DRIFT.

I went to a neighbor's and filled the back of our truck with some old, dry compost. On the way back with the first load, I could see in the side view mirror how a little of the compost was drifting out onto the roadside, and sorta smiled thinking about how nice this drive would look if I did this enough times––a sort of residual fertilization program: Our style of natural farming, in a sense, improving the landscape beyond our farm.Because heavy on my mind was also all of the drift from herbicide we can see around our county. Roadside trees and plants show with bleached white leaves, and the fields look stained with black. If you were to stand above it, it would look like a bomb went off––not even and straight like rows of corn, but powerful and indiscriminate, like chemical warfare.I've said it before, but farms are not contained by the barbed wire and land surveys that define them. They are living, connected parts of a giant biological organism. They touch. They mingle. Birds travel between them. Deer, farmers, dogs, water, and wind, too. What I do here affects what my neighbors do. And vice versa. If we promote life, we spread life. Death, unfortunately, is spreadable, too.Not lost on me, of course, is that there is a fundamental difference in approach. We love our neighbor's dearly, but we believe in diversity, where conventional farming is about sterility. So they may not want my life any more than I want their death.Ultimately, farmers can choose to change, but consumers help influence that decision. The choices we make in what we eat, have their drift, too. We create the demand for the herbicide, pesticide, and exhaust from trucks between here and California, Mexico or Canada every day. The question then is not just "Are these tomatoes good for me," but "Are these tomatoes good for everything?"-Jesse.