HISTORY LESSONS.
This winter I've been trying to catch up on some reading and lately the theme has seemed to lead to a simple conclusion: you aren't just what you eat, you are, unequivocally, what everyone eats.I'm currently reading Timothy Egan's "The Worst Hard Time," on The Great American Dust Bowl. This is a period of our history when the government pushed Native Americans (masters of husbandry, those guys) off their land and encouraged farmers to move West. Millions of acres were soon plowed on what was traditionally, and naturally, perennial prairie grass. Wheat was planted heavily throughout the late 1920's with the blessing of the government, a booming economy and good weather. Then, suddenly as if by punishment, the economy crumpled and the rains stopped... for nearly 10 years.
Far too many parallels can be drawn between how we were treating the land and the economy in the 20's vs. now––i.e. roaring 20's/Great Depression/Dustbowl vs. Roaring 2000's/Great Recession/Great Drought––and that might not seem so scary if I weren't a farmer now. In a situation like the Dust Bowl, it simply does not matter how one treats the land if everyone around them is plowing it up like idiots (sound familiar?). And we can now throw pesticides, herbicides and fungicides into the mix and arrive at not only the possibility of a brutal air assault, but a lasting and effective attack on our ground water, our local wildlife and our health.Last week, in fact, the New York Times had an article about that very subject, how at least one community in California could no longer drink its water for the poisons it contained from the runoff of a nearby commercial dairy (somehow tainting ground water is legal?). I know a natural farm whose spring––which they rely on entirely for their drinking water––was recently compromised when the neighbors decided to plant their wonderful pastures up the hill to corn, an act which requires loads of herbicide. Herbicide will seep into the soil, then the ground water, then build up in our bodies if we consume it. When we eat anything commercially farmed, we have to acknowledge there is a family somewhere who can't drink their own water because of it. And increasingly, a country that can't either."At present," writes Wendell Berry in a recent piece for the Atlantic, "80 percent of our farmable acreage is planted in annual crops, only 20 percent having the beneficent coverage of perennials. This, by the standard of any healthy ecosystem, is absurdly disproportionate." If we as a culture continue to depend on big agriculture for our food, all food will suffer, because all farmers will suffer. Everyone loses. We need proper husbandry and land practices, absolutely, but we farmers can only do so much. If our neighbors are still getting subsidies and the corn and soybeans are still flying off the shelves (and freezers), they will continue to plant them with gusto. And if mother nature decides she wants to cut the rain for a while (seen any terrifying droughts around lately?), then we might not see a trickle down effect, the effects might just roll over us like dirt in the Dust Bowl. All of us.- Jesse.