E is for Experimental / Entrepreneurial

The next key characteristic of those who can lead us into "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible" is an experimental or entrepreneurial bent.  These leaders are not wedded to the status quo; in fact, they naturally question its underlying assumptions.  They allow their curiosity about alternatives to guide them, seeing adventure or opportunity where others see only drudgery or roadblocks.  Some of these leaders have long (or always) been in touch with this aspect of themselves.  Others among their ranks need encouragement – and practice – to rediscover this way of being in the world.  I am in this latter category.  Maybe you are too.  Here is a poem of encouragement for you: 

***

Try It

Try this. Try it out. Try it on for size.

Just try. Why? Because that cattle path you've worn
in your brain's made a groove, a rut so deep –
            and deepening with every pass –
it stands to cleave your gray matter clean
in two. And what will you do then? How
will you manage, half a melon in each hand?
Surely it is better, is it not, to tread a lighter course,
to thread between the sycamores and walnuts
on either side, to weave even as you wander,
to trail fresh forest dust in your wake, the stuff
of fairy tales, binding the world together under
spell of your loose magic. Go on. Go ahead. Try it.

D is for Diversified

My kids were home on Fall Break this past week.  This is a relatively new phenomenon in our neck of the woods, a full week off from school at the height of the fall season.  We didn't have this kind of pause when I was in school in the '80s and '90s, or even when I was teaching in the 2000s.  But I'll take it.  I actually think it's a very good thing.  I'm generally in favor of opportunities for kids and families to extend their learning outside the traditional classroom.  Or just outside, full stop.  Much of the medicine our bodies and souls need can be found, free for the taking, out of doors.*

I might have planned a few outdoor family excursions for the kids' week off, had it not been for one giant magnet that has kept us close to home:  the birth of our dairy cow's new calf.  Stella was due to give birth the week before last – her official due date was October 6 – but since the broader calving "window" can extend ten days or so on either side of that, all the plans in our lives for the last few weeks have come with the caveat:  "unless Stella is in labor."

In the week leading up to her due date, Stella showed a new sign of imminent delivery almost every day: the disappearance of ligaments around her tailbone and hipbones, swollen lady parts, a bulge on her right side, and finally a sunken look below her ribs from the calf's "drop" into the birth canal.  So I was somewhat surprised when October 6 came and went with no baby. 

Fortunately, we didn't have to wait long.  Stella went into active labor in the middle of the afternoon on October 8 and gave birth to a healthy little bull calf less than two hours later.  Leo had arrived!  And my girls got to witness the whole process from beginning to end.  What a gift!  Quite a way to kick off Fall Break.  And I'm pretty sure the barn counts as "out of doors."

The girls also got to watch as Stella's epic mothering instincts then went into hyper-drive: she eagerly licked Leo clean, lowing softly to him all the while, and finally nuzzled him to stand (with a little help from yours truly).  She had him up and nursing in just over half an hour.  Right off the bat, he got a good dose of colostrum, the "liquid gold" that precedes milk and carries so many of the antibodies crucial to a calf's health.

I milked out a gallon of colostrum the next morning – the first of many twice-a-day milkings that will bookend my days for the next several weeks, until Leo is big enough to consume a sufficient amount of Stella's milk that I can drop my milking for our household consumption to once per day.  I chilled and then separated the colostrum into small jars for freezing.  I texted two of my friends with beef cattle operations to let them know it's available, come next calving season. 

My ten-year-old, Emma, and I talked about how ranchers often find themselves in need of colostrum, if a momma cow dies from complications of calving.  It's not uncommon for ranchers to milk colostrum from the warm body of dead cow, in an effort to save the calf, who must have colostrum within the first 12-24 hours of life or their odds of survival drop to near-zero.  And though powdered colostrum can be found in many feed stores, a stash of the real stuff can be a boon to the whole local farming and ranching community.  Even a little bit can bridge a calf until some commercial colostrum can be secured.

Not a bad lesson for a fourth-grader's Fall Break.  We'll take it.

For that matter, I'll take all the lessons the farm has to give, whether it's Fall Break or not.  I'll take these two especially, which simultaneously came into focus at one point for me this last week: (1) accept help and (2) take full account of what's going right, so that what's going wrong – and something is always going wrong – doesn't unduly skew your vision. 

So I mentioned those twice-a-day milkings.  Like "two-a-day" sports team practices, these sessions structure my day during this intense period while Leo is small.  Having breastfed all three of my own children, I can vouch for the fact that twice-a-day milking of a Jersey dairy cow is easier than nursing a human baby.  But when I was nursing my human babies, I did not yet have a whole homestead to run.  And, while he couldn't share the nursing duties per se, my husband could take over with the babies when I was simply too tired to do all the things. 

Now, however, it's all on me. It just so happens that Brad is recovering from reconstructive shoulder surgery right now and can help with almost none of the farm chores. So the twice daily milkings feel like a lot on top of everything else.  Not that Brad could help with the milking itself anyway, even with two fully functional arms; Stella has previously made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that she does not want Brad to milk her, not even with a milking machine.  But before the surgery, at least he could – and did – help with most other farm tasks, the biggest ones being moving our electric animal pens on a daily or every-other-day basis, since we practice rotational, multi-species grazing, sometimes referred to as "management-intensive" grazing. 

Oh, it's management intensive alright . . . or sometimes just intensive.  We've made the conscious choice, in designing and building our farm, to swap in our own time and attention for all of the chemical and most of the fossil fuel inputs that conventional farms run on these days.  This is one of the key principles of a regenerative agriculture practice, which I will discuss in more detail in subsequent posts.  Suffice it for now to say that while the benefits of this choice are numerous – ultimately outweighing the downsides – it is not without cost.  And when I'm bearing that cost largely by myself, in the form of my time and physical energy, it is, well . . . intense.

