Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Michael Nevin <mikepnevin@yahoo.ca>]

Hi - at the heart of agricultural revival will be a spiritual revival;

I bet one could look at history and find confirmation of the claim that good agriculture requires good culture and good headspace, i.e., spirituality.

 It is more than plant-productivity technique.

Altho there might be lots wrong with Europeon-style ag, is it not true that the Benedictines - surely a spiritual movement - were instrumental in improving agriculture; that agricultural improvements spread out from the network of Benedictine monasteries? I wish I knew more about this history.

Cheers, Mike in Toronto

TradingPostPaul <tradingpost@riseup.net> wrote:

> http://foodandfarming.bioneers.org/node/46
>
> Field of Plenty
> A Farmer’s Journey to the Frontiers of American Agriculture
> by Michael
>  Ableman
>
> The only thing small scale about Fairview Gardens is the acreage it
> occupies. On just twelve and a half acres, this organic farm produces over
> one hundred different fruits and vegetables, feeds over 500 families,
> employs more than 20 people, and hosts as many as 5,000 people per year for
> tours, classes, festivals, and apprenticeships. Michael Ableman farmed at
> Fairview Gardens from 1981 to 2001. Under his leadership the farm was saved
> from development and was preserved under one of the earliest and most
> unique active agricultural conservation easements of its type in the
> country.
>
> Michael Ableman:
>
> Close to 35 years ago I joined a commune in southern California that was
> based on agrarian principles. We had three different parcels of land
> totaling some 4,000 acres on which we raised row crops, orchards, operated
> a complete cow and goat dairy, and produced grain and fiber. Michael
> AblemanWe supplied our own
>  natural food stores, bakery, juice factory, and
> restaurant, as well as feeding ourselves. We even made our own clothing,
> backpacks and shoes. After only four months living in that community, I was
> given the responsibility of managing the 100 acre pear and apple orchard
> located in a high desert valley east of Ojai, California. At the time, this
> was just one of a handful of commercial orchards in the country that was
> farmed organically.
>
> And here I was, at the age of 18, with no orcharding experience, having
> never managed anything, directing a crew of 30 people, most of whom were
> older than I. The orchard had been abandoned for 15 years. The branches
> between the trees had become so intertwined that you couldn’t find the
> alleys down the middles of the rows. I had a 1930s copy of Modern Fruit
> Science, the journal from the guy who ran the place the year before and
> gave up in frustration, and a copy of Goethe’s famous quote
>  “Whatever
> you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic
> in it.” attached to the door of my 20-foot unheated trailer.
>
> Now, this could have ended up really bad, and under most similar
> situations, I probably would have ended up working in some high-rise office
> building. But there was something that took place down those rows of apple
> and pear trees, something very different than what is happening in most
> agricultural fields and orchards in North America. I went to work each day
> with 30 of my friends, and while we worked we joked, and we talked, and we
> discussed our dreams. We tried out our latest theories and philosophies on
> each other, speculated on the fate of the Earth, and ate our lunch together
> under the shade of the trees. In the winter, we pruned every day for four
> months straight. In the spring we thinned fruit. And in the fall it was a
> ten-week harvest marathon. It was repetitive work, but at
>  the end of each
> day, instead of feeling I had been chained to some mind numbing drudgery, I
> felt like I had attended an all day party.
>
> The work got done, the orchard thrived, and those apples and pears gained a
> reputation around the country. And while the cold nights and hot days of
> that high desert provided ideal growing conditions, I am sure that that
> fruit was equally infused with the energy of that group of people, and the
> pleasure they found in each other and in that land. Now this was my
> introduction to agriculture. This community experience has informed all of
> my agricultural endeavors since. It demonstrated that good food is more
> than just about the confluence of technique and fertile soil, that it is
> the result of men and women who love their land, and who bring great
> passion to working with it. That experience was my preview into the new
> agrarian movement that is now sweeping the country.
>
> It is a movement that I
>  believe embodies many of the most critical and
> crucial elements of a healthy society: reverence, mystery, humility,
> ecology in its wider sense, and community. For a long time I wanted to pick
> up the thread from where I worked on my first book, and visit and write
> about and photograph this movement. Tell the good story.
>
> We went to see folks who are happily married to a place, many of them
> master farmers and innovators, their farms incubators for the new
> agriculture. Folks who are demonstrating that farming is not just some
> lowly form of drudgery, but that it is an art and craft and an honorable
> profession. I’d like to very briefly introduce you to just a few of these
