Syllabus for Distance Learning - Day 3
March 18, 2020

    Let's call these three the "Agriculture Trilogy" in my Top 12 from the Last Ten Years book list.  I suspect we may see a significant uptick in interest in small-scale, home- and community-based agriculture in coming months and years, in the wake of the current upheaval.  These books give us a framework for understanding why that is a good and necessary development – and long overdue.

    The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (2006):

     A McDonald's drive-thru "meal," eaten in the car.  A frozen meal labeled "organic," prepared in the microwave.  A home-cooked roasted chicken dinner featuring locally-sourced and truly free-range, pasture-raised chicken.  And another home-cooked meal that the author assembled almost entirely through hunting and foraging, including wild boar and mushrooms and bread made from airborne yeast.  

     Michael Pollan unpacks these four meals, and in so doing, he not only exposes the tragedy, danger, cruelty, and waste of industrialized agriculture, but also shines a light on viable alternatives to factory farming – with special emphasis on grass-based, closed-energy-loop, fertility-and-nutrient-building farming practices, or what has come to be known, in the decade and a half since Pollan's book was published, "regenerative agriculture." 

  

  Brad and I were already inching ourselves toward learning where our food comes from and producing some of our own, when we read this book.  But Michael Pollan opened our eyes and kicked us into high gear – or the highest gear we were capable of at the time.  It turns out, re-ordering our society's broken and deeply dysfunctional relationship with food takes time.  There are no quick fixes, and we cannot get ourselves out of the mess we've made by simply avoiding "problematic" foods.  Our entire food system is deeply flawed, and it will take a critical mass of us actively imagining, creating, and opting in to better food systems to avoid the looming crisis that industrial agriculture has in store.

    If you need a jump start, Pollan's most famous book will do it for you. 

    Family Planting: A Farm-Fed Philosophy of Human Relations by Kimerer L. LaMothe (2011):

    What does it look like several years after you trade in teaching at the most prestigious university in the world for raising four – then five – kids on a farm in upstate New York?  What lessons can you learn about life and love and family by learning to farm from scratch?  What can the Jersey milk cow teach you, and the chickens?  What can the vegetable garden teach you, and the compost pile? 

    LaMothe invites us on an intimate journey of discovery, of struggle, of joy, of fear, of abundance.  She asks, How do we participate in the dance of creation going on all around us and in us and through us?  She calls, Will you join in the dance?

   And on a personal note, as I've mentioned before, Kimerer was my principal academic advisor at Harvard, where she was serving as the Head Tutor for the Committee on the Comparative Study of Religion when I was an undergrad there.  She and I both participated as panelists at the Committee's 40th anniversary celebration back on campus in 2014, and Brad and I visited Kimerer and Geoff's farm afterward, as part of that same trip.  That was about eight months before we moved back home with visions of small farm life germinating in our hearts.  Thanks for the push, Kimerer.  

   The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture by Wendell Berry (1977):

   Granddaddy.  That's what threw me off.  That's what she called him.  Granddaddy.  I'm standing in the bookstore at the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, like a hungry kid in a bakery,  trying to figure out how not to buy a copy of every single Wendell Berry book on the shelves, and the clerk says, "Granddaddy only has a few copies of this one left."

   Wait.  What?  Hold up.  "Did you just say, 'Granddaddy'?" I stammer.  "Yes, ma'am," says the lovely dark-headed young woman I would guess is ten or twelve years younger than me.  "Oh, wow."  Tongue tied, I fight the urge to bow to her.  She carries his genes.  My husband is trying to keep my kids from wreaking total havoc on the second floor of the tidy shop.  There are thuds and squeals up there, and we end up having to buy a box of pencils because one of my daughters tears it open.  "Wendell Berry is your grandfather?" I ask, just to make sure I'm getting this straight.  "Yes, ma'am."  "Oh, wow."  Long pause.  "I love his work."  "Thank you, ma'am.  I'll tell him."  

    I managed to get out of there with only about a dozen of Berry's books.  My mom bought them for me as an early Christmas present.

   We had stopped at the Berry Center to pay homage in the fall of 2019, on the way home from the 3rd Annual Homesteaders of America conference in Front Royal, Virginia.  I had read The Unsettling of America in the summer of that year, and had come to understand that Wendell Berry was preaching regenerative ag before regenerative ag was cool.  More than a generation before Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry had seen and warned of the grave dangers of industrialized agriculture, and not just for the environment or for health or animal welfare reasons.  Granddaddy knew that petroleum-based industrial ag is bad for our souls, both collectively and individually, and he started calling us away from the cliff – calling, like the prophet in the wilderness, or like the "Mad Farmer" of some of his poems. 

    Alfred North Whitehead once said that Western philosophy is really just "a series of footnotes on Plato."  Something similar can be said for those of us who want to build an agricultural system that is truly life-sustaining and life-affirming for all future generations: we're all just making footnotes to Wendell Berry.  As Shawn and Beth Dougherty write in their 2016 handbook, The Independent Farmstead, Wendell Berry "has already said the best of just about all there is to say about responsible tenancy of the earth." 

    Now, all we need to do is follow Granddaddy's advice.  You can start by picking up a copy of this book.