So I'm taking help from whatever quarters it comes.  Even with only one functional arm, Brad can still do most of the light housework – dishes, laundry, etc. – especially with the kids' help.  That's a blessing.  And you know what else can be a blessing?  TV.  Yep, I said it.  Of course, we usually put pretty strict limits on our kids' TV watching, preferring them to head outside during these glorious fall days, but an occasional movie can keep them occupied long enough to stem the tide of chaos they can so readily churn up.

So I did not object when Brad queued up the 2006 film version of E.B. White's Charlotte's Web for the littles to watch early in the week.  We've had several Charlottes we've tracked in the years we've been out here on the farm, always in the fall.  One built her web in the protective cage around one of our peach tree saplings, another on the front porch next to the firewood rack.  This year's Charlotte actually built her web and laid her egg sac in the upper corner of the barn door.  Classic.  So now, watching the movie rendition of the story, my two younger kids would see why I always call these spiders "Charlotte."  A little cultural literacy (albeit visually mediated) never hurt anybody.

But what struck me about the story, immediately, was its portrayal of a small, diversified farm.  The domesticated animals that "people" Wilbur the pig's barnyard include geese, sheep, dairy cows, and a horse – a range of species (narrow as it is) that one almost never finds on any farm or ranch today, at least not one from which a family might actually expect to make their principal living, financially speaking.  By 1952, when Charlotte's Web was originally published, the forces that would push farms and ranches toward bigger footprints, fewer (or no) animal species, mono-cropping, and hyper-mechanization had already been set in motion and were gaining a ferocious momentum.  In the wake of World War II, the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower dubbed it, turned its massive stocks of chemicals and machinery away from the battlefields of Europe and out of the Asian skies and trained them on America's still-fertile heartlands.  And now, several generations later, we have the degraded soils, poisoned waters, and sickened people to show for it.†

But in 1952, the small, diversified farm was still enough of a reality in enough places that E.B. White's portrayal would have seemed far less jarringly idealized.  The notion that good farms need a wide array of plant and animal species to thrive would still have formed something akin to a basic assumption, as opposed to the "radical idea" that it represents today.  The notion that a diversity of animals and plants was a sign of biological strength, as opposed to an economic liability, was still viable.

Today, the logic of "get big or get out" has largely played itself out, such that farming and ranching in any form, diversified or no, is a barely viable proposition by either biological or economic measures.  The economic viability of American agriculture, writ large, has long been a function of government subsidies.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, in theory; given the fundamental importance of food, basic economic support for the people who grow it makes sense.  But when, in practice, the vast majority of government subsidies go to prop up food production practices that undermine the biological viability of agriculture in the long run (or, increasingly, in the medium or even short term), such as the mono-cropping and overproduction of grains and the feedlotting of animals, those subsidies are doing more harm than good.  So much in subsidized conventional ag – which is most of the agricultural sector – destroys soil and water systems (not to mention our bodies) and leaves society dependent on the petrochemical-pharmaceutical-industrial complex.  And still, due to artificially low food prices (enabled by the same agricultural subsidies), a staggering percentage of farmers and ranchers have to work off-farm jobs or otherwise generate some source of non-farming income just to make ends meet.  Something is wrong with this picture.  Something is rotten in Denmark.

Now, let me be clear: I am not blaming farmers and ranchers for this situation.  They, and the rest of us, find ourselves trapped in a food system that we did not create, a system that was created over decades, out of a heavy admixture of good intentions, bad information, and perverse incentives.  And there is far more here to unpack than I can possibly attempt here, at this juncture. 

What I can say is that there is growing consensus within agricultural networks that re-diversification of farming and ranching is essential if we, as a society, are to begin to heal the wounds we have unwittingly inflicted on ourselves.  It would be nice if government subsidies could be redirected toward this goal, and there are some indications of movement in that direction.  But is it like attempting to turn the Titanic – too little, too late?  Perhaps.  And, in any case, I think a healthy (and hopefully constructive) skepticism about the ability for centralized government to administer sound agricultural policy, in light of the U.S. government's track record over the past seven decades or longer, is warranted.    

Fortunately, an increasing number of farmers and ranchers – largely small-scale producers, by modern industrial ag standards – are moving ahead without waiting around for government programs, re-diversifying their operations, or in the case of new farmers, setting them up as diversified and diversity-enhancing operations from the get-go.  These growers have internalized the bedrock principle that healthy food comes from healthy soil, and healthy soil is alive, teeming with microbiology, the hosts of beneficial bacteria, fungi, and other microscopic critters that give soil that rich, loamy smell and activate its powers to transfer nutrients to plant and animal life.  These growers have integrated into their operating frameworks the fact that a teaspoon of healthy soil can contain billions of living organisms, over a billion bacteria alone!  And they have come to understand that our heavy machinery and petrochemicals (in the form of pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides) have deadened most of the life in our soil, deadened the soil itself, and thus deadened the food that we produce from it.  Most importantly, these growers are demonstrating, in real time on their own farms and ranches, that what feeds the soil microbiome, enabling it to feed us in turn, is the strategic movement of diverse megafauna (e.g., cattle, sheep and goats, pigs, poultry) across landscapes and the wise management of diverse cover crops over topsoil.‡

The good news is, our soils can be regenerated through these and other diversity-enhancing practices.  The bad news (or "bad" news, depending on your vantage point) is, it takes time.  And I mean that in at least two senses:  yes, it takes time in the sense that it does not happen overnight; it is a years-long, arguably decades-long, process to restore soil health.  But it also takes time in the sense of hours in the day; it literally takes the devotion of one's waking hours to move animals and observe field conditions and respond to the myriad contingencies that arise when trying to rebuild soil health.  It is not a "set-it-and-forget-it" process. 

Nor is it a "hands-off" process.  Agricultural diversity also involves – gasp! – manual labor, the kind that actually requires use of our physical bodies.  Shocking, I know. Go ahead, clutch your pearls.

