Agriculture Collage
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FINALLY, THE RAINS have stopped. For now.
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You cannot miss the window. The young plants in the green house are getting impatient, long-stemmed and straining. The soil is still wet. Too wet? Perhaps. But if the rain comes again, it may be too late.
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The sun is low and warming. Egg and toast and coffee. Kelsey and Ashley prepping tools; Noah on the phone, calling friends. "We’re planting and could use some hands. Y’all interested?"
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They trickle in, parking across the river and paddling over in canoes. Matt and Peter. Danny. Andy and his daughter.
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You plant deep, spaced at three feet in row. One person shovelling, one placing and filling and tamping. The rows are four hundred feet long. You fall into rhythm, throwing weight onto the foot that drives the shovel down into the earth.
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It goes on like this until dusk, the cast of extras rotating throughout. At length, the greenhouse is nearly vacant. Arms aching, Kelsey grabs me a beer. We look out at the field, dark brown and now punctuated with young green.
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"How about that?!"
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DAD LEFT THE farm in 1957 to attend college. That left Grandma and Papa to milk the cows, tend the garden, sow and harvest the corn and soybeans, raise the pigs, and so on and so forth. This was in Odell, Illinois—ninety miles southwest of Chicago, population forever hovering around one thousand souls.
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Dad stayed in California after college, but remained, essentially, a farm boy in heart and deed for the rest of his life. He tended a garden of a half dozen raised beds along the side of the house. Mom called the garden Dad’s “psychiatrist”, and he rarely missed a session after work. There were squash, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, peppers, and sweet corn. This last towered majestically over the wooden fence backing up to the Lin’s yard.
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Digging potatoes out of the ground was the job of choice, always thrilling and somewhat miraculous. I put them in the yellow basket with the black handle, sprayed them on the lawn with the hose, and carried them proudly inside to Mom. In September there were apples, and we never quite knew how to absorb the sudden preponderance of them. The default solution was applesauce. Lots of applesauce.
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The Odell farm is quite different now. No pigs, no cows, no garden. Three-hundred-foot-tall windmills dominate the landscape. Odell is different, too. Most of the shops are closed. Some were boarded up one day and left with all their merchandise inside like time capsules from the mid-1980s. The Wishing Well Café, with its picture of Papa’s high school basketball team on the wall, is still there. So are the two bars: Pour Richard’s, and the other one. For everything else, you drive to Dwight or Pontiac.
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THE YOUNG GIRLS are dancing, stomping on the packed earth. They are threshing the paddy, Nagil explains quietly to my left. The day is waning and we sit with the rest of the village on a gentle slope. The girls are lifting their arms skyward, rhythmically and gracefully. Now they are separating the husk of the paddy. Everyone is clapping in sync with the dancers. Rice terraces cascade down the valley behind them, grey-green in the progressing dark.
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So this is how it used to be, I think to myself. These are people so intertwined with the cultivation of the land and the seasons that it informs and infuses their art and their leisure. The whole village is out; some three hundred people in this remote corner of Sri Lanka. And what of the paved road being constructed into the heart of the village? How long will the dances go on when it crosses through this natural amphitheater?
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In my mind flash images: of village women in Borneo, laughing and stomping paddy spread out on big tarps along the village’s main road, waving as we pass by on motorbikes; of an old man, stooped and leathery, planting his starts of rice on a hillside in Japan. They would understand this dance precisely.
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IF WE NO longer dance to celebrate the harvest today, it is because agriculture and culture have largely been divorced from one another in modern society. Agriculture has become “food production,” terminology that conjures imagery more of a factory than a farm. Yet food is not produced like an automobile or a widget. It is grown. That our culture has forgotten this basic truth is at the heart of our sorrows.
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Efficiency, uniformity, predictability, profit maximization; these are words of industry, of things, of production. Balance, interconnection, moderation, diversity, spontaneity; these are words of living systems, living beings, living communities. To impose the former too zealously on the latter is to put life in a straight jacket, to reduce unfathomable complexity to a column of numbers. It is to place narrow ends above means, and, in so doing, to siphon meaning from both. Life abhors a straight jacket. It will either whither or defiantly burst forth.