> folks. I’d like you to see their faces and to hear their story. And these
> images and narrative are excerpted from my new book, Fields of Plenty
>
> Richard Dewilde and his partner Linda farm a couple of hours outside of
> Madison, Wisconsin. Richard drives us around in
>  his Chevy pickup to check
> out some of the 39 fields of vegetables that are scattered around the
> valley. There is a case of 30-odd eight Springfield, silver-tipped rifle
> cartridges sitting next to the four wheel drive shift, a bag of tobacco and
> some rolling papers, and a single cipollini onion sitting on the seat. I
> don’t normally get all gaga about kale, but the field we’re looking at
> is as deep a green as anything I’ve ever seen. Not the kind of
> artificially pumped up rank green that comes from too much ammonium nitrate
> or urea. This one is deep, and blue, and forest like.
>
> The plants are vibrant and well formed, with huge turgid leaves, each plant
> standing up straight as if they’d been told to pose for my cameras.
> Richard tells me he gets snapshots in the mail of someone’s kid eating a
> piece of their squash, or corn, or a carrot. There is an enclosed note that
> says, “This is Johnny’s first meal.” 18 years later and
>  they’re
> providing the food for Johnny’s wedding. At the market his customers will
> introduce their kids to our farmer. There are these beaming kids standing
> there that have been raised on his food.
>
> Born in Idaho, raised in potato fields, Gene Theil comes from four
> generations of root people. Ask any chef or farmer’s market regular in
> Portland, Oregon where they get their potatoes, and they’ll tell you
> matter-of-factly, “From the potato man.” Theil farms at 4,600 feet in
> the mountains of eastern Oregon, taking advantage of a perfect convergence
> of ideal potato conditions, a blend of high elevation, deep glacial soils,
> clean and abundant fresh water and low humidity. “It’s rewarding to go
> to restaurants and markets and find people who really appreciate what
> you’re growing,” Gene reflects. It’s fundamental. We need that
> sustenance, that connection, that completion. When you produce a product
> and they see its value, it’s like
>  searing truth. They taste that truth.
> It’s the ultimate compliment.
>
> Everything at Strafford Dairy in Vermont is run on gravity. The milk moves
> downhill from the milking barn, to the cooling tanks, then on to the
> bottling and ice cream rooms without the use of a single pump. When the
> pasture was cleared, trees were left strategically so that as the shade
> moves across the pasture, so will the cows. At first I marvel at these
> simple innovations, then I realize it doesn’t exactly require a masters
> degree in industrial design to figure out that using gravity is a good idea
> or that trees provide shade and the cows will follow. It’s just that so
> much of agriculture has lost any relationship to common sense. We’ve got
> this idea that things need to be complicated to be any good—that simple
> solutions can’t possibly as good as technological ones.
>
> Earl Ransom runs the 30-cow Guernsey dairy herd, selling milk in glass
> bottles, just like
>  the milkman used to drop off at my house when I was
> growing up. The farm also produces premium ice cream made with the eggs
> from older brother Barry. “Of all the things I’d like to give my boys,
> I want them to be able to die as old men on this land,” Earl’s wife Amy
> tells me. “I also want them to be respectful. I want to make pickles. And
> I want to personally eliminate all the flies from this farm with my
> swatter.”
>
> Jennifer Green farms alone, producing 30 different grains with a team of
> horses. She does her own milling, and produces pancake mixes, and polentas,
> and breakfast cereals, which she provides to the 200 families in San
> Francisco who are members in her grain share program. We often agonize over
> the quality of our vegetables or fruit, wax eloquently over cheese or wine,
> but accept flowers, edible seeds and cereals that are rarely fresh and come
> from a limited diversity of plants. Jennifer’s 30 acre canvas is filled
> with
>  one-third to one-half acre plots of amaranth, barely, millet, teff,
> heirloom wheats, blue and yellow popcorns, garbanzos, lentils and fava
> beans, pumpkins, sunflower, and poppy seeds, all merging and mingling
> together.
>
> In the spring before our visit, the pear and apple trees on Bob and Eileen
> and Selena Lane’s place were loaded with fruit. Special attention was
> paid to the orchard to pest and disease control, to summer pruning, and to
> the very time consuming, expensive job of fruit thinning. By late July, the
> Lanes were preparing for the largest crop they had ever had, and doing as
> most of us would, quietly planning on what they would do with the much
> needed extra income. Tuesday, July 26th, was clear and sunny and hot. Work
> had wrapped up early and the small crew was hanging out talking near the
> house. There was a distant rumbling and a mellow thunderstorm began. Then
> the sky turned black, the temperature plummeted 30 degrees and
>  lighting
> came down in sheets. At 3:15 the hail came. Large hail. Hail up to a
> half-inch in diameter. Exactly thirteen minutes later the hail stopped, the
> sky cleared, the sun came out and the Lane’s fruit crop was destroyed.
>
> Eli Zabar is not a farmer, he is a successful baker and retailer with