Here's the bottom line:  diversification in agriculture – which is just one strategy for maintaining and restoring biodiversity more generally – does not mesh well with lifestyles organized around the principle of convenience.  Quite the contrary: rebuilding and preserving biological diversity is decidedly inconvenient.  But you know what's more inconvenient than biological diversity?  Starvation.  Mass famine.  That's inconvenient. 

Are these really the stakes?  Is starvation really what our society faces if we don't change our ways when it comes to agriculture?  Surely, our technological advancements can save us, right?  Haven't I just crossed the line over into hysteria? 

Possibly.  But the risk seems significant enough to me to take very seriously – seriously enough that I want to know from the inside, in my bones and with my hands and by muscle memory, what it means to participate in the building of biological diversity of soil.  I suppose I've made a kind of Pascal's wager: since it's impossible to know with certainty whether our society is nearing the total collapse of the food system due to biodiversity loss, I've assessed the downside risks of both sides of the proposition, just like Blaise Pascal evaluated the downside risks of commitment to the Christian God in the absence of strictly rational evidence for the existence of the Christian God.  For Pascal, the choice was clear: if it turns out you're wrong about the existence of God – wrong either way, whether by belief or disbelief – what you purportedly "give up" in the way of some finite earthly pleasures by "erroneously" embracing a life of faith pales in comparison to what you will definitely lose (eternal life with the divine) by erroneously rejecting the Christian life.  And in any case, what do you really have to lose by following Christ?  In essentially all relevant ways, Pascal's argument suggests, the committed Christian life is an intrinsically better life in the here and now than a life of entrenched atheism.

We can, of course, quibble today with Pascal's specific conclusion about Christianity, but his heuristic of comparing downside risks in situations of inescapable uncertainty remains helpful.  It is a useful tool in many situations, including the one in which we appear to face the near-term threat of food shortages stemming from profound losses of biodiversity.  What do we really stand to lose by taking this apparent threat seriously, even if we're wrong about it?  I can't answer this question for everyone – and I suspect it might prove counter-productive to try to do so – but my own answer is evident in the way I spend my days now.  As Albert Schweitzer once wrote, my life has become my argument.  What I've "given up" in the way of some conveniences and financial security/social status, I've traded for fresh air, tired muscles at the end of each day, and sound sleep.  Our family has swapped out many processed foods for whole and homegrown ones, and we gather for just enough family dinners around the kitchen table to make it all worth it.  So even if I'm wrong in my belief that our society needs to make significant changes to reverse the damage we've done to our soils and mitigate the consequences of that damage, my family will have lived a more fulfilling and joyous life than if I had continued down a conventional path, disconnected from real food and the processes that make it possible.   

So I'll milk Stella twice a day for now, rotate my other cows and my goats and chickens to fresh ground every couple of days, and keep up my quixotic relationship with my vegetable garden, inconvenient as all these things are.  I will accept the help that Mother Nature offers, by learning to operate on her terms rather than imposing my own foolish ones on her.  And I will train my attention on what seems to be going right: that there are farms and ranches – including my own! – reconnecting to the health that is possible through healthy soil, soil that is alive and continually enlivened by a diversity of life forms, ranging from the microscopic to the large and cuddly.

*Of course, I realize that precious few families in socio-economically disadvantaged areas like ours can use a Fall Break in this way.  Even "solidly middle class" families these days may find it difficult, without significant advance planning and saving, to break away from the work-school routine multiple times per year.  This is why programs such as the Boys & Girls Club are so vital in communities like ours.  They fill in a necessary gap, providing low-cost childcare for working families with school-age children during school breaks.

†Again, the literature to support this claim is vast.  To orient yourself, start with Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America (1977), then read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), then watch the documentary film Kiss the Ground (2020).

‡Google these practitioner-advocates, just for an initial sampling (and one that is admittedly idiosyncratic to me):  Gabe Brown in North Dakota, Joel Salatin in Virginia, Richard Perkins in Sweden, Jean-Martin Fortier in Canada, Will Harris in Georgia, Charles Massy in Australia, Greg Judy in Missouri, and Dr. Allen Williams who ranges the southern U.S. from the Carolinas to Louisiana.

A is for Artisanal

Yesterday I finished a batch of goat cheese.  In the early afternoon, I drained most of the whey, pouring it off the top of the small pot in which the cheese had cultured and into another container, destined for pouring over chicken feed so my birds get their regular dose of homemade probiotics.  I then wrapped the remaining blob in a cheesecloth and hung it over a bowl on the counter to strain out the rest of the whey. Drip. Drip. About eight hours later, right before bed, I took down the cheesecloth, opening it gingerly to take out the freshly formed ball of cheese. With only eight hours of hang-time, the cheese was not quite as dry and crumbly as feta, but not quite as creamy as cream cheese.  It had reached the perfectly scoopable or spreadable texture that my family has come to enjoy.  So I worked in about a teaspoon of salt with a flexible spatula, reformed the cheese into a ball (roughly 16 ounces), and stored it in the fridge.  No fancy herbs for this batch, but with some good crackers, this simple fare will make for an indulgent lunch for me for a good four to five days, even with the kids and my husband snacking on it here and there as well.  

That's how I finished the batch.  But when, and how, did I start it?  That depends on how far back you want to go.  In one sense, I had started it just the day before, when I slowly warmed about two and a half quarts of goat's milk to 86°F on the stovetop, stirred in the culture powder I buy from an organic supplier, and covered the pot to let the cheese "set" on the kitchen counter for 24 hours or so.  Easy-peasy.

But in another sense, this batch of tangy, creamy goodness started well before then.  For one thing, since I only have one goat in milk right now – and a small one at that, a little Nigerian Dwarf doe named Petunia – it takes a full 5-6 days to get enough milk for a batch.  With her production waning as she nears the end of her current lactation, I'm lucky to get a pint a day.  So clearing the 2.5 quart threshold takes nearly a week of milking!  But of course, the fact that Petunia is producing milk at all stems from the fact that she gave birth to two healthy kids back in May of this year – itself a consequence of Petunia's planned breeding period last fall with our main herdsire, Nasturtium (whom we affectionately call "Nasty").  I could trace this batch back even further, to when we acquired Petunia and her four sisters as our starter herd in January of 2020, with Nasty joining us on the farm a few short months later.  And so on, and so on.