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Life in a straight jacket is three trillion corn plants blanketing the United States, doused in chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It is billions of chickens crammed into dark cages and millions of cattle confined in feedlots, fed with corn which they cannot naturally digest, and kept alive with antibiotics. Life in a straight jacket is perpetual war on insects, on all but a select handful of cultivated plant species, on the life of the soil, and on the life of human communities. How long, we must ask, can we expect to thrive as a species while we systematically undermine our life support systems for convenience and a quick profit? Is that a question we would really like our children to experience an answer to?
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Agriculture is a dance, a complex interplay between the human species and the species we most directly rely on for life. Until recently, our job has been to be alert, to follow cues, and to both lead and let ourselves be led. Overuse of fossil fuels has intoxicated us, given us the false sense that we no longer need to follow cues, and fostered a sense of entitlement that we are to lead form now on. No need to value soil health. No need to hedge bets with species and varietal diversity. No need to know where my food comes from or how it got to my plate. Ends trump means.
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That these views and attitudes have so deeply penetrated our current culture does not recuse us from reality. The dance is give and take. It begs our watchfulness, our humility, our reciprocity, and our careful involvement. We need to get back in step.
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LIFE BEGETS LIFE. The foundations that support, and enable, the marvelous diversity of complex species are the microorganisms of sea and soil. Without them, the whole house of cards tumbles inward.
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That “conventional” agriculture disregards the microscopic life of the soil is perhaps its most dangerous characteristic. Bacteria, fungi, and a host of macro-organisms serve many functions in maintaining the Earth’s living skin: providing nutrients for plants and animals, capturing and processing life-enabling elements such as nitrogen from the air, binding together soil particles to create a hospitable growth environment, and sequestering millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These invaluable services are degraded as soil life is wiped out by compaction, chemicals, and over tilling of topsoil. Our crops are put on an expensive and self-perpetuating life support regime comprised of chemical fertilizers, further compromising soil health and contributing to an array of environmental disruptions and health problems, not to mention political conflict and destabilization.
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The result is a catastrophic loss of topsoil, leading to ever declining fertility, increasing desertification, and rising dependency on fertilizers. This is the great irony of the agricultural Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s; by boosting our crop yields through intensive use of chemicals, we have facilitated a population increase while simultaneously undermining the long-term capacity of the planet to provide food for those added billions of human souls. We have, in effect, created a “food bubble.”
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What is needed is a renewed focus on soil health. Vibrant soil is the foundation of a healthy farm, a healthy society, and a healthy planet. The benefits of healthy soils cannot be overestimated, nor can the perils of denigrated soil. For example, raising the organic content (the mélange of living and decomposing organisms) of the world’s agriculture soils by even one percent would sequester massive amounts of carbon dioxide and help mitigate climate change.
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Pioneering botanist and organic farmer Sir Albert Howard wrote in the early twentieth century, "The whole problem of health, in soil, plant, animal, and man is one great subject." Since Howard and before, soil health has been at the heart of the sustainable agriculture movement. Through composting, green manures, cover cropping, minimally disruptive cultivation techniques, and crop rotation and diversification, the sustainable farmer is tending to his most precious resource; the few inches of living earth that gives rise to all terrestrial life.
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THAT THE FOOD we ingest in a very real way becomes us is something we all know intellectually, but often take for granted. A better understanding of where our food comes from literally translates to a better understanding of where we come from. Energy and matter flow through us like oxygen through a flame. We are in constant flux, no more able to exist in isolation than a cell in the body can. To draw attention to this reality, deep ecologists use the term “ecological self” to refer to an organism’s myriad ties of interdependence with life forms and systems outside of the narrow, egocentric self. Contemplating the ecological self helps us begin to dissolve the artificial and arbitrary separations we draw between what I call “me” and what I call “not me” for reasons of convenience and practicality. The deeper we look, however, the clearer it is that, physically speaking, “I” am a construct, a short hand description of a confluence of matter, energy, and process. Understood as such, my food is seen as part of the ecological self that has yet to pass through the process known as Chad Morse. Food is not something separate that the ecological self eats. Food is the ecological self.
