Creation

The only thing louder than destruction is creation.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...and God said "Let there be light"...then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds...Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness"... The God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground -- everything that has the breath of life in it -- I give every green plant for food." And it was so. God saw all that he made, and it was very good..." Genesis 1 (selected verses).

The Lost Knowledge of "development"

I have been reading some of Wendell Berry's essays in "The Gift of Good Land." Berry inspired me to learn how to farm after I read "The Memory of Old Jack." I appreciate his critique on culture as it relates to agriculture. In one essay called "Three Ways of Farming in the Southwest" he describes the Papago culture of the Arizona desert:

"In response to their meager land, the Papago developed a culture that was one of the grand human achievements. It was intricately respectful of the means of life, surpassingly careful of all the possibilities of survival. Their ideal was 'survival, not triumph' -- so Charles Bowden writes of them in Killing the Hidden Waters. The Papago communities were at once austere and generous; giving and sharing were necessarily their first principles. The people needed each other too much to risk individualism and dissent. For, as Bowden says, 'The man who hoarded, who saved, who said he and his blood would make it on their own...such a man led his kin to extinction. In the Sonoran desert a man could get and edge, but never savor control. Power came from toil and could only  be stored in other human beings."

"The result was paradoxical: in these almost impossible circumstances, the Papago acieved what Bowden accurately cals a "society of abundance." THe poverty of our "affluent society" never existed among them. The old-time Papago lived close to the Christian morality that we profess, and far indeed from the morality that we practice. We could do worse than put ourselves to school them. "Having little," Boxedn says, "they shared all." And they lived in harmony with their place: they "lived the net yield of the desert's hydrologic budget."

"Contact with white people brought many changes, of which the most radical may have been wells drilled into the aquifers that underlay the desert. But this was a part of a government program that also included livestock production and education. Bowden notes the irony in this effort, which proposed to bring self-sufficiency to a people already marvelously self-sufficient. The opposite happened" 'Education devided the tribe between those who had seen the tractor and those who had not. Stimulation of the cattle industry resulted in the ruin of the rangelands. The wells...cut the ground from underneath the ancient mutual dependence and sharing. A half century after the commissioners' optimistic forecast, the Papago are not respected by their white neighbors and are not self-supporting. They now have a groundwater problem, an overgrazing problem, and an economic problem. The society of abundance is gone."

-Berry (1979)

For  me this loss of a culture mirrors what our culture has become today. We do not know how to support ourselves other than with money and we do not know how to use the land. 

The current face of agriculture

As a "city girl" many of the images that I saw of the country growing up were the rows of corn as I was driving on the interstate. Actually living in the country has allowed me to see what the country actually is today.  It has come a long way since "Little House on the Prairie" and not all of it is as magnificent as it may seem. As a group of interns we discuss these issues often. 

The drive into Alexandria offers just a small glimpse of what agriculture is. The following pictures are taken from my drives in and out of Alex. One Sunday I drove to Brainerd to visit family and took mainly the smaller county roads, and this was where I actually saw the face of agriculture. No longer are farms the small family farms, but they are large farms that grow mainly one or two different crops. Often times as interns we discuss what this has done to society and to our food (I'm interested in the society part, many of the other interns are concerned about the environment). One thing that sticks in my mind is the government policies that play a large role in the current system. They say that if a farmer grows a certain amount of a certain crop they will  receive a subsidy. So the farms continue to grow. Then, the farmer stops seeing his crop as food and it he/she perceives it as merely a product to be sold, and therefore the use of pesticides and chemicals do no worry the farmer. Some of the farmers in the area have gardens in their front yards, but they are  very small. They would never spray chemicals on these vegetables because they don't want to eat the stuff. They also become much more dependent on a grocery store, which is a really silly idea." Why would you buy your food from a store when you can produce a lot of it in the land that you own?" 

There are two things on the drive to Alexandria that are so juxtaposed and show the current system. The first is an abandoned small farm house, barn etc. that I like to imagine was a lively flourishing farm many years ago. 

The other is a large farm with two silohs and a grain machine that I can't recall the name of right now. They obviously have a lot of land and grow a lot of food. (Sorry that the picture is hard to see, I took it while driving)

This is not a one time site, I see properties like these all the time. And maybe the barn is falling apart and they are no longer farming, but the family is still living in a small house on the land. What's sad is that these small farms (and even large ones) are continuing to die. The younger generations are not interested in working in the kinds of job that the work is hard and the rewards are little. Not only is the pay low but you are not producing much to be proud of. Not only are the generations dying, but so is the knowledge that came with it.