Alternatively, I could trace back through the energy path that this batch has traveled, back through the grass, brush, and hay that make up all but a tiny fraction of Petunia's diet, back to the sunlight that fell on that grass, brush, and hay, activating their power to pull nutrients up from the soil, back to the sun itself.  It never escapes me that when I eat goat cheese, I am eating just another form of sunshine.  It is entirely accurate to say that we are all made of the stuff of stars.

I believe it is likewise accurate, therefore, to say that when I make goat cheese – or grow a watermelon, or collect an egg, or spread our homemade butter on toast – I am actively participating in the ongoing work of Creation.  I am following the lead of the Creator, the Great Artisan, who is said to have pronounced the heavens and earth good.  That kind of pronouncement wells up out of deep pleasure, a satisfaction borne of transforming mere chaos into life-giving and life-sustaining order.  The Creation itself stands as the Creator's open invitation to seek precisely this kind of pleasure.  We have all been called, in other words, to be artisans, whether we recognize it or not.

An artisan is one who lavishes seemingly excessive care and attention on each iteration of her work – excessive, that is, from the standpoint of efficiency.  Efficiency is not the artisan's organizing principle, but rather quality and craftsmanship.  It would push the argument too far, of course, to say that efficiency is outright at odds with artisanal work; concern for efficiency has its place in the artisan's bag of tricks, and can, at times, lend a certain elegance, a spare beauty, to both the creative process and the creations that unfurl from it.  But it is not the artisan's paramount concern.  The artisan – the artist – serves the work itself, seeks to discover what wants to emerge into existence by virtue of bringing to bear the full measure of her attention, experience, and skill in a tiny corner of the world, even if only for a few brief moments. 

The artisan's work thus expresses her love, her desire to participate in the force and flow by which Creation continues to unfold in real time.  It does not require control of the creative process from beginning to end – because, as with my goat cheese, where is the beginning, really? For that matter, where is the end?  And as any well-traveled creative will tell you, "control" of the process is a temporary illusion at best.  The hallmark is attention, intentional and loving engagement with the creativity that swaddles us all, if we give ourselves permission to sense it. 

Will you accept the invitation?

E is for Ecological

The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) once quipped that the whole history of European philosophy could be characterized as a "series of footnotes to Plato." Something similar could be said about any and all writing about integrity food in the twenty-first century:  it's all just footnotes to Wendell Berry.

Essentially, everything that needs to be said about the right relationship to food – and, by extension, right relationships among people in society – has already been said, and better, by Wendell Berry (b. August 5, 1934).  The Kentucky farmer, poet, novelist, and essayist has been writing about food integrity – or the loss thereof – for well over six decades at the time of this writing.  Often referred to as a latter-day Jeremiah, Berry has been calling, with the prophet's clarity and doggedness, for his fellow Americans to recognize their blindness and repent from our destructive habits, chiefly our modern ways of producing food and obtaining other raw materials, which will ultimately, if continued, destroy our ability to produce food and access life-enhancing materials.  Often accused of being a Luddite, the author of The Unsettling of America (1977) and dozens of other books, has actually proven to be a veritable visionary, quite ahead of his time in terms of understanding what is necessary for a society, for communities and families, to truly flourish.

And just what is that?  At bottom, although he prefers the term "agrarian," Berry's vision is ecological, in the broadest and most fundamental sense of that word.  The prefix "eco-" derives from the Greek word oikos meaning "home" or "household".  And when coupled with the suffix "-logical" – logos in Greek signifying the deeply embedded (and, by connotation, divinely ordained) reason, nature, or plan for something – the word ecological literally means "the nature of home."  To study ecology, then, is nothing more than to study the internal logic of home, to endeavor to understand, and to live by, the Creator's templates for the only home we humans have been given: Earth.  What Wendell Berry has been calling us to do, in other words, is simply to get our house in order. 

Have we listened?  Barely, if at all.  Over the decades Berry's writing has spanned, we have only continued to do more damage to our home, not less.  We have continued as a species – led by those of us in the techno-industrial West – to foul our nest at breathtaking speed and with staggering "success."  We have continued, with what can only be characterized as willful blindness, to reject the core insight of ecology: that everything is related to everything else, that everything is connected to everything, that "to be," as the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh gently insists, "is to interbe."  We – and perhaps still only some of us – are only now, at this late hour, with our own destruction encroaching upon us, beginning to come to grips with the hard truth: that to harm our home is to harm ourselves. 

But the flipside of that hard truth is a beautiful one, and it is the very truth that Wendell Berry has sought, with seemingly quixotic persistence, to keep in front of our eyes these many years: that to care for our home is to care for ourselves.  This is the essence of ecology.

May we heed the prophet's call to repentance.  May we take up the work of repairing and restoring our home.  May we, as Shannon Boyd, director of the Wendell Berry Farming Program at Sterling College, has said, "practice radical homecoming."

L is for Local

Last fall, at the beginning of my second year of homeschooling my kids and several months into my dairy cow's first lactation, I took a 9-week online course through Acumen Academy, a nonprofit dedicated to the development of "social entrepreneurs."  I had *so much time on my hands* (can you taste the irony?), I thought, sure, why not?  What's one more thing?  In the wee hours of the morning, I would get up and do the course assignments, before any kiddos got out of bed and before morning farm chores beckoned. Maybe – just maybe – it was a little nuts to take this on, but in reality it was a lifeline for me, an opportunity to really examine why I felt, and feel, so drawn to questions of food integrity and food security (which are almost the same thing, in the end) in and for my community.