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This all may sound a bit metaphysical, but it is quite practical and also quite useful in reinforcing life-sustaining attitudes and behaviors. My understanding of the world’s great spiritual traditions is that they each provide techniques and conceptual tools that enable us to better embody what we might call an inclusive “ecological consciousness” as opposed to a narrow, egocentric consciousness. A society that has attained a mature ecological consciousness practices an agriculture that emphasizes systemic health over short-term profit or yield, an agriculture that treats animals with deep compassion and a sense of gratitude, and an agriculture in which ends and means are inextricably linked. As Wendell Berry so eloquently expresses:
How we take our lives from this world, how we work, what work we do, how well we use the materials we use, and what we do with them after we have used them—all these are questions of the highest and gravest religious significance. In answering them, we practice, or do not practice, our religion.
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PROPONENTS OF LARGE-SCALE industrial agriculture argue that a hungry and expanding human population can only be fed by increased yields per acre and greater efficiency. A nearly identical argument is used to justify the development and use of genetically engineered (GE) crops.
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The principle problem, however, is not that we are lacking food. The problem is primarily one of waste and inequitable distribution. Starvation and malnutrition are a manifestation of severe global inequality, a yawning and increasing gap between rich and poor.
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Industrial agriculture in several ways serves to reinforce this gap, as farmers in developing countries become ever more dependent on fertilizers, pesticides, proprietary hybrid and GE seeds, and machinery produced by multinational corporations based in wealthy nations. Money, self-determination, and know-how are thus siphoned out of the hands of small farmers in poor countries. Furthermore, small farmers shifting from diversified subsistence agriculture to cash cropping are drawn increasingly into a money economy and lose the safety net of being able to grow or barter for their own food. They become one of the most vulnerable elements in a volatile and unpredictable global food economy. The staggering number of small farmers who have committed suicide in recent years (nearly twenty thousand annually in India alone) attests to the extreme stress exerted by an increasingly globalized, increasingly industrial agricultural system.
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Agriculture giants like Monsanto, Cargill, and Archer- Daniels-Midland are faring much better, of course. St. Louis based Monsanto, producer of Roundup pesticides and ninety percent of the world’s GE seeds, posted profits of four and a quarter billion dollars in 2007 and projects steep increases in revenue in coming years. Monsanto has made a practice of suing small farmers who are found to have Monsanto’s proprietary crops on their land, even when those crops arrived through truck spillage or cross-pollination. The company has been well protected by the United States Government, with former Monsanto executives such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, and former Secretary of Agriculture Anne Venneman holding or having held key posts. It is worrisome indeed that industrial agriculture seems to be more focused on corporate profits and consolidation of the control of food and seed sources than alleviating world hunger and the well being of small farmers.
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ANOTHER COMMON MYTH surrounding large-scale industrial agriculture is that it has freed much of humanity from the “drudgery” of farming. Farming is a very demanding profession, and clearly it is not everyone’s calling. Yet I do not know many small farmers who would describe their work as drudgery. Indeed, small independent farmers tend to be among the happiest, most fulfilled, and most civic-minded people I know. They generally find their work physically challenging, intellectually stimulating, and deeply connective and satisfying. Millions of former small, independent farmers throughout the developing world have been “freed from the drudgery” of farming by extreme environmental, technological, and economic pressures, and they are flooding into cities that are increasingly overwhelmed by their influx, or they are migrating far from their families to places like the Salinas Valley in California to work long, backbreaking hours for very low pay.
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There are many troubling consequences to this large-scale depopulation of rural agricultural lands. First, the countryside is drained of cultural vitality as well as of the people who most intimately understand how to cultivate the land sustainably. The remaining landholders are left to cultivate much more acreage, with increasing reliance on mechanization and use of chemicals in place of human labor and skill. The land is thus worked more distantly, more abstractly, and with less personal attachment and investment than it had been before. Huge bodies of place-specific human skills, techniques, knowledge, and low-impact technologies are lost in the historical blink of an eye. Nowhere is this more evident than Brazil, a country that has converted much of its farmland to industrial scale corn, sugarcane, and soybean production as its farmers stream into the cities’ impoverished favelas.