> several stores in Manhattan that feature products from his own kitchens,
> bakeries, and now from over half an acre of their own rooftop gardens.
> These gardens aren’t just some passing novelty trial experience. Zabar
> invested in installing steel beam reinforcements for the rooftops above his
> bakeries, where pipes carry the spent heat from the ovens into the
> greenhouses. Winter tomatoes and salad greens are produced by two full-time
> rooftop farmers.
>
> Ask anyone in northern Wisconsin what to grow and they’ll likely tell you
> milk cows or corn. No one would ever suggest sheep, and if they did it most
> certainly would not be for milk or
>  cheese. So when Mary and David Falk
> launched their sheep dairy operation, their neighbors though they had lost
> their minds. This ain’t no high tech, heavily capitalized dairy
> operation. From the Orv’s pizza truck-turned cooler, to the homemade
> milking platform, everything has been patched and pieced and thrown
> together. The cheese is truly adventurous, wrapped in vodka soaked nettles,
> aged on cedar boughs. If you’ve been raised in white-bred America, eating
> individually wrapped, sliced Swiss and orange cheddar singles, you’ll
> probably think twice if you saw the Falk’s cheese. Brown and crusty, with
> ruts and holes, blue and white with brown streaks, covered in leaves, they
> look like some bad experiment gone awry. Mary’s own mother told her they
> looked like moldy horse turds. But their customers seek out their classic
> homely and ugly look, and the cheeses have won numerous national awards.
>
> Farmer John Thurman chuckles as he tells
>  me, “We’re sure not keeping up
> with the Jones,” nodding towards the three rusting 20 foot trailers that
> house him and his wife Ida and their 7 children. At night we gather outside
> to talk. I take out one of my harmonicas to entertain the kids and begin to
> blow a slow blues in the key of G. Ida rolls her eyes with pleasure when I
> play the final note. She tells me it reminds her of her roots in
> Mississippi, when the old timers used to sit around telling stories and
> playing music. Considering the poverty that exists here, I am amazed to
> discover how much of John and Ida’s time and energy goes into community
> projects. Teaching local youth how to grow food, providing fresh vegetables
> to seniors, organizing a black farmers cooperative. John describes the farm
> as “nothing special,” just a group of hard working people trying to
> make something beautiful. Each week, John and Ida and their kids trek into
> Chicago to sell collards, and sweet
>  potatoes, and beans, and melons, and
> pasture raised chicken to the all black Austin farmers market, in a
> neighborhood that does not have a single grocery store.
>
> Ken Dunn farms in the city of Chicago in the shadow of Cabrini Green, the
> 16-story, prison styled, wired covered housing project, built in the ‘50s
> to warehouse the city’s poor and unemployed. Dunn’s two one-acre plots
> boast 30 varieties of heirloom tomatoes striped German, brandywine, green
> zebra, black Russian—growing in the composted remains of rejected apple
> and cherry pie filling, and the uneaten arugula salads and filet mignons
> from local, high end restaurants. Five tons of compost made from
> Chicago’s waste has been laid down over this site—just a fraction of
> the 15,000 tons of urban waste that is disposed of in this city each and
> every day. The ground feels like a sponge, and if I close my eyes and plug
> my ears it would feel as if I was walking on the floor of some
>  virgin
> forest. The tomatoes don’t seem to mind the constant noise or bad air, or
> the poverty that surrounds their little island. The plants are tall, and
> robust, and absolutely loaded. Their world is rich in nutrients, reflected
> warmth and light from pavement and buildings, and the attentions given to
> them by local chefs who are thrilled to tell their clientele that the
> tomatoes on the menu were harvested down the street.
>
> Elario Álvarez slipped over the border into the U.S. 20 years ago to work
> in America’s fields. He had nothing. Now he owns his own farm and employs
> over 100 people. Álvarez’s pepper field is like an out of control block
> party. Eighty-five varieties, many of his own selections, are thrown
> together in an 8-acre burlesque of color and shape. There is humor in this
> field—a former migrant statesman on the ultra-linear, mono-cultural,
> totally predictable fields of America’s industrial agriculture. I tell
> Elario he
>  is crazy, that I’ve never seen anything like this before; that
> he should quit harvesting peppers and open the field up as a seasonal
> museum. I imagine docents giving tours, stopping along the rows to discuss
> the history and culture and use of certain varieties; the arrangement of
> color and shape; what the farmer was going through in his life when he
> planted this section or that; as if they are standing at the Metropolitan
> Museum of Art analyzing a Matisse or a Van Gogh.
>
> George and Anna Zebroff are Russian Doukhobor fruit farmers in British
> Columbia. As we are preparing to leave, George pulls me aside. “You have
> eaten our apricots fresh and dried. You drank our apricot nectar, and even
> tried the kernels, but there is one thing left.” There is a slightly
> mischievous tone in his voice as he guides me to the front of the house.