Acumen offers a wide range of courses, many of which are led by prominent cultural and social scouts, such as Elizabeth Gilbert, Krista Tippett, and Adam Grant, just to name a few of my favorites.  The courses range in content from the nitty gritty of securing funding and doing sound data analysis to more "big picture" offerings in storytelling and mission development.

I took the course entitled "The Path of Moral Leadership: Hard-edged Skills to Start Building a Better World," which was led by Acumen's founder, Jacqueline Novogratz, and which took a deep dive into the principles and practices she discusses in her book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution.  It was a useful exercise that culminated in participants' drafting our own manifestos, to give voice to the visions we had come to see more clearly over the span of the course.

What follows is my manifesto from the course, which I offer here as my best articulation to date of why Local is the first guiding principle of "LEADER⁵SHIP for a More Beautiful World." 

* * *

Declaration of Food In(ter)dependence

A Manifesto for Local Food Revolution

Food is love.  Love is where my people are.  My people are in this place.  In this place, I feed my people, and I am fed; I love, and I am loved.  Therefore, I love this place.  My people and I, we love this place.

Together, we seek to heal this place, to heal ourselves, to receive the healing – and health – this place offers us, in love.

Together, we practice turning away from the ways of not loving this place, from the ways of control, of extraction, of exploitation, of narrow "answers" and quick "fixes" that create problems for others to contend with, often at the remove of several generations.  These are not the ways of abundance but of scarcity.  These are the ways of fear and not of love. 

Together, we seek to learn from this place, to learn the ways of the Creator by examining Creation and following its patterns wisely.  For its patterns tend to make food in abundance, which is to say, love in abundance.  We thus seek to be co-laborers in the ongoing unfolding of Creation, through quiet attention leading to our collaboration with its loving work.  We seek to learn the masterful craftsmanship of this place, as apprentices in the arts of abundance.  Using our best judgment as often as we can muster it, we look to nature as a principal guide, as a sound measure of the rightness of our actions, defining human flourishing in terms of harmony with Creation – and thus with the Creator – and not as something to be wrested from Creation by force.  We do not mistake ourselves for masters over this place, but practice knowing ourselves as its students, stewards, and servants.

Together, we practice acting in good faith and always first assuming the same about each other, reminding ourselves that what we have in common matters far more than the things we think we disagree about.  We know we will not always know the right or best path, or that we may sometimes fail to choose it even when we do.  We know we will sometimes be blind to ways that affirm life better than our current ways, and that we may, at times, stubbornly cling to our blinders to avoid acknowledging or examining such alternate ways.  But we seek the humility to turn to the right as best and as often as we can make it out, to do better as we know better.

Together, we seek to deepen our ties to each other, to foster a robust and generative interdependence among ourselves, here in this place, by reducing, with steady determination, our default dependence on distant forces, powers, people, and systems to supply the very basics of our sustenance.   We do not reject out of hand the benefits of commerce, cooperation, and cultural exchange with far-flung people and organizations, be they governments, corporations, or otherwise; indeed, we acknowledge and affirm the good that has and can come from complex economic development.  But we also know it is difficult, if not impossible, to forge and maintain enduring personal relationships – which are the basis of a genuine and life-giving accountability – across significant physical, social, and economic distances.  Further, we are mindful of the ways in which excessive reliance on distant forces can obscure, or block entirely, our perception of harms perpetrated on other people and places in the service of our unexamined desires, thus severing our sense of responsibility for the consequences of our actions in the world.  We are likewise mindful of how such excessive reliance can foster a certain creeping helplessness in ourselves and those around us, diminishing, often significantly, our capacity to practice care for ourselves, our families, our land and animals, as well as our neighbors and others here in our more immediate circle.  So we are keenly aware that a profound misalignment of our lives with the patterns of Creation may be signaled when we cannot so much as feed ourselves without resorting to sources and forces outside our local network of mutually accountable, personal relationships.

Together, therefore, we celebrate each step, however small, toward alignment with Creation's patterns, toward reweaving – or perhaps truly weaving for the first time – the ties that bind us together in this place and with this place.  We encourage and support each other in all efforts to learn (or re-learn) the skills, crafts, knowledge, and ways of moving our bodies and interacting with each other in the world that honor Creation's templates and build our capacity to work in concert with them.  In short, we commit to accompany each other on this journey into responsibility, into mature neighborliness, into abundance, into love.

Food is love.  Love is where my people are.  My people are in this place.  In this place, I feed my people, and I am fed; I love, and I am loved.  Therefore, I love this place.  Together, we love this place.

 LEADER⁵SHIP

So what is this "different way of being in the world"?  And how do we become the kind of people who practice it?  What are the habits and practices of body and soul, both for individuals and for groups, that can help us move beyond mere good intentions and into "a way of being centered on connection, beauty, health, and wholeness"?  To borrow a phrase from the contemporary social philosopher Charles Eisenstein, how do we live into "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible"?

In my own journey, I have often wished for a roadmap of some sort, some step-by-step guide for making integrity food, and all that integrity food entails, a reality for my family and my community.  But what I've realized, as I suggested yesterday, is that there is no roadmap. There is no step-by-step guide.  There is no program for this work.  Programs are but poor substitutes for people who are learning to come into right relationship with one another and with their place, the literal land that surrounds them. And the way in which a particular set of people live into right relationship with each other and their particular place is just that: particular.

That said, there are, I believe, certain criteria or guiding principles for moving in this direction.  They are less "how to" and more "how to tell" if you're on the right track – the right track for your particular circle of concern, that is. 

There are many different articulations of these principles out there already, in books and through various social media outlets.  This is just one version, which I have distilled from a combination of my own practical experience – an ongoing dance with trial and error – and the wide array of reading, listening, and watching I've done in this space over the last five years and even back further into my undergraduate reading in the comparative study of religion.  There is nothing especially magical about this particular version of the principles, but it does have the advantage (if I can venture to say that), of being organized into the form of a mnemonic, in the hope that memorability will facilitate implementation.

