land

 "Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do.  They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides.  But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it." Aldo Leopold

thistles

 I have long thought that patches of Canada thistle are there because the soil, probably compacted, needs their tap roots.  Now I hear Klaas Martins say that there seems to be a built-in control in the process.  Evidently the symbiosis between root and soil life requires that the tap root growth be in anaerobic conditions.  So that is why after persisting and thickening several seasons, the thistle patch fades and disappears.  Those roots have worked themselves out of a job as they made the compacted layers of the soil more permeable and thus more aerobic.

It is easier to observe this in a pasture than under crop conditions with the continuous tillage and/or chemical interventions.

Southernization

 It is becoming harder to ignore the evidence that the Midwest, the nation's farm belt, is becoming more southern in its economy and assumptions about its population.  Like the plantation south before the Civil War, the usable assets are concentrating in ever fewer hands.  If the current farm size here in Chippewa county, reaching toward three thousand acres per farming operation does not give sufficient evidence, what about the collectivization of livestock agriculture into huge concentrated confinement operations; five thousand sows in one building, ten thousand milking cows per site on a half dozen sites within a few miles of this farm?

We are busy wringing the "expense" out of farming, or as the late Paul Gruchow, interpreter of his own rural upbringing, once pointed out in plain language, we are taking the human trash out of agriculture.  Like the south with its slave labor, we have supplied ourselves with underpaid and too often terrorized brown skinned folks to do the hard work milking the cows, caring for the hogs, slaughtering the animals that we once took some pride in doing ourselves.  And like the slave economy of the south, we have generated massive inequality in our midst and begun to welcome in the class sorting this inequality permits and encourages. Also like the south we have permitted and encouraged the development of a class of people we think of as "white trash", folks who for one reason or another have not been able to move toward opportunity and who see no great reason for hope here. 

It is difficult for me to believe that the countryside I left for the University of Minnesota in 1966 has anything at all in common with what I see around me now. It feels as if this change over just one human lifetime, is a story not told and not heard, and for all of its killing of dreams and unrequited desire for stability and community is but one small generator of the huge anger and resentment that has taken our political life by storm.

Berry

 I pulled Wendell Berry's "The Hidden Wound" off the shelf for another read.  Published in 1989 before Berry became our American prophet of healing, it is his meditation upon his own role, as a rural white person in the border south, in racism.  The phrase, "the hidden wound" refers to the wound we whites have given ourselves in the course of our centuries long treatment and mistreatment of the negroes in our midst.  It is, he argues, a mirror image of the wound we have inflicted upon them.

I have been bothered, as an upper midwestern farm kid and now an aging Minnesota farmer over how this applies to me.  While negroes have been scarce in my experience, I grew to adulthood among Mexicans and Americans descended from Mexicans laboring in the sugar beet fields.  Right now, down the road in the nearby dairy factories, brown skinned people milk the cows we milked formerly.  Little is heard about the harsh impact upon rural communities, mostly white, of this collectivization of agriculture.  Nothing at all is said about the effect on the people working there thousands of miles away from home.

The working of slave or underpaid and abused labor helps us separate ourselves from the strict expectations and difficult life of actually working the land, and in so doing hinders our understanding of it, putting beyond reach our availing ourselves of its blessings.  This is the wound.

Berry wants to understand his wound as completely as he can in the hopes that understanding as much as possible of it may help it to heal.  

There is another wound.  This has to do with ownership of the land.  Native wisdom tells us we cannot ever own land.  We have yet to take that in and meditate upon its meaning in our lives and for our future. 

Maintenance

 While the crops farmers surrounding us are working long hours for a few days to get harvest done our work with crops and livestock is pretty much unremitting.  October is the time when the demands of harvest add to the necessity of getting winter feed lined up, buildings and livestock equipment repaired and things generally buttoned up so that we can get our work done this winter.

What this shows is a general human tendency that when there is more work than time to do it, routine maintenance gets left.  We prove to ourselves every year that someone to fix, repair and build is an important asset on this farm, because every October we see too much of the planned repair and renovation undone. This will make our winter tasks harder and less satisfying to do.

Farm income must cover the support of the farm's staff.  

natural wisdom

"I turned them ahead as usual toward the end of the day", said the farmer/field day host.  "They walked ahead, took a mouthful of the new grass and turned around to beller their complaints at me."

Then he told us that when he checked them the next morning they were all peacefully and happily grazing.  He went on to say he thought that the violent weather including hail and wind predicted for the night before had caused the plants to draw the sugars and liquid carbon, the good stuff, down into the roots where it would be protected, and that the sugars and nutrients had arisen to the foliage in the morning.

What are we to do about this kind of information, we who consider ourselves rational?  Do plants know to protect themselves?  Or more accurately, do they protect the nutrition for the animals that graze them?  Rationality has coached us to think of plants and animals as similar to, but maybe a small step better than machines.  Does this really describe the world?

I have seen cows with their noses pointed straight into the air so that another cow might groom their throats with that rough tongue in long strokes, bottom to top.  And horses standing in pairs, scratching each other's rumps with their teeth.  This doesn't bear much evidence of the old "nature red in tooth and claw" individualist thinking.

Just before the Covid locked us up, I was listening to a soil scientist presenting his findings about a long studied apple orchard planted on a south facing slope.  The bottom of the slope was a wet area and the top somewhat more droughty.  The scientist explained how he had devised a series of experiments and observations to prove or disprove his casual observation that the trees in the orchard were providing for each other through general association with the web of soil life where they stood and with which they were intimately involved.  He thought he saw strong indication that the trees on the bottom of the slope were sharing the water where they stood with their mates on the drier upslope through the web of life in the soil. 

 Again, do we credit this?  This fellow was not some crazy hermit, but a University trained scientist. For myself, I plan to keep these things in mind as I explore.  And while I am little qualified to pass judgement on the reality of this, I do find myself wondering about a situation in which an apple tree may send water uphill to help a thirsty compatriot but a modern nation such as ours cannot pass a law that provides health care for all and some basic help for families.  What really can we and should we learn from the plants and animals we so casually manipulate?

fear

     I have been grazing several dozen cow/calf pairs at some distance from the home farm this year.  I spent last year taking up miles of old rusted barbed wire and the steel posts it was hanging on so that a good perimeter fence could be built.  I began to notice hammering in the distance occasionally which reminded me of my youth on this farm.  But I soon worked out that what I was hearing now was shooting at the nearby gun range.

    What I hear now when I am with the cows is gunfire.  Someone thinks it worthwhile to spend money on the gun(s) and ammo and then endless hours shooting away at a target placed in front of a sand hill.  Why? Fear is the simplest and I think most accurate explanation.

    In contrast the hammering I heard in my youth a half century ago really was hammering.  It was also industry.  Someone was fixing buildings or fence or building new.  

    It is important, I think, to point out that "industry" in description of those sounds at that time bears little resemblance to what we have learned to think of as "industry" today.  Those people were not industrious little worker bees busy doing something or other to create the profit margin for some corporation.  Instead those were people, usually families, creating the means and the likelihood of their own survival, and they hoped, prosperity at their own homes and farms.

    That official and academic agriculture decided soon after WWII that those lives were worthless, that money could devise ways to do it better and cheaper and that those people were better used and more useful if driven off their property and on to an assembly line is one of the true tragedies of our history.  It takes its place with the theft of land from the natives and the enslavement of Africans as major moves to take possession of the earth and its wealth by the very few.  And these things created the dangerous and despairing and hopeless environment in which we survive today.

    We are a long time gone in the wrong direction.