Farming for Life

by Lynn R. Miller of Singing Horse Ranch

Farming may be enough for a lifetime
but is a lifetime enough for farming?

Preparing for difficult times

Now we find out what we’re made of. Every step we take, every concern we allow ourselves will define our place in these difficult times. We must protect our families and ourselves without forgetting humanity and nature. How we do that will determine the shape of the new world ahead.

Even before the planet’s aggravated weather cycles could finish whuppin’ our sorry butts with natural disaster after natural disaster, ‘our’ economy goes terminally ill. The planet is sick and we made her sick. The corporate dragons who promised to feed and care for us are imploding. The coupons we were told to treat as indicators of our ‘wealth’ have become worthless. The governments we needed to believe in have become hideously self-serving and stupid. And, irony of ironies, the very skills which have been mocked and denigrated for half a century now turn out to be the only things which can save most of us; skills such as food preservation and gardening, the craft of natural farming and the ability to heat and clothe ourselves.

Is there hope? Of course there is; hope, and real opportunity, but sadly not for those crippled by fear and angered by the loss of net worth. And perhaps most important, not for those who can’t ‘feel’ the change and the threat.

There might be a fancy scientific term for what I know as the ‘boiling frogs’ syndrome. Scientists tell us that if you put a frog in a pan of cold water and set that pan on a stove burner, that frog will sit there until the water boils and the frog dies. Conversely, if you try to put a healthy frog into a pan of nearly boiling water it will immediately jump out, saving itself.

So-called advanced modern society, commerce-riddled as it has been, requires the ‘boiling frogs’ syndrome be true of us sheep-like humans. We sit calmly in the water of our society as the temperature goes up gradually. Today that metaphorical ‘water’ is reaching a boiling point as millions face certain unemployment, hunger, and homelessness. And no effort is made by us to leave that pot of water we know as today’s commerce-driven society. How do you leave that society, you ask? By taking charge of your lives, by returning to the basics of a self-sufficient existence, by ‘re-villaging’ into communities of like-minded individuals, by growing some, if not all, of your own food, by rejoining the biological world and demanding of applied science that it truly serve humanity and the planet, by rejecting sadism, gluttony, and ingratitude, by disconnecting from the electronics and chemistry which deaden us.

Comedians and politicians, working with and without script, are still heard, even in these woolly days, deriding any who would even think about growing their own food. That won’t last long. We gotta eat. And the party in power better realize that soon because we are only three or four missed meals away from revolution. As fathers and mothers, think about what it would mean to you to watch your own children starve. Now multiply that in the U.S.A. by millions and apply those intense feelings of desperation, helplessness and fear up against the news stories of multimillion dollar pay packages for “hired” executives of corporations and boondoggle bribes for elected officials. (They all are employees, not owners. And they control the decision making processes which have resulted in our economic meltdown and put millions of people out of work.) That, I insist, is a post-modern recipe for a revolution, one which we would be well advised to avoid.

So, I maintain that the concept of families working with their own hands to provide some measure of their own food, shelter and heat ain’t funny, it’s essential. It used to be called self-sufficiency and early on we discovered that when we had more eggs, milk, potatoes and beans than our family needed we could sell or barter that excess. It was good and we called that farming. Though industry took upon itself to raise large tracts of food, it was less of farming and more of agribusiness. And agribusiness with its heavy metals and toxic chemistry has had absolutely nothing to do with self-sufficiency and less to do with sustainability. Now we see the transition to a fresh form of true farming immersed in self-sufficiency. This good new farming has the power to save each of us and our planet. It will also give us, as a wonderful bonus, true sustainability.

Today, amidst the culture wars and an imploding economy, marketing professionals work continuously to claim ownership of the word sustainability for their corporate clients, a claiming race which embraces all the toxic vagaries of fashion and fad. That won’t last long either.

The quest for sustainability ahead of self-sufficiency is misguided. Selfsufficiency must come first, and when it does come, sustainability will follow…

A few months back, we had returned from an extended business trip and I went immediately to turn the irrigation pump back on. The glorious summer heat held promise of damage to this farmer’s hayfield if he let too much time pass without the sprinklers going. High elevation sunlight causes a more rapid transpiration of moisture than down at lower elevations. We are up against the Cascade mountains at 3,000 feet.

I opened the gate valve from the irrigation lagoon to coax water to prime the pump and mainline. Then I pressed the electric pump switch. What resulted was a terrible, irregular screaming noise I recognized as steel against steel set to in a losing battle. I turned the pump off. Not good. What did this mean? Would I need to replace that big pump and 3 phase 25 HP motor? It would be a bad time to do that. Summer is always tight with so many things demanding what few funds are available. So I calmed myself down and set to thinking about the best way to proceed. I don’t like it when things feel insecure.