I will just introduce the principles here, and then delve into each one of them in turn in coming days and weeks.  LEADER⁵SHIP:

Local

Ecological

Artisanal

Diversified

Experimental / Entrepreneurial

R⁵ – Regenerative, Recreational, Recursive, Redundant, Resilient

Sacred

Holistic

Integrity-focused

Permaculture-based

Beyond Good Intentions 

The problem with good intentions, of course, is that they're never enough.  They're necessary, but often (usually?) woefully insufficient.  And what's more, they tend to obscure any practical results that are out of joint with their noble character, thereby often (usually?) leading to even further perverse real-world outcomes.

For example, it is unquestionably good and noble to aim to eliminate hunger and food scarcity, to "feed the world" as the so-called Green Revolution of the post-World War II era promised to do in the United States – and delivered, with nothing short of spectacular success.  It was a success, that is, only if you completely ignore the devastating impact of all those "miraculous" wartime chemicals on soil health, and therefore ultimately on human health.*  Similarly, it is undeniably good to try to help farmers stay in the business of farming by providing economic supports, since Mother Nature cares not a whit for the rules of free-market economics.  But when those economic supports come in the form of government-guaranteed crop subsidies and government-backed crop insurance, and those subsidies and insurance, in turn, underwrite production of only a handful of so-called "commodity" crops (corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, and rice), they in fact drive the trends toward monoculture cropping and farm consolidation that end up making farms and farmers – and therefore the rest of us – even more vulnerable to disease and long-term environmental and economic ruin.  The ironies of our food system are both palpable and legion.

So good intentions, when divorced from careful analysis of their practical effects, are basically indistinguishable from bad intentions.  I know there are others who take the argument to the next level, positing that the perversities of our food system must actually be the result of the bad intentions – or at least the greedy intentions – of the giant agro-chemical companies and the elected officials who do their bidding in the realms of policy, legislation, and regulation.  And sure, some dynamic along those lines is operative.  But I think any narrative that relies exclusively, or even just heavily, on that kind of conspiratorial explanation for our food predicament misses the larger point.  We can manage to get ourselves in this kind of pickle without any consciously bad actors pulling the strings. 

The truth is, we can manage to get – and keep – ourselves in this kind of pickle simply by failing to continually question our assumptions, chief among them the assumption that there is some grand program, some "scalable" model (there's that word again), that can be devised by so-called experts and then applied, more or less uniformly, everywhere.  But here's the reality:  there is no program.  There are sound principles for farming practices that are conducive to long-term human and environmental health (human and environmental health being so intertwined as to be basically indistinguishable).  But how these principles and practices play out on a given farm in a given community in a given region must necessarily vary according the character of the land and other particularities of that place. 

So what we need are not programs but people, people who know their place – not in the sense of acquiescing to some pre-ordained social hierarchy, but rather in the very literal sense of coming into intimate relationship with the land that surrounds and supports them.  It is through such intimate relationship that we guard against the potential perversities of mere good intentions.  It is not a panacea, this intimate relationship – that would be synonymous with "program".  But it is a start of a different way of being in the world, a way of being centered on connection, beauty, health, and wholeness; a way of being that is wary of, if not thoroughly allergic to, shortcuts and cheap substitutes.   

* Here, I'm talking about the dizzying array of fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides, and herbicides that most farmers came to depend on after World War II, almost all of which are petroleum derived and many of which are simply repurposed explosives ingredients and agents of chemical warfare.

Community Feast

It doesn't really happen in isolation.  Food, I mean.  Food is the paradigmatic communal good.  At all points along the trajectory of its existence – from the planting of seed to the breaking of bread – food is meant to be shared.  The bread and the wine, they make for communion long before the hungry arrive at the table.  The bounty of hunt and harvest, they literally make the community, and the work of building starts long before anyone comes to the feast.  The feast is, in truth, the celebration of what has come to exist in the very process of its making:  community itself.  No feast, no community.  And no community, no feast.

The breathtaking tragedy of the modern industrial food system is that it breaks this bond.  From the single-cockpit crop duster spraying glyphosate and destroying the microbial bonds that make for healthy soil, to the drive-through burger consumed alone on the highway, the system by which the vast majority of North Americans obtain "food" (one can argue it barely meets a proper definition) severs our ties with each other and with the earth in a bewildering number and variety of ways.

How did we arrive here? This story has been well documented by a small army of journalists, historians, economists, health professionals, and others – not to mention a good number of farmers and ranchers themselves* – over a period of decades now.  And there is little, if anything, of value I can add to their body of work, except to observe one particular unifying theme: that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  I hazard this cliché as one summary of this body of work – notwithstanding the usually sound editorial bias against clichés (due to their tendency to obscure more than they reveal) – because it is precisely the cautionary nugget I need to bear in mind as I take the next logical question as the organizing principle of my life:  So where do we go from here?  How do we get ourselves out of this mess?  What does the work of redemption look like, in practice, on the ground, in the ground?

These questions are worth inhabiting.  Their answers are worth living toward.  And even from the wilderness into which we have unwittingly wandered, we can make out the essential contours of the land of promise, where we gather around the table to feast, to celebrate the ties that have been formed to make the feast possible.

*In addition to the resources mentioned yesterday, I would also recommend – again, merely as a starting point, because the body of work has burgeoned in recent years – Dirt to Soil: One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture (2018), by North Dakota farmer and rancher Gabe Brown. 

Mama Don't Preach

And, lest anyone think this is taking a turn toward the preachy, let me make one thing absolutely clear from the get-go:  I am not in right relationship with food, despite going to relatively drastic lengths to get there.  I'm nowhere close – which means, by my own terms, I am not in right relationship with love.  I am not in right relationship with my family, my neighbors, my community, the world.

