permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>]

"Chuck Walters - An Organic Hero"
http://organictobe.org/index.php/category/gene-logsdon-blog/

An Organic Hero

From Gene Logsdon:

Chuck Walters is almost blind but, using electronic equipment that
can render printed words into sound, he continues to keep a lively
presence in his magazine, Acres USA: The Voice of Eco-Agriculture and
to turn out book after book on farming and economics that make
mincemeat out of the political and economic powers that he believes
are reducing farmers to mere slaves operating food factories which
are not sustainable. That's why he is surely one of the most revered
and most vilified leaders in the world of agriculture. I think he is
a genius. Mega-agribusiness thinks he is a crackpot.

Mr. Walters grew up, literally, in the dust bowls of the 1930s. He
remembers his mother putting wet sheets over the doors and windows of
their home to keep out the dust and watching the sheets turn to
panels of mud. He remembers children dying, literally asphyxiated
with dust. He remembers "cows that died with balls of mud as big as
softballs in their guts." So when he writes about the ruination of
the land by bad farming, he speaks from his own gritty experience. He
served in both WW II and the Korean War, so when he talks about the
stupidity of war, he talks from his own grim observations, He has an
advanced degree in economics, so when he discourses on the dangers
inherent in current banking policies and the in mega-consolidation of
businesses and farming, he speaks from a position of authority. He
was the journalist-publicity director for the National Farmers
Organization (NFO) when it began, baring the scandals and injustices
that made farmers fighting mad, so when he writes about the insidious
manipulations of the oligarchies of power to turn farmers into "hog
pen janitors" he knows the territory.

He is the author of several books on the organic principles of
farming as laid down by scientists like William Albrecht and others,
so when he sounds the alarm against the misuse of chemicals and
technology in food production, he's not just clacking his teeth. And
he has been the first among many to protest the way big agribusiness
is attempting to manipulate organic certification standards for its
own ends, thereby rendering the definition of organic meaningless, so
he demonstrates, always, that no one owns him except his personal
devotion to what he perceives as the truth.

When I first started reading Mr. Walters, he seemed so fiery and
fierce in his condemnation of the dangers he recognized in farming
and indeed, in almost all areas of human behavior, that even I was a
little afraid to get too close to him, if you can believe that. He
was supporting farming practices and theories repudiated by
mainstream university science. He was writing for the NFO while I was
writing for Farm Journal, Inc., hardly a friend of NFO and definitely
not a friend of the kind of seemingly strange farming ideas that Mr.
Walters championed. But like all "far out" prophets who do their
homework, he kept sounding a little more sane with each passing year,
and finally I had to look him up and get acquainted. I found him calm
and likable in person (unlike his combativeness in writing) and so
widely knowledgeable that it was impossible not to respect him. He
could quote about every famous person in history from Plato to "Bush
43" as he referred, not at all approvingly, to the current President.

Recently I caught up with him again, interviewing him and reviewing
his writings for my latest book, The Mother of All Arts. He was still
going strong, bubbling over with enthusiasm for his new book in
progress, a novel which is "sort of autobiographical", as he puts it.
His "wild" organic and agronomic theories are no longer ridiculed and
his economic predictions, in light of the current banking debacle,
are eerily right on target. Although Chuck Walters will be known
mainly for his untiring pursuit of sustainable advances in food
production, he is also a most potent social critic - he knows that we
can develop a sustainable farming system, but if economic and war
policies from on high work against such a system, success is hardly
possible.

Anyone who has been reading Walters for the last thirty years is not
a bit surprised at the current chaos in our financial institutions
because of the sub-prime crisis and hedge fund mania. He has
predicted it all, and has spelled out the reasons why it is
happening. The clever attempt in the last fifty years to transfer the
basis of wealth from real goods like food and fiber and natural
resources and real work to paper money and make-believe paper work
can lead only to catastrophe. As he sums up in his latest newsletter
in Acres in October, 2007: "If this letter is strong tonic, so be it
- just remember the brew was fermented in the day that public policy
decided to empty the countryside [of farmers] and substitute debt for
earnings so that now America can't even feed itself."

I think nearly everyone in the field of organic food has been reading
Mr. Walters, but if you haven't, and especially if you are not into
organic food production, check him out. And for those who have
learned to be cautious of the printed word, this is not a paid or
unpaid ad. I have no business connection whatsoever with Mr. Walters,
nor does he even know I am writing this.
~~

Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in
Wyandot County, Ohio.

Current Books:
All Flesh Is Grass: Pleasures & Promises of Pasture Farming
The Lords of Folly (novel)
The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture
of the Land)