Court of Farming Wisely

by Lynn R. Miller of Singing Horse Ranch

We speak of them as present example.

The old husband and wife partnership has worked a lifetime on this farm, caring for their four acres of orchard, the 4 two-acre fields of legume pasture and hay, and these two acres of poultry operation. They hold title to 20 acres that feels to them as a very large outdoor garden, house, and sanctuary.

In the beginning, (their beginning), they cared, with thoughtful vigor, for five bee hives as they also cared for all of the intertwined parts and elements of their farming. While it has become more unpredictable, difficult and demanding they maintain hives still, they farm still.

They keep close-by a dozen hens for their own egg supply. They house on the opposite corner of their land a perpetual rotation of fortytwo dozen pullets and a like number of cockerels for local markets. Three times a year they market a set of between 800 and 1000 chickens as hens and roasting birds. Over the years local customers, including restaurants and private schools, wait patiently for their poultry and their naturally grown cherries.

A good year these days might produce 40 ton of their glorious Bings. And, as suggested, after forty years the clientele has become both exclusive and inclusive. But the details aren’t always theirs to know as most of the fruit is hand picked on calendared days by the individual buyers with families in tow.

Those numbers of acres, birds and cherries — while they form the largest part of this small farm’s income — those numbers are a trap. This couple long ago realized to worry after the numbers was to potentially and emotionally lose the farm every single season, lose it to worry. So they came to think of this production they sold as leavings. This was farm produce, beyond what the farm needed to keep for itself, beyond what they needed for themselves. This was what they were left with to find a home for. The real ‘income’ of this jewel, and myriad other such farms, was the four dimensional vitality, the regenerative fertility, the sustenance of its encircled biology.

When the family included their three growing children, they kept two fine Guernsey cows for milk, butter and cheese. And these days he keeps his prize Belgian gelding, Champ, who he joins with, in work, every chance he gets.

But their young growing family-time seems a hundred years distant. They knew and know each tree in their orchard, intimately. They wish they could know their grandchildren as vigorously. They know the soil of that orchard as both food and bedding for those trees. And they understand how it biologically joins the surrounding soil of the pastures. Their only abiding regret these days is in this nagging doubt for the future of their combination of way and place.

They are unassuming representatives of today’s diminishing court of farming wisely. It is telling, and understood, that they, all of these like-minded quiet, steadfast farmers, are unknown and even less valued by the majority of humankind. They know who we are;— that ‘everybody else’ we. But we haven’t a clue any longer who they might be. Their example does not serve ‘everybody else,’ or at least, from a digital distance, that is how it feels. They long ago became arcane. The devolution of society has made it so the paths to the working knowledge of this couple and others like them are shrouded in unattractive even suspicious mystery. “There must be a reason they choose not to announce themselves and display achievement as we do? Why would we want to go back to a time of such superstition and hard work?”

He is a natural-born engineer and fixer-upper. Back at their beginning time, his urgencies were centered around building up their vision for this farm. With crop failures, fires, flooding, wind damage, and nature’s subtler heaves and tosses, those first years it was hard to appreciate the internalities. Even so, for him and her, that chosen, self-assigned purpose was, both past and present within the challenges and difficulties, always a song. He ached most days to have everything respectful, each part to the next. He wanted the bees to respect the cherry trees as much as they were obviously thrilled and filled by the pollen, and with his help he also wanted the cows to respect their pastures, and the poultry operations to feed them and the soil. But then there was/is his itchy need to build contrivances that would make each chore a delight. He revelled in understanding the maintanence of these contraptions and these routine efforts all along the music of the farming.

Yes, there was that under-handed slow-pitch toss towards convenience but it was never his prime goal. His purpose was his goal and it regenerated itself with the orchestrating of little parades of process that never failed to bring a smile.