I am not writing these reflections from some vantage point where I've "figured it out" or somehow gotten my act together when it comes to food (and therefore love).  Not by a long shot.  In fact, the truth is very nearly the opposite: I feel compelled to write, in large part, precisely because I'm so far off the mark, still, despite the forty chickens in the coop and another dozen in the freezer with the butchered beef steer; despite the three dozen eggs on the counter and the few dozen winter squash curing in the sun for winter storage; and despite the goat cheese in the fridge and the dairy cow – the blessed, friggin' dairy cow – about to pop with her next calf, and all those gallons of milk that will come as a result. 

Yes, we've come a long way in a pretty short amount of time.  And yes, I'm proud of all the work we've put in, what we've learned, what we've built.  But I'm no doomsday prepper.  I harbor no illusions that my farm is going to "save me" and my family if society falls apart tomorrow.  Spoiler alert: it won't save us.  But that's not why I'm doing this. 

I'm doing this because it makes me feel alive now, and because I've read and listened to enough of the scientific and economic analyses of our current food system to understand that the way we produce and consume food "at scale" (I've come to hate that phrase) in North America is fundamentally not aligned with feeling alive – truly alive – in the present.  It is designed to give us a calorie-dense, synthetically-flavored series of dopamine hits, at the expense of a wide variety nutrients conducive to our health.  Nor is it designed to support our long-term well-being.  And forget the well-being of our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, or their grandchildren.  Our current petrochemical-dependent food system has profoundly sickened our existing society and also threatens to sterilize the earth (where it hasn't already), greatly diminishing the ability of future generations to produce food for themselves.*

Okay, that got a little preachy. Sorry.  

But hopefully you can hear my heart through the preachy tone.  I care about eating, and I care about food, all aspects of food, because I care deeply about quality of life, both now and deep into the future. 

But don't most people care about quality of life, both now and deep into the future?  I believe they do, and I sure as hell don't want to give the impression that I think people have to have a big garden, raise their own chickens, or buy a gosh-darned dairy cow to prove that they care.  That said, I do think the world would be a better place if a few more people did these kinds of things – like, if everyone who felt internally drawn to this kind of life could have the courage and the economic support to venture into it.  But I'm not on a mission to turn our society back to the days of Little House on the Prairie.  (Although there's a good deal to learn from those books, like how to capture cheese culture from the rumen of a slaughtered calf. Pro tip.) 

What I am on a mission to do is to issue an invitation, an invitation for my friends and my community to experience real food – or, as real as we can make it in our current circumstances – and then to pay attention to what that experience prompts them to do next.  Maybe it's trying to grow something yourself.  That would be awesome.  Or maybe it's simply forging a relationship – or several of them – with people who are growing some food themselves using methods that require little to no petrochemical or otherwise energy-intensive inputs in the process, what Joel Salatin calls "integrity food".  That is also awesome. 

I want people to find their own way to join in on this journey, and I don't want anyone to hold back because they think they have to "get it together" on some level before they can really start.  Hogwash.  None of us has got it together.  But I have a pretty good inkling, from my own experience on this journey, of how we can start to get it together: together.  Join us.

I promise I won't get preachy on you.  Or, maybe just a little . . . . (Wink.)  

*There are many resources available to begin examining this claim. Three that have had the biggest impact on me are the Kiss the Ground documentary film from 2020, Michael Pollan's 2006 bestselling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Wendell Berry's 1977 opus, The Unsettling of America. 

Work of a Lifetime

But who doesn't love to eat?  I mean, seriously.  It is the essential experience of our waking lives, all of us.  We don't eat, we don't live, at least not for long.  The need, the want, the desire to eat impels us all to action, and is with us, from the moment we leave our mothers' wombs.  Why do newborns cry?  Ninety-nine percent of the time, it's for one of three reasons:  they're sleepy, they're poopy, or they're hungry.  Okay, cold; maybe sometimes they're cold.  But the point is eating – receiving the comfort of food, relief from hunger – is one of the most fundamental experiences of our whole lives.  And it is fundamentally about pleasure: the pleasure of connecting with other humans and with the good of the earth, the pleasure of receiving care, the pleasure of having our needs satisfied.  It is the pleasure, in other words, of love.

So why should it seem like such a "radical" thing to say that food is worth the devotion of my life?  Or, maybe it's not such a "radical" thing merely to say that.  Words are cheap these days.  Verging on worthless.  What's more genuinely jarring, from the perspective of the implicit norms of our modern techno-infatuated, money-obsessed (enslaved?) society, is to actually devote one's life – one's time, one's physical and mental energy and well-being, etc. – to food.  And not just to its (hopefully) pleasurable consumption, but likewise to the pleasures – and the perils – of its production and preparation.

If all of us must, and do, eat, and if, as I am asserting, food is a (the?) quintessential expression of love, then why does the unspoken script in our society relegate food production and preparation to the "lowly" bin?  Why is there so little legitimate social prestige, as opposed to patronizing lip service, accorded to farmers? Why would it constitute a status risk for an Ivy-league educated attorney, like myself, to turn to farming, at least long before I have the "financial freedom" to do so by any conventional standard of financial security?  Why would it seem like a "sacrifice" for me, at the outset of the most promising years of income-generation in my profession, to turn my law practice into a side gig so that I can put the practices of soil health, animal husbandry, and gardening – of cheesemaking, for Pete's sake – at the center of my life?  

There are many reasons for this dynamic, which have been explored and explicated well and at length by cultural historians, sociologists, economists, and others.  These reasons are beyond the scope of this immediate reflection. But they all converge around a basic theme:  that the culture that both crystallized in and grew out of the European "enlightenment" – the culture that, for anyone living in North America and Europe (and Australia), is as unavoidable as the water in which fish swim (and is almost as invisible . . . almost) – holds a certain disdain for bodies and everything related to care for bodies.

To put it simply:  we in the cultural "West" have a dysfunctional relationship with bodies – our bodies, other peoples' bodies, animal bodies, etc.  This dysfunctional relationship is one instance of our dysfunctional relationship with the material world more generally.  And nowhere are the dysfunctions of that relationship, as well as the potentially devastating consequences of those dysfunctions, more apparent than in our habits and attitudes and assumptions and practices around food and eating.  These warrant further examination.

