Prokopská Farma
Who we are, what we do.
I thought perhaps it’d be a good idea at the start of this year to introduce myself and our farm. You can think of this piece as an outline for what I’ll be writing about in more detail throughout the year. If you’re interested in what we’re doing and would like to support our work and see a little video made about the farm last summer, read on until the end.
Prokop’s Farm. That’s us.
Prokop was a hermit who lived in a cave in our valley in Prague almost a thousand years ago. The valley is named after him, ‘Prokopske udoli,’ now a park that runs east to west on the south side of Prague. He’s the Czech patron saint of peasants. Our valley has been home to quite a few peasants throughout the ages. Less now, but that’s changing.
Lucie and I used to travel a lot. We rode our bikes a few thousand miles thoughout the Balkans and hitchhiked across the U.S. We met people that grew their own food, kept flocks of chickens, milked cows each morning, traded eggs for peas, and poured shots of homemade brandy soaked in cherries that’d bring the dead back to life. We experienced remarkable hospitality everywhere we went and it all revolved around food. A seed was planted.
We like good food. We got tired of buying organic cucumbers wrapped in plastic, bloated chicken, pale eggs, and tasteless tomatoes. We couldn’t get the good stuff, so we decided to grow our own.
We spent a summer in Lucie’s native Prague gardening in containers on our balcony and starting a guerilla garden on an overgrown lot close to our apartment. The next year we found a small plot of land with a thriving jungle of blackberries, stinging nettle, and rose hip next to ruins of a mill from the sixteenth century. By chance, the city owned the land along with a bordering meadow. Scribbled ink on paper and it’s now under our care. Till when? Let’s call it forever.
We’ve cared for chickens, pigs, ducks, geese, sheep, goats, and rabbits. We’ve eaten them too. We feed the garden soil with compost that our chickens make for us from ‘waste’, and the compost feeds the chickens. In it, we grow over a hundred different types of vegetables, herbs, and flowers from seeds of the highest quality. We do this without machines, without chemistry, without tilling, with friends, and with joy, for those who are close to us.
We started a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) our first year farming that has now grown to over forty families. Each week from the end of May until the end of October the members stop by the farm with a bag or box for their share of the harvest. We also sell salad greens and herbs to a few restaurants and small organic shops.
After a year in the main garden, the city asked if we would like to care for a seven acre field up the hill. We spent March of 2020 planting hundreds of fruit trees and berry bushes on what was a tilled moonscape. Many of these plants we grew ourselves from seed or cutting and plan on continuing to propagate perennial plants to offer for sale (see website for more info). We still call it ‘The Field’. In a few years, hopefully, we’ll call it ‘The Orchard’. It’s nothing short of astonishing to see the life flood back into this land; spiders, butterflies, flowers, bees, falcons, pheasants, frogs, people.
That same year we were fortunate enough to buy a plot of land with a small cottage a stone’s throw from the main garden. We’ve been hard at work the last few years reconstructing the original house and adding on to it. We’ve lived in our home the last two and a half years without running water (yes, we have a compost toilet), or electricity, or road access (it’s about 100 yards from the driveway to the house). A little over a year ago we had a baby, our darling little Marie. She likes to gnaw on garlic and carrots and at six months could pick her own raspberries. I’ve got high hopes she’ll be a farmer too.
We dug in a cable to the house and got electricity this winter. It’s amazing. I’m a big fan. Living without it taught me about the necessities of life and how we’ve confused many luxuries for necessities in modernity. You could say we specialize in low-tech solutions and are eager to share the simple systems that we use to heat our home, compost our ‘waste’, use solar panels and batteries, collect rainwater, filter it, and heat it at the same time we heat our house.
It’s been a labor of love. But there is joy, beauty, and meaning in labor, in a job well done. It’s the reason Prague’s Old Town draws tourists from around the world. The historic buildings are monuments to the love of craftmanship. All the details, the dimensions, patterns, colors, gables, spires, murals, mosaics, statues, shadows, soft golden light. It’s magic. As Kavka said, it’s a mother with claws. Unlike the strip malls and monoculture fields that plague our landscapes, it’s a place worth preserving. We need to make more places worth preserving.
We take pride in our craft. We paint the landscape with care, the patterns of nature are our template. We think that fields, forests, roadsides, suburbs, and city blocks, should be beautiful and productive, made for and by people, their animals, and wildlife, not machines.
So what is Mad Farmer? Mostly it’s a place where I’ll be sharing what we’re doing here in Prokop’s Valley. Occasionally I like to have some fun with stories or take aim at a culture that destroys the life it depends on. I rarely hit the mark.
If you’ve made it this far perhaps you’re interested in how you can support what we’re doing. The easiest way is to subscribe to this page and share it with friends. You can also support our farm by becoming a paying subscriber, in which we will be enormously grateful. If you’re around Prague and want to get involved you can get in touch at the contact below. We wish you a fruitful year!
Sincere thanks for reading,
Brett, Lucie, & Marie
Website: Prokopskafarma.cz
Email: peasantpolis@protonmail.com
Howdy from Australia 🇦🇺! Your Substack looks amazing and I'm looking forward to reading lots of your posts. Despite being in opposite hemispheres, it appears that we share similar ideas about growing food. Thanks for taking the time to write about it.