contact

 We have lost contact with the soil and that is the fundamental reason for our deteriorating world.  We started a few centuries ago with digging sticks.  Simple tools, the hoe and shovel and spade were devised from this start.

At some point we figured out how to use animal power.  The first "plow" behind an ox was essentially a large digging stick. Then iron was formed into plowshares and other cultivating tools which were drawn behind teams of animals, the farmer walking behind or in front of the creatures.  Gradually seeders and cultivators and hay mowers were devised, all drawn behind teams of animals and former human tasks began to be mechanized.  

Eventually someone put seats on many of these machines and farmers no longer walked as much.  The bond between soil and the human foot was stretched.  

Early tractors began to replace the animal teams.  Instead of feeling the soil underfoot the farmer felt mechanical vibrations up his spine as he rode the machine.  Additionally the noise of the machines separated him from hearing the wild things that had always surrounded him.  And the machines were now fed from the petroleum industry and not the farm.

From here for a while the machines changed by getting bigger and more powerful.  And now we have guidance systems.  Tillage marks in the fields are now in straighter lines than any human eye and hand on the steering wheel can accomplish.  

The next step, already underway, is to take the farmer out of the picture entirely, to make him obsolete.

And there are several principles here that we should study.  One is that the move in agriculture toward mechanization is in essence a move from the female toward the male. Women operated the digging sticks.  Few women have yet figured out how to make themselves obsolete.

Another is that the art has gone out of farming while the science of plants and animals has concentrated in the laboratories, which devise solutions that are administered through the corporate structure that rules us.