But to cut to the chase for the time being: if food is love, but our relationship with food is dysfunctional, this means our relationship with love is dysfunctional.  To put it bluntly:  when we are not in right relationship with food, we are not in right relationship with one another.  I aim to do whatever is within my power to rectify this state of affairs.  I have begun with my own household, but the journey is already beckoning me outward, to reach beyond my immediate circle even as I seek to deepen these labors of love within and for and with my own family.  This is work worthy of a lifetime . . . and more.

Confession 

It comes down to this: I love to eat.  If you want to know my why in the world, you don't have to look much further than this:  food is how I experience love in the world, how I give love, and how I receive love. So what I'm really doing when I orient my whole life around food – which is what I seem to have done over the last few years (or have actually done, to the detriment of other pursuits) – is orienting my whole life around love. If I have shared food with you, particularly food that I had a significant hand in preparing or producing, what I've really done is shown my love for you. Food is my love language.

I could say much more.  I could take a stab at exploring why and how this came to be, this state of affairs where food, for me, is synonymous with love. I could do that, and perhaps I will in coming weeks and months.  But for now, it is enough to put this stake in the ground and just come out and say the truth that I have lived into over the last several years – and will continue to live into "Lord willin' and the creek don't rise": Food is love, and love is worth the devotion of my life, so food is worth the devotion of my life.

There. I said it.

Eat well today, friends.  Feed your people well today.  Love well today.

Play the Fool

I guess we're all gonna play the fool
here, every one of us pullin' the wool
down over our own eyes, so bound
to fantasy we fail to feel the wound.
Senses dulled, we mistake the blood
on our hands for mere color, mood
enhancement for dancing with death,
toying at life. We dare not look 'neath—
hell, we won't even look the surface
square, who are we kidding? In case
we slip and feel too fresh the brush
of truth, we have the tools to push
it aside, or bury it far enough down
to forget, we think, what was known.

In Prophetic Fashion

Despair is not my style. I don't wear it well,
and it clashes with my hope-toned skin. But.

But.

Here I am, staring down a whole wardrobe
of sackcloth and ashes. I just want to wail
in the streets, moan, mourn all we've lost,
all we've yet to lose, and soon. How has it
come to this? By what strange sorcery did
we trade all the beauty and holiness of the
world for thirty pieces of silver? It's a con,
all of it, all that comfort and convenience,
all that ease and repose. False gods, all of
them. We are all idolaters now, all sinners
in the hands of an angry God, breakers of
the covenant of goodness, crude foulers of
the fine work of the Divine Hand, faithless.
Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand!

Ottawa County

A day's ride, or less, at the leisurely pace

of a sound, fit horse—a rare find these days—
is one way to measure the world, this world,
the one for which I am responsible, like it
or not. Twenty-two miles, give or take, from
north to south, from east to west. No stranger
to heartache and harm, this patch of ground
bears scars, as do the living and dead who
people its pastures, rivers, history, and hills.
I no more wish to abandon this place than I
wish to part with my own rib cage, beating
heart within. And yet, I have not yet known
it, not in the least. Grand Spirit, help me find
the pace of Your repair of the world, this one.

Muddling is the way.

Fumbling and befuddled,
disheveled and frayed—
that's how it gets done.
You have your moments
of insight, but they flee
on close inspection, and
you're left feeling your
way in the dark and the
fog, crawling at times,
hands raw, knees purpled
from buckling under the
weight of not knowing—
or, rather, knowing the
only thing you'll ever
know for sure is you'll 

never know for sure. 

From the Bluff

I get the utility here. I mean,
I get it as much as I can get it,
from a distance, from this high
remove, perched here, safely,
it seems, above the fray. I feel
none of the rush of play, none
of the neurochemical surge of
the art of it, the game of it. So
slow, so thick, my humours,
vein slugs, vulnerable to birds
of prey. And yet, I imagine it:
the squaring off, the refusal to
look away, the hell-if-I-know
knocked together with the no-
holds-barred instinct to Stay.
Alive. I get the necessity of it,
the absolute inevitability of
the fight on this turf, on these
terms. But I'm tired, tired of
these stakes, these methods—
tired of this game, useful as it
is, here. I long for a longer
game, one veering off toward
infinity. So I raise my gaze to
the horizon, the ever-elusive
edge of sight, the realm of
eternal possibility. I get that.

 Firefly

Let's just get one thing straight here:
I don't know what I'm doing. Never
have. Just wingin' it, blinkin' my way
in the night, a firefly, lit and longing
for bliss and home and something I
can't … quite … put antennae on. A
spark hiccupped here, blip there amid
foxglove petals demure in their cast,
I intermit lumens in the search for—
for what? I haven't the foggiest clue.
But I am compelled, drawn, pulled
into this silent dance that echoes the
stars, somehow passes ancient chips
of flame off to new bearers of light.

 To the Osage Mother

Who foraged these Ozark woods before . . .

Whose daughters and sons learned the quiet,
                the stillness of the deer hunt, on pain
                of hunger, pang of feast forfeited to
                a wayward footfall in the wee hours;

Whose brothers and husbands could wield
                bone needle as well as she, threaded
                with sinew for wedding hides tanned

                for winter shelter and summer shade;

Whose own mother grew impatient with age
                with any careless weave of a willow
                basket, so gathered shoots in shallows
                and tutored fresh-fingered children;

Whose father felt the freedom of this place
                long before . . . foreign talk of it rang
                hollow, dividing, subdividing the land
                into parcels, taking without knowing;
    
I long to ask you questions,

                but where can I find you now?

I wish to dwell with your wisdom,
                but how to resurrect it?

 
If I dance beside this spring,
                will your spirit seep forth truth— 

                strike me dumb and instruct?