She helps with his inventions as she so easily understands the natural ways of plants and animals to dance and curl in answer to rewarded actions. “Make it easier for them to peck at that,” she would suggest. And he could see it. “Make it so the growing pea plant has to reach across to that other trellis, but careful that the distance is hers to own.” So he used thin dried grasses woven into frail cording to bridge the distance and invite the tenticales to curl and twist and crawl along. And she smiled in marvel at his genius.

Now, well past the beginning times, his urgencies have slowed to become his welcome routines centered no less on the vision of their farm. For both of them understand that their lives have all along been devoted to one another, to nature and to the endless making of this farm.

He would, in a slow February moment, walk inside the branches of one of the older cherry trees and lay his hands on its trunk and limbs to feel the sturdiness and imagine he could feel its blood coursing from worms down below all the way to swollen buds above. It always reminded him of who and what nature has been and would be. It told him emphatically, as would a dog howl of signature, his place in the widest scheme was in the work.

And he frequently would pronounce his tree well and good.

Under that moment were many seasons of remembered concern, care and work, procedures that rescued stressed trees, saved entire crop. But then the setbacks and losses. it all amounted to a golden, well-worn, scarred even tenure.

She is a born nurturer. The health and comfort of the animals, people and plants in her sphere shape her every single waking day. And she is as an alchemist, with the ingredients for cooking, with bits of cloth, garden arranging, with bird feeding, with general repairs. All of it forgiveness as forward.

She preferred he left the fence repairs to her. He preferred she always return the tools to where she last found them. She knew she was the one to do any haggling with other folk (or with him). He knows he is to stand with his arms crossed and his lips drawn thin and silent in those moments with her and other folk. He left her to haggle unless it was with him. When haggling directly with her he is yet often forgiven to have brought the fun. He loved to tease her by offering more rather than less and then changing his mind just to spice the bargaining. It was a game they played together, that’s how she forgave him. For him that forgiveness has always been a reward.

Their personalities, interests and skills gave their partnership a wonderful head start, but this audacious couple, together, came to fruition as they discovered over time that allowing nature to work her wonders – that’s what built fertility and vigor. And now these days with aggravated weather patterns askew, they work harder to protect their orchard and their bees.

Low-tech modern devices, like frost fans and solar fox lights, are welcome tools as they know how incredibly important prevention can be. He had come up with the idea of wide shallow ditches that they could fill as needed. These served many purposes but he appreciated most their usefulness in providing, many cold nights, a low localized fog that, along with the fans, softened frost and kept it moving.

She works part time at the local library. And he does repair work for other farms out of his own farm shop. To this they add the income from egg and poultry sales, the income from surplus raw milk, and the ceremonial u-pick orchard sales. But the larger part of their best loved income comes as invisible. It is from barter.

They prize their circle of farming friends, some neighboring, others far flung. Their barter circle they call it. It seems to be always growing – for anyone open to honestly trading this for that was potentially a new friend. He was forever reminding himself that they were rich in and with friends. She knew that who they were and how they worked was a fragile and important element in their at-large community. Just as that wide circle of family and friends provided them immeasurable assurance, so too this couple did the same for all the others.

These feelings join other more worrisome thoughts as this couple struggles to imagine what will come of their farm when they are no longer able to work it. And that they project that concern to several of their neighbors with similar age and uncertainty.

And then a revelation came to them. They were beginning to act as if they were nearly done when what this farm had always wanted of them was to feel it was forever and always just beginning. Yes, perhaps their youthful vitalties were waning but they were always to be a match for the carriage of magic that knows to value every scintilla of their tiny natural universe and its countless interactions. It was not a closing off or an approach to end times, it was an opportunity to open and share all of the experience for the treasure it is. And to share it one on one, two on two, family to family. Therein was always the answer to who might carry on.