FARMING, BY DEFINITION, is a risky business, and its risks are only increasing as the climate destabilizes. A farmer can do everything right for the entirety of the growing season and still be devastated by a storm, freeze, drought, flood, or onset of pests. The factors beyond the control of the farmer are numerous and constantly looming. As we move towards a more just and sustainable agriculture system, one of our tasks will be to better distribute the risk of farming onto the community that benefits from the farmer’s efforts.
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Risk mitigation exists in many forms today. The United States Government, for example, provides subsidies and price floors for staple crops such as (conventionally grown) wheat, corn, soybeans, cotton, and barley. Farmers can purchase insurance policies to cover damage from hail, flooding, and other unforeseen natural factors in order to protect their investments. Most of these forms of risk mitigation, however, are unavailable, unaffordable, or ill-suited to small, sustainable farms. In fact, Federal farm subsidies are frequently criticized for the fact that they most benefit large landholders in developed countries and serve to undercut small farmers in developing nations. Thus the small independent farmer, who provides one of the most essential services to society, shoulders an enormous and inequitable amount of uncertainty and risk.
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An increasingly popular model in which communities help farmers distribute risk is the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) arrangement, in which members pay a set price up front for a share of the farm’s harvest delivered regularly. Members also join the CSA with the understanding that they will absorb some of the loss if the farm has a bad year. Such safeguards are essential to making small farms viable and resilient.
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IN MODERN INDUSTRIAL agriculture, each calorie of food grown uses approximately ten calories of fossil fuel energy through fertilizers, tractor and shipping fuel, etc. This is an astounding measure of the fragility and waste of the system, as well as its huge reliance on fossil fuels.
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It is predicted that sometime within the next decade or two, perhaps even within the next several years, the planet will reach “peak oil” production. After the peak, global oil production is predicted to begin a slow and steady decline even as energy demands continue to climb skyward. The result is almost certainly to be sharp and sustained increases in energy prices.
Peak oil will have a tremendous effect on agriculture and on food prices. The ten-to-one calorie ratio mentioned above is only possible so long as oil is inexpensive. When oil costs jump, so will the costs of fertilizer, pesticides, tractor fuel, cooling, shipping, and so forth. The oil spike in the summer of 2008, at which time oil prices rose to one hundred forty dollars per barrel, offers a glimpse of the challenges of peak oil. In the wake of the price spike, dozens of countries experienced widespread protests as staple foods like rice and corn became nearly unaffordable.
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For families and individuals already on the economic margins, the predicted cost increases that peak oil will likely bring could be devastating. The clear and sane strategy is a dramatic shift towards more localized, less chemical- and fuel-dependent agriculture. This shift is already occurring, manifested in the proliferation of farmers markets, CSAs, urban farms, and home gardens. To weather the changes that peak oil stands to bring and to ensure that the most vulnerable elements of society do not slip through the cracks, this shift will have to move into higher gear as soon as possible.
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Many lessons can be drawn from Cuba, which faced its own oil crisis in 1988 when the Soviet Union collapsed and the country lost seventy-five percent of its almost oil imports overnight. Cuban agriculture, which had become the most energy intensive in all of Latin America, had to redevelop and re-skill itself immediately. Gardens popped up in every empty lot in Havana, organic techniques were utilized throughout the country, and the number of farmers and growers significantly increased as human labor and skill was once again at a premium. Today, Havana produces nearly eighty percent of its food within the city limits, and most of that food is grown organically.
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More and more cities, like Havana, are waking up and responding to the dangers and opportunities of peak oil’s implications more quickly than national governments. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newson, for example, has outlined an ambitious plan to convert empty lots, median strips, and rooftops into community gardens and urban farms. Peak oil may prove to be one of the prompts we need to transform our agricultural systems for the better. But for that transformation to occur without a large amount of trauma requires that we take a proactive as opposed to a reactive approach.
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THE CRISIS WE face in modern agriculture, a system that is relentlessly and increasingly undermining its long-term viability, is but one manifestation of a society on much the same course. Across the planet, our species is nudging fisheries, forests, and rivers in the direction of collapse. We depend on these ecosystems for our survival, and thus ensuring our continuance requires us to take a deep look at why we are behaving in such a self-destructive manner. What are the assumptions and beliefs that have put us on this trajectory? Some might argue that we are by nature an incurably greedy and violent species, and that changing course is hopeless. I think this view overemphasizes our capacity for shortsighted and competitive foolishness and underemphasizes our largely untapped reservoirs of cooperative creativity and adaptability. Agriculture offers our children and us a wonderful entry point to cultivate these latter capacities and develop an understanding of how humans can be co-creators of healthy, life-sustaining systems.
