Reporting from Moncure, N.C. — "Hey! Crop Mob! Over here!"
Rob Jones, his boots smeared with mud, was trying to get the attention of a ragged group of young men and women dressed in jeans and work boots. They were toting shovels and rakes as they stomped across a barren field toward a plot of freshly turned earth.
This was Crop Mob, a roving band of volunteers dedicated to helping young farmers build sustainable small farms. It's a modern version of a barn-raising, with volunteers brought together by Google and Facebook.
Jones, a Crop Mob founder who grows his own vegetables at home, gathered up the volunteers to help farmer Jason Oatis build rice paddies. They were to be taught by Oatis, a bearded 40-year-old who is trying to carve out a sustainable farm on a few acres of sticky clay soil on a pine-studded plot in central North Carolina.
"It's fantastic -- these people love working the land, but they don't have their own farms, and I could definitely use the help," Oatis said as the mobbers' shovels smacked against wet clay, pounding out low earthen walls for each rice paddy.
Jones and several other young, back-to-the-land enthusiasts started Crop Mob on a local biofuels farm. Nineteen volunteers showed up for the first mob in October 2008, harvesting 16,000 pounds of sweet potatoes in a few hours.
There have been 15 Crop Mobs since, each one bigger than the last as word spreads over the Internet. More than 80 volunteers dug rice paddies, cleared fields and repaired a roof on Oatis' rough little farm on a crisp Sunday last month.
Gathering once a month, the mobs have dug, weeded, mulched and cleared land for farmers across two North Carolina counties. Some mobbers are office workers and backyard gardeners. Others are striving young farmers. All are connected by social networking websites anchored, naturally, by the Crop Mob website at www.cropmob.org "> www.cropmob.org .
The idea is to help small farmers work plots that are far more labor-intensive than industrial agriculture, Jones said. But the broader goal is to support sustainable farming of locally grown food -- and to inspire people to get their hands dirty and grow something.
"Crop Mob is not a charity," said Jones, who has a master's in environmental education and now has a fellowship with a community development nonprofit group. "At its core, it's about community -- farmers helping farmers. And when the 'agricurious' come out to help them and learn, well, that's just icing on the top."
