From the Farm to the Table

What All Americans Need to Know about Agriculture

Gary Holthaus

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813146669
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Agricoltura sostenibile

A portrait of the realities of agricultural life in today's world, based on interviews with more than forty farm families. In this book, dozens of farm families from America's heartland detail the practices and values that relate to their land, work, and communities. Their stories reveal that those who make their living in agriculture—despite stereotypes of provincialism perpetuated by the media—are savvy to the influence of world politics on local issues. Gary Holthaus demonstrates how outside economic, governmental, legal, and business developments play an increasingly influential, if not controlling, role in every farmer's life. The swift approval of genetically modified crops by the federal government, the formation of huge agricultural conglomerates, and the devastating environmental effects of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are just a few issues buffeting family farms. From the Farm to the Table explores farmers' experiences to offer a deeper understanding of how we can create sustainable and vibrant land-based communities by adhering to fundamental agrarian values. "Tells the story of modern agriculture through engaging interviews with men and women who make a living farming in southeastern Minnesota. In a tone reminiscent of Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth, he examines the far-reaching effects of genetically modified organisms, free-trade agreements that nurture 'transnational corporate profit, ' dependence on fossil fuel-derived chemicals, and the toll all this has taken on the land and farmers." — Library Journal

Part I

In the Beginning

CHAPTER 1

Fundamentals

It seems right to begin with the oldest elements. From the beginning, the Sumerians were right, the ancient Greeks were right, the American Indians were right, the Chinese were right: in the beginning, there were earth, air, fire, and water. We may all know these, but some in our cities and urban bureaucracies—and even some farmers—may have forgotten them. It is no disservice to either language or thought to speak of soil as earth, and light as fire, for soil provides the earth a skin of healthy nourishment that enables life, and light takes its origin in distant fire, is but fire spent by distance. For farmers, soil, air, sunlight, and water are perhaps the more pertinent names for the ancient elements, for any farmer knows profoundly that everything depends on them.

Lao Tzu thought water offered a good model for human behavior because “it does not contend,” as one translator ends chapter 8 of Tao Te Ching. “The best way to live / is to be like water / For water benefits all things / and goes against none of them,” Jonathon Star begins his translation of that chapter. “No fight, no blame,” concludes another, by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English.¹ I love that chapter, especially its central description of a way to live, and have turned to it often over the years, grasping, as always, for straws that may help me create a life worth living. Farming is clearly a life worth living, but most farmers I know are on a constant quest to find “the way” to live it. Nevertheless, Minnesotans—and practically all others—know that Lao Tzu was wrong. Water does contend. It contends with earth as spring’s snow melt floods our rivers and summer rains move tons of topsoil off our fields. Water not only contends but often wins, rearranging earth with a power that increases geometrically as its volume increases arithmetically, moving all but the most basic geologic forms before it in that eternal war that Heraclitus said was the beginning of everything. In northern climes, even those rocks we think eternal surrender to water, which seeps into cracks, freezes, and breaks them apart with its sheer expansive power. Water and soil are in balance when we are fortunate and do not abuse either, in contention when we are careless or uncaring, stripping the cover off soil, exposing it to the power of rain’s erosion.

As contentious as water has been and increasingly will become, “there is a lot of nonsense about water being our most important resource,” says law professor Charles Wilkinson, who specializes in western water issues and American Indians’ water rights. He convinced me with one question: “Which would you rather be without for the next half hour, water or air?” How we love air. To fill one’s lungs with air after exertion, to come up from under water not sure if our lungs will burst before we reach the surface, to inhale deeply after an asthma attack: such experiences remind us of the sacredness of air. Without air there can be no water, and fire suffocates and dies. Air is the great respirator, for fire and for plants and animals and soil. When air combines with bacteria that cling to the roots of plants in healthy soil, nitrogen is formed, and all life becomes possible. So air is another of the great elements essential to life, and it too has its own power. Air in motion can wear down rock, pick up earth enough to hide the sun, carry strontium 90 to warp the genes of our children, or bear the pollen dust from genetically modified crops to corrupt our vegetation. And when it really kicks off its shoes and starts to dance, it can knock houses off their foundations, throw cows over phone lines, and level towns. But do without air? Not a chance.