Even in times such as these when culture wars predominate, there remain non-profit organizations whose stated claim is to help people like our couple by protecting the land from development, even protecting it specifically FOR farming. This husband and wife have researched some of this and what is missing in their view is an appreciation of the structural realities of continuity and the poesis which would have survival feel heavenly rather than as just a noted escape from calamity. ‘Who will farm this place, how might they do it, and what value to them is our history and the history that came before us? The spring which has been the never failing water source for this farm is central to the property and protected by that meandering swale which serves as a multi-species woodlot thick with underbrush. Were it to ever be cleared the spring would dry up quickly. There are so many little things just like that spring and its hidden sourcing.’

There is a soft, persistent genius that has gone into the now two different overlapping generations of this farm. A history of hand-offs and information transfers that include buckets full of intangibles, things like the natural signs of weather and migrating wildlife marking field work, planting, harvest and winter preparations. As well as things like marking past gratitudes as paid in kind and in full. That these farms in other hands may not measure up to contemporary demands and expectations – this, yes it, to be wary of. The graciousness that has this couple thank their piece of land each day for what it gives them, that manner does not translate to finite numbers for the accountant’s talley. Neither does the entire previous genius that has gone into the farm’s magical growth.

But this cultural mistake is not just about farming, it is today about society writ large. Fifty years or more ago we, all of us, arrived in the future with artifice of rampant commerce as fanfare. The heralds proclaimed life would be easier, opportunities would abound, synthetics and chemicals had arrived to save us, nature was tamed and in hand as our servant. Now (then) we could afford to pretend to be people we were not. Anyone who so wished could be a snob without portfolio at a moment’s notice. Bargains were made, contracts drawn, and fortunes loaded in the accounts of a very few mostly indolent and unpleasant people.

We’ve been in this future now for quite some time. It’s unpleasant and it’s not working. In fact, in too many ways it is turning out quite badly. More to the point our present and immediate futures are deadly. They are death to the oceans, the sky, to soils, to forests, to wetlands, to wildlife, to fish, religious belief, to biological diversity, to the human species. Our futures, as in this ridiculous construct of our futures, they are death. A circle with no accounting, Our future has become the death of our future.

We, collectively have made this mess. History, that long record of precious previous genius, has shown with absolute certainty that we have it deep within us to correct it. Time to move past the future on into genuine whole-sum time, where abundance is one word and no longer three.

Agri-business, today, is about producing commodities/ingredients. A handful of corporate interests control the production of ‘ingredients.’

I pen these words as an old upright human being whose brain has collected more thoughts, smells, images, fears, triumphs and failures then I may intelligently access. So I sit in piles of books, catalogs, periodicals, and papers – knowing right where my thesaurus and dictionaries are. I struggle as I have for three quarters of a century to find new pathways into ideas, observations and workable conclusions because I feel oddly compelled to attract others to these conversations I am having with myself. It’s not so much that I think I have something worthy to say, but rather that I need to hear what you have to say and to hear how I might respond. So, it starts with me putting it, however tentatively, out there.

As an errant word-herder I appreciate how the wider world offers up answers, enticements, mufflers and apologists in staggering array all swirled together to produce the illusion of a thicket of impossibilities. (I speak of errant as in the old archaic definition, traveling in search of adventure.) But as a farmer the notion that I might have to go to the pasture and try to separate the chickens from the hogs and the ATVs and the dairy cattle from the beef cattle and the accountants and the horses mules and alpacas while the balers bale and the haters wail and all the day is golden. Now that is a swirl few could survive, but I know many a farmer who would cut through the crap and get to what needed doing and do it.

But then the economists and accountants and store-bought realists sense an opening, a crack in the moment and they rush in with a reminder that all of society today must align with the conventional wisdom of market reality.

To talk about old farm folks who aren’t part of the larger equation, not anymore, that does not, they argue, escape the rules of today’s game. The cost of doing business is a prime example, tied as it is to return on investment, formulas which circle back round to the primacy of investors and their protections from liability afforded as they are by modern (sic) governmental warrantees. Where in that is any room let alone value for true preservation and protection? Where in that is the possible holiness of shared beliefs stemming from a collective memory stretching back, through dust, blood and loss, a million years or more?

