Farmaponack

Nobody saw it coming. Farmers, in the thick of spring preparations, didn’t have time to wind their watches, and no one attended the Zoom meeting.

They didn’t imagine that a village, emboldened by its recent defeat of the leaf blowers, would not stop there.

Instead, while the farmers leveled plows and planted peas, they may have missed their final opportunity to keep the last nail out of agriculture’s coffin.

To whit, the village, seeing no public outcry nor gathering of attorneys, decided by mutual consent to prevent and ban all commercial farming in Sagaponack.

This does not mean that you, the landowner, cannot enjoy the rich topsoil of your expansive house lots. Nor does it prevent the lucky few who own agricultural reserves from buying tractors and getting dirty.

But it will prevent you from getting a deer fence.

An official, wishing not to be named, commented how this killed two birds with one stone, the albatross — deer fence permits — and the bluebird, the bluebird of happiness.

In order to run your garden in Sagg you will need to submit a schedule of profit and loss, showing losses of 100 percent or more for every 0.025 acre farmed. Then you will qualify as a non-farming entity, permitted to farm for a yearly fee of $100 per year.

The farmers, caught flat-footed (what else is new), have sent petitions to Albany. But, more importantly, they have started filling out paperwork on the local level proving that, if they paid themselves, the farmers would in fact lose 200 percent.

For now, the farmers are unified, even discussing the idea of forming a village themselves; Farmaponack has a lovely ring to it.

On a sun-filled afternoon, the farmyards were happy places. Each denizen, busy in his work, feels the early optimism of planting season upon him. Every single one of them confirmed that they were committed to planting a crop and working like hell, with no certainty that his efforts will come to fruition — that is, the farmer is openly committed to losing just as much as he is enticed by winning. On a diverse vegetable farm, something fails, always.

And, for this reason, it will not yet be too difficult to prove a loss of at least 100 percent.

(Happy April Fools Day.)