What does it mean to be secure? One of the hardest, flintiest first lessons of life is that there are few, if any guarantees. We don’t know what weather, money, equipment, family, friends, strangers, health and life herself will bring to us tomorrow. With or without experience of horrible and seemingly inexcusable loss, some people are terrified by the vagaries of life. Some others of us know the comfort of believing in whatever the outcome may be. They have a ‘faith’ both generic and specific. But even with faith we still want for security in the immediate sense; we want to know we can care for ourselves and our own on into the future.

Even in our modern form, luckily most humans still have a little of the proverbial ant in them. We, the many, busy ourselves to gather up the ‘necessaries’ to get through the winter, get through the lean times. We gather and store. Some, though, feel the urge yet DON’T follow it because modern convenience and the industrial marketplace seem to imply a guarantee that they are being taken care of, that they will be taken care of on into the future. But ‘it ain’t necessarily so’. A lot of modern society has run on a qualified institutionalized faith. We trusted that our bank deposits were secure, we trusted that there wasn’t any water in the fuel we purchased, we trusted that our jobs were somewhat secure, we trusted that the governent wouldn’t allow some preventable outside threat to hurt us, we trusted that the tap water was clean, that the air was breathable, that the food was safe, that the pump would go on running forever. For some, to do otherwise was to go stark raving nuts with worry. But there were, and are, no guarantees. Today is a day when more of us are feeling this reality. Today is full of the doubts about tomorrow.

People out of work and keen, if not desperate, about surviving may constitute big opportunity for the country and the world. No one wishes for or welcomes their trepidation, yet I do see these folks and their need as an opening for constructive change. They want to work, so offer them jobs to rebuild our country’s crumbling infrastructure AND offer them a chance to farm a piece of ground, offer them homestead opportunities. Such ideas might anger an out-of-work auto worker or stock broker but those stressed jobs may not be available for a very long time. In the meanwhile, good work rebuilding the country or farming will offer them a dignified alternative. Humanity needs fed. Corporate industrial agriculture tied to banking CANNOT do the job. Small independent farms scattered across the landscape, they alone can do it. We need millions of small farmers RIGHT NOW. I say we press the federal government to release large tracts of arable public land to a whole new homestead act.

It was summer time and the irrigation and pump repair guys were sure to be busy. It would cost me an arm and a leg to get anyone to come out here to service this unit. It’s a big one, got to be 600 pounds all told. Luckily it’s sitting above ground and in a solid little shed. That will give me a few options. What should I do? I could separate the pump from the motor to lessen the weight of each half but that would mean doing a blind surgery on the guts of the cast iron-enclosed centrifugal pump. I would need to trust that removing the nut on the end of the shaft to release the impeller would be sufficient to allow me to pry the two halves, engine and pump, apart. Not knowing what other pieces might be out of sight and potentially ruined, I hesitated. Then I remembered the adjustable pump-shaft collar that compresses the packing. I could get to that, so I removed it to check the status of the packing material. It seemed to be fine. So, that meant I was left with disconnecting the pump entirely, lifting it into my pickup truck and taking it 30 to 45 miles to a repair shop.

But first I needed to find a shop I could trust. So I called a few friends and found a good recommendation. I called that shop and the lady said that ‘the repairmen are gone all day everyday doing installations and repairs.’ If I wanted to bring it in she would see if they could do a rush repair.

“I can tell you one thing,” she says,“it counts in your favor that you are not afraid to take it apart and bring it in yourself. These days we get so many people who don’t want to get dirty and are afraid to try anything mechanical. The guys like someone who’s not afraid to get greasy, oh, and I might add, also not afraid to admit when they don’t know everything. That’s what’s moved into this area, a lot of people who claim to know everything and can’t do a thing for themselves.”

Today common sense, basic skills, and a self-sufficiency mindset are positioned to once again become each individual’s most important tools. I am speaking of all aspects of daily life in this new confused century, but most particularly agriculture. So much of farming is done in tight places, trying to get something apart or back together again. Any chance at all of success translates to a measure of self-sufficiency which is self-fertilizing. What I mean by this is that each time you succeed with the mechanical, animal, crop, and/or procedural challenges of farming you feel thrice emboldened to deal with the next challenge. The success makes your self-confidence grow as if fertilized.

