket we found at a flea market.
          If we’re going to have kids, we announced, totally plastered at this point and wildly unprepared to be parents, we should raise them in a wholesome environment like on a farm and not this city, we sneered, with its crime and its grime and its slime. What do we want our lives to look like, we asked each other, clinking our wine glasses and congratulating ourselves on not overthinking what should surely be the adventure of a lifetime and not the biggest mistake we’ll ever make.

Matt Goldberg’s fiction has appeared in The Normal School, SmokeLong Quarterly, JMWW, Philadelphia Stories, and elsewhere. His work has also been selected for Best Small Fictions ’23, anthologized in Coolest American Stories ’24 and ’22, and awarded first place for the Uncharted Magazine Short Story Award in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, judged by Ken Liu. He earned his MFA from Temple University. Find him online at mmgoldberg.com.