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.