Divine fire, nurtured by air, was wrested from the light of the gods by Prometheus, according to one useful early story. Prometheus pays dearly for that service to us, spending eternity chained to a rock while birds pluck out his liver every day, only to have it grow back every night, repeating the agony over and over. Imagine those birds clawing right now, as you read this. Think of the pained body, chained to rock, knitting through the long night, trying to heal itself before the next day’s tearing of flesh. The interpretations of the Prometheus story I have read stress his arrogance and his desire to usurp the power of the gods. But the story also makes clear that the theft of natural resources, our modus operandi today, is not to be taken lightly. We will pay for our thoughtless exploitation. Call it fire or light, sun’s gift to us, via Prometheus, is the bringer of warmth, creator and transformer of everything green. Without fire, nothing works, and we are chilled to the bone. Better believe it. Norman, an Eskimo friend, once tried to walk from Nome to Teller at minus forty degrees and the wind blowing. He strayed from the trail and disappeared into a long, fireless night, till his body was eventually found. Too much fire and we crisp; only a shadow remains, burned into a wall in Hiroshima. Too little and we freeze. Fire to see by, fire to contemplate and learn from; who can resist looking into its bright leaping and tossing? Fire in the belly to ignite the heart and balance the light of the mind. The power inherent in fire strikes fear, or awe, into us, yet there is the renewal of fire: “From the ashes, a fire shall be kindled; A light from the shadows shall spring,” says J. R. R. Tolkien, sounding cadences akin to the prophet Isaiah’s.² Destroyer and builder, fire cleanses the earth in a flash, provides heat needed to germinate seeds, clears away leaves and branches that block the sun, and frees the earth to flourish again, its ash recreating and renourishing soil.

Soil. Dirt. The earth, from which we come and to which we return. Source of all we raise, and of myriad healing plants we neither sow nor tend, many of which we do not yet know. Soil is the other essential, always primary; seed is always secondary—purebred, hybrid, or mongrel GMO—no soil, no crop. Healthy soil is one element that is but a combination of all the others: water, air, and fire; plants, animals, minerals, and that warm light from the sun that speeds decomposition. Soil’s power, too, has a name; call it germination. Immanent in healthy soil lies the source, perhaps, of all creativity, a source of food for all: microorganisms—one farmer I know insists we use their “scientific” name, “critters”—and all the myriad species of vegetation, and all the creatures that depend on plants for food or a home. All species have this dependence in common. Both praying mantis and human live within plants, the mantis poised on its green stem, sheltered and shadowed by the leaves and branches above, just as we live within the trees and grass that frame our homes and thatch our roofs. Each has its uses in this great, laughing, complex, lively scheme of existence. The soil that supports us all, soon or late, consumes us all, and we are all one in it. Like rain, soil cares not if we are just. Ultimately, it dissolves us all, and absolves us as well. Soil, when healthy, is the ultimate giver, giving its all to generating and nourishing all. I mean no disrespect when I suggest that soil, Lao Tzu, not water, should be our model.

And the interdependence of these four ancient elements—not one can exist without the others—offers a clue to our own interdependence, regardless of culture or language, religion or color, and to our absolute dependence on the earth’s own elements, however many there may be. Whatever we need to know to survive and flourish we may learn from the earth itself and all its interdependent species, including humans. Indigenous peoples have understood those relationships for thousands of years. Some of us are unwilling to acknowledge the connections yet. The day after Prometheus stole fire, he tried to hide it from the searching gods. In the process, he smothered it, and it went out. He stole it again next day, separated it into several fires, and ran his first scientific experiment. He allowed it air ever after. . . . No, you’re right, that’s not in the story, but since we humans often seem to learn best the hard way, my story is just as likely to have been the case as the older one.