In California, as across the country, school gardens are proliferating rapidly. This is one of the single most encouraging signs that future generations will have the opportunity to develop the ecological consciousness so essential to a sustainable society. The garden can be a profound teacher. It reminds us that our food comes from somewhere, that much time, labor, and care went into producing it, and that growing food is a cooperative venture between humans and other organisms. The garden teaches us about cycles, about life and death and their constant and necessary interplay. With skillful guidance, children can learn that growing food is honorable, essential, challenging, and fulfilling work deserving of our respect, gratitude, and participation.
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The rapid increase in young people interested in farming, school gardens, and suburban and urban agriculture is also heartening. The Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture at the University of California at Santa Cruz, for example, now receives four to five times as many applicants than the program can accommodate. Young farmers are finding creative ways to set down roots everywhere from traditional farmsteads, to university campuses, to the backyards of neighbors. This population understands the disastrous implications of industrial agriculture as well as the benefits to community, health, posterity, and the environment that sustainable agriculture yields so generously.
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Cheap oil and large-scale mechanization have literally uprooted our culture over the past one hundred and fifty years. Agriculture has long been one of our primary links to the land and to the non-human world. Suddenly, this link has been largely severed for ninety-eight percent of the U.S. population. As psychologist Bill Plotkin observes:
"As people grow more removed from personal contact with nature, awareness and appreciation of the environment declines. Ecological illiteracy breeds apathy about environmental fragility and, inevitably, leads to further degradation of habitat, the very habitat that human survival and imagination depends upon. People who know about their environment care about it. People who care, conserve."
Fortunately, millions of people the world over are recognizing just how much we lose by severing or obscuring this connection with the larger web of life and how much we stand to gain by reaffirming life-sustaining agriculture. Regaining a connection to and an appreciation of our food source is about much more than food quality, decreased reliance on oil, and the strengthening of our local communities. The agricultural crisis is a microcosm of the planetary crisis. If we understand the former and embrace the attitudinal shift necessary to move towards sustainability, we stand a much better chance of navigating the larger challenge.
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THE SHIFT TOWARDS local, sustainable agriculture brings with it the near-forgotten pleasures and anticipations of seasonal eating. Anyone who has had the good fortune to eat a perfectly ripe peach fresh off of the tree knows that there is nothing in life more sublime. The season’s first tomato off the vine is cause for celebration, and the winter squash that sustains us throughout the cold months offers hearty comfort. In wealthier areas of the world, we have become accustomed to being able to eat anything, any time, anywhere. Indeed, it is remarkable that a New Englander can buy tomatoes grown half a world away in the dead of winter. Yet, what was once an astonishing novelty has become so commonplace and convoluted that many people no longer know when, where, or how their food was grown.
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Eating more seasonally moves us from instant to delayed gratification. It teaches us about nature and her cycles: when she is dormant, when she is tender and exuberant, when she is robust, and when she is heavy with the coming year’s promise. Seasonal eating connects us to place, reminds us that cultivated species have all sorts of preferences and proclivities. Local, seasonal eating brings us back to regional cooking styles and traditions; a fine start to a cultural renaissance.
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FOR HUNDREDS OF thousands of years, the gathering, hunting, cultivating, and preparing of food was by far the dominant activity of our species. As such, food and agriculture occupied a central place in our stories, our songs, our technologies and innovations, our teaching and education, and our ideas about our place in the world. The Industrial Revolution has so rapidly and completely altered our relationship with food, as well as the land, species, and processes it derives from, that we seem suddenly adrift, dislocated from the very systems that we depend upon for life. This represents a profound disconnect from reality, and it is a disconnect that is threatening the very future of the living earth as we know it. Perhaps we can begin to reconnect through food, this most basic and universal tie between the planet and ourselves. Perhaps we can be reminded that we are part of the larger web of life, and that only in tending to the health of that web can we thrive and prosper as a species.
