Had two friends call me last night and tell me to turn on the radio to NPR. It was about 8 and I'd just got the boys in bed for the night. They sounded urgent. I turned on the radio to a fuzzy signal and heard two voices I slowly recognized. WB and Michael Pollan talking to each other. I was pretty excited to hear the old poets voice. I don't hear it often. I like Michael Pollan as well so needless to say I sat and listened.
Here's a few things I took from that conversation.
Wendell is an old man and a farmer. He jokes like the ranchers I know. Refreshing and dry. In listening to him talk he seems senseable. There's a practicality in the way a farmer or a rancher talks. The words could be ideal, inept, or inconsequential but the voice is one of serene reality. The world is as it is and my drawl backs that up. His voice would go well with the sentence, "Take your high falutin ideals, wad em tight, and shove em back where they came from. The south pasture needs mowin." I'm sure he would be much more poetic than I but there you go.
On his ideas I have to say two things. Let your agriculture find its way in your place. Nature will breed itself to adapt to your land and circumstances with a little help and heirloom seeds you can harvest. It's not that complicated. In those same thoughts he talked about looking at nature for agricultural understanding. I believe he quoted Sir Albert Howard who began the organic farming philosophy with his treatise An Agricultural Testament. Sir Howard looked at four sources of agricultural knowledge in that treatise: the methods of nature, the agriculture of nations passed away, the practices of nations unaffected by science, and methods much studied by science. WB talked about observing the methods of nature for knowledge about domestic agriculture and this is something that I'd never considered before. I found Howard Alberts writing and here's a great quote from An Agricultural Testament that sums up WB's words. Click the link to get the whole document.
The main characteristic of Nature's farming can therefore be summed up in a few words. Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of fertility; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease.
It's nonreductive complexity that can be easily observed. Just open my eyes.
The other thing I took away from this conversation was the idea of the individual stepping up and making an agrarian reality in community. There are top down methods of conservation that can be implimented, like forbidding the patenting of life, which would help free many forms of agriculture from such big brothers as Monsanto, but the big changes that will make a local difference are to be found only in the place they grow and by the people they affect and who choose to make a difference. So there you go. He knew I was listening.
I wish there was an archive of these conversations but there isn't so I can't direct you to a chance to listen to the poet yourself. But then again, maybe that's okay. Maybe I just need to be fine with the limit of listening in the moment and appreciating good friends to let me know I need to turn on the radio.
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