Nothing much has really changed, even after nine thousand years of applying the scientific method in agricultural experiments. Yes, we’ve added a few elements to the periodic table, but the old rules still apply: we must end our war against the elements, our best knowledge still insists, and generate balance and harmony—the great ritual linchpins, from the teachings of old Confucius to those of modern Navajos—or we die. Our choice. Work with life’s fundamentals: nourish the soil, maintain the water, protect the air, and either block the sun or open oneself to it, as appropriate. That’s all that is required of us, but these are not elements to mess with, and we dare not shirk our responsibility to them. Ask Prometheus. Ask anyone whose aircraft, for whatever reason, has lost its lift. Ask my friend Norman. Ask Napoleon and Hitler and their invading armies. Ask any farmer who plants too early, or too late, or who watches the rain wash his topsoil into the creek, to be swept into the great river, and sometimes into the water supply. Soil, water, air, and light. These are still the things without which neither agriculture nor a society of any kind can begin or continue. Talk about self-interest! Our care for them is the outward and visible sign of our care for ourselves, and one indicator that we have a future on this planet.

Yet agriculture is innately destructive, an earth-depleting activity. Whatever plants we raise, for food or beauty or healing, take chemicals out of the soil in that great reciprocal exchange that marks every natural process, whether cosmic, atmospheric, geologic, or human. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow, Tolkien might have said. We have understood for millennia that we have to put back into the soil what we take out. But if we do not exercise care, our replacing of those chemicals pollutes our streams. And now we are discovering that, without great care, our confinement of large numbers of animals exchanges life-giving air for toxic methane. There go soil, water, and air—three strikes and we’re out.

However our agriculture works, when it works, chances are good that it works because people thought very carefully about what they wanted to accomplish and tried a variety of things before they hit on practices that brought the desired ends. What farmers know is that whatever practice works now may not work next season, because the frost will come late or the rains early, and heavier than expected, or not at all. The most carefully considered plan will have to be revised. And they all also seem to know that just the fact that it works on this place is no sign it will work on yours, or on that other one a drainage over—you know, that 360 down on the county line.

While I may have made working with the basics sound simple, there is nothing simple about it. In the nature of this cosmos lies a conundrum: everything is related, so what appears simple inevitably has a context that makes it incredibly complex. Every connection, benign or malignant, metastasizes: earth’s soil related to sun’s light; sun’s light related to bacteria; bacteria and light related to nitrogen; nitrogen related to plants; plants related to the respiration of everything living, permitting and sustaining our human lives. The cosmic and the most microorganic are thus related: the long-lived light of stars related to the brief life of the tiniest bacteria, some so far underground they never see the light, yet they absorb its presence. There is no escape, and there are no exemptions from this system. When the system goes down, we all go down, from the very top of the food chain to the very bottom. If we do not nourish the smallest creatures, we dismantle the mantle of earth, knock the props right out from under ourselves. Perhaps that is why Tlingit Indian elder Austin Hammond says, “You have to remember that Ground Squirrel is Grandfather to Bear.”And our human lives are all related, not only to those fundamental elements of nature that tend toward balance but to all other humans. We are all caught up in the same natural processes, and we are all equally caught up in those social processes that yearn for harmony at the same time that we thwart it, acting too often out of blind self-interest that refuses to see where harmony lies. So we kill each other, dominate each other, exploit each other, refuse to cooperate, and seek our own advantage, or try to, knowing all the while that societies, like the more fundamental elements, are created for a gentler balance and harmony.

Farming today is a matter of dealing not only with the complexities of earth, air, fire, and water, but also with the complexities of nation-states, transnational corporations, trade policy and so-called trade barriers, markets or lack of them, supply and demand, our human greed and our human compassion, our excitement at competition and our pleasure in cooperation. Given the complexities, farming in our time is never about farming only. Whatever else it might be, the story of farming is a story of connections. Those connections are not only biological or geographical but historical, taking us far back in time. “All narratives require a scale,” says Richard Fortey in Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth.³ Indeed, historical time is too short to measure the present. But even Fortey’s geologic time gives us a scale too brief for understanding the present moment. The photosynthesis taking place in your garden, pasture, alfalfa, or oaks this instant began not eras or eons ago, as geology measures time, but light-years of time and distance away, connecting us to a past—and a cosmos—all but unfathomable. Since those four elements with which we began are involved in the growth of plants and the health of animals, including humans, farming’s connections extend to the farthest stars, to light and times far older than our oldest stories and our deepest geologic strata.