And why is it we are called so frequently by commerce and jealous indolents to adhere to the rules of today’s game. What rules!? I hear myself screaming, and Scout says Pop you have to calm down, so I sip my beloved morning coffee and find my breath and wonder at how easily I am drawn into the invisible fray.

My good friend Robert C. Yoder and I were speaking recently about those books and authors which deal with philosophies and political arguments aimed at agriculture and society at large. He asked, “Can you explain to me why it is you are upset by this book when it seems the author and you are in basic agreement about the subject?”

“I don’t think my opinion matters in this regard.”

And he said, “It matters to me, and I think it matters more broadly as well.”

“Well, Robert, it’s the manner of the author and his presentation which upset me, not the substance of the argument.”

“I don’t understand.”

I thought to myself of myself: there’s that old saying again – it takes one to know one.

“It’s an echo of an echo of an echo. That author is so disparaging of everyone, all of us, because of these things, but more important he needs us to know he is disparaging of all of us. That’s the thrust. When these subjects and this time plead for windows towards solutions, not yet another rattattat slap of a ruler across our proverbial knuckles, he (and yes, I) fail the moment by flailing about in our own bizarre version of verbal retaliation. Maybe it’s that we need to lash out at society because society has no time, or less time, for us?”

“And the manner part?”

I attempted to answer his question. I suspect I failed but it planted a seed with me and it invaded the process I have for writing these essays. That’s a good thing, a worthy benefit from the many excellent conversations I have with good friends. After fifty years of this business it is about time I confess that I have had a lot of help putting these ideas on paper. (In other words it has not always been solely my fault. Chuckle, snort.)

Back to the manner question: The people I’m turned off by are not the ones I necessarily disagree with. The ones I take an instant dislike to are those who remind me, right off the bat, of my self. I’ve known about this failing for all of my adult life and it disturbs me and intrigues me both. So I have made it a mission to understand what the essence of this complaint, or defect is. And I have landed on ‘manner’ not manners.

I have always felt comfortable with true farmers, something about their stoicism, their manner of going about everything in their lives. I learned from my own farming that how we spend our time, the space, the elements, the rigor of challenge invites a solemnity married to an easy humor which is held strong by clear goals. All of that is of a manner.

So I know what it means to be invited to an easy-going solemnity by circumstance and environment. And I know what it means to reject the invitation.

I was taught by my father that I was to practise finding good things to say about people whom I might want to curse. My heroic, ordinary and astounding father was a Wisconsin farm boy version of an idol of mine, a quintessential gentleman, the actor Ronald Colman. Neither my farming, nor my father’s admonition nor the example of Colman won out over me. I failed all three. I am the antithesis of these examples. I wish I were of a far better manner. So when I find myself in the presence of someone who ought to know better, someone who, inspite of his intelligence and working credibility, insists to malign and disregard, to belittle and disrespect I am quick to dismiss that person for I know him to be me. Ergo: it takes one to know one.

Confession complete it does not change the fact that in my opinion a vindictive manner diminishes or destroys the good that may have been done. I am trying very hard to teach myself that lesson. So I start with looking back, recent and distant, to the good that may have been done, and how within the vindictive control of society, disregarded altogether or way too soon.

I’m looking and thinking about previous genius.

When we get older one curse is having so many people lament that it be inevitable that we will, to varying degrees and in varying ways, lose our minds – to forgetfulness, to dementia, to regret, to fear. We end up dwelling in all that sour juice.

I think it is about the ‘dwelling.’ And all of this talk about positive outlooks, that figures right in there as well. Quite specifically, for me accepting the task to put together random thoughts towards sharing ideas or an idea keeps my mind trim, keeps any dementia in the junk drawer of my life, keeps the regret mixed in with the lint in my pockets, keeps the fear in this slightest of forms possibly useful as armament. I choose to dwell on the good stuff.