I went into the little pump shed with wrenches in hand and took everything free, especially careful to cut the power. I have a pair of heavy steel loading ramps for my equipment trailer. I took one of those and set it into the shed and on to the bed of the truck at a steep angle. Next, using a pry bar and three short lengths of pipe I raised corners of the heavy pump motor and slid the pipes in to make a roller bed for the motor bottom. Then I carefully rigged a short triangulated chain yoke on the pump and hooked it in to a come-along I had fastened at the back of the truck. Going slow and double checking all anchor points, I ratcheted that pump up into the truck bed. The whole thing took three hours, what with the extra cautions and running back and forth to the phone. I felt mighty good about getting it loaded but I had a passing worry about the time spent as I should have been working getting the summer Journal done or on training my two stud colts. I had to chuckle, these were minor worries compared to what was happening around the world, to the world, and in spite of the world.

I travel often and talk to a great many people. The conversations today, each today, start with shaking heads and worried glances as everyone acknowledges their worry over the economy. Some of us share talk about stocking up and fixing things so’s we can take care of our families and friends when things go further down. A few express downright panic as they see they don’t know what to do and are sure as heck not prepared to take care of themselves, let alone their families and friends. A few of us see these difficult times as opportunities, not to take advantage of the downtrodden but to provide for them in ways which help us as well.

Back since February and March, when the fuel prices grew springs, the middle eastern wars became institutionalized, the planet went into its shake and sweat, domestic inflation went through the roof, and the banking crisis announced it was here to stay, people began to mutter, chatter and worry. And as more and more factories and corporations laid off people the economy started to take on the causal stink of the greedy and incompetent past and present administrations.

The pump shop I took my unit to has been around a very long time and the distinctive galvanized building told you so. Driving in with the pump I noticed that the old trees had been cut down and the shop squeezed between two big new commercial developments almost complete but dangerously barren because all evidence of the contractors was gone. Another casualty of the banking crisis. I talked with the pump folks and explained my irrigation worry and the need for a quick repair. They were keen and promised results in two working days. Feeling like things were going to work out fine, I took a moment before loading up in the pickup truck and gazed around sighing, across the highway was a new Super Walmart, next door a four story resort motel half done and vacant. It was inevitable that this family pump business, supporting so many farms and homes, would inevitably be squeezed out. Another unfortunate change in the fabric of this community. I knew I wouldn’t be bringing my irrigation pump to Walmart for repairs. These developments are not fed by need, they are spurred by speculation and they have already destroyed sustainable aspects of this community.

The word sustainability is used so wrecklessly and politically today that its meaning is perforated. Sad, because we need the word or its essence to hold water for us as we work to define and understand right livelihood and the human future on this planet. We must understand that true sustainability, that capacity for systems to regenerate and sustain themselves, is at war with the gods of commerce and the corporate ethic. And in true Machiavellian-style the enemy is hard at work to usurp the word “sustainability” as its own, redefined, retooled, and priced to sell.

The British essayist and mystery writer G.K. Chesterton warned sixty or seventy years ago that if we weren’t careful, advertising would replace organized religion as the shaper of human society. Turns out he was right. We weren’t careful and it did happen. Today, millions of people go to their grave believing that their individual life had been measured by their purchasing power. There are churches today who preach that God wants us to be commercially and financially successful. I disagree. I believe God wants us to be farmers, stewards of the land and of biological life, and happy campers because we feel good about our workaday world. I refuse to believe that God cares how many homes you own or what car you drive or the nature of your stock portfolio. But there are those who will argue with me in that direction. From atheist to agnostic to raging secular hedonist we argue with one another on these questions … and they do not matter in the final analysis. Fact is, we can care about the world we live in or we can disregard her, it’s our choice. Really our choice because those codes of conduct, moral institutions, and halls of learning which gave us the credos of caring, sharing and believing, those guides of old are gone. They’ve gone shopping – those churches, schools, synagogs, charitable institutions et.al., gone to the marketplace, left the stone tablets and ivy covered halls behind and stuffed their wallets with little magnetically charged plastic cards. Still, whether we care about the world we live in or not is something we, rich and/or poor, have power over. This is something we can see, touch, feel. And, if we allow it, it is an involvement which can reward our peace of mind and our self-sufficiency many times over.

I returned in two days and picked up the pump, repaired, sandblasted, painted and ready to reinstall, all for half what I had expected I would need to pay. And smiles and stories were thrown into the mix by the pump shop folks as I was asked where our ranch is and if I knew so and so and how the crops were faring. Felt good. As a friend of mine sometimes says at odd moments, “We’re farming now.” And he’s right, this is part of the intangibles of farming. It’s moments shared with folks of common values, all of us appreciating who we are and what we do. Part of that right livelihood business, we know at these softer moments that we are who we want and need to be.