The connections we need to acknowledge are also economic and political, for farmers around the world today are connected by a single marketing system. There is no farmer anywhere who farms in a vacuum, or in the old dream of independence. Though farm practices may differ enormously from one region to another, from one country or continent to another, one thing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) surely illustrates is that Mexican subsistence farmers, American farmers—whether organic or agribusiness—and Canadian cattlemen and grain farmers are all involved in the same economic and political process. In that process, no individual American farmer’s combine or high cab tractor gives her an advantage over a subsistence farmer’s hoe, and NAFTA unites American, Mexican, and Canadian farmers more powerfully than our Constitution ties us to the United States. What we mischievously call “free trade” is the great leveler and oppressor, and its globalization unites the people of the land in a single system that turns Jefferson’s independent yeoman farmers, wherever they live on this earth, into serfs for transnational corporate profit. This in a cosmos that has no use for single systems and dooms them to a short life.

All these issues become essential elements of the farm story all across America and wherever farming happens in the world. There can be no separation because we are all related, all of us ingredients in the great mystery that somehow turns light and leaf into food that creates and sustains us and allows us to breathe. We must learn to cooperate with that mystery; if we do not, Steven Stoll reminds us, we lack “the longheadedness, the sense of future, required to build a republican nation.”⁴ In our own time, we could add “or even to survive.” It’s our choice. Every day.

CHAPTER 2

Histories

Immigrants in 1846 followed wagon ruts all the way from Chicago to Red Wing, Minnesota. The army had worn the ruts into the rolling hills and prairie during the Black Hawk War. At Grand Detour, a common stop along the way, the Anderson family halted for a rest. They saw a plow leaning against the blacksmith shop, gleaming silver in the sun. They were struck by it and inquired after it. Their respondent gestured toward the smithy and said, “He is the only man in the world who can make a self-polishing ploughshare. Out here, in this new soil, a farmer has to spend half his time pushing the dirt off his ploughshare.”

“You mean that blacksmith can really make a plough that scours?” the Andersons asked.

“Yes siree! Wouldn’t be surprised if someday you hear more about him. His name is John Deere.”¹

Early Swedish settlers thought the prospects on the other side of the river looked promising, according to James Banks in Wing of Scarlet, an early history of Goodhue County. They saw “a territory that was rolling, covered with heavy timber, and had rich soil. The rolling terrain provided self-drainage. The heavy growth of timber provided building material and fuel and cover for game.” Banks notes that wild nuts, berries, and fruit were abundant, and he also identifies a wide variety of wild animals, some of them more appreciated than others. He mentions beaver, mink, bobcats, timber wolves, gray squirrels, rattlesnakes, skunks, rabbits, and deer. He also calls attention to a universal male settler characteristic. “In those days one of the first ambitions of a young man was to grow a beard. It was a custom for all men to display the heaviest growth of whiskers possible.”² We could note that what attracted people, whether American Indian or European, was the natural biodiversity inherent in this natural landscape—at least till we get to what appears to be a monocrop of whiskers. Those early, bearded homesteaders soon cut the timber, stacked the logs, cleaned out the stumps, and began to farm. But they were far from the first to farm the region.

The first settlers arrived perhaps 12,000 years ago. They were hunters of mastodons, caribou, and bison and harvesters of green plants that grew in wild profusion. Archaeologists discern a change in the physical evidence around 2,500 years ago that suggests a change in culture, one so great that it perhaps represents a whole new set of invaders rather than a cultural evolution. Within a few hundred years, the hunters of ancient animals now long disappeared and the foragers of wild plants in abundance also became harvesters of domestic crops, beginning an agricultural adventure that has never ended, though it has surely waxed and waned.

That culture, called the woodland stage of the immense Mississippian culture that extended from centr...