None of that is original. It all comes from previous genius, near and far. If we could but clear our nostrils of the stench of commerce and commercial news and allow ourselves to travel occasionally back for touchstone and basis to the times and places when common and superlative genius had profound effect on the planet and humanity we might find reason to delight more purely in the up close and tight surround of our immediate NOW. That now could be defined by where you want to end up, or by a refreshening of gratitude for where you find yourself.

Make it apply, make it apply, make it balance! It’s an economist’s war cry.

I prefer; make it an apple, make it an apple, have it taste good!

When comedians shortcut substance to arrive at the big or little laugh, they slide from kinship to thin-ship and it is all pratfalls as false parallels. The best of them wear a deep dark woe in their eyes as they must return to closets to attempt to forgive themselves.

The egregiosity of offense reminds us of the store-bought economists indentured to board rooms. Hear them insist “your job is to make your arguments and findings fit our objectives, ergo make it apply.”

How did we ever settle on that?

One of the most inspiring films in 25 years is David Attenborough’s documentary Ocean. The lesson therein is that if we protect our oceans from the rape of industrial fishing, quicker than we can imagine the habitats will revitalize and return along with all of the living creatures of the sea, also vast fertility and health will return and the rivers of kelp and overall fecundity will restore climatological balance to the planet. It is a lesson about allowing nature’s restorative balance, I cannot but feel, to my core, the parallel to the answer for farming: to allow that farming be redefined to a protective allowance of any and all of nature….?

Perhaps it starts with each of us refusing to make our finding fit our objectives. Instead, think what it might mean if we start allowing our findings to mold our objectives?

oh give us this day
a job to do
that we might

find through
stations of purpose
paths of warmth

light we lost
love we tossed
needed seeds

The need to make is central to the human condition, We deny it at our peril. The need to make is one reason so many people are drawn to farming because it is a practice and a discipline filled with craftsmanship and myriad satisfactions of the need to make.

In the invisibly distant past, humans may have felt invited to gather food, fiber and even shelter from the complex interconnected expanse of nature. We were gatherers, then hunters, and with time we became toolmakers. In the beginning, tools simple and direct, with time complex and part of a multi-stage intent. Design and the rudiments of a crude engineering outlook came into the picture. And, during all of that transitioning, any one of those ancient persons had ample opportunity to feel the engagement with creativity, the soul-defining that comes of creating something altogether new and, by gum, freshly essential.

One of the natural protections for aging memories comes of a community of need and interest in what those memories hold, the secrets and recipes and procedurals that made gardens of our farms and lives.

The earned humility of long-lived lives can be a genuine calming strength but for those who follow there is a great loss if it is mistaken for reticence. If the old woman does not feel it is her place to make critical observations the very young should be encouraged in their nagging insistance. Somehow, comedy in hand, we need bring generosity to both ends of each bridge.

There is a glow that is reciprocal, one to another, when the very young and the very old bring genuine delight to one another. And I believe that delight is held in subliminal mysterious understandings one to another.

At each and every moment in the ridiculous long history of humanity there have been threats that what may be lost in each time of passing, be lost forever. So long as we need our moments for relay, the energy remains, the purpose gains force, the next days are guaranteed. So long as previous genius is allowed to smile. So long as the future be of the cycle of life.

We need a smiling solemn court of farming wisely, one which calls upon previous genius and determined individual farmer inventors. A court that would marshall all humans to understand and appreciate the incredible life sustaining advantages of the best localized, human touch farming. A court that would encourage the acceptance of liability for any and all interactions with nature.

We need maps to next steps from that previous genius which ached with the earned view of potentialities, towards, always towards. We need the old farming couple I have spoken of to fade, oh so slowly in the glorious light of shared accomplishment and wonder. That’s the key to a birthing future.

LRM