hands on

We have a long field road which cuts the cropping acres into two long rectangles, which are then divided into three parts each.  This time of year a farmer can get considerable recreation just walking that road in the morning, looking at the crops and hay at different stages of development and appreciating the beauty.  It is during these walks that I get to be fully aware of how important beauty is, that in farming, it is a standard by which we can help wisdom sort through which technologies to use or not and when to refrain from doing whatever we have the capability to do.  I call it farming on foot and I have spent the last half of my working life trying to teach it to my kids and grandchildren.  I claim to be able to feel my farm through my feet, in the same way I am beginning to sense the rightness of the ingredients and their proportions with my hands when I go to knead the weekly loaves of bread.

I go along with Wendell Berry's character, a blind bachelor farmer a little too fond of the drink who claimed to know his farm very well.  To paraphrase;  "I have measured the whole thing hereabouts," he said, "in man-lengths".

Meanwhile, the next generation, here as everywhere else is "techie"  While I had my spiritual experience walking up the field road scanning the hay in windrows, the corn in rows and the rye looking for all the world like a green Lake Superior being played with under a blue sky by the northwest wind scudding across the grass in waves, one of the younger ones was busy zipping around on a four wheeler geo mapping all the field boundaries, the pasture paddocks and each tile intake.  To do the tile intakes, he needed to stop on it and then tell the satellite to remember it.

The maps will be handy.  They are certainly easily made these days.  I understand the satellite can be made to map soil types and weed infestations, among other things.  This is useful.  But if it becomes exclusive, if it gets to the point where we are not using the tool to help with the farming, but have stepped aside so that the tool can do the farming, then we will no longer mourn the passing of a farming culture.  If the indications all around about what unrestrained technology does to human culture are to be taken seriously, we will no longer even remember there was such a thing as farming culture.  A great chance for humans to survive and thrive on earth will disappear down the memory hole. 

I will content myself with reminding the younger ones here that a technology that can pin point a tile intake can also be used to locate you when your government or another one decides you need to be eliminated. 

Jim