I drove home and readied my tools to reverse the process of loading the three phase pump and motor back onto the foundation. Rigging a chain into the rafters I hooked into the motor casing and half lifted / half drug the unit down the steel ramp. Using a heavy pry bar, I walked it into position and bolted it back into the piping. My last piece of work was to rewire the motor. I thought I was being careful to replace the wires as I had marked them. I buttoned everything up, straightened my old back and smiled at my handiwork. Now to open the water gate and turn the pump on. Sweet quiet running motor and pump but NO water came out.

I phoned my friend Larry and he confirmed my suspicion, I must have reversed the wires causing the pump to run in reverse direction. I took the covers off and redid the wiring. This time when I pressed the pump switch six hundred gallons a minute pulsed through the 8 inch pipe. “Now we’re farming!”

Sustainability? Self-sufficiency? You want to know what these things are all about? Follow a farmer or rancher around for a few days.

There is no other segment of society which offers endless opportunity for regeneration and sustainability; farming is it. All other segments of society and commerce are ultimately governed by a limitation either of resources or of profitable application or of both. Humankind needs all the product of the farm each and every day. And all the product of the farm may, if we organize the farming accordingly, be part of the net gain to fertility, community and planet. We may grow beans, while improving the top soil, and extending the life of a seed variety. We may produce milk, while improving the top soil, improving a livestock strain, and adding to the beauty of a landscape. We may put up hay while training work animals and improving self-sufficiency.

If we make the claim that farming is the answer and that we need more small farmers and that there has never been a better time to be a farmer, it’s appropriate to ask what sort of farming we are talking about. I am want to differentiate between industrial-scale agribusiness and the craft of human-scale farming. I believe the latter serves all of us best. And I am most certainly not speaking of a return to some antiquated, nostaligic form of farming. I am speaking of a new farming, not in the distant future, but one which is already scattered amongst us today. It’s a new farming whose limits are defined by values. I like to think of it in terms of the individual unit, one person’s farm.

One man’s farm: from its perimeter to its center never further than one might walk with a load.

One woman’s farm: never less than the circumference of the dream it represents.

One man’s farm: no matter the scale so long as it befit an individual imagination and endeavor.

One woman’s farm: a perfect interlocking fit to the next woman’s farm, or the edge of nature.

One man’s farm on balance, always on balance. Balance not as of style but as of manner. That farm must be the size which fits the true manner of the man. And the farm will be the prize hard-won of the deliberate maintenence of appropriate creativity.

Why one person’s farm? Why not the farms of many? The farms of many should not be measured by their outer collective boundary but by the energy of the pattern of shared perimeters. Measuring the boundary of all, of the many, gives the lie to larger singularities. It’s the difference between edge defining size versus the internal weave.

In classical music, symphonic orchestration requires, demands, the composer own a level of intimacy with each and every sound, instrument, human performance aspect and sound chamber. There is no other way to achieve the powerful fertile singularity of composition. The same is true of one person’s farm; that farmer must own intimacy with all aspects and components of his farm if a singularly fertile and constantly regenerative whole be the goal. At some point increased size and quantity require abstraction and with this, intimacy is lost. Music is lost, fertility is forgotten. Regeneration and sustainability become conceptual impediments to profitability. But so what? Profitability is no measure of permanence or fertility or art or sustainability. And, as we see today, corporate profitability is off in some parallel universe with little or no use to those millions who are starving as we speak.

With a manner of persuasion born from understanding, the fertility of one small farm may be as regenerative and sustainable as the wave action of the sea. Do we measure profit from that wave action? Typically, profit is a subjective measure of income retained. The wave action of the sea is a phenomenon. The growth and produce of the soil is a phenomenon albeit one a thoughtful person might orchestrate.

There is so much we might say of profitability and all of it apology or rationale. There is so little we might say of the craft of farming and most of it promise and wealth. But this we can say, those particular demanding labors of one man’s farm require of him that his mind be fully on his work. And so engaged, this man becomes his work and the work becomes the man. The farm’s work takes on the manner of the man, be he artful and/or responsive – and the man likewise, be the work tedious and/or challenging. And these manners blend to a defining balance the repeating final ringing tone of which is accomplishment, tedium, labor, artistry, responsiveness, gathered gardening, stockmanship, challenges, all of the farm’s fueled future towards a chance at the exhiliration of right livelihood. Farming for life. Turn the words around and inside out. A life for farming – or – farming in order to live – or – farming to create life – or – farming to sustain life – or – farming to support life. It works every way.

Farming for life now offers the grand answer to what is the collapse of the grand illusion.