> There on the stump of a cherry tree, now used as a table, is a bucket of
> fresh, warm goat’s milk, a small
>  container of amber honey, a few spoons
> and glasses, and a tall glass bottle filled with a clear liquid. This, he
> tells me, is apricot elixir. There is ritual to all of this. In Russian, he
> asks his young grandson to demonstrate. With a spoonful of honey in one
> hand, and a glass of warm milk in another, the young boy alternates back
> and forth. Then comes the elixir. George mixes it with goats’ milk and we
> toast. It is a powerful drink, but it goes down easy. He pours another and
> we drink again. I protest when he offers me a shot without the milk.
>
> John Thurman, who you met in these slides, told me, “If you have farmed
> you can run the world.” I thought about that and about what it means to
> be a leader, and I realized how few leaders there really are. We’ve got
> plenty of managers and legislators, actors and dictators, and manipulators,
> but I’m talking about leaders. Folks that have compassion, respect for
> diversity, creative vision,
>  and understanding of our true place in nature.
> I wonder how it happened that lies, and deception, and obfuscation, greed
> and thievery and murder, could have become the dominant characteristics
> required for government office.
>
> So who are we going to be able to seek out to guide a society that has
> become so completely disconnected from the natural world, from the most
> fundamental necessities such as food and water? What will happen if there
> are more Katrina’s? What will happen when the oil runs out? I think John
> Thurman may be right. In a time when our primary connection tools are the
> computer and the cell phone, those who have maintained an intimate
> connection with the land, whose daily work is inextricably connected to
> biology and botany and animal husbandry—those who know how to restore and
> nurture soil, care for animals, coax food from the earth—may become very
> important to all of us.
>
> The hysteria over arugula or heirloom
>  tomatoes, the explosion of farmer’s
> markets, the desire to meet face to face each week with the person who grew
> your nourishment, goes deeper than the food. It may just be part of a
> desperate longing to have some connection to the real world. And I’ve
> watched chefs receive mythical rock and roll status. I think its time that
> farmers receive that same attention. So I strongly encourage each of you to
> make friends with a farmer. You’re going to need them. For I am certain,
> as the current global industrial experiment—and that it is—comes apart,
> our society will once again have agriculture at its center.
>
> This past spring I took my three-year-old son Benjamin out to a friend’s
> cabin located on the west coast of Vancouver Island. We left the farm and
> hopped on the ferry in good spirits, the guys out for a little three-day
> adventure. What I didn’t realize was that to get there required driving
> through a huge, relatively fresh, clear cut.
>  Now, I’ve seen a lot of
> ecological devastation, but there is nothing quite so exemplary of
> human’s most destructive ways as a rich, diverse, life giving, oxygen
> producing forest, reduced to vast fields of stumps, brush, and eroding
> soil. The emotional impact of being in the middle of such a thing for an
> extended period of time is overwhelming. And little Benjamin was glued to
> the scene, looking out the windows of the truck with the most heartbreaking
> look of horror and dismay. I felt like I had just unknowingly taken my
> young son to see a really violent film. And when it came time to drive home
> after our little retreat, he cried, he pleaded with me, not to drive back
> the same way we had come. Now “why” is a word that you hear a lot with
> a three-year-old, but there was a new persistence to Benjamin’s “why”
> after our experience that day, and my responses could not satisfy. I find
> myself asking “why” a lot these days as well, but I
>  cannot find answers
> when my questions stray too far beyond my own land and the community in
> which I live. “Why” is a word we should all be asking of ourselves and
> of those who claim to be our leaders.
>
> What if after the events of 9-11, America had asked “why” instead of
> “who?” What if we could ask “why” in regards to the recent
> hurricane? As we bear witness to the disappearance of nature and the
> disconnection of the society from it, we also see an increase in confusion,
> and extreme lack of compassion and understanding for how to take care of
> each other and for our world, a loss of understanding in regards to cause
> and effect. It takes a real conscious effort to rise above the propaganda
> and the lies, the litany of misdirected questions. Step out of the
> confusion, and be like little Benjamin. Come back into our beginner’s
> mind, to our sense of childlike wonder, and start asking “why” as
> honestly, freshly and as persistently as a
>  three-year-old.
>
> I believe that to deal with the great unraveling that is taking place
> around us, we’ve got to come back home, immerse ourselves in that which
> goes on in our own back yards, and in our own communities, and on the land
> that we farm. We can feel paralyzed by the broader world scene, but we have
>
> === message truncated ===

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